DAD

 While Grace Notes undergoes the editing and publishing process, I am pleased to release this excerpt, a special chapter that has been approved for posting! 

DAD

My father died two months after his 75^th birthday. Luckily, we got to spend his last birthday together and I took him to a movie. Although Dad was frail and not feeling well, he wanted to gratify me and go along. We saw A Soldier's Story, starring Mel Gibson, and from the corner of my eye, I observed my father fight back tears, which made my heart miss a beat. Undoubtedly, the tragic woes of war reminded him of his youth and his own army service, while the movie's theme of death reminded him that soon, he too, would be gone.

When I brought him home I gave him his last ever birthday gift: a handwritten book of gratitude, carefully culled, called 75 Ways I Love You.

A spiral bound journal, costing me virtually nothing, except the time it took to write it and the emotion poured onto every page, evidenced by a few tear-soaked stains.

I believe it was the best gift my father ever got from me. His face said so when he looked up at me after reading it, his hazel eyes brimming with tears and devotion.

When I began writing the birthday book I didn't know how I could possibly come up with 75 reasons for loving my father. Easily 10 or 20 reasons … maybe 50 … if I extended my imagination and my memories, but 75? That's astronomical.

So I made a list. Free-thinking scribbles about what Dad had done for me and any qualities or quirks that made him special. By the time I finished I had to edit out many entries to limit my grateful love letter to 75 facts. It turns out I could have written 1000 things about why I loved my father. And I knew he was going to die.

Dad's heart, though expansive, had expired. He was on borrowed time. We all knew it and Dad had known from the beginning of his dire heart diagnosis that he would die. He told me so. It made me angry. It pressed heavy on my own heart that his heart had defected.

Four and a half years before his funeral, Dad took me for a walk.

One day, out of the clear blue he said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Why?” I asked, noting his unusual urgency.

“I want to talk to you. Let’s go,” he insisted.

That’s when he told me he was going to die.

“I got my wake-up call,” my father unceremoniously announced. “I’m not going to live much longer and there are things I want you to do....”

Not long before that, my father had gone to the hospital with an angry lump in one leg, cramps, and chest pains.

Diagnosis: heart disease.

Prognosis: not good.

We walked. We talked. I asked questions. Inside my head I remember thinking: How do you know for sure? Maybe they are wrong! Why are you telling ME?

Then my heart hurt. It beat harder and faster and angrier. Why are you laying this on me? The worst part about it for him was that he knew he was going to die. The worst part about it for me was that he told me about it. He made me face my own mortality and I didn't like that one bit. I'm not ready to forfeit my Daddy … I'm barely forty years old!

Anger and anxiety inside me muddled his message. I was mad at him and felt guilt about that right away.

Plus, there were the things he wanted from me. Things I didn't really want to do. Reconciliations with people I didn't really want to reconcile with.

My father was a peaceful and loving spirit. He wanted love and for everyone to get along. Within our family that was never going to happen. Too much hurt and too much wrong had come about. Now he's telling me his life is coming to an end and I'm the only person he is confiding in and he wants me to fix everything for him so he can die in peace.

No pressure, right? I felt furious at him. And then ashamed again for my feelings.

My father had not had an easy or happy life. Born to immigrants, he survived the Great Depression, WWII, struggles to earn a living and raise a family of four children, the early loss of his only sibling (my aunt Annette) to cancer, and the death of his parents. Dad also endured a 48 year marriage to my mother, a monumental achievement only surpassed by the fact that my father had no enemies. I've never known anyone else so beloved by absolutely everyone who ever knew him.

As we came around a corner and climbed the short hill towards his house, I boldly asked him how he managed to stay married.

“Why didn't you divorce?” I softly interjected into our intensely revealing and controversial conversation. If he could tell me he was going to die, I could ask the hard questions that had plagued me for most of my life. This may be my only chance to understand what I never understood. The now or never atmosphere surrounded us both while we walked and talked.

