My father’s death certificate reads about 5 years ago. I refuse to remember the exact day. It’s in the middle of March. Bloated with a ruptured intestine and with faint awareness due to morphine and a series of head injuries from repeated falls in the nursing home, he lay in a cinderblock hospice facility on the frigid and blustery north shore of Lake Michigan. His window facing yet farther north: a weedy field of shivering goldenrod, and milkweed stalks, exposed by a winter of light snow, implying sunlight by long quaking shadows. To mute the din of the facility, I plugged him into my iPod, pumping his head full of Chopin waltzes and mazurkas from a Rubinstein recording; his last expression of any sort was a faint smile and low sigh when I set the earbuds into his gaping old man ears. These were waltzes and mazurkas he used to play on our out of tune upright pianos, interrupting his woodworking putz with glorious, rolling harmonies that bespoke of his large hands and seldom exposed emotional currents.
I covered him with my flannel, and rested my hand gently on his shoulder, more affection than he’d tolerated from me when fully living. Through his transparent skin, I was able to see the pulse fade from his carotid arteries. That was the last time he died.
My father and I were close, at least as close as two highly introverted cerebral misanthropes of different generations and genders can be. Our relationship was like a shared iceberg: cool, unstoppably large, ominously silent, and mostly beneath active perception. At some point during my early teen years, my dad became unhappy and started drinking a metabolically unsustainable amount. This contributed to a volatile home environment. I left when I had just turned 16 years old. By the time I was 24, I received a call that my dad was likely to die because of esophageal varices and to hustle my ass from my Bohemian life in Cleveland to Michigan to say my farewell. He managed to keep breathing, but he’d killed some key linkages his brain. He was now angry, mean, obsessive, and spiteful. He was no longer capable of sharing a meaningful, enduring connection. He was disqualified for a liver transplant because he thought AA was beneath him. He was only capable of the kind of inward exchanges that come from codependence and guilt. The understated bond between us had been washed away with so much Four Roses. Grieving for this relationship involved a good deal of anger. But truly, it was grief. So much was lost to those bottles of whiskey.
Before my dad died the first time, we had a wonderful, sparse, and awkward relationship that I treasured. My mom and I were distant at best, so I just had my dad. He often had to acquiesce in his parenting on account of my jealous mother, but to avoid too much sentimental verbiage, here’s a list of what I had grieved after he was initially lost to alcoholism.
- Watching Monte Python
- Talking about Classical music
- Sitting down and trying to figure out theoretical physics
- His Humanism
- His pipe dreams.
- That he valued me
- The heaps of scraps he’d let me make stuff from in the shop
- His encouragement for me to do difficult tasks
- His sense of depth and value in human experience
- His joy when tinkering
- Oddball unscientific experiments.
Not sure how I can tidily sum up this post. I suppose I have loose ends wallowing in grief still. I truly wish that he hadn’t died twice. The things that I lost the first time were things that would have been profoundly valuable to share the rest of our concurrent lives. Those good times were so fucking long ago and were lost for all the wrong reasons.