Category: father

Resemblances

~ hija15699 ~ 2 Comments

I strongly resemble my mother. In school, people always knew if she showed up there, and the news would reach me: “Your mother’s here. She was in the hall heading to the office.” What? How did they know? “You look exactly like her.”

I want to tell you what my father looked like. You can’t really see him by looking at me. He had curly hair, which was brown, a regular brown and not dark like mine was back while he was alive. When he was in the sun, there was almost a red hint. Whenever he grew a moustache and beard, red would show up along with the brown. Dad’s eyes were blue. Sometimes they appeared greenish, or grey. We girls used to tell Dad that they changed depending on what color shirt he wore. That he had “mood eyes.” On the last day I saw him alive, his left eye was such a brilliant blue, I was startled. I felt guilty, too, for softly pulling up his eyelid to peek beneath it while he was so deeply asleep. I didn’t see a color that blue until nearly 20 years later, when I visited the Bahamas. The water was impossibly blue, like Dad’s eye.

My father had a receding hairline, hairy chest and arms, and hair in his belly button. On Saturday visits with him, he’d sometimes nap on the murphy bed in his apartment while we girls watched TV beside him. While he was asleep, we’d roll up his pantlegs and roll down his socks, giggling at his hairy white legs. Then we’d peek into his bellybutton for lint. He’d snore slightly, until our fussing over him woke him up. Lying down, Dad’s ribcage seemed large. His voice rumbled up out of his chest when he spoke. He was a man of average height, not heavyset, with good posture, and when he needed to command attention, he could. He could have been a police officer, but he wasn’t. He worked in the public schools and liked people. They liked him, and his voice. Usually when he conversed with others, they shared a chuckle before parting ways.

Dad was fair, as a British descendant, and his skin was sensitive to anything harsh. When he worked at a deli counter for a summer, wrapping meat in paper and string, trying to break the string cut his hands. He was the only one who had to reach for the scissors. I remember the time he got burned from a grease fire on the stove. When he moved the pan into the sink, flames wafted over the back of his wrist and gave him 3rd-degree burns. I’d just had first-aid training in 6th grade at school, and I forced him to let me examine his hand. The skin was red, and purple, and blue, with an open wound. Dad had wrapped it himself, and I insisted that we take him to a doctor. Dad’s teeth were slightly crooked and the top canines were pointed. We liked it when he bared them a little, and called him a vampire.

I don’t look like my father. My hair was dark, like my mother’s, before it went salt-and-pepper. My eyes are so dark a brown as to be nearly black. My coloring is not as pale as his, though lighter than if I weren’t sensitive to the sun, so perhaps I inherited something of my father’s sensitive skin. Here – where I mostly take after Dad is in my hands. I’m left-handed like he was, and my palms are somewhat square like his. The tips of my fingers aren’t elegantly oval like my mother’s but spatulate, like Dad’s. On a sidewalk in a suburb of Michigan, there are four handprints pressed lightly into the cement: Dad’s, Mom’s, my older sister’s, and mine. The mark nearby is from my younger sister’s shoe when she twisted away, afraid to let Mom put her hand into the wet cement beside ours. 25 years after Dad died, I placed my hand in the print Dad had left. His hand appeared only slightly larger than mine, surprisingly. When I remember holding his hand, warm and slightly moist, it always seemed much bigger. Oh – my thumbs are his. Just after he died, I was reading a book. I noticed my hands holding the pages open, noticed my right thumb. I cried.

The necessary building of unnecessary stairs

~ hija15699 ~ Leave a comment

My father is rebuilding the wooden steps leading to the front door. A tree branch fell in yesterday’s storm, and splintered the original stairs to bits. I’ve watched Dad build with wood before. He can knock together small projects easily. There have been other, larger ones, too, which I have never seen. At the high school downtown, Dad has directed students in constructing stage sets for the theater department’s plays. It’s a part of his life I don’t know. I’ve never seen a production there, nor will I even see a photograph of his work, until I’m an adult, and he is long dead.

