Now Face West

Facing East

This is the tenth Father’s Day that has dawned for my children without their father here with them.  This year, they all are also separated from each other, occupying different spaces on two continents.

Seven years have passed since we brought his ashes to billow into an underwater cloud at Northern Ireland’s northernmost point.

And, strangely, it is just four years since my own father died on Father’s Day , after living to teach generations of students and be a grandfather to young adults.

I am a theoretical physicist’s daughter: I understand chaotic progression cannot be undone. But I can’t help feeling the world might seem a little less profoundly disordered were they here now.

Could Jim have averted this pandemic?  Perhaps not, but he surely would have seen it coming and calmly set in place and guided the communities around him to a reasoned response, adopting practices which would have saved lives, just as he did with earlier viruses which spread into human populations.  He took significant time out of his early career as a practitioner to devote himself to mastering emerging, fast-moving research about a past zoonotic pandemic, in order to be able to help people many others were at best disinterested in treating.   His hallmark always was a prescient, “Show me the data”; he would listen and always, always learn a great deal before proceeding.  

At a far smaller scale . . . .

I would not currently have a bleeding, throbbing, plum-hued thumb, embedded with a fierce circa 1802 splinter.  I would neither occupy my current home, nor have been doing a household chore involving unfinished antique wood.  And even had I been, Jim would have been able to extract the splinter.  

I would not have learned the patterns of the seasons in which flora grow and collapse before doing it all over again.  

Hundreds of thousands of photos would have gone untaken.  I do not exaggerate.

I likely would have yet to experience the agita of handling family finances.  Jim spared me quite a bit.

I would not have driven about a quarter-million miles, including the miles between Pittsburgh and New Hampshire that delivered me to an industrial park, lost in the middle of the night in Connecticut, where I found the musical score Jim made for when he knew I’d need one.  

I would not have known so many people had such depths of kindness….or that a few people I thought I knew better would be capable of so grievously disappointing me.  

I would have had a lot more sleep. 

But what else would not have happened?

Would one of our daughters not have gone into global health and recently put the final touches on a dissertation modelling the spread of spillover pandemics? 

Would one of our sons not have chosen, after hearing from physicists at his grandfather’s memorial service, to start in a new direction and begun an additional graduate program in physics?

Would I have gone back to my home state and my original job, or ever met the colleagues and friends who have brought so much to my life?

Had life not unwound as it did, I assuredly would not have seen penguins on the equator, or cliff-dwelling birds above a midnight-black sand beach in Vik.  I would not have traveled by camel into deserts on two continents,  or come perilously close to causing an international incident at the G8 summit in Belfast.  I would not have been overcome by dizzying heat in timeless Banaras, rounding an ancient  corner to stand eye-to-eye with a water buffalo.  

 

I would not have stood up alone on a stage and told more than 2,000 people about bringing my husband home to die, and I would not have met my friend Bethany, who told her story on the same stage and told shaky me to just look at her when I got up there, and I’d be OK.  

I would have slept through, or not been outside to see, countless dazzling sunrises.  

I would not have stopped being afraid of all but one thing.

I would not finally have learned how to love with no fear; had I paid more attention, I would have realized our children got there long before I did.  

The hardest thing to admit is that I would not have become a better person. The experience of a devastating illness and premature death distills a good marriage to the essence of the people who share it, and gives both a chance to know and to choose what to hold onto.

Today, for Father’s Day, I am wearing the color Jim liked best–though scarlet creates an unfortunate match in feverish feel and tone to my violent  global allergic reaction to summer’s arrival–as if he needed its bright beacon to locate me, when I know part of me accompanied him as well.

This morning I stood in the place where I now live and faced sunrise, as I usually do beginning in the dark wee hours of summer, waiting to see what kind of light and color will erupt and shimmer over the Atlantic., while feasting noseeums remind me I am indeed still here, hair-trigger immune system and all. 

