Lillies

Late in the winter, I guess it was early spring, but the leaves were not out yet, I heard news that my dad was not doing so well. In the summer, July, the year before, he had a surgery to remove the cancer. The surgery was an intense removal of much of his pancreas and bile ducts; I am not sure what else. "I think we got it all" the surgeon said. We were hopeful; my dad determined. He was not the type to give up, not even to death. I am like my dad. I believed he would be okay. But by November he was in the hospital. "He looks bad" my sister told me. "He's not going to make it" she said. I did not believe her. I did not go visit though until the end of February. Maybe it was March.

When I saw my dad, there was a part of me that saw clearly what my sister was talking about. She only went to see him maybe once or twice in the hospital. She was so ashamed of herself and how she looked and how she had become that she did not go out, plus she did not have a car. That she died 18 months later is another story.

There was this other part of me, the child part, that did NOT want to believe that my dad was dying. I looked at him wide eyed. I could feel this child in me being right out in the open. Afraid; willing to do anything it took to make him okay. I tried to get him to eat. I read him the newspaper. I read him poetry. Hafiz. I left when he was tired and I was there when he needed company or help. I poured myself into him. But I sensed a dam blocking the waters of life that I had to offer. He did not want to eat. And in private he complained to me that he just could not eat, and he hated people encouraging him. I told him I would stop doing that. That was when I began to accept that he was dying. If he did not eat, he could not make it to the summer; could not make it until I had more time to visit with him and say all those unsaid things. And spend time together; all that unspent time. He could not get to know my son, (whom he had benignly ignored since my son's birth).

I remember when I told my dad I had to go home. And I cupped his beard grizzled face and said: You get better dad! I will be back soon. I love you. My dad couldn't talk very much at this point. The radiation apparently burnt his esophagus or something in his throat. In a weeks time I drove back to see him as he was doing worse. When I was there he showed a renewed effort with the physical therapy and eating. The day before I left we watched an old classic: All Quiet On The Western Front. My dad's wife said he loved that movie. In the end three American soldiers are executed to the deep sadness and shame of their commander. I thought it was depressing. He fell asleep during this movie after he had grasped my ankle (my knees were bent as I lay in the bed next to him). I stayed there until he maybe woke or changed position, not wanting to move his hand from holding me. I knew it was his minimal way of showing affection. My dad loved me. He needed me. He told my sister he had regrets. He must have. In the morning I found out it was a bad night. I told his his wife that they had to agree to have him go to the hospital. This is because we all thought he might get better! Otherwise I would have mentioned Hospice care. She cried a few tears; I hugged her. She said: It's not what we want.
I said: I know. But I also knew that if he fell in his weakness he would get hurt, she could get hurt, he had to have better care.

I drove the five hours to my home in Massachusetts. But when I got home I heard from someone, maybe my brother, who I had implored to come down from his home in Maine, that my dad would not make it through the next weekend. Do we have an internal time lines for these things? The next day I got back in my car and drove back to Pennsylvania. By this time my father was in the hospital on a ventilator. I sat in his room with him, and his wife. I felt silly for bringing him a moss garden that I had made from the very early spring mosses. His wife showed him but my dad was clearly not really comprehending. Living had become a most awful painful existence to him. He tried to communicate with us by writing on a pad of paper. He started to spell out: I'm ha... and I said: Hallucinating? He looked at me and nodded. I said: Is it spiritual? I was wondering if he was seeing angels or dead relatives. He looked at me like I said the weirdest or craziest thing. Shortly thereafter he asked when I was leaving. I knew he was tired. And I said: I'll go now. I kissed him, said I loved him. I understood, really. But I left like a chastened child who had been rejected by her parent. These feelings criss crossed in me: maturity, childishness, understanding, fear, self-pity, compassion.

I spent the next few days sitting with my dad and his wife. People would come and visit. I could tell it was not as important to them, of course. Just paying respects and giving support. My dad's step daughters would come and go to support their mom. I sat there alone, listening to my dad's slow gravely breathing. I had arrived at the last moments of his consciousness. At the moment when his doctor asked him if he wanted any "heroic measures" of ressucitation. My dad shook his head very very slightly. After that he was unconscious. My brother came and talked to my dad in a sort of sing song voice that you might use to comfort a child.

I got a strong intuitive feeling on the day my dad died. He had been unconscious for three days. And I had sat there from morning until night. This feeling hit me like a thunderbolt. He did not want to die in front of me or my brother. And so I told his wife this and I left. I drove in the misty night to our old house. And then I drove home. Very soon after I walked in the door I got a call from my dad's wife's daughter that my dad had died. I told my brother: he's gone. My brother started weeping. I went back to the hospital. I looked at his dead body and saw nothing of him there. People always say that and it is true. We all said our goodbyes and we walked, his wife, her sister, her daughters, and myself, out into the Spring night. The lights were shining in the parking lot, illuminating the bright colored tulips and hyacinth.
I drove back to my mom's and laid down on the mattress bed in the basement room. I did not know what to feel but feeling burned within me. I had no idea how I would feel, what I would do, what would happen.

