“Surviving a loss and letting go is only
half of the story. The other half is the secret belief that we will find, in
one form or another, what we have lost. And it is that potential, shimmery as a
star on a clear night that helps us survive.” – Veronica Chambers
“You can’t make pancakes without breaking
eggs.” – Spanish proverb
My
father’s birthday is Christmas day. He has been dead for almost 26
years, yet he would still only be 79 years old. Cheated, him and me and
my children, and theirs. Dead at 53.
And
cheated too because he was born on Christmas Day. Imagine the cheaty cheat
you’d feel if your birthday fell on Christmas, especially as a kid—whatever
happened to that other day, the one mid-year, where everyone gets together to
sing “Happy Birthday” and play Pin the Tail on the Donkey and eat double
chocolate layer cake with small sugar trains on top and shower you with gifts
and focus on you alone, celebrating the very fact that you were born into the
world?
For
him, it was all compressed into one relative-heavy day—nothing to look forward
to in March or June or August—no, just this one day, his own birth overshadowed
by another and, as time went by, overshadowed even more by a large red-suited
man with rosacea.
Oh,
sure, people would say they had combined your Christmas and birthday present to
accommodate both occasions, but I can’t imagine that this convenient
fabrication made Daddy feel any better, more special, less cheated.
So,
as an adult with a family of his own making, we celebrated Daddy’s birthday at
Christmas breakfast—specifically focused on his birthday and marred only
slightly, I imagine, by the fact that he had to compete for our divided
attention—after all, the loot from Santa was achingly just in the next room (my
good lord, man, there’s a General Electric Show ‘n Tell Home Entertainment
Center Film Strip Viewer and Record Player waiting for me under that tree!)—and
perhaps marred also by the fact that he had to cook it himself. Or maybe he wanted
to, always having been known as the best breakfast cooker in the house: grits
and bacon, sausage and biscuits with sausage gravy, scrambled eggs, pancakes in
the shape of animals or letter with Aunt Jemima syrup. [This was before my
stubborn descent into vegetarianism as a teenager.]
I
loved those pancakes. No, I adored them. I loved the attention they
represented, the personalized creation of batter and fluff, perfectly creating
a P and a D in his hand and sometimes a flower or a heart or triceratops or the
word “love.”
Grandma
would join us, white-gloved to assess the dust; we would put an extra leaf in
the table and fold our paper napkins into pointy triangles instead of
rectangles, to be fancy. I always thought of it as cozy and realize now that it
was actually tight, a table in the small kitchen since we had no dining room,
room for only one person to stand and refill juice glasses. Probably my
mother dreamed of a house for entertaining the Lottie Moon Women’s Bible Study
Group; what she got was a house for raising orange-haired children, giving us
the biggest room in the house as a playroom complete with a schoolroom-sized
chalkboard for my work as a pretend teacher and eating, instead, at a table
pushed up against the kitchen wall. Never mind that the living room sat unused,
ripe for space but untouched by human hands, save when the preacher visited.
So,
Daddy cooked and we ate, giving him birthday presents at breakfast, wrapped—and
this is important—in birthday wrapping paper, not holiday wrap. This couldn’t
appear a haphazard, forgotten day, lost in the thrill of that Oscar Schmidt
Autoharp and new Bobby Sherman album left by Santa, no.
One
of those last birthday (of course, we didn’t know how few he had left), I saved
all my tips from working at Joe’s Dairy Bar and bought him a Mickey Mouse
watch. Mind you, the crowds at Joe’s on Sunday nights after church were
amazingly large (no lactose intolerance among the Southern Baptist crowd), but
cheap, so it took a while to save enough for the special edition Mickey Mouse
watch with the date on the dial! Imagine! I thought it suited his pixie sense of humor, that crooked smile of his,
and he did love it!
