When grief ages

I have been writing this post for days; I have been writing this post all month; I have been writing this post for twenty years. My father died twenty years ago today of lung cancer. He didn’t even live a year past his diagnosis, the diagnosis he received while I was in my junior year of college. The diagnosis he and my mother weren’t going to tell me about until my brother threatened to tell me himself if they didn’t. They told me when I came home over the long Thanksgiving weekend, and he was dead the following July. Eight months. Eight months, more half of which I missed finishing out my junior year. My father wouldn’t hear of me taking time off and coming back home. He wanted no part of me putting college on hold. (I can’t recall if I actually suggested doing that. If I did, I can well imagine I said it knowing he would refuse.) It was the pride of his life that he, a high school drop-out, put both his kids through college debt free. He didn’t live to see my senior year, but by the time he died he knew the tuition had been covered; he knew I’d be able to finish without having to work. He was quietly but implacably opposed to me holding a part time job during the academic year. “No, you won’t get a job,” he told me when I said I could work part time to help make up the difference between in-state tuition at the University of Illinois, where my brother went and where I could not, would not follow, and the out-of-state tuition at Indiana University where I wanted to go. “Your job is to be a student. My job is to pay for it.” He wanted me to be a student. He wanted me to take classes and study and make friends and play sports and have the time to do whatever it was that kids did in college. (Things he didn’t get to do; I’m well aware that he needed me to have the full co-ed experience because he never had it. There are worse dreams to pin on your children and god knows I don’t hold it against him. I found my best self in those four years, and I owe that to him.)  

So I went to Indiana, with its collegiate cycling tradition, and I had the time to be a cyclist in college because my father was an old-fashioned mid-Western man who believed that putting his kids through college was a man’s job; and being a cyclist in college was the best thing I did in those four years. It was where I found my best self. It was also the thing that carried me after he died. The spring of my junior year, when he was dying, and my whole senior year, when his death was raw and unbelievable, cycling saved me. Racing saved me. I rode my bike hard that year and a half, grinding out time trials on Flat Bottom Road, climbing Firehouse Hill then coasting back to the base to climb it again. Riding full of sorrow and anger and self-pity, riding as if I could leave first his cancer and later his death behind me. Riding with my team, who were the only ones who knew what was going on with me. Who were the ones who knew that I wanted it to hurt, I needed it to hurt, I wanted to finish those workouts, those sprinting drills, those team time trails, those spinning drills, and fall over on the side of the road and throw up from the effort. Because if it hurt, if I was gasping for breath, I was still alive.

Now, unbelievably, it’s been twenty years – twenty years! I have been fatherless almost half my life – and the sharp and jagged edges of grief have been worn away; I don’t have loose pieces of glass rattling around inside of me anymore, cutting me anytime I make a sudden move. I don’t wake up from dreams of my father believing for that first confused second that he’s still alive. I don’t miss him every day. I probably do miss him every day but it’s not all-consuming; it’s background music. A kind of emotional white noise. What I miss now are the things I miss on my father’s behalf. The things he missed. He never met my brother’s wife, or my husband, or any of his grandchildren. My father coached hockey, and of his four grandchildren my Small Boy is the only one who plays. My father missed that, his grandson learning to skate. He would have liked my father-in-law. Sharing no common language, they wouldn’t have understood a word the other had to say, but my father-in-law would have taken my dad to an SCB hockey game and they would have been great friends. He would have thought R was a fine man and he would have enjoyed teaching him to fly-fish. He would have laughed when I moved to the farm last year, the laugh of a father sharing with his daughter a private thirty year old joke about living on a farm. I miss these things on his behalf, I mourn for everything he missed and not, I think, for myself anymore. I have had, after all, twenty years to get used to his absence. Grief and I have come to terms.

It still sneaks up on me though. I expect it on days like today, on my father’s birthday or on Thanksgiving, but grief sneaks up on me sometimes, too, at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected places. In the locker room lacing up the Small Boy’s skates. Racing popsicle stick boats in the creek with the boys. Catching a whiff of coffee beans grinding at the grocery store. It’s there, suddenly, over my shoulder, like a cyclist I can’t drop. It’s not fierce and urgent anymore, though; it’s not racing me to the mountain top. We don’t grind it out, grief and I. It doesn’t taunt me, and I don’t need to beat it. I don’t need to push, and push, and push. I no longer need to be the fastest girl on the track, racing away from my loss.

You can’t out-race grief anyway; it’s got a better bike.

Holding it in my hand

My copy of Walden and Other Writings is the copy I gave my father for Father’s Day in 1988. I am sure that somewhere in a box sits my first paperback copy from high school with its underlinings and marginalia, but the copy I keep in my library is the one I gave my father and which I took for my own after he died. I inscribed it with a quote of Thoreau’s, his most over-quoted quote, no doubt, but one I chose for a reason:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…

Then I wrote “Happy Father’s Day to the man who taught me the above long before I ever picked up Thoreau. Thank you,”

Twenty years on, it is hard sometimes to distinguish between memories of the actual relationship I had with my father, the real feeling that was there at the time, and the glossed over glow the memory of a dead loved one can take on. Especially after twenty years it would be easy to have created in my mind a relationship far different from the one that really existed at the time. In light of some of my other memories that have revealed themselves as false, I hold this copy of Thoreau with my school-girl’s writing on the fly-leaf, this piece of my love for my father that I can hold in my hand, especially dear.

