more from the novella I am never publishing.
ever.
erm, I skipped January?
-
February 2009
The call comes in the night, like I thought it would.
"Come home." My mother's voice is a hoarse ghost. She's been crying.
There isn't a second thought whether or not to fly home instantly. It's like a reflex, like when a doctor hits your knee to examine your agility. And off you go.
"Sorry," my boss tells me over the phone. He's a nervous man not good with emotion. In a way, he is a shadow of my father. But younger and chubbier and less astute. "You sure you want to use your vacation time up on this?"
Well, so long, summer dreams of Istanbul. I'm on the red eye home, one of a scattering of people found sleeping in blue fake leather seats. There is a girl in the front I catch staring at me. She’s cute, but I’m never going to see her again. Blonde hair, flat nose. She's reading a magazine with her legs crossed at the knee. I will never see her again and I don’t.
At the airport, my Uncle Nelson is waiting for me. He was three years older than my father and by all mathematical scheming, should be dead first. He is my mother’s older brother; he is the protector of the family. My father is like me and has no siblings.
Nelson is impatient to get going.
“Come,” is all he says and I- didn’t even check a bag, not enough time- follow him out the terminal. With Nelson around, I feel grounded and practical. The man’s very sensical; he will have things in order for us. He’s like a humorless version of my father. Maybe that was why my mother was drawn to him in the first place.
Am I seeing my father everywhere? I shake this worry off- it's not relevant enough for me to dwell on it.
The drive to my parents’ home is long and silent. I almost want Nelson to turn the radio on or say something but all we hear our noises from the outside world. I never know what to say in these situations. I think about the work I’m missing. Oh, well. Nothing important. My father is dead.
At the house, I run out of the car like a kid coming home from college for the first time. Except there’s no joy to my steps, simple urgency marks every point.
The whole family (or what is left of it) has gathered about. Aunt Elva, Aunt Jo. They are there and their eyes are bloodshot from crying. A few of my cousins. Uncle Patrick, Jo’s husband, looking severely out of place. My father’s best friend, Jim Crimshaw, Crimshaw would be a surprise for any associate of my father’s, but he’s from his school days. He wears a plaid shirt with the sleeves bunched up at the elbow. His brow is furrowed. He’s trying to make sense of things and he can’t.
But I ignore every single person and keep going to the woman in the corner, with her arms on her knees. The woman who will not meet anyone’s gaze that day. She briefly looks up and I see tears.
“David,” she says. I drop my bag and take her into my arms.
Funeral arrangements are easy enough. After the death of my grandfather, my father felt compelled to make the necessary previsions for the instance of his own mortality. He was 57 at the time. This makes things less hard on my mother, but hard enough. He wanted to be cremated.
“They’re going to burn his body,” she tells me. She’s shaking. “Burn it like firewood. Oh, God. David. I can’t...”
“It’s what he wanted, though,” I reason with her, feeling weird even doing it. Burning. I picture flames and a coffin sliding down a narrow passageway...
She twitches. Too much for her. There is no need for me to break into historic practices of taking care of the dead or the cold logic of how much, frankly, cheaper cremation is in this situation. From here, I take over.
The funeral is a fine affair. The day of it, it’s beautiful outside. Like a day for a wedding. The irony of this would delight my father.
My mother says that his death came out of no where. Just one of those things about life that drop upon us when we least expect it. I am not so sure, but I also put my mother’s reaction in bias of denial. Something was going on- the coroner’s report backs up my suspicions- but she ignores this. Ignorance is almost always bliss.
Many people come to the viewings. We have two in the days before, at Ferguson’s Funeral Home, a place that has always given me the creeps, since I was a kid and we’d drive by. The whole idea of the pre-funeral ritual is rather grotesque, when you give it thought.
Former students and friends and I’m sure an old lover or two. My mother stays close to the casket, dressed in black. She always has a tissue in hand. She looks just as pale as the corpse, these days.
I wear a suit and stand in the back and greet people. I say, yes, I am Edmund’s son. Thank you for coming. We really value your consideration at this hard time for my family. It means the world to us. They become lines in a play to me. I think of Ibsen.
One older man I’ve never encountered before grips my hand in his cold lock. He looks like he just came out of work; his face is covered in the lines of age.
“Your father was a dear man,” he tells me. He can’t stress this enough. “A dear, dear man.”
“T-thank you.” Why I hesitate: I don’t know. And I’m led on by an innate curiosity. “How did you know him?”
“We worked together a long, long time ago. I saw him, now and then. You know, for all he accomplished, what was amazing is that he kept his head so down-to-earth. You meet a lot of people like him who just let everything get to them. Rest assured, your dad was never like that, and that’s what set him apart,” he tells me. And then he walks off to my mother, gently. He is about a foot taller than her and has to reach down some so that they meet, eye-to-eye. He says some words to her. I cannot hear them nor make the shapes out that his lips are mouthing. They are lost to me. And then he touches her knee and is quiet for a moment. And, like that, he is gone. Rushing out the door, his trenchcoat flapping in the wind he has created.
