Gibraltar Topples

After a dark freshman year at a Catholic girl’s college in Madison, Wisconsin, I transfer to the University of Minnesota.

I am reading in my bedroom one warm summer night in 1972 when Mom shouts from their bedroom.

“Help! Help!”

I plunge into their room—Dad can’t get his breath. I phone the rescue squad, which arrives quickly and spirits the two of them off to the hospital. Jim and Ro and I follow in the car.

When we reach the hospital, they’ve put him in intensive care.

“Your father is alive, but he has congestive heart failure,” says the doctor.

“Doesn’t failure mean it stopped? But he’s alive.”

The doctor clarifies: “His heart is working, but not well.”

Dad looks terrible: gray-faced, tube up his nose. I want to protect his dignity.

He’s hospitalized for five days. We’re badly shaken. Mortality is not a word we associate with Dad.

When he’s home and recovering, we have gentle conversations.

This unnerved him, too. He makes a point of saying he’s had a happy life. He talks of mom with tears in his eyes: how he loved her, how she hurt, how we must be kind to her.

“Sure, Dad. But you’re doing fine.”

Early that November, my senior year, five weeks shy of turning twenty-one, I win a nice character role in a University production. Final dress rehearsal is tonight.

I live in a crummy but autonomous little studio apartment near the campus, but today I decide to leave my morning class early and take the bus home to Tangletown.

It’s not even clear to me why I’m making this hour-long trip. Certainly not to press my opening night outfit—I’d have to carry it back on the bus. I’d come home a few days earlier to repack my stage makeup in Dad’s old unused tackle box. There’s no reason to come home, so why? Maybe I just wanted to stroke the old dining room table and get some good luck vibes from the folks.

Rounding the curve, I know instantly why I’ve come. Red lights flash across the face of our white house. I tear across the lawn and up the steps.

The dining room is full of men in uniform, in white and blue. Pogo’s here, too. Mom is weeping in his arms.

“What happened? What happened?” I am asking. It’s the ambulance, it’s the rescue squad. “Is everything okay?”

And no one answers. No one answers. Like I’m not there.

An anonymous uniform says, “It’s your father. Your father. We did all we could do.”

My father. My father.

I split in two.

•••

They did all that they could do. I must do all that I can do. I must go hug my mother. I sidle past my brother.

I try to comfort her and fail. I am not tall enough, nor am I male. She doesn’t see or know me.

So this is death.

I take a breath.

Half an orphan now. Gather up the others. Ro and Jim and John.

I drive to the high school, gather up my broken melting baby sister. On to campus to pull Jim out of freshman English. He looks up from his desk; our eyes meet through the glass in the classroom door. He knows at once, and starts to cry. As do we. Liquid with grief.

We drive to the hippie-house on the West Bank. A fellow war-resister answers the flaking door and shouts for John, who descends halfway down the spooling staircase.

We tell him. He says nothing. Does not move. His glaze of silence will last for years, barren of tears.

•••

At home, in between sorrow-choked phone calls and plans, I remember my dress rehearsal. No understudies. But must the show really go on?

My siblings encourage me: “You should do it. If you want.” “Dad would want you to.” “We’ll be fine.”

Performing. Something I know how to do. Unlike everything else now.

So I do. It’s the ultimate dinner table play, whose warm and philosophical central character, Grandpa, is like Dad at his best: You Can’t Take It With You.

After rehearsal, I grab a few things from my apartment and get a ride home from a friend.

Mom’s in bed, Pogo’s gone, Tom and Mary Kay are flying in. John—stony, tearless—turns in early. We three Youngers stay up late that night, sprawling in the living room, holding our personal Irish wake, remembering details, telling old stories. Suddenly we’re electrified by a sound not heard for ten years: The broken grandmother clock.

Bong.

Bong.

Bong.

We gape at it, agog. No one is anywhere near it. It broke years ago and was never repaired. The time on its beautiful face has been stuck at 2:50.

Bong.

Bong.

Bong.

The hands drop to 6:30. Unbelievable. Spines shivering like xylophones, we stare at one another.

Twelve

Thirteen,

Fourteen.

More. Way too many.

Scary, yet delicious. An unmistakable message from Dad.

Years later, when Mom dies, the clock in Ro’s house will stop at 2:50.

•••

The funeral home, the rosary, all a blur. Relatives and cards come flooding in to her, who lost her marriage and her best friend in a day; weeping, weaving in each other’s arms a nest of grief, all but stiff and stone-eyed John, numbed by the war in our home.

The Mass I can’t recall, but I wore white, affirmation of all that is ongoing, having seen Dad glowing in a dream. Even science holds that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Even science, I think to myself. In my heart I know the him of him is not so dead.

But my body knows death, from my dad’s forehead. It is cold, it is final, it is all they say it is. A shock you never get over: when you feel with your lips that warmth has flown.

My mother quivering in black like Jackie—all I recall are the moving reflections of leafless branches over the limousine hood rushing at me, entering my chest.

•••

He’s honored with a veteran’s burial at Fort Snelling, firm triangle of flag placed in Mom’s trembling arms, something to hold. It rains every day for a month.

I move home for a while.

After the funeral, the dozen carrot cakes, the homeward flights, John’s wordless departure (will he never break down and cry?) after the thank-you notes, the play’s last performance, the dwindling phone calls, the on-getting of life in the quieting house, it starts to sink in: a heart attack. At fifty-nine. Dead in his own bed, reading an unlikely bestseller: Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Certainly loosened your soul, that book.

Incapacitated by grief, Mom stays in bed. We three youngest of the Youngers, weakened, weeping, drawn to one another, plunging our faces in his clothes to catch his fading smell, what was his voice like where was his laugh? Remember the way he said chocolate? What was the last thing he said to you?

A day or two before he died, after packing up my makeup in the old tacklebox, I stop into their room for a bit of advice. Mom’s asleep.

•••

“Dad, I’m thinking about cutting my hair,” I whisper. “Should I?”

“No matter how you wear it, you’ll always be beautiful.”

I smile. “Aw, Dad. Thanks. Good night.”

Our last conversation.

•••

Outlived by your own father, Dad, you spared yourself your larger fears: senility, incompetence, incontinence; you died with the lion within you alive.

Each pain withdraws, compacts, compresses. Each joy expands. The subtle force of memory forms these family lands; upheavals, the continuous melody of life, the urge to leave this country and to revisit it form these lands.

Flash floods rush through the landscape sweep away the crumbling houses.

I see your green gray eyes parting the leaves for a look, your voice a part of nature.

The flower thanks the gardener.

Yet here’s a picture of a you I never knew, under the wing of a Piper Cub, wolf pelt by your side.

Why did your heart break? Why could you not love my brothers as you loved me?

What is you and what is me? What is the myth our lives are telling?

What are the symbols of our time? What is America, what is the movies?