When
he died, I made sure Mr. Sossoman arranged it on the wrist on top so
all those hundreds of people who came to see him in his satin puffy
box would smile and nod knowingly. “Yes,” they’d say to themselves,
“that
Melvin always did have a smile on his face.” The funny, bright red
“Merry Xmas”
Western bow-tie that he proudly wore with a sly smile to holiday
parties is
always front and center on my Christmas tree.
That
same birthday, I talked Mama into buying Daddy a pair of Lee blue jeans. She
balked—“what will people think?”—and I insisted. “He’ll love them. Just wait
and see,” I said.
He
wore them everyday. He had them on that last harried ride to Intensive Care on
Mother’s Day weekend, the unsigned Mother’s Day card we found afterwards in the trunk of his car a
most terrible symbol of his suddenly unfinished life and his thoughtfulness, simultaneously.
Daddy
went into the hospital
that day and only his clothes came back out. I used to see Mama open
that hospital
bag of his last clothes, closing its top around the whole bottom half
of her face, trying to smell him, desperate for his scent after he
went underground. I tried to convince her to bury him in those loved,
worn
jeans and his beloved red plaid corduroy shirt, but she drew the line
at the
Mickey Mouse watch. A woman knows her limits. I wear that shirt now and
perhaps Mama
still has those jeans in that bag, taking them out from time to
time for a whiff of him, real or imagined.
Daddy
hooked a holiday stocking shortly before he died, having been introduced to the
wonders of rug-hooking by a wife who was frantic—desperate even, and with good reason—to provide him
with a quiet hobby, one that unlike watching Joe Namath wouldn’t involve
excitement, anticipation, movement, stress to his heart. If ever there was a
hobby like that, I suppose rug-hooking was it, followed only by sleeping.
So,
when Christmas comes, like it inevitably does, my sadness at his leaving
magnifies: when I see that holiday stocking hung from my dining room mantel, I
both smile at his leaving it behind and I weep for the reduction of his life it
represents, a heart patient quietly hooking rugs at the very prime of his life.
And
yet, I wonder how much my adoration depends on his loss. If he had been living
these 25 years, would I have seen things about him as an adult that I didn’t
like and he, me? Probably, just as we all do. So, instead, he has been given a
special status—that kind of adored position where time stops so we can’t peek
under the curtain and see things with which we disagree as often occurs when we
age, watching parents and relatives and friends (and self) too closely over
time become people we might not want them to be, or be ourselves.
None
of us are immune from that disappointment, that change of heart, that
realization, that sudden knowing, are we? Perhaps not, unless we die young.
It’s not a good trade-off, and it’s a chance I long to have taken, to grow up
with him, warts and all. Maybe then I would have learned to incorporate all
that new data, that vision of family from grown-up angles, where Grandpa is no
longer nine feet tall, but just usual-sized, for example. Perhaps then I would
have learned to be forgiving of those foibles, that fall, that shrinkage in
estimation—that human reality, the stuff that really is us over time—to resist those impeachment proceedings of others
that we’re prone to. As Deming said, “the
greatest losses are unknown and unknowable.” Here’s to knowing.
When
my stepfather died 23 years after my father, this time I was ready. He
asked me
to write his eulogy and deliver it at his funeral and I did all that.
It was a
fine eulogy, I think, one with a satisfying organizing principle, a
rhythm to
it like all good speeches, a clarifying sense of closure and
rounded-ness. I
wrote it on a flight beside a Baptist minister; perhaps his
denomination was
the final inspiration. Writing it had haunted me during those 37 days
while he
died—knowing I needed to get on with it, yet feeling bad about
announcing the
end while he was still in process, knowing that summing up a life is an
awesome responsibility, but not yet feeling the sense of it, the way it
should add up, until that
flight. And then it was done. I had realized the parts and the whole.
It was a
fine tribute, a tripartite homage to the life of a tall man with a
Southern
accent, a golfer’s tan, and a dark green Lincoln Town Car.
