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 75th
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 75th
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