I don’t usually remember to look behind me, but this time I did.  The color there was gentle, the clouds swirling and soft, without the hard bright edges of the too-bright-to-behold sun being delivered squalling into the horizon for the day ahead. 

Sometimes looking back is uncomplicated and beautiful.  

Happy Father’s Day.

Father’s Day 2020

 

A Wishbone Sunset and a Journey Home

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July 16th, 2016.

At the appointed late afternoon hour,  one of our daughters was a wedding guest several hours away. She was in the same chapel where, at a service of remembrance four winters ago, the sun had suddenly streamed through a frigid cloud cover to the last strains of the first verse from Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy:

“. . . .Hearts unfold like flowers before you, opening to the sun above. . . .Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the storms of doubt away; Giver of immortal gladness, fill us with the light of day.”

July 16th is my wedding anniversary. Somehow, already it was my sixth one alone.

Does the journey of marriage continue after death parts those who took its vows?

Weeks ago I watched the end of my father’s life of more than sixty years with my mother, including just short of 59 years of marriage.  I wonder whether she too will come to tap–or, as I have, sometimes fitfully and fruitlessly beat my fists against–the boundary at which their paths unwillingly diverged, and how she will see the new space between them.

One can only share a journey so far…or at the veil’s threshold does the form of the relationship and of each of its innermost parts simply change, becoming not so much disordered as reconfigured?

My husband’s size 13 work shoes’ thunks on the sixteen stairs that curved upstairs in our house have become transfigured into “footprints like a butterfly’s.”

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The ever-present camera he used to carry, elegant and specially adapted to his patient photographic skills, has transmuted into a small and simple point-and-shoot one I cannot be without.

It is curious–one of my father’s favorite and most loaded words–that as traditional time moves forward, my mind carries me almost ceaselessly back . . . to my older brother clicking his heels at our wedding, to my husband plucking a plump leech from our youngest child’s toe at a first visit to his favorite lake, to the glimpse of a summer stand on the side of the road that looks just like the place we picked strawberries with visiting friends from California when our children were babies.

Now I have gathered in my arms, as if holding a child, black boxes holding my husband’s and my father’s ashes.  I had told my mother what the box would look like and what its weight would be.

It is as if everything, part and particle, has been rearranged in time and shape and space itself. And while there is conservation of matter, love remains capable of infinite expansion.

“When the sun hangs low in the west
and the light in my chest won’t be kept
held at bay any longer
When the jealousy fades away
and it’s ashes and dust for cash and lust
and it’s just hallelujah
And love in the thoughts,
love in the words,
love in the songs they sing in the church….”

Not infrequently, I thought I heard myself voicing Jim’s thoughts, in the measured tone he would have used, while speaking to my father as he was in hospice care at home.

And I thought of the single most ridiculous and selfish thing I said to Jim during his illness, when I wept in the deep winter of his hospice care and said he would never be alone, but I would be alone forever.

What I meant was that we–our children and I–would never leave his side, and I could not face being being without him, of not having him at my side, for the rest of my life.  I still can’t. I still and always will miss his physical presence more than words can say–the same measure by which we love the children born of our marriage–but I also believe what I read to the close friends and family who gathered after my theoretical physicist father died, about why you’d want a physicist to speak at your funeral:

 

to “remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. . . .  [and] tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives. And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that…scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.”

 

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July 16th.  The day my father had walked his only daughter down the isle of Memorial Church and I married my husband.  This was the first time both were gone. My husband’s ashes were mixed with the sea on Father’s Day; my father died three years later on Father’s Day.

“When my body won’t hold me anymore
and it finally lets me free,
where will I go?
Will the tradewinds take me south
through Georgia grain, a tropical rain
or snow from the heavens?
Will I join with the ocean blue
or run in to a Savior true
and shake hands laughing?
And walk through the night, straight to the light
holding the love I’ve known in my life….”

