Two Years

Two years ago about 2:40 MDT this morning, my father was declared dead.  He actually passed closer to midnight, maybe even right at midnight, but it had taken the hospice nurse a few hours to get back to my folks' home from visiting another patient.  When I had arrived about 7:00pm that evening, after an anxious 4 1/2 hour flight from Baltimore, his breathing was spectacularly labored and loud.  "That's hypothalmic breathing," the nurse had said.  "The last parts of his brain have shut down; there's almost nothing left."  She predicted he'd go that evening, most likely once the family that had gathered had left and Mom and I went to sleep.  "People need to be alone to die," she exhorted.  And that seemed to be the case with Dad:  as I was drifting off to sleep, just a few minutes after Mom and I had headed to bed, I noticed the absence of his breathing.

In the days and months since I held his cold and stiffening hand in mine and kissed him good-bye, my family's collective life has changed dramatically.  My wife and I bought a house with my mother and we share our little serving of suburbia together, building gardens, cooking for each other, caring for and worrying about members of our blended and extended family, and coming together or going off into our respective corners as we can and need.  Old friends of Dad's have become new friends of ours and allegiances long steadied by his influence have withered or failed.  The hot steely longing of being unaccustomed to his absence has cooled to the familiar hardness of a world without him.  Dream visitations and habitual thoughts of "oh, I should ask Dad about that" have fallen out of mind, leaving the what's so of those who remain.

Of course, Mom and I still actively remember and memorialize him, if more purposefully now than before.  As I write this, I am wearing a favorite ring of his; today Mom carries on her neck a small chain with an elephant pendant that he wore in a photo she has with him.  Tonight, we'll order in Red Robin:  Dad loved hamburgers and opted for meals from the chain when he couldn't find a local place.  We'll make a communion of beef and onion rings and, for a moment, feel his presence.  But our day to day lives are much more about living forward than they were two years ago, which is what he wanted.

I sometimes wonder what Dad would make of our current crisis.  I imagine he'd be his usual circumspect, gentle self, even as he would probably be enraged by our Federal government's response and by the more radical individualist behaviors.  Having lived through several wars and fought in one, I expect he would contextualize current events very much within the ebb and flow of civilization.

Which seems like a good lesson.  Things are serious, but sometimes things get serious.  Do what you can and let go of what you can't.  "We come in in the middle of a movie and we go out in the middle of a movie" -- something his friends told me he said to them a lot.  I might think of him as a 20th century Taoist Farmer.  He was a smart guy and a class act and a model I'll never equal.  But I don't mind trying.