Delivering
that eulogy was tough going. Tougher than I ever imagined. In fact, spent by the
anxiety of watching me choke on words, one of my mother’s friends said
afterwards that she didn’t know how I made it through. “I had to take a Xanax
just to get to the funeral,” she explained. Later, at Mama’s house, my brother
pulled out a pill bottle, asking if anyone needed an Ativan. (Note to self:
after always hiding the occasional wine bottle when my Southern Baptist family came to
visit, I suddenly realized that perhaps they don’t drink not because of their religion, but because they’re all high on
prescription drugs, so just a shout out to them: no more hiding the Mt
Difficulty merlot at my house.)
As
I looked out from my pulpit into the church, I saw the sons of my
father’s
friends, looking just as their fathers had looked 25 years before;
their daddies
then pallbearers for my father’s casket—the one like Hoss from Bonanza
was
buried in—and now here before me their sons, spitting images and
pallbearers
again. In that hot-faced moment of recognition, I wasn’t speaking at my
stepfather’s funeral anymore, I was speaking at Daddy’s, saying what I
needed
to have said then, but was too young to know or say. I'll admit that I
got momentarily angry at all those people who had continued living
while he didn't, including the dead man lying below where I stood. And
in that circular moment, I
could barely speak; there were moments of real anguish on the part of
the
congregation (and me), that kind where you feel deeply for the person
trying,
desperately, to go on, like I felt when Richard Gaylord choked on “God
Bless
America” that time at the Burke County Fair. There’s a tape of the
eulogy; I’ve
not been able to listen to it since.
There,
there in the front row was the reincarnation of one of my father’s friends—his
son, Kenneth, all grown up into him now, the very mirror of his dad. And
Ronnie, further back, always true and faithful and representing his recently dead father,
having become him. It was suddenly still 1980, that horrible May moment when I
reached out like a child to touch Daddy’s casket as he was rolled out of the church, those
young 50-ish men in the church for Daddy’s funeral, feeling his loss but even
more so, their own sudden vulnerability.
My
father’s death at 53 in 1980 is the fulcrum around which my life moves. Or
perhaps that’s not exactly it. Perhaps it is a rivet on which things hinge,
that holds things together. No, a grommet through which everything else is
laced? Yes, since that would imply a hole, I think that’s it. Like Fermat’s
last theorem, it will take me 375 years to work it through. I suppose we all
have something like that to puzzle through, fill up, patch, lace shut.
Journalist
Marjorie Williams died of liver cancer last January three days after turning
47. A writer for The Washington Post, Vanity Fair and Slate magazines,
as an “act of mourning,” her husband compiled essays of hers in a book entitled
The Woman at the Washington Zoo:
“Having found myself faced
with that old bull-session question (What would you do if you found out you had
a year to live?), I learned that a woman with children has the privilege or
duty of bypassing the existential. What you do, if you have little kids, is
lead as normal a life as possible, only with more pancakes.”
Pancakes
made into initials—is there any breakfast food more glorious, more personal,
more full of sheer, fantastic, lasting love?
Yes,
it’s clear what I need to do: I need to buy myself a Mickey Mouse watch.
~*~ 37days: Do it Now
Challenge ~*~
Find what you have lost.
Cook
monogrammed pancakes for people you love. Wear comfy jeans and a plaid shirt
and a goofy watch that makes you (and others) smile. Celebrate your birthday
whenever you get a hankering to.
Hook a rug to leave behind.
From the last alphabet challenge: R is for Rightness
Christmas
Day is my father's birthday. 
My
father’s birthday is Christmas day. He has been dead for almost 26
years, yet he would still only be 79 years old. Cheated, him and me and
my children, and theirs. Dead at 53.