But I was not alone. Grateful for the indulgence and the company, I followed an impulse to go with a friend towards a spot I’d never seen before, where an outdoor chapel’s pews face the sea. Over the course of nearly an hour, we watched layered clouds brighten and sharpen into a wishbone suspended over the sun as it dropped under a purple band at the horizon.

What did I wish for as a child when I held a wishbone in my Drumphian fingers? What do I dare to wish for now?

The wishbone had to be broken, snapped clean through, to make its fulfillment possible.

 

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A few people then wandered near us and quickly left, remarking that they’d “just missed” sunset.

We waited.

The noseeums began biting.

We waited some more.

The visitors who had flashed by in search of the precise moment of sunset weren’t quite right.

They hadn’t missed it. Once we had waited long enough, it gloriously reassembled.

 

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Father’s Day Deluge

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It’s difficult to mark Father’s Day when the man to whom fatherhood was the most fundamental adult role is no longer here.

My children and I have occupied different venues on such days, first venturing only across the state border for a short mountain hike, and the next year flying across the sea to Northern Ireland, where I remain certain that a heavenly prank was played on me in an effort to get me to smile.

Baby steps.

As predicted, today brought torrential rain, a doleful downpour so strong it woke me in the wee hours.

This time, I took a page from Jim and prepared for the Father’s Day deluge by actually consulting the weather predictions and setting out a day early.  True to form, I managed to get lost both on my way to my original destination and in the woods where I wandered for hours at my runner-up spot.

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On the bright side, being lost in the woods means being less self-conscious about engaging in animated conversation with the departed.

I rushed a picture of a waterfall, then paused and wove a path to a different angle: “You would have waited.  You would have gone up here and held still until the sun fell there.” Click.

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But eventually practical thoughts can intrude even while wandering among waterfalls on a glorious early summer day.

“I’ve done it again, Jim.  How do I get out of here?”

“Oh, I should follow the trail with the horse poop?  You’re right: the stable must be nearby….”

After a few hours I found my way out: there was indeed a stable.

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I had just a small request for Jim. “Could you send me just one songbird, or a butterfly–a moth would be fine.  I’d actually love a moth.”

I stepped out of the woods into bright sun and a path that led to stables.  To my right was a pond where a goose basked with his brood.  Something brushed by me and settled on the ground. Before taking off it paused several measures, slowly opening and closing its wings with the steadiness of a heartbeat.

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A Father’s Day Toast

One of my daughters had to explain to me the frequent appearance of Jim’s left hand–the one with the ring divet–among photographs he took from mountain tops: it was how he set up contiguous shots to form a panorama

My electronic inbox overflows with entreaties to make Father’s Day purchases at deep discounts.  Shopping is not on my mind.

Even my reliably soothing farm game saddens me with a “Father’s Day Quest” in which a brown-eyed, raven-haired girl pops up with bubbles of text recalling what her father has taught her, like looking at stars through a telescope and how to drive.  (It was I who had to ride shotgun for all of those hours with the daughter who just got her license.)

Last Father’s Day, not long after Jim’s death, I took the children who were home with me on the kind of family hike Jim frequently took with us.  He would clamber with his long stride up a mountain with our youngest jabbering musically in a baby carrier on his shoulders as the other three zig-zagged ahead, happily crying out “This way!” when they spotted the painted triangles which marked the trails.

Clusters of us would link and unlink  hands, helping each other over boulders and down slippery stretches.  Jim, who always carried the lion’s share of the weight, though it never seemed to burden him, would dole out water bottles and other supplies.  Small hands would grab fists full of his special gorp mixture.  (Despite the seemingly indiscriminate grabbing, the M & Ms and cashews always would go first.)

Of course this time, without Jim, I got us a little bit lost on the way up to the trail head.

When we finally arrived, all the trails we ordinarily took were obstructed by fallen trees, casualties of catastrophic spring storms.

One of Jim’s many photographs in deep greens and crystalline blues
(c) 2010 Jim Glennon

Continue reading “A Father’s Day Toast”

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