“I was in it for the long haul. What was I going to do?” Dad answered, with surprising forthrightness, as he turned his head to look at me with a perspicacious stare, which signaled a bold and honest confession that may have lingered underneath for decades. Realizing the weightiness of his admission, Dad intentionally lifted the weight of seriousness with wittiness – something I usually do too – and I realized then that I had adopted that trait of piercing sincerity with levity from him, especially in instances where I use humor to take the sting out of otherwise unbearable shame.

“Why do you think I stayed away on the road every week and traveled for a living?” Dad said, adding his signature chortling chuckle as his eyes glowed with glee that he had finally admitted his vocational vacancy from all of our lives as the way that he had coped with an emotionally oppressive situation.

Dad loved my mother from the first moment he spotted her standing on some steps. She wore a hat. Without even meeting her yet, he picked her out from afar, singling her out of a bevy of other bride hopefuls and knew she'd be his wife.

Like a lot of people, his gut knew before his head had a chance to harness any rational thinking, but unlike most of us, my father paid attention to his intuition. Typically ignored, inner “knowings”, integral and intense signals, are elementary parts of our human electrical system. We are, after all, made of working parts. Parts that regenerate through restoration. We are machines. Warm, human, machines. We communicate with signals. That requires electricity.

I'm convinced the ability to recognize and pay attention to those subtle signals, once essential to the survival of our species and now suppressed for most people, is an inheritable attribute.

My father was a literary, musical, mystical man. Fortunately, I am the same way.

In fact, he spent the last few years of his life writing a novel. Left unfinished, it remains a task for me, to somehow step into his scenes and usher his story to a publisher.

As we finished our walk, I found no way to bring frivolity to the facts of what my father had told me.

He would die. He wanted me to know. And he wanted me to keep this secret to myself.

After we got home, I sneaked upstairs to the attic bathroom in my parents' house. Knocked for a loop with the news, I needed a bath. As if soaking could remove the stain of permanent pain.

Theirs was an old house and this bathroom stored the treasure of an antique Victorian style claw-foot bathtub. Huge, embracing, shaped correctly, more curvaceous and human-like than the modern clunky, rectangular and shortened tubs. It had sinuous exquisite little faucets externally attached, and once filled, one could slide fully below the water. A real bath.

I could easily drown if so inclined. I thought about that … which meant inclination.

My mother forbade bathing in this bathtub, because the pipes were nearly a hundred years old and in her paranoia she decided they would crack if water ran through them. I decided pipes are meant for water to course through them and in my typically recalcitrant irreverence for her dictatorial ridiculousness, I settled in for a soak.

The pipes didn't crack. Or I didn't notice, too occupied with my own sudden splitting inside. I thought again about slipping beneath the water, about escaping the inescapable. My father was going to die. He just told me so. That meant my life as I knew it was already over.

Why did he tell me what he told me? How could he do that?

I felt at fault for feeling he was selfish. I felt guilt for feeling everything I kept feeling, but resented the pressure of carrying such a heavy burden alone. Was he sure? How could he know when he would die? Was he simply trying to manipulate me to do things I didn't want to do? No … my father didn't operate that way.

But now every day going forward I would worry if that would be the day I would lose my father.

I wept. Salty snotty rivulets streaming, glad for the water I saturated in to absorb my outpouring of grief. It's not any day when someone says to me “I'm going to die” and leaves me in charge.

How long would it take? One year? Two? Three? How long would I be consumed, just waiting for my father to die? The thought of waiting for anyone to die is plain wrong. I didn't want him to die, yet what if he lived eight or nine or ten more years? That would kill me! To carry this secret around without any certainty. How? When? Where?

I looked around my childhood bathroom. Pink. It had been painted pink. Sparse, small, as old bathrooms are, it had only the essentials: a porcelain sink, small medicine cabinet, toilet, and this giant tub, plus one small window which let in light and chilled air. I smiled when I saw two small golden angel decals, pictures of angels playing musical instruments that had been pasted onto the toilet tank, forgotten fragments from my tumultuous teen years.