It was real. He was my father, and I loved and admired him. And I know, and will always know, that at least once in my life before he died, I told him clearly that he taught me how to live a true life, and that I was grateful.

This brings me some peace when the memories shift like mist over the river.

Speak, memory?

I recently realized that for years I have been misremembering something about the day my father died. It’s a detail, a secondary detail, but it was a detail about the day my father moved from being here to being not-here, and it hit me, after all these years, that it is inaccurate. It is as if for years I have associated the day my father died with the crescent moon in the sky only to consult a lunar calendar and discover that on that day the moon was in fact waxing gibbous. 

I don’t know how I came to associate this false detail with that morning, the conflating of two memories over time, probably, but now I am forced to wonder: what else have I misremembered, or forgotten altogether, about that day? And worse, this: what have I misremembered, or forgotten altogether, about my father? Twenty years, my father died twenty years ago this July, twenty years is a long time to hold on to the weather, the phases of the moon, the leaves on the tree outside my bedroom window. It’s a long time to hold on to how he dressed, what he ate for breakfast, the nicknames he gave me, the sound of his voice. I lost that one, the sound of his voice, I lost that already  years ago. Is this my fate, to slowly forget the details? Is this his fate, to fade away into photographs that never change, but don’t tell the whole story, either?

And what of that false memory? The fact is inaccurate, but that I held on to it for so long that I came to believe it was true, that happened. That’s real. It became my detail, and though it does not correspond to the world as it existed that morning, it belongs to the world as it exists now within me; it is inaccurate, yet true. What do we call the space between what happened and the way we remember it? The detail is factually inaccurate, I see now that it must be, but I still believe that some part of it is true.

Telling stories

I once heard an interview with Maurice Sendak in which he said that we all tell the same story over and over. Perhaps we disguise it under different details, perhaps one year we render it in poetry and the next in prose, perhaps we change our metaphors and geography; but we tell the same story, our story, again and again.

Perhaps, even literally, we repeat the same story. I used to know a woman who frequently re-told the same story. She wasn’t a bore about it; it wasn’t a long story and she only told it when it made sense in the context of the conversation. When her story was over the conversation would flow naturally whatever direction it went in, and this woman didn’t try to steer it back around to her. She simply told her story. But if you had known her for awhile – our kids went to the same play group in the city, and I saw her weekly for about a year – you couldn’t help but notice that you’d heard that story before. Maybe even twice before. 

It was not, on the surface, a dramatic story. Some years ago she took the train through the Canadian Rockies; she met two Australians on the train; they shared the journey; they are still in touch today. Nobody got off the train at a remote station and missed getting back on; nobody woke up to find their backpack and passport had been stolen in the night; nobody got dangerously ill with no doctor for hundreds of miles. She took the train through the Canadian Rockies and made some friends. It seems to be a simple story. But it means more than that to the woman telling it. The sheer fact of her repeating it, of it being one of her favorite stories, tells me that for the woman telling it, it is a touchstone. It is one of the stories of her life: it tells her something about herself, reminds her of something about herself, it is a story that is meant to say more than it does. Perhaps it is a reminder of the life she led before she had children; perhaps it is meant to tell the listener that she is an open person, open to travel, open to making friends; perhaps, telling this story in the shadow of the Swiss Alps, she is saying something about how mountains speak to her soul. I’ve never been able to figure out what that story really means to the woman telling it, but in telling it, I believe that she is doing much more than simply sharing an anecdote: she is revealing something about the way she sees herself.

I think we all have these stories, one or two or three touchstone stories that we come back to again and again. Stories that help us explain ourselves to the world, stories that help us explain the world to ourselves, stories that tell us who we are. Dutch Friend once commented that I write about my father a lot. I suppose I do, though I write about a lot of other things as well. But I do think the poems that invoke my father are more likely to be published, and those are the pieces Dutch Friend reads. I think they are more likely to be published because they are more likely to be good. The things I write about my father are often my best pieces. They are my best pieces because they are my true pieces.

They are my story.

Haunted

I’ve been captured by the villanelle lately. It’s a very precise poetic structure with both a rhyme scheme and a pattern in which two lines – introduced with the first and the third lines - are repeated at specified intervals. It does not come easily to me; I find it difficult to pull off a natural, lyrical villanelle. And yet I find myself writing them. I have heard it said – or read it written? – that the villanelle, circling back as it does to those two key lines, is a good form in which to explore obsessions, recurring events, memories one cannot, does not want to, escape. It’s a good form to use when a few images have you by the throat and won’t let go.

The villanelles I’ve been writing are about my father. I remember my father best as a fisherman. As the years pass and specific details fade – what shampoo did he use? what did his voice sound like? what was he wearing the last time I saw him alive? what was he dressed in for his funeral? - there is still a  tightly held clutch of memories, solid like river rocks in my fist, that I can still see, taste, hear almost two decades after his death. Almost always, these memories, these moments, are connected to my father’s life as a fly-fisherman and to the places that life took him, took us. Invariably my memories of my father are bound up with the waters he fished, the waters that became the companions of my childhood and the rivers to which I always, though years may pass, return. The places I love and the ways I love them have everything to do with this simple fact: my father was a fisherman.

That is the line I cannot let go of. The line that will not let go of me. That is what I return to like a salmon to her spawning ground. That is my one true thing.

My father was a fisherman.

Protected: When I watch you