Eddie

I shut my eyes and draw the boy a little closer to me.

Dad, help me! I think. This time I don’t shrug off the touch of his hands on my shoulders, the same touch he gave me on the night he passed over to the other side.

When he died…Oh, tell it the way it is, Edwina. Dying is the proper word! It’s got nothing to do with going away. Going away means the person is going to come back, and that’s not going to happen. He’s gone. For good. For the rest of your life. And whatever you might have felt, assume that it can’t have been real! He’s gone forever.

In a flash I feel the anguish of knowing that I’ll never again hear my father outside my body, only inside me. My memories of my father—his voice, his smell, and the rhythm of his footsteps on asphalt—are like gently fading stars.

Sobs shake Sam’s body.

I feel Dad’s hands on my shoulders and hear his voice in the darkness. “Shush, Eddie, shush, my little Winnie. Come here! Come here and listen to me. Are you listening?”

That’s what he would always say to me when I woke up in the middle of the night, gasping in fear. My dad would sing to me. He sang whatever came to mind. Sometimes he put to music a poem he had recently read in one of the forgotten books in the lighthouses he oversaw. Or he would sing straight from the gut, composing one-off melodies without lyrics.

He would cradle me as softly as one would a petrified bird in a warm hand, while I, resting against his chest, listened to the sounds, which next to his beating heart were released into the world.

“You mustn’t think,” he told me once when I asked him how he managed to sing wordless lullabies that were never written down and never would be. “Don’t think. Follow the image you see inside you and slowly re-create it with your voice. Don’t search for words to capture your pain and your consolation. Seek out a place and sing it.”