11/11 is the day he died. They were in Fort Lauderdale, my parents. He asked for a seltzer. Then his heart seized — gone. He was gone long before the ambulance siren could be heard be bee-bawing down Route One.
My mother called. I lived alone. “You’re the only one who cried,” she told me.
The circuitry-skips are evidence of trauma. The way I can never remember if I was 24 or 26 when he died. I have to do the math, even now, even today – 42 years later. I just stacked the dates and subtracted to get 42.
I have never been to his grave. Somewhere in Schenectady. My mother lies in a neighboring state, a ratty little cemetery in Essex. I have photos of her two grandsons tending the plot with me, one holding a little red plastic watering can. One met her, one was born four weeks after she died.
That collision of death and life means I always know how long she’s been gone. However old my younger boy is – now 29 – offers the accurate tally. She’s been gone 29 years.
“An accurate tally” is a weird way to describe an absence that even now can feel like an open wound.
“You’re the only one who cried.“
I couldn’t offer perfection, none of us can, but the ichor that seeps is clear and somehow pure.
My mother struggled with numbers as much as she excelled with pattern and color. “How old are you now?” she would ask at every birthday after I left home.
I’m not there yet, but expect to be. It happens. It happens whether I avoid cooking in aluminum pots or am religious in taking turmeric.
The loss of faculty. The coins clattering to the floor.
Season offers its consolations. How perfect to lose a parent in the grim graying of November or the tiresome bleakness of February.
Both my boys were born in almost-spring-time. Three days apart, 17 minutes apart, within a few ounces of each other. The midwife was impressed, as if I had anything to do with it.
I read Saeed Jones on the toilet this morning. Yes, that is a thing I wrote. I do not offer perfection.
His entire volume speaks to the loss of his mother. His bag of tricks is bigger than my bag of tricks, and I’m grateful for his capacity to put himself first here, then there, around grief. Grief is grief, one way or the other and also from the side. He shows me that. The book is warped from living in the room where we take showers.
That’s a lesson I took from my mother. “In this house, we use books.” As in devour, as in tear up, repurpose, underline, dog ear, keep out and available no matter the weather.
My father was a whistler. Not surprisingly but still how weird, so is my husband. Trills and melodies that put an Irish busker to shame. Both of them.
Summertime in the neighborhood, the call home was a piercing two-tone whistle made by placing two pinkies in his mouth and pressing, pressing — what? What? I no more understand the mechanics of my father making that shrill call than I understand how the hawk that circles my neighborhood produces her cries.
We know them now, the hawk cries. We hear one often when we’re out with the dog and always we tilt heads back to spot the elegant thing, often riding a thermal clime well above the canopy, sometimes alone, sometimes pestered by one or more smaller birds.
First, the black walnuts fall in all their pelting urgency. Now come the layers and layers of butterscotch–gold maple leaves. They swish when we walk through them when we’re out with the dog. A nostalgic sound. A New England sound.
Across the fence, two oaks hold onto their leaves. There is so much about the world I do not understand. Pattern and color, coins, the body becoming a husk, our own silent desperation.
Damm you are such an excellent storyteller … thank you for sharing that s about your parents. BeautyFull .. excellent that you also added pictures.
Thank you Tina. I appreciate your saying so.
Dee~ Sigh. Oh gosh. You’ve stirred up so many related memories of my own with this piece. One of your best ever. Book ready poetry, which pulls a reader in, but just as quick a moment, has that reader falling down a watery well of their own life. I could list here the many connections that came up, but I need not do so, for the point is that they did. They did come up. Thank you.
I love seeing younger you and your precious boys. Lovely markers of time and place and the beauty of family, being a mother.
💕
What a wonderful way to describe being engaged. Thanks Nancy. And I’m up for your stories any time
I remember your dad‘s memorial, Seeing your mom kneeling at the side of the casket, rubbing his head is what sticks in my mind. That, and the brown wool skirt of Maureen‘s that I wore with a black top I had made. And Angus telling the story of your dad being wheeled out of Lenny’s (Where I worked at that very time of the memorial) by the ambulance crew, him saying to other diners, “ don’t get the scallops.” Other than that, I really didn’t know your dad. One of the few places our families didn’t intersect for me.
