Chapter 37

WE GO IN REVERSE; we walk to the nurses’ station where a nurse with dark hair and a sad, trembling smile hands us my father’s black shaving kit and a small paper sack no larger than a lunch bag. In it, his wedding ring, watch, and his paratrooper bracelet. A life reduced to ounces. We move on, past the painted walls, past people in wheelchairs, and past doctors and nurses—a whirl of faces and colors, voices and sounds.

Silently, mechanically, we step into an elevator, descend, then walk across the echoing lobby floor. When the exit doors blow open, we walk out into a backdrop of summer, a day so brilliant that my father’s death feels even more implausible. The loss, even in its immediacy, is so blinding that, like the day, we cannot look at it.

I don’t know if, across the steaming parking lot, we walk in step, my mother, my sister, and I, or if we scatter, one or more of us staggering behind through the colored maze of cars in the lot. Finally, finding ours, climbing into the backseat, I turn as we drive away; looking out the rear window, at the light changing, at the groups of people walking by in slow motion, and the hospital growing smaller and smaller until it is an unrecognizable silhouette on a distant hill. I watch as the summer day goes by and birds flock together in a sky that looks so extraordinarily ordinary. We drive by the cottages on Route 89 and see a blur of people standing on docks. Finally, turning right, we drive down the gravel road to our summer cottage. In the late afternoon shadows it looks like any other day there. Why hasn’t it been blown to smithereens?

News of my father’s death has already reached the press. I remember hearing a bulletin on the car radio just as we drive in. A sentence, a string of words so inconceivable, no more comprehensible than if the words had been spoken in a foreign language. A purported fact: “Rod Serling died today at two twenty p.m.” There is more. Something about the open-heart surgery. Something about how he had another heart attack, and then . . . a flash of a hand as someone in the front seat—my mother?—clicks off the radio mid-sentence.

As if we can stop it if we don’t hear it, turn back time. Make it not be true.

Don’t let the words into the house. Hurry! Slam the doors! Lock the windows, shut the curtains! Stand guard!

I find that what is left behind, what remains initially, defies the reality of my father’s death and perpetuates false hope. His shoes by the door, his comb by the sink still holding a few strands of his hair, papers on his desk, mail just that day addressed to him; all concrete acknowledgments of his presence, possibilities of his return, challenged only by the sudden, insidious silence of the house, the low murmur of voices in the living room, the sea of dark, crushed faces.

That first night, Rochelle stays in one of the bedrooms, some friends in the other. Jodi and her husband are in the cottage and so I sleep in my parents’ bed beside my mother. Something I haven’t done since I was a little girl. I listen to the voices in the hall, the toilet flushing, someone whispering for the dog, and doors almost soundlessly closing. I look at my mother in the darkness; I can just make her out in the moonlight. She is curled on my father’s side, her brown hair spread across the sheet, a pillow in her arms. Is it my father’s? For a moment I watch her and listen to her breathe until, somehow, I am asleep, too. When I wake in the early morning light, I am confused, startled to find my mother beside me and for a nanosecond, I have forgotten where I am and what has happened and that my father is dead and that I am not in my room at all, but theirs, and in that instant, I realize that I have wet the bed.

 

 

Sometimes, evenings, I seek refuge in my father’s closet. Closing the bedroom door, I hide in there, surrounded by him, his ties, his shirts, his Mr. Rogers sweater, his soft, camel-colored sports coat that still smells of his aftershave. On the floor his blue slippers, worn at the heel just like the ones he has in California. As if he has walked in the same pair from coast to coast.

Someone asks me—was it the minister or my mother?—if I want to say anything at the memorial service.

In the late afternoon, I sit at my father’s desk and write several pages. I later give them to the minister. He asks if I want to read what I have written at the service at Cornell’s Sage chapel but I cannot. He will read it for me:

The winter was so cold and endless. I couldn’t wait until the season would take on a warmer color and when it finally changed and the sun bent down offering us the summer’s warmth, my father had a heart attack and I wished that the season would retrace its steps. And I wished with all my heart that it would be winter once again, seizing us with her bitterly cold and endless days.

Never have I known this depth of pain and loneliness. Never had I realized how insignificant so many things were until now—emotions that cannot be turned on and off with a change of colors.

It’s hardest at night when all the sounds of the day have ceased, most of the people have gone home and thoughts of him fill me. I’ll remember something he’s done . . . and smile and laugh out loud. And I’ll remember him kissing me on the forehead or the way he said, “I love you.” . . . Mostly I remember his eyes. My father had very intense, yet soft and gentle eyes.

Sitting in his office, he surrounds me. All the things he’s collected through the years—pictures of himself as a child in his Boy Scout uniform smiling the same smile. A little boy—he never really did grow up. He had that rare quality of being able to hold on to the things one usually leaves behind. Most people can never envision their father as a child—can only hear stories and see pictures that are only moments of their many moments. But I feel that I almost grew up with him because he shared so much of himself with me. He was the kind of person who when he told you a story, no matter how many times you heard it—he made you laugh.

He gave so much of himself and touched so many people’s lives. So many loved him. So many will remember.

If there had been some way that I could have slammed that door shut so that the doctors couldn’t have gotten in, that final time to empty us—I would have. I would have locked it forever because it will never seem right to me that a man who loved life so much—so very much—had to leave it. I thank God, only, for never allowing him to know that he was going. I feel bitter and filled with a pain that goes beyond words. My first thoughts, my last thoughts—even most of my in between thoughts are all of him.

My father . . . my friend . . . who passed through my life for a very short time . . . and loved . . . and then had to go, still loving.

Another color will come. Leaves will fall and summer will be done; but my father will remain in every color, every season. He will never really be gone and I will continue to speak to him each day and hope that someday he will be able to show me he can hear me.

Though small of stature, he was a giant . . . and I love him.

I have to believe what I have written. How my father will never be gone. The notion that he will not be back is too shattering to consider, as if to suddenly comprehend the distance to the sky.