“Who was that?” I ask my mother later, as we are about to leave for the night.
She purses her lips.
“An angel, I figure,” she says. And I know she does not believe in them.
The service itself is beautiful, as it is supposed to be. Have you ever been to a bad funeral service? With my mother observing, we wouldn’t have anything less.
He called himself, the last few years, “a recovering Catholic.” Despite this, the service at Saint Benedict’s, the church he grew up at. Father John gives mass. Father John married my parents, baptized me, oversaw my confirmation. He was my family's priest. He didn't always approve of my father's choices, but he liked us. And, at a time like that, I suppose that's what you want in a priest.
Family I hadn't seen in years filled the golden brown pews. Friends of my father's that had stopped writing and calling and generally banished his existence showed up, looking uncomfortable yet concerned. They gave my mother and I the well-meaning brush-off on the way out and we both knew that old acquaintance had been forgotten.
There is no kind of funeral like a Catholic funeral. Its own variety. I've always been more to the agnostic side of things, but these events have been enough to scare the fear of a very Biblical God into me. A fire and brimstone God.
And in my chest, there is an emptiness. I wish I could console my mother better. I wish I could morph into my father for her, leave me in ashes. She cries a lot. Shakes. Stutters and has moments of this pure silence, which is utterly terrifying and leaves me scrambling like a little boy.
"I miss him," she tells me at dinner. She drinks her wine with such precision. "Lord, I just miss him. But you know, David. I expect to see him walking in through that door any moment now."
"So do I." I check over my shoulder for his figure.
There is one bright spot. Sarah. Sarah Brannigan is the daughter of my father's second college roommate. She would come over for picnics and holidays when we were much younger and our parents were closer. There was a falling-out, somewhere through the links of time. Later, I find out the root. But that's later. Now, I just remember a troubling afternoon spent with my mother as a child.
But Sarah is radiant. Truly, the bright spot. Her auburn hair glimmers in the artificial church light. Her head cocked to the side, talking to her father. I remember lusting for her as a child and unaware of the depth of my feelings. Now, I know. The emptiness is levitated by a tug of want. Our eyes lock in the church. She stares for a moment. Does she recognize who I am? She has to.
I am a pallbearer for my father's casket, but it's just in ceremony. It's heavy against my shoulder. We all know where this is going. My mother heads the procession. Her head is ducked down.
"David?" Later Sarah asks me, when she finds me after the funeral. Her eyes are bright with awareness. She remembers me.
We make plans for lunch. In the time of despair and confusion, there's a rush of joy.
erm, I skipped January?
-
February 2009
The call comes in the night, like I thought it would.
"Come home." My mother's voice is a hoarse ghost. She's been crying.
There isn't a second thought whether or not to fly home instantly. It's like a reflex, like when a doctor hits your knee to examine your agility. And off you go.
"Sorry," my boss tells me over the phone. He's a nervous man not good with emotion. In a way, he is a shadow of my father. But younger and chubbier and less astute. "You sure you want to use your vacation time up on this?"
Well, so long, summer dreams of Istanbul. I'm on the red eye home, one of a scattering of people found sleeping in blue fake leather seats. There is a girl in the front I catch staring at me. She’s cute, but I’m never going to see her again. Blonde hair, flat nose. She's reading a magazine with her legs crossed at the knee. I will never see her again and I don’t.
At the airport, my Uncle Nelson is waiting for me. He was three years older than my father and by all mathematical scheming, should be dead first. He is my mother’s older brother; he is the protector of the family. My father is like me and has no siblings.
Nelson is impatient to get going.
“Come,” is all he says and I- didn’t even check a bag, not enough time- follow him out the terminal. With Nelson around, I feel grounded and practical. The man’s very sensical; he will have things in order for us. He’s like a humorless version of my father. Maybe that was why my mother was drawn to him in the first place.
Am I seeing my father everywhere? I shake this worry off- it's not relevant enough for me to dwell on it.
The drive to my parents’ home is long and silent. I almost want Nelson to turn the radio on or say something but all we hear our noises from the outside world. I never know what to say in these situations. I think about the work I’m missing. Oh, well. Nothing important. My father is dead.
At the house, I run out of the car like a kid coming home from college for the first time. Except there’s no joy to my steps, simple urgency marks every point.
The whole family (or what is left of it) has gathered about. Aunt Elva, Aunt Jo. They are there and their eyes are bloodshot from crying. A few of my cousins. Uncle Patrick, Jo’s husband, looking severely out of place. My father’s best friend, Jim Crimshaw, Crimshaw would be a surprise for any associate of my father’s, but he’s from his school days. He wears a plaid shirt with the sleeves bunched up at the elbow. His brow is furrowed. He’s trying to make sense of things and he can’t.
But I ignore every single person and keep going to the woman in the corner, with her arms on her knees. The woman who will not meet anyone’s gaze that day. She briefly looks up and I see tears.
“David,” she says. I drop my bag and take her into my arms.