I settled on five years. An arbitrary and fair number for my father's foreseen prophesy. Instantly, I felt at fault for setting a parameter, but if he didn't die then the burden of waiting would consume me, wondering when? Next week? Two more years? Was he wrong?

Death is not the most beautiful part of life. Death is brutal, but more so to those left behind. And exponentially more severe to those waiting to be left behind.

I was mad at my Dad. Mad that he had told me and left me to sort out the confusion. My anger layered on top of my guilt. The warm water did nothing to soothe my anxiety. I knew. I couldn't not know what I now knew. My father would die. It was a secret. I could seethe, but I better believe him and prepare for the worst without knowing when. I fluctuated between fury and sorrow. Sorrow trumped my wrath, squeezing inside me. That's anxiety. I recognized its vice-like grip around my gut. I wanted to scream, to yell at God, but unable to cry out, not daring to risk getting caught in the sacred bathtub filled with forbidden water and tracks of my salted tears. Scared, I stifled any sounds along with my unsettled secret and sunk low to the water surface.

My father finally retired. He and my mother moved to Atlanta, built a new house, settled into senior years as grandparents to my nieces and nephews. Dad spent his time writing his book, but wouldn't share what he was writing, which made it more difficult for me to fulfill his vision and finish his story.

I called him every day, an adopted habit, one that attempted to assuage the worry and the waiting. As if I could make up for all the days and years of our sparse communication.

Also, I traveled a lot. Ski trips, vacations, beach getaways, aboard cruise ships as an enrichment speaker, and often out of the country. I fretted that I would be away when Dad died, preemptive remorse for being gone at the wrong time. (Naturally, the day Dad died I was far, far away, as I feared I would be when the time came.)

Months morphed into years. The light in my lamp of pretend joy-filled life dimmed. Impending death, the certainty of loss followed me as a dark cloud, blocking my perspective and shadowing my private pain.

After nearly four years, I remembered my predetermination and became more preoccupied. Then Dad suffered a small heart attack. With his usual acumen of acceptance, he called it his “happy heart attack.”

Frantic, I went to sit by him at his hospital bed and I quietly searched his face with a silent plea that he should reassure me we still had time together.

“I'm ready to go,” he whispered. “I've lived a long time, I've had a good life, and that's it....”

But that's not it! I protested internally. What did I expect? Not that.

As I sat by his bed, holding his hand and looking out the window into the night, I knew that this was the beginning of the end. I didn't say anything. I looked at all the buildings around, so many little lights … the hospital helicopters repeatedly taking off and landing, so many little lights … everything twinkling and blinking and brightly oblivious to insignificant little me watching in the window while my father lay dying and I clinched hard against crying.

My happy halted in that singular moment of recognition.

Dad apologized for not feeling like talking. Nor did I feel like talking, but I didn't say so. I nodded, held his hand and we stayed side by side in silence.

Was it then that the idea blossomed for a book of gratitude?

Surely I wanted to write something to him and for him, to tell him he had done his duty as a dad. He had been the best example of fatherhood: a diligent provider, a loving and caring man, a soft influence and staunch supporter of so many of my secret wishes shared only between us.

He stuck up for me during decades of squabbles with my mother. He slipped me money, usually in one hundred dollar increments, making certain I stayed solvent, especially during times of anguished struggling. He played Anagrams and other games with me, took me to amusement parks and rode the rides with me! At ten years old, my first sojourn into the sea was holding his hand, but after getting a mouthful of ocean, I ran out crying because the saltiness shocked an unwary sheltered me.

“You never told me the ocean is salty!” I hollered with hostility at my father.

“You never asked,” Dad said, in his matter-of-fact didactic delivery.

You never asked. Dad said that a million times – about loads of things. It always made me laugh. How was I supposed to ask about anything I didn't know to ask about?

He cracked me up.

Cracked me up … another one of my father's corny and familiar expressions.

