Always a Parent
A friend of mine buried her father today. He was sick for more than a year, really sick. We spoke two days ago. Her voice was shaky. It was clear her father was getting worse by the day and that his last day was fast approaching. Tremulous, she told me that she has tried to write down everything of meaning her father has said to her in these past difficult months. It is the notebook of her heart. I imagine that she is holding it now with her fingers pressed hard into its cardboard covers as if holding on to it tightly could make him somehow come back.
And I think of the lines in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, 'This was a man!'
“Do you know what he said to me today?” she asked rhetorically. “He said, ‘You are so beautiful.’ Imagine that? He can hardly day anything, but he said that to me today.” I know that she will hold on to those words for the rest of her life. In darker moments, she will know that a childhood hero thought the world of her. She may have lost her father today, but she will always have a parent. His voice will continue to sing inside her.
From speaking to hundreds of people who have lost parents, it seems like nothing can prepare you for it, even when you know it’s coming. No matter how prepared you think you are. No matter how old you are. You can arrange the logistics of hospice and a funeral beforehand. You can talk to friends, your priest and your therapist, and somehow all the words do not add up to the confrontation of this primal, primordial, loss.
People who have just lost a second parent, describe the new layer of grief that sets in. “I am an orphan,” they tell themselves. And by this they do not mean that they are like small pitiable children in a Dickens’ novel. What that mean is that the foundation of their lives – whether they were close to their parents or not – has been viscerally removed. They walk in the world now with a phantom limb.
Maya Angelou captured it in her poem “When Great Trees Fall:”
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
My friend will gnaw on her father’s kind words. These are not only words unsaid but all the words, the stunningly touching words, he left her that fill in the college-ruled pages of a child’s notebook. It makes you ponder what we need to leave our children when we leave this world that goes far beyond the financial last will and testament of a family estate. He left his daughter a legacy of language, even as he moved in and out of coherence.
I envy those pages and think back to all the school notebooks that held words we instantly forgot after a test, the used and broken spirals of those books that testify to so many wasted hours. And on this sad day, I am happy that although a friend lost her father today, she still has lines and lines of his love.