The funeral was arranged by my dad's wife. I felt left out a bit by her and by the catholic religion they were both part of. But what could I do? I had no rights to make decisions; I could tell that I was only a guest. I called my ex husband and he agreed to bring my son down for the funeral. He also brought bunches and bunches of white lillies. I had asked him for them since his family grew them, and I could not afford to go to a florist. I wanted something to show from my side of the family, for my sister, myself and my brother. None of us had the money that my dad's wife's side of the family did. I felt ashamed to not have anything to bring.

When I opened the plastic sleeves of lillies I set to arranging them in glass vases I bought at walmart. They were simple but beautiful. The next morning I loaded these carefully in my car and set off for the church. When I arrived curbside, one of the funeral directors said to me: Oh! You are going to be in a lot of trouble! He had thought that I was a flower delivery girl. I could not believe this, but then again, it really emphasized how I felt; not a part of this funeral, not a part of my dad's life. Excluded from his death.
I told the man that I was the deceased's daughter. He apologized and maybe asked someone to help me with the loads of flowers. I tried to place them in the vases with water but they were too heavy and spilled over, water on the floor outside the chapel. My long time friend was in the chapel viewing my dad in his casket. He saw me and I thanked him for coming and he said: I liked your dad. And then he offered to clean up the spilled water. Thank God for Pete. I let him do it, and went into the chapel for the viewing and service. My sister came at the last moment in her self-shame and sat next to me. Her four children, her husband, my son, my brother, we all sat in the second row. My dad's wife and her daughters sat in the first row.

The funeral was unsatisfying and boring. No one gave a eulogy. The priest said a few personal words and there was a mass. I hated it. It made me feel unfinished. When his casket was taken out Amazing Grace was played. That was one of my dad's favorites but it came off as though an afterthought. We drove to the cemetery.

More words were said at the burial. The funeral director handed out carnations to the family members to place on the casket. Carnations, to me, are the cheapest, most banal flower. They can survive being out of water in a cooler for a week. To me their colors are like tissue paper. I noticed that the funeral people brought the lillies too. But I had this carnation. So I put it on my dad's casket. And then those lillies were handed out to everyone else. And everyone else was glad to have a flower to offer to my dad's final goodbye. Everyone else took a beautiful spray of white flowers and put them on his casket until it was covered with them. Inside I felt a happiness, that somehow I had added myself to this so personal event from which I was excluded. I had given everyone that last token of love and respect for my dad. And in so doing I was given the gift of delight at seeing his coffin covered in a natural spray of flowers in the warm sun of an early spring afternoon. The last glimpse everyone had was of a pure white heap of flowers. Not the confined arrangements from the florists. But a simple wildness that exemplefied me, my sister, and my brother. It showed a hint of the most precious gift my father's life had given us: our love of nature and wild places.

When I was leaving the burial site, my cell phone sounded. It was my new boyfriend who was coming back from England where he had visited his parents. He, being from the Middle East, was required to register his leaving the country and he had forgotten to do so. We worried he would be exiled to Canada on his return. But on that moment of my leaving the cemetery, he called to joke first that he was in Canada, but really in Boston. Life went on......

Life's a Peach

Hmmm, something that's bothered me over the years is how fruit has gotten so expensive and yet half the time or more, it doesn't really taste very good. I've developed a sort of avoidance to buying oranges and nectarines and peaches from the supermarket. Too many expensive mealy peaches and oranges. I just hate it when they are like that. I know that fruit is bred now to endure shipping in trucks across the country and for long shelf life in the grocery store. I know about plant breeding. Sadly. I see these beautiful orbs piled up in the produce department, reminding me of costume jewelry draped on black velvet under special bright lights. They look sooo good. My tongue has been disappointed too many times.

This time of year peaches can come fresh from the tree. I have visited peach orchards and have truly found the abundance and sight of glowing soft- looking golden red jewels amongst the pointed leaves enchanting. Oh yes, it takes my breath away. And I feel fulfilled. To actually pick one from the tree and eat it, letting the juice drip on me, well that is like the cycle of life to me. Especially on a warm late-summer day. If only there were more of these kind of days.

Ripening~peaches need ripening. How sad that those sold far from their trees are not really meant to ripen but to be sold. And ripening is a waiting thing, a knowing thing. Starting when we are young, we develop that intuition of knowing when fruit is ripe. We learned that from biting too soon into a hard and sour plum or nectarine. We didn't need our mothers to teach us this art of waiting and knowing. We learned through experience. And somehow this is like our lives in a bigger way. You know, a metaphor. How many sour, hard peaches do we need to taste before we master the delicate art of ripening?

Wow, life is a peach. This is not what I intended to write. And it fills me both with happiness and questions about my own beliefs. Wariness and visions. Gratefulness and fear. Fear of the superficial and controlled falseness that seems to run this world, and biting into the sour hard fruit. Grateful for those late-summer days when a peach is the most special thing in the world, and seeing a child's fingers hold one as big as his hand is a gift.

