It is a hair shy of nine pounds. I don’t know why I felt
compelled to weigh it. But there it is, the bar hovering in mid-air on my
parent’s beam scale. When the funeral director first handed the box to me,
the density of it surprised me. How much should ash weigh? He asked if I needed help bringing the box out
to the car - like they do at a grocery store when an old lady is leaning on her
cane or a frenzied mom is juggling three kids and a cart full of frozen
pizzas. It seemed a bit excessive, but I
suppose I had my own impediment. He had
seen my tears at the funeral.
I shrugged him off politely and carried my dad out into the
cold. It didn’t feel right putting him
on the floor mat. I scanned my back seat and placed him in my daughter’s booster
chair. After a moment of hesitation, I decided to pull the shoulder buckle
around and click him in.
I drove the half mile to my parents’ house, soberly,
carefully, with tears blotting my eyes.
My dad had left on a stretcher exactly two weeks before - carried out
the front door into an ambulance and now I was carrying him back in. When he was discharged from the hospital,
bound for the nursing home, my mom had the sagacity to have the medical
transport detour past their house. I wonder if my dad knew then as he looked
out the window. I am consumed with the hope that his final glance of their red
brick English Tudor offered him something profound.
I am in my parents’ house alone now and I’m not sure where
to put him. Later this spring when the ground is mossy green and the warm wind flips
up our hair, our family will pick a weekend.
We will fly out east and scatter his ashes in his Elysian Fields, his
college campus that marked the pinnacle of his athletic success. We will find a
robust, patriarchal tree with branches as thick as elephant limbs - one that is
worthy of him and we will lay him to rest.
His fragments of bone, his dust, his DNA. I am at ease with leaving him there in the
earth’s care.
But, for now he needs a sojourn. Perhaps in the living room
where he sat and read the sports section before he stopped being able to
concentrate on the words? Or my old
bedroom, where he spent his final year, shifting from the chair to his bed with
his diaper between his legs and his knees wobbling beneath him? Or even the basement, where his shelved
athletic trophies overlook sofa cushions greased with the oil from his hair. I consider the rooms carefully, anxious of
what he might approve - as if he still has a say. As if he might claim his own
vantage point from which to watch life unfold in this house. My mom coming down
in her robe to brew the morning coffee. The grandkids setting up the toy train
tracks. Blake basting a ham in the oven
for Easter brunch.
I lean against my parents’ sliding back door. The glass is
cold and shocking against my cheek. I peer beyond the garage at the house on
the adjacent block where my dad grew up. It remained in my dad’s family for
decades, passing through his parents, to one brother and then the next. When my parents bought the house saddled up right
behind it in 1980 it seemed almost kismet. A looming 6-foot privacy fence now surrounds the
underground pool where my dad taught us to swim. I marvel at how I never noticed how small my
dad’s circumference was. Even when he
was healthy, most of his life: his home, his work and his history were confined
to four neighborhood blocks.
The scale of it saddens me. I wonder if he had regrets. I
wonder if the human life span might just be long enough to disguise its brevity until it smacks us in the face.
The truth is we are lucky if we get to watch our parents
die. Give their eulogy. Hold them in a box. Mourn their absence. I can only hope my
daughters will do the same for me someday.
It is the natural order of things. The alternative is inconceivable.
I think of my girls and wonder if I handled it right. The
way I told them, poised like dolls on the love seat, quiet hands at their
sides, sensing my heaviness. I tried to keep it simple. Grandpa was old. Grandpa’s heart was sick. Grandpa died and he is not
coming back. Perhaps I should have
googled in the driveway how to articulate death to kids. My three-year-old wept.
The older one asked questions and later cried when I tucked her into bed. I have a sense that they are okay.
A few days after the funeral, I dropped off my youngest at
day care. The teacher opened the door
and my daughter chirped matter-of-factly, “My grandpa died like our goldfish
died.” I shrugged and took a deep
breath. Devoid of emotion, that is pretty much the gist of it.
I pull my face away from the glass and carry the box through
the empty house, room by room, waiting for what feels right - not wanting to
put him down. I am used to the weight of
it now and somehow, it begins to feel impossibly light. I’m trying to
comprehend how the strongest, most solid man I knew could be reduced to fit
into a container the size of a tissue box.
How a heavy weight wrestling champion could disintegrate into matter
that doesn’t tip nine pounds.
I envision how my dad must have cradled me thirty-seven
years ago in that hospital room, his firstborn daughter, a squirming pink-faced
infant curled up like a snail in his tan September arms. I must have felt so impossibly small to him. An 8lbs 15oz gift that instantly made him a
dad.
We have changed places in perfect symmetry. I see that it is
my turn to do the carrying.
