Dad

I have not spoken to my dad in over forty years. Years ago I turned my back on him and walked away and that was that.

No, we didn’t have a fight.

He died when I was 25 and that walk away came right on the beat at the conclusion of the service in the cemetery after we lowered him with sway and love deep into the womb of the ground, like a treasure chest, ceremonially buried in that family secret place that only we would ever know the location of.

When you bury a parent, time suddenly becomes unfathomable, unreliable, it suddenly faints away like a delicate socialite onto a waiting divan, from the searing heat of loss,

Our parent’s final breath pushes us into a dimension of exquisite separation and inextinguishable pain, where everything still feels just within our reach but in truth is now as far away as the weeping moon.

The cemetery only knows formality. The weathered stones, which, like the canvas of our souls, have epitaphs and life stories carved deeply into them, stand like a million and one gravely silent soldiers, who rise up one more time, to salute and pay homage to our fallen heroes. When we turn and float back to our cars, behind us, the soldiers become like parents to our parents and rock and hush them like newborns, with the lullaby of the wind and the music of the rain, until cold finally becomes warm and sleep becomes eternal.

In life we are plugged directly into the outlet of the ever-expanding hearts of our parents, who involuntarily send telepathic messages of hope and vital instruction to us, especially when any one of the Four Horsemen of our potential Apocalypse: sadness, regret, heartache and fear come suddenly stampeding our way, ready to trample us into atoms of life weary dust.

When our parents are no longer, at first we feel like we are no longer. We have never gone unescorted, unprotected. Left with a never employed corsage. We have never traveled without secret certainty. Distance from home, after all, is both unmeasurable and incalculable, because we can always close our eyes and transport ourselves back to any point in the time our time, where our houses still sit with a woeful mom staring from her perch at an upstairs candle window, or a slouching dad, sitting relaxed in the arms of an overstuffed chair in front of a stone fireplace whose flames keep the engine of memory and roaring.

We do not feel the need, especially where we grow stubbornly older, resistant and sometimes even dismissive of our past, to be there.

But the truth is, despite the appearance of irrefutable courage, we are there.

We are always there.

And we will never, ever leave. There will always be, in our sovereign wake, the faint echo of murmuring televisions and laugh tracks, the precision tapping of keyboards, bursts of laughter, the clink of dishes being washed, the click of a living room lamp as it is startled back to consciouness from its comatose state.

We can never leave.

We will only be left.

When our parents wither like a rose and regress before our Keane-wide eyes and turn, by the tick tock, countdown minute, translucently pink and shockingly helpless, it can be infuriating not because they are suddenly frail or infirm or even needy, but because that is when it slowly dawns on us that they do not come with any kind of warranty, which we presumed was always a part of the written agreement between mother and child as witnesses by God.

You suddenly get that the contract can be voided and there is nothing to stop you from being permanently declared an orphan.

When they expire, like a subscription to a dependable magazine that was always right there in the mail box on the exact, agreed upon date it immediately signals to you that the rehearsal is finally over, it is opening night., you have been pushed out onto the proscenium and the optimal glare of the lights and the sound of a rustling audience do not inspire courage or confidence.

You do not want to be there.

Out there all alone. The first wave of panic comes when you can’t remember your lines or where you are supposed to go. All eyes are on you and all you want to do is cry out for your mom or dad and have them magically return to swoop you up and return you to that place where hammocks sway like hula dancers, kettles whistle like sailors, the arms of fresh laundry clap like synchronized country line dancers and dishes sit on dinner tables, arranged just so in a ritual of quiet preparation that was completed a million and one times whose very presence assures that you will be nurtured and most of all loved.

We can, even after decades, for a brief second or two, conjure up our parents, through the atomizer spray of mom’s go to Chanel or the snifter scent of Dad’s small white bottle of Old Spice that sits like a lazy lifeguard on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet.

And in moments when we get especially angry or hot tempered with ourselves, that is when our parents will make a brief cameo, whispering from the ether of our ears, to remind us that nothing is worth that kind of aggravation.

But the voices which speak to us, are not the actual voices of our parents. It is just our inner translators, who are doing their best to sound just like them.

The only way we can hear our parent’s true sound is through a sister or brother, aunt or uncle or any other relative who sound just like them.

None of this suggests that your ongoing relationship with your parents, now in death, will be an easy one.

The unresolved fights still wage on demand. Their many weaknesses and neuroses that they carried into battle like rifles aimed at themselves are still just as infuriating. Their compulsions and obsessions, which eventually drove you away are still pretty much up and running.

In you.

You see, things do not get simpler in perpetuity.

They just become less and less important.

You will always miss them.

Sometimes in a moment of disproportionate happiness or defeat, you will even forget that they died and go to the phone to call them to just, check in.

And then you will remember. Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

But trust me, you will talk to them on a regular basis, out loud, because whether or not you believe in heaven, to the very end we need to feel that they are always inches away, watching us, feeling what we feel, hearing what we hear, seeing what we see.

Like when they watched us from the bleachers of a Little League game in the slow motion afternoon of summer,, when the pretzels were warm and slathered with mustard, the sun was full and accommodating, the score changed as often as a traffic light and the very next cheer that would be sent your way meant more to you than anything else in the world.