I want to watch Dad as he kneels to his work on the front steps, but this day he seems not to welcome it. It isn’t so much his brusque tone, as the tension in his shoulders and arms as he moves. He drops the small bundle of unpainted boards onto the cement apron, and the hollow clatter feels like a dismissal. I will not see Dad wield a hammer and nails again, but I remember the sound of metal hitting metal as he proceeds, an angry sound.

The splintered steps are necessary. Mom has warned us girls against going through the front door until Dad tells us it is safe. The fall from the stoop to the cement apron isn’t far, except for the legs of a 7-year-old-child. Something about not having front steps feels like an emergency. We have the back door and its postage stamp of porch, but from the gravel street in front of our house, the missing porch steps are alarming, like the sight of a broken-out front tooth. An unacceptable gap that is something to hide. When I lose a front tooth just before school picture day, Mom tells me sternly that I am not to smile with my lips parted when the photographer asks me to say, “cheese.”

Dad has to build the steps because there is no one else to do it, because hiring somebody costs money, because he is the one who is supposed to fix things. Usually, Mom is the one to point out what my father is to fix. Either Dad doesn’t notice the problem, or he is willing to tolerate the broken or imperfect much longer than my mother can live with it. Dad can solder, tack down a loose shingle, saw, and hammer, and glue. He can put things together. But he’s not built for labor, with his sensitive hands, fragile skin, and history of enlarged heart. I have rarely seen him run, never hit a baseball, nor do lifts on a chin-up bar. I remember the hand grip strengtheners in his first apartment after the divorce, and the chest expander with rows of resistance springs connecting two handles. I remember my sister and I seated on the toboggan, crying out for Dad to pull us and run! and the wheezing way his voice came back to us, “I am running!”

My father has to rebuild these steps, even though, as it turns out, he won’t need to use them for much longer. One thing that is unusual about the broken porch is that neither Mom nor Dad was the one to point it out. It was my sisters and me who, where we were in the living room near the front door, heard the crash of the tree branch just after the boom of thunder. I remember the rattle of the screen door when the branch struck it on the way down. We ran to the windows to see what was trying to break in. Wet black bark and leaves loomed, reaching. It looked like an entire tree had fallen across the front door. But Mom and Dad didn’t hear it, or our shrieks of surprise. It was a shock to go into the kitchen and see only the looks of annoyance on their faces. That was the first time I recall my parents in deep discussion, apparent serious talk that seemed to shut out all other things. Talk that was more important than the house falling down. Perhaps that was a lead-up to Dad’s leaving. I didn’t think of it as a clue, when I looked back on it later. There had been plenty of others: tiny quarrels which Dad lost quickly, issues about money, issues about providing better, issues about seeing what things Mom saw were wrong. The deep talk in the kitchen that day was secondary to the chaos at the front door.

I didn’t see Dad’s cross undertaking of rebuilding a set of steps he wouldn’t use as a sign of the change to come, either. He finished them, cut up the wayward branch, cleared things away in his usual manner. When he moved out of the house, I was as blindsided as my parents had been by lightning hitting the tree and bringing a branch down onto the steps, just missing the house. An impact concealed beneath ongoing thunder.

If ever the dead

~ hija15699 ~ 1 Comment

If ever the dead were to be recalled/ it would be in [a] voice flung confident/ into the raving light.

“The Silence,” from Cardinals in the Ice Age, by John Engels

At the hospital, a member of the staff came swiftly into the room to check Dad’s unconsciousness. She touched him, looked into his eyes, and called out in lifted voice,  “Robert! Robert!”

My heart clenched. That was the name of his dead brother. 

