First, there’s May 29. As you may have put together by your own clever self, that’s The Missus’s and my anniversary. This has always been an easy date for me to remember, because it was also my Dad’s birthday. Somewhere around here was also my maternal grandmother’s birthday. And finally, because I have many happy childhood memories of Memorial Day — which used to fall every year on May 31 — the very end of the month always seems to carry with it an assertive whiff of celebration and commemoration.
But then we come to the small matter of June 4, 1988…
Dad had just passed his 64th birthday when he died, that day, of cancer. He’d been sick from it for a couple years at that point, and that he finally died of it was not (in retrospect, and forcing myself to be objective) more or less tragic than the great majority of such deaths. He was a good man who died much too young for his family, and (thanks, oh thanks for morphine) he died as comfortably as possible under the circumstances. It is both true and not true that not a day goes by that I don’t miss him: I do not consciously think of him every day, yet a part of what I do think of every day is tinged — even if I don’t notice it — with his absence.
But again, about that day:
For some time, the four of us “kids” had been in rotation, supporting Mom — so we hoped — with the workload of caring for Dad and giving her some down time. On the morning in question (it was a Saturday), I left my apartment for the 40- to 50-mile drive to the house (THE house; the only one Mom and Dad and the four of us had lived in while we were growing up).
I’d long aspired to be not just a writer, but a photographer, and in those pre-digital-camera days it wasn’t uncommon for me to have my 35mm Minolta close at hand. Just in case, you know.
So as I drove down to the house that day, while my mind was cast forward to the weekend just beginning, I also had one eye sort of half-aware of photographic opportunities en route. And I found one — of all places, at a cemetery. (This one.)
I pulled off the road and into the driveway. What had caught my eye that morning was not just the white of the tombstones and the clapboard church, but also the sky; huge puffy cumulus pillows on a deep-blue field. I knew these pictures would be especially effective, because (a) my camera was loaded with black-and-white film, and (b) the lens was fitted with an orange filter, which would further deepen the tones of anything in the blue and green ranges: the sky, the trees and grass, the dark-green shutters on the church windows. The contrast would be stunning, I told myself.
So I shut off the engine, got out of my car, and took my pictures. Got back in the car and drove the rest of the way to the house without further stopping or incident of any kind.
My memory of what happened when I opened the front door is murky. I heard somebody say my name, preceded by the single “Oh” vowel-word which never presages good news. And then I was in the bedroom with Dad, or with the soul of what — until just about the exact moment I got out of the car to take my pictures at the church — had been Dad…
I don’t want to melodramatize this all too much. Too many people have lost well-loved fathers, and — much as I’d like to — I honestly can’t think of my Dad’s death in operatic terms. (Dad himself would be horrified by the prospect, I’m pretty sure.)
But, well, Dad, listen: by now you know what you were, and you know what I am, and you know what we were (and weren’t, never could have been) to each other. From what I can see of it through the wrong end of a twenty-one-year telescope, it looks okay to me. Part of me kinda wishes we’d had more time than we did, but the rest of me is grateful for what we did have, and grateful too that our good-bye was no more than what it was: straightforward, however foreshortened, and not played out over decades.
And although I’m never sure, really, what I mean by this, I’ll just close with the phrase I always, silently, recite to myself when I remember 6/4/88:
I’ll be seeing you.
marta says
A lovely piece.
MsJax says
Beautifully written and quite moving.
(Interesting recaptcha: finish string.)
cynth says
The Recaptcha says weeps talk. Oh, the things that could be said but we didn’t say always linger over our heads. But the important ones are the ones we whisper in the dark to our loved ones today. Thanks John for a very nice tribute to Dad.
Jules says
Oh sigh. That is a beautiful tribute. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Querulous Squirrel says
Not a dry eye here. Beautiful tribute. Stunning church photo: juxtaposition of flying windows and gravestones; sun on church and flying clouds; moving picture of thinking of dad as a child. Whole thing evocative of so much.
John says
Thanks, all… I don’t think I worked on this for more than a minute at a time without thinking, like, What the heck are you doing? Don’t you realize this sort of subject matter practically screams for commenters’ approval? Ultimately decided (obviously) to just barge ahead, and let this go.
marta says
It may or may not scream for commenters approval–such is the nature of this blogging game. But while it is troublesome to write a post just for the approval, it is not better to avoid a post because you don’t want to seem like asking for approval.
Make sense? I’ve had the same conversation with myself. But what if you put it out there and got…nothing? Always possible. I’ve had that happen–put something up that meant a lot to me and put it up after a long debate with myself, and I got no response at all. Then of course I can’t mention it because that’s even worse.
So write what you want. The approving comments are certainly true. You brought up a theme everyone can relate to. It probably reminded every reader of a moment of their own. Therefore, a lovely piece.
John says
marta: Thanks again.
It does make sense. The decision-making process — to post or not to post; and then if you post, to leave in place or remove — can be a hall of mirrors if you let it go on too long. It depends, I guess, on the blogger’s relationship with his/her blog, and with the post in question. Are you just thinking out loud, talking to yourself? or are you looking for interaction?
s.o.m.e. 1's brudder says
Maybe the weirdest possible “recaptcha” yet: building sorro.
I recall the day only in a very, very murky way, but always remember your arrival and wishing for no reason other than something weirdly metaphysical that I wished you had been there with me at the moment of Dad’s last breath (or so it seemed to me). I think we all thought that we helped that last soft inhale/exhale with the morphine cloud around him. Were his predecessors from the Lodge there with him? Were Marian, Nan, and Pop? What I remember was the sadness and simultaneous relief that this fairly modest man (in any kind of worldly way) had lived too short a life, and would no longer be shrinking into non-existence. Those last months were horrid. I miss him every day, maybe more lately. Thanks for giving new perspective for me.
John says
brudder: “No longer shrinking into non-existence”: exactly.
You have a way of visiting at just the right time.