Funeral arrangements are easy enough. After the death of my grandfather, my father felt compelled to make the necessary previsions for the instance of his own mortality. He was 57 at the time. This makes things less hard on my mother, but hard enough. He wanted to be cremated.
“They’re going to burn his body,” she tells me. She’s shaking. “Burn it like firewood. Oh, God. David. I can’t...”
“It’s what he wanted, though,” I reason with her, feeling weird even doing it. Burning. I picture flames and a coffin sliding down a narrow passageway...
She twitches. Too much for her. There is no need for me to break into historic practices of taking care of the dead or the cold logic of how much, frankly, cheaper cremation is in this situation. From here, I take over.
The funeral is a fine affair. The day of it, it’s beautiful outside. Like a day for a wedding. The irony of this would delight my father.
My mother says that his death came out of no where. Just one of those things about life that drop upon us when we least expect it. I am not so sure, but I also put my mother’s reaction in bias of denial. Something was going on- the coroner’s report backs up my suspicions- but she ignores this. Ignorance is almost always bliss.
Many people come to the viewings. We have two in the days before, at Ferguson’s Funeral Home, a place that has always given me the creeps, since I was a kid and we’d drive by. The whole idea of the pre-funeral ritual is rather grotesque, when you give it thought.
Former students and friends and I’m sure an old lover or two. My mother stays close to the casket, dressed in black. She always has a tissue in hand. She looks just as pale as the corpse, these days.
I wear a suit and stand in the back and greet people. I say, yes, I am Edmund’s son. Thank you for coming. We really value your consideration at this hard time for my family. It means the world to us. They become lines in a play to me. I think of Ibsen.
One older man I’ve never encountered before grips my hand in his cold lock. He looks like he just came out of work; his face is covered in the lines of age.
“Your father was a dear man,” he tells me. He can’t stress this enough. “A dear, dear man.”
“T-thank you.” Why I hesitate: I don’t know. And I’m led on by an innate curiosity. “How did you know him?”
“We worked together a long, long time ago. I saw him, now and then. You know, for all he accomplished, what was amazing is that he kept his head so down-to-earth. You meet a lot of people like him who just let everything get to them. Rest assured, your dad was never like that, and that’s what set him apart,” he tells me. And then he walks off to my mother, gently. He is about a foot taller than her and has to reach down some so that they meet, eye-to-eye. He says some words to her. I cannot hear them nor make the shapes out that his lips are mouthing. They are lost to me. And then he touches her knee and is quiet for a moment. And, like that, he is gone. Rushing out the door, his trenchcoat flapping in the wind he has created.
“Who was that?” I ask my mother later, as we are about to leave for the night.
She purses her lips.
“An angel, I figure,” she says. And I know she does not believe in them.
The service itself is beautiful, as it is supposed to be. Have you ever been to a bad funeral service? With my mother observing, we wouldn’t have anything less.
He called himself, the last few years, “a recovering Catholic.” Despite this, the service at Saint Benedict’s, the church he grew up at. Father John gives mass. Father John married my parents, baptized me, oversaw my confirmation. He was my family's priest. He didn't always approve of my father's choices, but he liked us. And, at a time like that, I suppose that's what you want in a priest.
Family I hadn't seen in years filled the golden brown pews. Friends of my father's that had stopped writing and calling and generally banished his existence showed up, looking uncomfortable yet concerned. They gave my mother and I the well-meaning brush-off on the way out and we both knew that old acquaintance had been forgotten.
There is no kind of funeral like a Catholic funeral. Its own variety. I've always been more to the agnostic side of things, but these events have been enough to scare the fear of a very Biblical God into me. A fire and brimstone God.
And in my chest, there is an emptiness. I wish I could console my mother better. I wish I could morph into my father for her, leave me in ashes. She cries a lot. Shakes. Stutters and has moments of this pure silence, which is utterly terrifying and leaves me scrambling like a little boy.
"I miss him," she tells me at dinner. She drinks her wine with such precision. "Lord, I just miss him. But you know, David. I expect to see him walking in through that door any moment now."
"So do I." I check over my shoulder for his figure.
There is one bright spot. Sarah. Sarah Brannigan is the daughter of my father's second college roommate. She would come over for picnics and holidays when we were much younger and our parents were closer. There was a falling-out, somewhere through the links of time. Later, I find out the root. But that's later. Now, I just remember a troubling afternoon spent with my mother as a child.
But Sarah is radiant. Truly, the bright spot. Her auburn hair glimmers in the artificial church light. Her head cocked to the side, talking to her father. I remember lusting for her as a child and unaware of the depth of my feelings. Now, I know. The emptiness is levitated by a tug of want. Our eyes lock in the church. She stares for a moment. Does she recognize who I am? She has to.
I am a pallbearer for my father's casket, but it's just in ceremony. It's heavy against my shoulder. We all know where this is going. My mother heads the procession. Her head is ducked down.
"David?" Later Sarah asks me, when she finds me after the funeral. Her eyes are bright with awareness. She remembers me.
We make plans for lunch. In the time of despair and confusion, there's a rush of joy.
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