Aho!

A couple weeks ago I was visiting my dad. He lives with his new wife in *her* home where she raised a family and lived her married life with her first husband. When I got home, I realized that I had this strange curiosity about my dad's life that I hadn't ever put into words or thoughts.

But this starts a long time ago. When I was a kid, a little kid, my dad worked as a lawyer in town, maybe two miles down the road from our house. To me it seemed like worlds away. Sometimes we would visit him at his office. The atomosphere was fifties style with old furniture and some kind of old *lawyer's office smell*~a mix of paper, cigar and cigarette smoke, worn leather chairs, and old building and drapes. There were two general secretaries, and my grandfather had his own long time secretary.

I used to love the office supply closet~coveting the paperclips and pens and unsharpened pencils, and pads of yellow legal paper. But I felt so uneasy there, like I didn't belong, and I was shy when the other lawyers would talk to me. I would climb the stairs to my dad's office, and see him behind his desk and feel oddly disconnected from him, like a spectator. My dad is not a 'kid person' so I didn't go jump on his lap nor give him a kiss. I did like to sit in his big slippery and faded leather chair that had wheels and would spin around. I would look around and see photos of myself and my siblings. School pictures. Sometimes pictures from our trips. I'd think~hmmm...I wonder why he chose that picture, it's not even *like* me? It was as though I could see his sentimentality for us in those pictures. This was my curiosity, that he had sentimentality for us.

My dad is a friendly guy. He was certainly friendly to us kids. I *know* that he loves us. But this odd feeling I get when visiting his other places shows me that there is a huge element of my dad that I just don't know. When he split from my mom, years ago, he moved into an apartment a few miles north of the town we had all lived. At that time I was moving away to Massachusetts, so I didn't really go hang with my dad in his apartment. (And if I did, my mother would have berated me, and without the subsequent years of therapy I would have let her!).
When I did go (usually he would just come visit at my mom's or I'd go to the alien office world), I could see the old furniture he had taken in the divorce and even odd knick knacks that my mother had made (doing ceramics was big in the 70's) or collected. It was like he was living as a castoff with the furniture and books and old stuff. I walked through as if I were walking through some kind of attic or second hand store not my dad's place, where he lived his life. He even used my old headboard from my double bed for his bed.

Over the years, dust accumulated there. My dad had a long term relationship with a past secretary from his office (in the beginning, she was 19, he was maybe 30 and married to my mom!). It seemed as though he must have never brought her there~how could he, it was so dusty and unimaginative? I remember this uneasy and yet curious feeling I would have there, and as I think about it now, I was *looking* for my dad. Looking to find out who he was, especially outside of our family. When he moved into his current home, I actually stayed in his apartment for the first time, with all his things. He was moving in with his wife-to-be, and my mom's house was full, so I stayed there. I had freedom to just wander around and try to take in my dad without him being there. I didn't snoop. I just looked at his music CDs and books. The dust just about killed me, triggering one long intense allergy attack.
Now at his new place, with his new wife, I have this strange feeling of disconnection (still) with my dad. Here is this woman with whom he had an affair and is now married. She knows him more than we kids ever did. Or could claim to. They call each other 'hun, and honey' and, well, they are married, and happy. The house is extremely neat and picked up. I wonder how my dad accomplishes this...does he do it automatically? Does he feel like it's *her* house and he has to? When he lived with us, he certainly didn't do that. I don't resent that, I'm just curious. I look around and I see his book collection in a very nice built in book case. I see some of the gifts I have sent him/them. And I was surprised to see a photo of my son on their refrigerator~a school picture.

I have not seen their bedroom or any of the upstairs. My dad talks to me of wanting to put in a patio. His wife's daughters are there in the house all the time, and this is their family home. It's theirs, not mine, and I can feel that...that disconnect. But it's where my dad lives. I think of how when he lived with my mom, we would just walk into their bedroom (for whatever reason) and I'd see his bureau top and all his bits and pieces there, and his closet full of suits, photos and some of his artwork and books. I could touch them, if not him, and *feel* him in a sense.
It's almost like he is a ghost in my life. It's so odd to say. It's so odd to feel as though I am striving to have a relationship with a ghost in my life (not a ghost in person). And I just realized that it's always been this way. And that's my dad. That's part of who he is.

This time of year, I go off alone, because no one understands the way it all crushes me. Like that Dave Matthews song. The cicadas begin to hypnotize, and I get lost in my wanderings. No longer thinking, just a feeling on my skin~it's the sky, tenderly pink, the corn stalks beginning to silhouette, the hollow musical sound of the black water stream.

It's that magic hour where you can feel *Pan* begin to change us into different creatures; creatures who are more ourselves, more who we want to be. The light hides us just enough so that we are not sure what we are seeing in each other. Not sure how old we are any longer.

I can see your eyes with the slightest shine; and I like to think we are connected in this magical way, which maybe only I know about it, but you can feel it. I know it must end, pretty soon actually....but while it lasts it is oh so pure and light, and makes me sigh with such pleasure~