Nov. 1

How is it that the trees are still flaming?

Goodbye, Dad.

Splinter, seed: lodged in my gut.

You were here for a long time, and then you began to disintegrate.  Every visit, more of you had crumbled.  What is both beautiful and terrible is that your love for me was still there, overgrown, buried, half-strangled, but present, and sometimes I could see it. You wanted me to be OK.  You wanted to make things OK for me.

This is so easy, trivial even, when children are young.  You scoop them up.  You cradle them close.  You speak to them in the soothing voice that silts down into their bones to lie there, fallow, for decades, until one day it emerges from their mouths, bubbling up in response to a child's cry.

It's harder, later, as your children grow older and smarter, darker and more private.  You attempt; you falter.  You call when you shouldn't have called, stand to one side when you should have stepped up.  You can't stanch every wound, but you try, and your trying is, in and of itself, a balm.

It's even harder when the hurt is you, and the way you are unwillingly ceding yourself, acre by acre, inch by inch, word by word.  You give ground.  But you still ache to help.  You still hold my hand.  You still put out your hand to catch my tears.

I want to give you the gift of my happiness, because a child's happiness is every parent's secret dream.  But I'm human, piebald, so I give you instead an acknowledgement of my debts.  You made me, whole. You made me whole.  

I love you, Dad. 

1942-2019

Six Words

Trains trains trains; trains trains sky

Six Words

Well over halfway to death.  So?

4:30

After 4:00 AM, I don't mind losing sleep quite so much.  During the first part of the night, or the black middle, failing to drift off feels crushing, a deeply personal lapse committed against the backdrop of the universe's unstinting indifference.

But after 4:00 AM, acceptance creeps in.  You may as well get up, because you're not sliding back into unconsciousness anytime soon. Though it's still pitch dark, the birds are restive.

And you are alone.

I get up and pad as noiselessly as I can through the darkened rooms of my house.  The HVAC system is quiet.  The rain has lifted.  Everyone else is asleep.  Even the cat, who never sleeps and yet always seems to be some degree of comatose -miraculous in the commonplace way of cats- lies still.  In an hour or two, my obligations will snap shut around me.  But not quite yet.

Serenity Now!

Although it verges on trite, I am passingly fond of the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

As the last line hints, making the distinction between changeable and immutable can be troublesome. 

But the difficulties don't end there, because, as so many bromides do, this one fails to account for, well, life.

To wit:

The non-binary nature of fungibility.  Alas, mutability is a continuum.  Many things can be changed- but only a little bit.  Or a thing can sustain serious alterations, but remain profoundly problematic.  Do you really still want to get out of bed and put on clothes in order to very slightly improve your relationship with your mother?  Which brings me to my next quibble...

Opportunity cost.  Say I can make a change, but only if I put forth Herculean effort.  Or effort that is less than Herculean, but is still effort.  I could have spent that time eating lemon cake.  I could have husbanded my emotional energy and therefore  had the fortitude not to snap at my coworker when she once more failed to note an important event in her calendar.  I could have taught my coworker to use her calendar.  I could have cured cancer.  Instead I staggered around trying to make a life change.  Ergo...

Unintended consequences.  Say you make your change, but then you don't have the energy to cure cancer.   Or say you make your change, but in making that change, you have created another, bigger problem: You may have cured cancer, but now overpopulation will decimate the globe.  You may now have enough pasta salad, but all your relatives are vomiting. Which means you will now spend an even greater proportion of your life than you had previously estimated cleaning up bodily fluid -an eventuality you could accept as unchangeable, but actually yourprobably could have changed your fate had you not embarked on your Quixotic quest to rip apart the fabric of the universe in the first place. 

I am not serene.  This is some false advertising.

1040

My father no longer consistently recognizes me.  I barely feel the sting of this; it is simply one more link in a chain of loss that stretches back, now, a decade and a half.  Loss upon loss, the whole thing still unfurling from my gut like a tapeworm.

I say "still" because this loss continuous and current- my father is still declining, and, lately, I've begun to feel myself tipping off the edge of my own cognitive plateau, beginning to slide.

But here is one new thing: After 15 years, the present is losing its grip on the past.  What I mean is this: always before, my father's debility leached backward, discoloring not only the man I loved as an adult, but the man I loved as a child and a teenager.  A letter he wrote to me while still cogent, a picture of him cradling my infant skull, a draft of the toast he gave at my wedding- these were agonizing artifacts, a reminder of the man who no longer was.

But finally, unaccountably, the present is receding, abandoning the past in its wake.  Going through my own tax records this year, I came upon an old return my father had filed for me when I was eighteen.  I do my own taxes now, just as he did.  I have opened college savings accounts for my children, just as he did.  And I am preparing for an uncertain future using what tools I am able to access- just as he was once able to.

The tax return is brief but assiduously completed; he used the numbers to open, and contribute to, my very first retirement account.  Here is another copy for you in case you want it, he scrawls across a duplicate form from 2002.

I know what he means: I love you.  I love you, and I always will.