I didn’t fear Robert would be recalled to life, still aged twenty after four decades of death. But I could imagine my uncle’s spirit, matured and paternal, surfacing through the years and distance from the mountains of Korea. He would appear in the far corner of the hospital room, first with a blank expression, wondering who had called his name with such command. Then in the next moment he would go to the foot of Dad’s bed. With great and wise tenderness he would gaze at his brother’s face, catching up with the changes. Robert would size up the situation and move toward the sleeping form. With surprising strength, he would lift Dad decisively, making him ten years old again before my eyes.

Then, without one look toward me, Robert would bear my father away. 

Writing for my father

~ hija15699 ~ 4 Comments

Dad died when I was 27. That’s when I began to write for him.

What I wanted – or needed – to do was to write his story before it disappeared from the world. In that sense, I wrote in his stead, rather than for him as in having him as listener or reader. A poem I wrote at that time was “Song for my father,” in which I acknowledged that I wanted to vocalize his words, but I knew I could only do my own keening for his loss.

My dad was so unremarkable, so unheroic, that when Sinatra’s “My Way” was played over the audio at Dad’s funeral it was almost laughable. About the only thing my father did “his way” was his death. He literally died in his sleep, in a coma, but I’ve always believed it was suicide by stroke. The second day after he was found unconscious, I had a talk with Dad in my head. “You’ve been looking for a way out, Dad. Here’s your window. Take it.” It wasn’t what I wanted, but the doctor said the stroke left him “no quality of life” even if he continued to live. And Dad had prepared his three daughters for years – since we were children – with his expectation of an early demise. For no particular reason, he didn’t expect to live longer than his father, who died at 45. Dad paved the way with self-denial, depression, and lack of hope. He gave me a great deal of love, but his quality of life had already become very low when he managed to slip out of that open window.

So I wrote for Dad. He had actually made a few notes in the last year of so of his life, prodded by conversations with me. He even spoke to me in the notebook. What he wrote echoed his sense of uselessness and lack of direction in life. I wrote for Dad in hopes of filling in the blanks left behind. I wanted to show the value in his life, for me in particular, and in the way all individual human lives are valuable. I wanted to express how I could accept his absence because I loved him so much, and what it was about him that I loved. I remember standing next to his hospital bed after he died, whispering, “Okay, okay; it’s okay.” It felt as if he’d become my child rather than my father, and I was overcome with tenderness and the desire to reassure him that his daughters would be all right. That I would be all right.

That night I was ill. The day of the funeral my anxiety was enormous. As our car followed the gray hearse through the streets of Detroit, I sat between my sisters hardly able to breathe. At the graveside a spider navigated the green AstroTurf beside my foot. Spiders had always terrified me. I thought I could become hysterical, and then realized, “If I let myself become a basket case in my grief, it won’t honor my deep love for Dad.” I managed to pull away from the worst of it, but stayed desperate to write for my father, to try to find the meaning in his existence, to discern the real truth of his short life.

I’m still writing.

lifeinonescene

~ hija15699 ~ 2 Comments

I crouch on a carpeted step where the stairway ends in the kitchen. I’m near the bottom, with my curly-haired little sister below me. Above me, I can just sense my older sister’s breathing, as if she’s invisible.

My father speaks: “I’m not going to be living here any more.” My legs press against the scratchy, low-pile synthetic carpet, dark brown. Do I smell the vomit of those nights when my sister threw up on the stairs? My mouth is filling with saliva. Do I want to vomit, or to cry? My eyes are burning, dry.

I think my head is pounding with the thud of my heartbeat. I’m afraid I won’t be able to hear what Dad is saying.

I have words in my mouth but I know I’m not supposed to say them. Dad is the one who is supposed to talk. I know this, because Mom is quiet. He is not saying enough, so she is glaring at him. He is not saying enough for me to understand what this means.

“I’m not going to be living here in this house with you any more.” I am smothered by the vague smell of vomit. The stairway feels like a tunnel and the space is getting too tight, closing in. It’s like a dream where I’m pinned in place; I can’t go up or down.