Fourteen years ago I flew on a plane for the first time.
I took an exam in the morning, something where we had to tie knots to demonstrate what we knew about rigging, for a guy I liked but everyone else pretty much hated. I always liked TDs.
While I was sitting on the floor of some room or other in the annex of Hall, tying cotton rope to crappy plastic chairs, my dad died. Later that night I got on a plane to go home for Thanksgiving break, and spent the entire flight with my face glued to the frigid window like a little kid, watching the lights of the farms go by. When I landed, my whole family was gathered to meet me. So: I knew it was over.
Today I've spent the whole day trying not to think about him. And every day this week, and every week this month, and so on. I forgot his birthday this year, which was something of a triumph. Of course, I was kind of hung over at the time.
I had my family over for Thanksgiving. Well, some of my family. It was nice. Frantic, and smoke-filled, and frustrating and silly and fun and satisfying. And happy, except for the part that was sad.
Today I've tried to keep moving. But maybe it's appropriate to sit down and deal with this for ten minutes. Or an hour.
It's not a big deal. It's not a fresh loss. It's not original. Everyone dies, and everyone's father dies, and being sad or weird or distracted by the death of a father so bloody long ago feels like nothing but wallowing self-indulgence. The epitome of non-problems: boo hoo, I had a wonderful Dad. And maybe it is.
And yet. Maybe it's ok.
What I think about him, when I think about him, which is as infrequently as possible because somehow it's like I got locked into being 19 at the moment when he died, which was not a particularly enjoyable age to be, is this:
I used to think he was Fred Flinstone. There's a pretty strong resemblance, physically and psychologically. He was a big guy, tons of black hair, running around and yelling, and loving us all ferociously, especially my mom.
He would get so angry at us he would throw shit and sometimes that shit would crash through the walls. He punched my brother flat in the face more than once. He lifted me off the ground by the neck of my shirt when he thought I was giving him attitude.
He loved us so much he would have done anything for us, especially my mom. He cried every time he heard me sing. He sent bizarre presents and played fantastic jokes and taught me how to navigate the woods and had awful taste in music and poetry. He was tone-deaf but the sweetest singer of lullabies I ever heard.
I don't know if he would be proud of me, anymore. I assume that he wouldn't. I mean, he would love me, sure. But he thought I could be so much more.
I wonder what life would have been like if he hadn't died.
Because I went to boarding school, we were able to become friends while I was a teenager, which I'm grateful for. He wrote me some excellent letters, which I burned three years after he died, when I tried to put him down in the woods behind the Oberlin arboretum. It worked, and it didn't. I kept the poems. They're awful.
He sent me a turnip for Valentine's day, which I gave back to him when he came to see a play I was working on. He drove a pack of my friends to a Pink Floyd concert six hours from our house and waited outside for us while the show was on, then drove us home at dawn. The whole time, he insisted we call him Joe the Bus Driver, and didn't once act like a dad.
He forced me to have horrible, tortured conversations on the way to school in the morning (a private parochial school that he paid for somehow and drove me to every morning, 45 minutes away) to train me not to be shy. (Did not work!) He didn't know whether or not he believed in God. He dropped everything to take care of my mom, even when I was part of the everything. Standing in the kitchen, on the other end of a telephone call from Pennsylvania where she had to be hospitalized, he looked at me and shrugged, saying "I chose her."
When I was three and realized that I was someday going to die, he didn't lie to me and tell me I wouldn't, or that it was all going to be all right. He picked me up, carried me up the stairs and told me what I could believe: that I wasn't going to die that night.
He was my champion, my protector. Nauseatingly, we called each other "pal." He gave me a wooden nickle, and then reminded me ceaselessly not to accept any others. He forced me to collect coins from other countries, which I found incredibly boring, but which he seemed to love. He read me awful anthropology textbooks about unsympathetic tribes, taught me algebra when I was 10, took me out in the backyard to learn to shoot bows and arrows, and nearly clocked me in the head with a boomerang.
When he went into a diabetic coma in Chicago - the first step of the last step, the beginning of the end from pancreatic cancer - he called me from his hospital bed when I was home alone on summer break, leaving rambling messages and telling me he was being held prisoner in a war camp, that they were poisoning him, that my mother was to blame. I rode my bike to my grocery-store deli job in the pouring rain.
The last night we were alive in the same house he said goodnight and went into the next room so my mom could help him into bed, and cried. Through the wall his voice said, "I'm never going to see her again, am I?" But the next morning he was up and sitting at the kitchen table in his usual chair, wearing a gray plaid shirt that hung on him like he was about to disappear. Just before I left, I left, I left to take a train back to college, I left so I wouldn't have to be there, we said goodbye.
I was so lucky.
He leaned against the counter and I tried not to cry, and we said all the most important things there were to say. I love you. I'll miss you. I forgive you.
And then I left, and my mom drove me to the train station, and I got on a train to Elyria - what shall we do in Elyria? - and never saw him again.
A month later, I took an exam and got on a plane to go home for Thanksgiving. It touched down 12 hours too late to say goodbye again, which I've never been sad about. It doesn't get better than what we had.
And now he shows up, in November, in my dreams. That first year he met me in my childhood bedroom, where he had packed a tiny blue-and-green flowered suitcase I used to own, and I walked him, living, into his grave. In later years I would meet just the pressure of his arms, or his smell, or a sight of his face. This year we had a conversation, but I don't know about what. All I know is that I woke up in the middle of the night, my face aching from grinding my teeth, unable to sleep.
It doesn't matter, anymore. It's not something new, and it's not anything unique. It's normal, to lose your parents. It's nothing compared to the grief of losing a child, or losing a spouse. But logic has nothing to do with this. My body knows. It feels the blow coming, every year, in the days leading up to the 25th. He comes to me in my dreams and I cringe from them. I sleep less. I get more brittle, less strong. Meaner. Sadder. Slower. And then it's The Day, a day like any other, with weather, and news, and events, and movies, and gym time, and casual "hello"s, and a frozen sense of isolation, like I'm viewing everything down a long tunnel with nothing at either end.
And tomorrow it will all be over.
Goodnight again, Dad. See you next year.
november 25, 2011
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