Dad loved to dance. Suave and smooth, he glided girls across ballrooms everywhere as a young man seeking a bride. Until my mother swept him off his feet, standing on some steps, wearing a hat. Go figure. No fancy footwork after all as a prerequisite to prenuptial.

Dad played violin. I loved when he accompanied me at the piano, standing behind me with his fiddle as we shared our love of music. He stopped doing that by the time I was a teenager.

Dad wrote beautiful poetry. Every card I ever got from him had a handwritten poem. He called me his “Princess.”

Dad taught me the meaning of loyalty: that I should never forget anyone that I ever loved. I have always held on so tightly … grasping, gasping at the losses, the loves....

My father's life was ending. He needed nothing. I sought to at least give him the satisfaction of knowing his life meant something.

I love you because you loved me.

Thank you for loving me – always.

I love the way you laugh.

I love that you played the violin.

I love you for writing a poem on every card you ever gave me.

My father died two months after his 75^th birthday, which was four and a half years after our fateful walk, well within my arbitrary assignment of allowable time.

As I had feared, I was far away when he died, 750 miles from Atlanta, walking around a park in Pittsburgh, thinking about him and imagining I heard him talking to me.

I clearly heard his voice in my head, but then argued with myself about the silliness of such a thing. Unfortunately, instead of listening intently I dismissed my wacky thoughts as creative thinking and debated with myself that it was only me talking to myself in my mind. How abject, because I know better. My whole life has been a series of unexplainable spiritual and surreal intercessions. Knowings I will never understand, yet are undeniably real. Dad kept talking to me, and I kept talking to myself, two streams of struggling sounds inside my consciousness – meaning I missed a message. When I found out later on that that's when my father died, I too late understood how important a moment I had missed. A chance. A choice. To listen and believe or to talk over a numinous communication.

The idea of my father whispering to me in the wind was too weird, too overwhelming. So I discounted rather than discerned his message. I talked over him as I had done in real life.

It's a sharp reminder of all the interruptions I initiated that curtailed curiosity or essential lessons throughout my life. Talking, even to myself, instead of listening.

I missed my father's goodbye.

I love how hard you persevered despite obstacles and downturns.

I love you for being calm in a family full of commotion.

I love you for your ambitions.

I love your faith in God.

That late spring day, ethereally beautiful, beckoned me beyond my irrational thinking into a peaceful walk on a grassy hillside of Schenley Park. The wide oval was unusually empty. A late Friday afternoon and I was the only one there. My car parked at the top of the hill looked out of place all by itself. The grass, so green, glistened with dew and lay thick like a velvet-textured carpet. Dandelions dotted the rolling landscape while white cotton-ball clouds clung to the sky and dipped down to the ground in downy thickness separated by pretty patches of the brightest bluest sky imaginable. I promise you, Heaven and Earth were kissing is what I saw.

I walked and thought about Dad. Where was he now? What was he doing? I closed my eyes and could feel him walking too – at that very same moment.

No! I countered, to myself … Dad walks in the mornings.

Still, I sensed his presence, heard his words, and argued again with myself at my daydreaming – my mind's meandering – dismissing meaningless airy-fairy reverie as wanton wishing.

Somewhere during those few exquisite moments my father faded away, falling with his final breath into that vast Heaven. (I didn't know it then, but later learned Dad died during my deep deliberations about him.)

I love you for instilling in me a devotion to nature, all living things, and an open warm way with all animals.

I love you for the sacrifices you made so your family had plenty.

I love your soft-spoken yet powerful demeanor.

That everyone who ever knew you adored and admired you.

Eventually, hunger stole me away to a favorite restaurant for soft-shell crabs and a luscious late lunch. While waiting for my food, I dialed Dad's phone number on my mobile phone, but hung up after one ring. Talking in a restaurant is rude and what if there were trouble with Dad? What if an ambulance had been summoned? I don't know why I thought those thoughts, but I did and that precise precognitive prediction does not make it any easier to accept what happened.

Days later I learned that Dad was walking while I thought those thoughts at the park. He walked a short block to his house, before falling down dead in his bedroom.

Who can ever explain such things?

