Every year, on the anniversary of his death, I write something about my dad. It is how I honor him, this dad of mine who also was a writer, but writing, in general, has been hard this last year. Writing something worthy about him is daunting on a tank that runs dry most of the time.
I started mulling over this empty tank of mine while I was in the car running an errand which naturally led me to think about the last few days of his on this earth. Those were his toughest days, waiting to die. They were also tough to witness and there are a lot of painful memories that rise up every September. He got admitted to the hospital and a nurse was having trouble getting his catheter in and she was pissed. Banging stuff, half-yelling, frustrated, and from what it seemed like to me waiting in the hallway, taking it out on Dad. Everybody calls him Bill, not William, I wanted to say to this nurse. He raised six kids in a small house so you couldn’t begin to imagine how much he loves the quiet. And since he’s dying and this catheter business you’re so mad about is preventing him from getting to his destination, why don’t you just let him have some of that fucking quiet so he doesn’t look so scared and then maybe the rest of us won’t be so scared either. But that’s the sort of thing you think to say a couple of decades after the fact which is a useless exercise in coulda shoulda.
Rather than a melancholy piece, I thought about writing about the parts of him that drove us nuts. He was a perfectionist, which in these days is more likely to be referred to as a healthy dose of OCD. We all inherited some of that from him. I have to write a grocery list in the same color pen. I can’t start it in black and then go to blue. No, I cannot or I would have have to start over or breathe in and out of a brown, paper sack until the next black/blue trigger. Or when we were kids how we all had to take our turn picking up sticks in the yard before he mowed, and after what seemed like hours of bending over and picking up stick after stick, he’d look out into the yard and say, “I thought I told you to pick up sticks. There’s some there, and there, and there….” When you were the one old enough to mow he’d look out over the finished lawn and tell you that you needed to work on making your lines straighter. If your first line is straight, he would say in all seriousness to your flushed, sweating face, all the rest of them will be straight. And the straightness of mowed lines have plagued me ever since.
He died a few short months after he retired, which was the result of using up all of his disability time with the company when there were no tricks left up anybody’s sleeve to keep him there. They gave him a big sendoff and we were all invited. We were in a packed room at the offices of Commonwealth Edison in downtown Chicago, with coffee and cake, and his boss said some nice things, and somebody else said some nice things, and they gave him a lamp made from an old meter and he said that was just wonderful. He’d always wanted one of those. When it was his turn to talk he thanked everyone, said he was grateful for the 45 years he worked there, that my goodness just look at all of you who came today to wish me well, that he didn’t know what the future held but he had Ger and the kids and the good Lord and so we’ll just take it as it comes. Before we left the house that day, Mom said just pray he makes it through this because he’s not good this morning and if he can’t say goodbye to his work friends I don’t know what we’re going to do.
His bad luck in getting cancer meant that we all took it as it came and twenty seven years have passed since then. There has been so much that has transpired in the family that he has been absent for – marriages and divorces, a slew of kids born, graduations, the death of his brother, a nephew, in-laws, the deaths of more friends of him and Mom than could be accurately counted.
So what is there to write about when it seems a lifetime has passed?
Sometimes I have imaginary conversations with him. When things are worrying to me, I am likely to run them by him in my head. I often wonder what it would be like if he just showed up on my doorstep one day. Rang the bell and when I opened it he would be standing on my front porch like he took a detour years ago and just now figured out people were looking for him. Would he even know it was me? I was a 33 year old pregnant mom of one living in Maryland when he died. Now I’m the 60 year old mother of three adult kids, one granddaughter, and living in Kansas. Kansas, he would say. That’s quite a leap you took there, kid. Two years after you died, Dad, I would say.
Almost to my destination I waited at a stoplight and watched an inflatable, green stick man announcing the grand opening of a used car lot. It bent and twisted with the wind over and over, never staying in one place for more than a second. Disappearing and nearly on the ground one second only to pop back up with an ever-present smile until the wind had other ideas. That’s me, I thought. That’s me in this country for the last year. Buffeted by the wind of current events, trying to smile, bouncing up and convincing myself that sooner or later it’s all going to be okay. Look at me. I’m smiling. That means it’s all okay and bad credit and no credit are our specialty, and thank God for being unplugged because night brings relief from another ugly news story.
By the time I reached the parking lot of Jo-Ann Fabrics I sat in my hot car and had a good cry thinking about all the things I thought I didn’t have left to say.
Sometimes I wish my dad would show up on my doorstep and ring the bell, and even if it only lasted a few seconds, I could look at him and remember it all. How he always said to us don’t you kids forget that you are your brother’s keeper, and then because he knew we watched more than we listened, he lived the life of a keeper. Maybe then I would know that no matter what happens or how the winds batter me, I have been and always will be tethered to goodness.
I forget that these days.
