Chapter 38

I HAVE NO RECOLLECTION of the planning, implementation, or the scheduling of the service in Ithaca. Only the memory that there will be one held simultaneously in California for his friends there and that a few days before, his close friend, Dick Berg, flies in from Los Angeles. A guardian angel with sad, dark eyes, arriving in the middle of the night and appearing suddenly the next morning at the kitchen table, just as the sun began to beat against the shimmering, green lake. Dick is there, and he is taking care of things. Screening calls. Telling someone, “No, the family doesn’t have anything to say. No, they don’t want to be interviewed outside the church.” He becomes our voice when we can attach no thought to words.

But then he has to go, leaving behind what he will say at the West Coast memorial service:

That was the essence of our friend. Wisdom tempered with fallibility, sweet enduring love and its corollary fear of loss, feisty courage laced with wit.

It’s been said that he worked hard and played hard. That isn’t so. He played with the enthusiasm of an innocent. And the work, in fact, came naturally. Relatively speaking, of course. For the dramatist’s craft is a highly sophisticated one, and surely he was one of its most gifted and innovative practitioners.

But where his peers may have anguished over the creative process, Rod woke up each day saying, “Let me tell you a story.” This was his badge, his thrust, his passkey into our lives. He was eternally the new boy on the block trying to join our games. And he penetrated the circle by regaling us with those many fragments of his Jewish imagination . . . intellectual stories, fantastic stories, hilarious stories, stories of social content, even one-liners about man’s lunacy.

However they were always seen through his prism, becoming never less than his stories. And because he came to us with love . . . seeking our love . . . we invariably let him tell us a story. And how much richer we are for it.

He ends with: “And that’s it. No literary critiques or biographical footnotes are required. They are a matter of public record. But just for the personal record . . . please believe this, Rod. That wasn’t the sound of a rototiller back in May. It was the peel of thunder. And we all heard it loud and clear.”

 

 

For a while there is a steady stream of people coming and going. My friend Ken is there. I remember him hugging me, his eyes red and his cheek wet against mine, and then suddenly Julie and Rhoda Golden arrive. Did they stay a day? Longer? Time has no meaning. Like living on the moon. We are floating through space where there is no logic, no gravity, just these days of people passing in and out, passing by, the trampled faces of my father’s friends.

And then they have to go, too, get on with their own lives, leaving behind the almost deafening silence of the house, doors quietly opened, closed, locked. The dogs’ nails clicking across the kitchen floor, clocks ticking, moving forward. All of the stillness so incongruous to what it should be, what it was, with my father there. It isn’t merely his physical presence that has vanished; it is the sounds that he takes with him. His cards slapping the kitchen table, his bellowing laughter, his voice on the phone, his calls to us from the porch when we are outside on summer nights. “Who wants to go get ice cream?” “Who wants to play miniature golf?” “Who wants to go swimming?” “Who wants to go for a boat ride?” His voice talking to the dogs, his snore from the hammock that suddenly, unimaginably, now swings empty in the yard.

Nothing, not even the memorial service—a blur of faces and voices and a daring blue sky—or the silent, dead house, is as unassailable as the day when my father’s clothes are removed, his closet emptied in a slow progression, up and down the stairs. Someone—who—their arms filled with stacks piled high, a myriad of colors: shirts, pants, slippers, sweaters, jackets, belts, coats, robe, and a red tie that slips from the pile and floats to the ground.

When everything has been taken, when the screen door closes a final time, I look at my uncle rocking on the porch, rocking in my father’s shoes, and I wonder, with everything tangible gone, what can I touch now?

 

 

Days later? Weeks? Final arrangements must be made. It had apparently been decided that my dad would be buried in the cemetery near the cottage. Years before he and my mother had discussed it and planned it as part of some insurance, so that when the time came it would all be taken care of. But where, exactly? That hadn’t been decided. They could not have anticipated this day actually happening—and happening so soon—that day years ago when they signed the necessary papers. After they’d passed them back across the table to the attorney, then stood, pushed back their chairs, and left.

They could not have imagined what would follow: my father falling to his knees, the surgery, the madness when his heart finally gives up, just stops, and the doctors cover him. They must have covered him, then backed away, their footsteps silent down the hall, like thieves, to find us, their eyes searching the room, their mouths moving, speaking, two words, it takes only two words: “He’s gone.” And then the crash landing.

We walk on the gravel road of the cemetery. The tree branches rub in the wind, creating an eerie whine, a kind of orchestra for ghosts. It is frightening there, even with the sunlight pouring through the trees. Shadows pass across the tombstones. Some are ancient, crumbled, fallen. Clearly no one has been here recently. There has been no thought, no prayer, no one to remember or to tend. It is as if for decades no hand has brushed away a leaf. No one has knelt, weeping, dampening a name with life.

We walk quietly, deferentially, looking for a place to bury my father’s urn.

It is warm in the cemetery. Isn’t it warm? It is summer. Why am I freezing? Is anyone saying anything? Is my sister there? Or just my mother? I remember only my mother—mother duck, me the obedient duckling, following.

And then her asking, “Here? Should we bury him here? He’d like this tree. Wouldn’t he like this tree?”

There is a mutual, unspoken recognition of the absurdity of the question. A nervous laugh. My father would have diffused that moment. He would have made some slightly off-color remark or a joke.

We would have laughed, and our laughter would have temporarily stalled that lacerating grief.

It is agreed. Someone speaks, someone decides. We will bury him by the tree.

 

 

Eventually the flood of cards and calls slows, and my mother begins to take long walks at dusk. Sometimes Jodi and I panic, calling out for her through the darkness. “Mom? Mom?!” And no answer. We never learn where she goes those nights, alone, walking in the dark.

Sometimes my sister goes up to the field by herself, and I can hear her crying in the distance. When I meet her at the door, her face is wet with despair.

We grieve separately. We still do, but I understand now why the wounded set off alone. Survival after such loss is an uncertain prospect, and grief and grieving, ultimately autonomous. There can be no set, appropriate measure of time, no prescribed formula to follow. Initially anesthetizing, this is, at last, an agonizing process.

As these first days of my father’s absence grow impossibly to weeks, then months with different names, the hammock fills with autumn leaves, piles of brilliant colors, shriveling, scattering, finally blowing away. Suddenly, then, snow is falling, and the ultimate question remains: How, when, does this happen, seasons changing, and life moving on?