I love that you always stuck up for me and defended me in many battles.

I love you for playing games with me – and teaching me to lose.

I love you for teaching me about business.

I loved looking at you in a suit everyday.

I love you for relinquishing our only bathroom to me, often with a face full of shaving cream.

I love you for enduring my pounding piano playing every morning at 6 a.m.

The day Dad died, he felt unusually good, and hungry for dessert. He asked my mother to take him for a banana split. Happy for his hunger, she eagerly obliged and he enjoyed his just desserts just before he left us all.

As she drove him home, that's when he asked her to pull over and let him walk a bit. (At that same time, I was walking in a park hundreds of miles away and thinking I could feel him walking too … I knew ... )

At the end of his long life, the last thing my dad did on the day he died was have dessert. What a way to go.

I had to write about it because it was a good way to go. Dying after dessert. It is a good way, supposing there is such a thing as a good way. And my father deserved a good way.

It is a beautiful way to go, really. How many people get to die after dessert? His heart stopped beating, his clock simply quit. He died as he lived ... quietly – no fuss – falling forward into Heaven. 

Except for the fact that this happened to my father, I think it is a glorious ending.

And he knew I had loved him. His last gift from me was gratitude.

I love you for insisting people recognize and care for the mentally retarded.

I love your love of music and reading.

I love that you wrote a book … expressing your secret love of flying.

I love you for all the $100 bills slipped into my purse or needy hand.

I love that you wrecked your Lincoln Town Car to save a gnat on your windshield. A gnat!

As my father read the birthday notebook, which was fundamentally a long and tender gratitude letter, I watched his eyes well with emotion and waterworks. I had no idea my words would move him so. I felt overjoyed that my gift of gratitude, which cost me nothing, gave my father everything.

That's how it goes with gratitude. It's the most valuable, least expensive, grandest gift of all. Gratitude fills fully and feels great.

I only saw my father once more after that day, an unfortunate oversight, which I regret grievously. I went to his house for dinner and watched him play with his grandchildren. Something in the way he looked at me across a room signaled he was looking at me for the last time – he knew it and I somehow knew it too. He lingered with his gaze and watched me walk while thinking what I hope were his thoughts of prayers for me.... I saw and sensed the little-known, and when I left I had an overwhelming urge to return to his house as I drove away for one more “I love you”. I just knew I'd never see him again.

I love how proud you were of every little thing I ever did.

I love that you carried a photo of me in your wallet.

I love when you danced with me.

I love you forever as the finest father.

Nothing and no one lasts. Dad was in his eternal home, and like him, I had looked to the heavens to see a sign, my own wake-up call, telling me with the utmost certainty that I would see him again someday.

I once heard a Rabbi talk about Heaven. He said it is like an apartment building. Everybody gets a home. People who behaved badly live in basements. People who didn't repent rightly reside on lower floors. Higher floors are reserved for good people who happily helped others and followed God's laws. And so on … It's an interesting visual and a merit theory with theological ramifications. If it's true, the one thing I know for sure about this Heaven Haven is that my father lives in the penthouse. He's a top floor father – of this I'm certain.

Grace Note:

Dear Dad,

You left life as you lived life. Quietly, peacefully, accepting and trusting in the glory of God. You had gratitude for all you'd been given and an hour before you died, you delighted in your last dessert – a banana split.

Every generation produces only a few great men, notable by how they loved and who loved them. For you, Dad, that was your greatest achievement … that anyone who ever met you never forgot the kind of man you were.

A good man. One of God's greatest.

How fortunate I am to have known you as my father. How blessed to have been born to you and to have had the privilege to call you Dad.

Thank you for my love of literature, my love of music, my love of animals and all living things. Thank you for your greatest gift of love to me and for instilling in me an endless pursuit of peace, plus inspiring me to love, to faith, to forget transgressions.

I will continue to follow in your footsteps. Though I will never fill them, I still know how to pray. Help me to love like you.

Thank you Dad.

I love you

Just Another Lori Story