So,
as an adult with a family of his own making, we celebrated Daddy’s birthday at
Christmas breakfast—specifically focused on his birthday and marred only
slightly, I imagine, by the fact that he had to compete for our divided
attention—after all, the loot from Santa was achingly just in the next room (my
good lord, man, there’s a General Electric Show ‘n Tell Home Entertainment
Center Film Strip Viewer and Record Player waiting for me under that tree!)—and
perhaps marred also by the fact that he had to cook it himself. Or maybe he wanted
to, always having been known as the best breakfast cooker in the house: grits
and bacon, sausage and biscuits with sausage gravy, scrambled eggs, pancakes in
the shape of animals or letter with Aunt Jemima syrup. [This was before my
stubborn descent into vegetarianism as a teenager.]
So,
Daddy cooked and we ate, giving him birthday presents at breakfast, wrapped—and
this is important—in birthday wrapping paper, not holiday wrap. This couldn’t
appear a haphazard, forgotten day, lost in the thrill of that Oscar Schmidt
Autoharp and new Bobby Sherman album left by Santa, no.
Daddy
hooked a holiday stocking shortly before he died, having been introduced to the
wonders of rug-hooking by a wife who was frantic—desperate even, and with good reason—to provide him
with a quiet hobby, one that unlike watching Joe Namath wouldn’t involve
excitement, anticipation, movement, stress to his heart. If ever there was a
hobby like that, I suppose rug-hooking was it, followed only by sleeping.
Yes,
it’s clear what I need to do: I need to buy myself a Mickey Mouse watch.
What a special tribute on this special day for your father. I'm so sorry for you loss; but love that you have such fond memories of the pancakes. Thank you for sharing your feelings with us. I hope you have a very Merry Christmas.
Posted by: Victoria | 25 December 2007 at 10:09
Today I am remembering, too. Mostly for my friend George, http://www.scrapbookgraphics.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=24412&cat=500&ppuser=5099 who died a little bit ago. At 15 years old, from a hunting accident. For whom I have been grieving for weeks. And I got sick. Weeks of crying suppressed my immune system, or so my sister said, and I got sick. I was sick on the last day of school before Christmas vacation. Accepting gifts, sneezing, sanitizing my hands, passing out the one hundred fifteen homemade bookmarks that I made for my beloved students. Sneezing/sanitizing again. Passing out the eight banana bread loaves packed in baskets with cinnamon candles I made for my friends. Sneezing/sanitizing again. Giving the homemade coasters with pictures of my friend’s babies on them along with cinnamon pine cones.
I was sick Friday when I came home and passed out in bed after being crabby with my own children. Slept Saturday and Sunday with my wonderful husband covering for me as he always does. Woke Monday and felt good enough to go out and finish the shopping. A black turtle neck for Bob. A jacket for Charlie. Jackets for both of my wonderful in-laws.
Then I cooked for Christmas Eve. Our family, Byzantine Catholic, always celebrated Christmas Eve. I made a ham, mashed potatoes, corn, peas and bread. Probably would have been more, if I felt better, but so it is.
Felt too sick to go to my brother-in-law’s house. So Tom took the boys there. Bob was here giving the boys their presents, and stayed when they left. He is their godfather, but he was my friend long before that. So we went to the family room and played on the boys’ brand new pool table that Tom and I put together last night at midnight. The one we had to call Dan and Abby over to help turn over because it was too heavy. So wonderful to have neighbors you can call at 11:30 on Christmas Eve to help you turn over a table that ways expressly, “It takes four adults to turn this over without breaking its legs.” I know, I highlighted the important parts of the instructions before beginning this project.
So I played pool with my friend that I haven’t been with in years. I see him every week. At the boys’ hockey games, or over for supper, but never see by himself. I got to be Ramona with Bob, instead of Nick’s mom with Alexander’s friend. It was so fun. We played pool, had some beer, ate some Chex Mix, but mostly were. Were the friends we used to be. Friends we had the intention and effort to be.
So, yeah, I may be sick at Christmas. But I am so glad to be sick. Because I got to visit with a friend I haven’t seen in so long. Me.