Mom died a year ago, on the 24th. And then there was my birthday… Today Stevie use the expression, “ Sick with grief.” So fitting. This is going to be one hard fucking holiday season. It’s already begun.
It is going to be all those FIRSTS for you. They are hard. I’m glad you plan to surround yourself with people on Christmas.
That scallop story highlights how very funny my dad was.
I was standing next to my dad when he got the call about Bill. He didn’t bat an eye. That said I don’t remember anyone crying at Nana’s funeral or on the deaths of Dick or Therese or Gene or Don or Genevieve. Even Alice’s funeral was a pretty dry-eyed event.
Weird family, eh?
I have no recollection of Bill at all but I remember thinking your mom was so beautiful. Was her 2nd marriage a happy one? I hope so.
I wonder what she made of all of us. Probably thought us savages.
I got a call from Therese not long after she got the news. She was really upset, perhaps a little into her cups. I remember feeling that it must be hard to lose a sibling. It was awkward.
And yes. My mother got a nice second chapter with her second husband. Not a long one, but a nice one.
I remember your dad’s funeral, too. Hi Lisa – I think we met once?
His was the first funeral I ever went to. I recall nothing except walking to the car from the cemetery when that service was over. I can still hear your mom’s cry.
I bet I was late and missed the memorial.
Am I remembering correctly that that night several of us young adults gathered in a dark room at your house and we all felt your dad was there with us. I’ve never experienced that intense a spirit before or since.
I was weirded out all day today. Maybe it was because your dad was ghost-visiting a few of us kids from the ‘hood? And visiting you of course.
Your boys!! So adorable.
When your parents left this world, they left giant holes that I can only fill with memories.
It is absolutely uncanny about the whistling. Love that quote from you mom about the books – solidly the case.that books were used! Devoured!!
xxoo
I am so aware of the fallibility of memory reading your and Lisa’s comments because I don’t remember going to the cemetery or any gathering after.
I do remember his boss barely able to keep it together offering comments. I remember a coworker and friend of his coming up to me and saying, “Your father shared some of his problems with me and you were not one of them.” I remember how I wanted to read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins and was overruled by my sister who read something instead from a volume of poems he treasured (The One Hundred Greatest Poems, or something) instead. My choice was less relatable, not one of his favorites, but for me it summed up something about him. The Windhover. “I caught this morning morning’s minion… “
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover
The poem, so perfect, particularly for one dear departed – all of it, of course, and this last line:
“No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”.
Not that I knew him well; he was just another adult – but he was your dad, and he was always aware of us, always a beacon of some sort for me. And, his bearing was intimidating yet welcoming. Like that wild painting your mom did of him?? I didn’t get the humor of that regalia until I was 40-something.
Anyway, I have great memories of both of them. It feels good to revisit them, and your truth about it over the years, now. It is gutting to lose a parent and so young as your dad was and your mom, though she lived longer, she wasn’t old.
It’s been a favorite poem of mine since college. No, high school.
Dee, this is lovely. Touching.
“In this house, we use books.” As in devour, as in tear up, repurpose, underline, dog ear, keep out and available no matter the weather.”
It took me a lifetime to learn that a well worn book was a truly loved book. It’s okay.
I’m going to find a space in the bathroom for a few magazines, and maybe a poetry book.
Love,
Betsy
I
Hi Betsey. Nice to hear from you! Gotta have reading material in the bathroom!
This is beautifully written and poignant. Worth reading any number of times. And look at beautiful young you! I noticed your mother was born the same year as my parents; my mother lived a few years longer but they weren’t happy years.
My father was born in 29. My mother in 33. Sorry to hear your mention of your mother’s unhappiness.