Not anyone’s mom, not anyone’s teacher, or wife or anything else. Just me. A girl who likes to drink beer and win at pool. Who tires of winning and then prefers to teach pointers of pool. (All geometry, of course.) A girl who hasn’t fallen on the floor laughing for such a long time that she forgot how it was, but was so glad to remember.
Posted by: Ramona | 25 December 2007 at 20:10
oh Patti! nobody can move me like you do. the real blubbering only happens when i'm reading you. but then again, nobody makes me feel as sane as you do, either. thank you. thank you, Melvin, for Patti Digh.
xo
Posted by: Mary-Sue | 26 December 2007 at 00:36
reading of your loss makes me feel mine
thank you
Posted by: Carrie K | 26 December 2007 at 01:04
My mom was buried 25 years ago yesterday. I was 22, a senior in college home on Christmas break. I worked the second week of that break and went back to school in January never missing a class. Life went on without a blip.
I felt like I had a double life. My close friends all knew and had made the trek to be with me, but I can remember telling an acquaintance at school, "Well, at home, my mother died." As if somewhere else she hadn't...
Today my kids gave me a beautiful angel and Christmas decorations emblazoned with the bright red cardinals my mother loved. And while I napped this afternoon my husband surprised me by making me lemon meringue pie from my mother's recipe.
I am overwhelmed.
Her name was Carol Terese Mary Schrenker Connor.
Posted by: terri | 26 December 2007 at 01:53
Thank you Patti, and Melvin, for 37 Days.
When my Uncle passed away, in his late 40s, I remember getting the call at home. I was only in high school. I didn't know what to feel, but I knew I felt loss. I went out on our deck, overlooking Lake Champlain, and looked up at the blue sky and there was only one feathery cloud. I don't remember much about my uncle, but I still remember the image of that cloud.
Posted by: Jillian | 26 December 2007 at 08:20
This is a lovely, lovely story. Incidentally, I started blogging after (& because of) losing my father, too. Also too young at 58 from a tragic accident. I share many of your feelings, including the anger at life going on - right away - when something so enormous had just happened. I felt like I was out-of-body, floating here but not really *being* here, for a long time. It was as if I watched life around me as a movie i wasn't much interested in anymore. I've oft lamented that were it not so painful, it would be fascinating, this metamorphosis as we grieve. Incidentally as well, I have hopes of turning some of my own musings into a book, though I await my family's readiness (& approval). You have such a beautiful gift for cutting to the core and fleshing out the *real stuff*. Sometimes, I'll admit, I can't even read you when you first appear in my inbox. For some things - like say, oh, deep soul-searching - great preparation must be made.
I was most attracted to your recent plea for an assistant, but then realized I mostly wanted it because I would very much like to know you. Whether or not I'd be a good assistant is another thing altogether, though I do like order. :)
Thank you for sharing your heart's language. The tears choked back all day yesterday beg to be let forth - I go in search of a box of tissues.
Warmly,
Laura
Posted by: piscesgrrl | 26 December 2007 at 12:48
Victoria - thank you so much for writing - I hope your holidays were merry, too...
Oh, Ramona - the story of that young boy is heartbreaking. My thoughts and prayers go out to you and his heartbroken family. And your story of visiting with yourself after so long is really beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with me...your tribute to George is beautiful. We have so, so much to learn from young people. (And I hope you are feeling better)
Mary-Sue - and you made me cry with that last line. Thank you for your lovely note.
Carrie K - peace to you.
Oh, Terri - I'm so sorry for your loss, and so glad for the wonderful way your family remembered. Thank you for sharing her name - there is something about naming that is important, isn't there?
Jillian - thank you. Those touchstones are sometimes unlikely, but very important, aren't they? thank you for this image...
Laura - I was so moved by your note on many levels. Many thanks for sharing everything you did. And, by the way, you don't have to be my assistant to know me... ;-) ! I'm so sorry for your loss...
Posted by: patti digh | 27 December 2007 at 11:56