The Hook

Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain; a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats,humiliations, and despairs--the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
- Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

It is a platitude that you don't appreciate what you have until you have lost it. Then again, as my brother pointed out, platitudes get to be platitudes because they're true. (That's why my brother is the smart one). I miss my Dad. I miss his voice, a lot, because he had a beautiful voice, and I miss there being someone on this Earth that really gets me. On the other hand, it just may be that I miss him less now than I have for the last 43 years, because I feel his presence with me. I can't see him, I can't hear him, but I can feel him, and I know he's happy. He loves my farm, he loves the music I chose for his visitation, he loves me, more than I ever knew. He loves being free again.

My dad has always loved the absurd. He used to tell my brother and me about how Vaudeville performers, when deemed unsatisfactory by the audience, used to get "the hook," which was sort of a giant sheep's hook that suddenly emerged from backstage and pulled the performer off the stage by main force. And whenever my father witnessed a particularly dismal performance, of any kind, he used to comment, "give 'em the hook!"

Well, Dad got the hook. Not him, so much, as his body. The failures, the betrayals, the generalized debilitation, the whole human comedy playing out on my dad's battered frame, just wasn't funny anymore. But Dad was a trouper. The show must go on, and he fought as hard as anybody can fight to make the show go on.

I don't know how the Invisible Life Forces managed to convince my dad to go already. Dad had the quintessential Taurean disinclination towards prodding and an almost superhuman capacity to resist it. I have a strong suspicion that Saint Peter, out of sheer desperation, may have come down and whacked him with a tire iron when nobody was looking. In ICU, Dad complained of a bright light (with the adjective "damn" implied) that was irritating him enormously. Since all the lights were off and the shades were drawn, I prayed that God might try music instead, and maybe He did.

Or maybe, while floating around above his hospital bed looking in vain for some sunglasses, Dad just said, with a decisive chomp on a pipestem, "Give him the hook, boys!"

My dad has a new body now, and a new life, and he's not, strictly speaking, my dad anymore, because he's back to being just who he is without earthly roles and obligations. And I have to learn to relate to him on that level, just as a fellow soul, and yes, a Republican soul, because, let's get real, Dad might have a spirit body and a different name and he might exist in another plane but he's still a conservative.

I mean, death is birth. You leave the baggage and keep the essential. My dad's music, his sense of humor, his integrity, and his conservativism are part of his soul's true nature, and you wouldn't have it any other way. The pain, the fear, the worries, the misunderstandings, all got the hook, along with the body.

Have fun, Dad. You deserve it.

The Big Wave

Many times, my father has told me a story about how when we were on vacation at a lake , a big wave came from nowhere and engulfed me. Each time he tells the story, his shock and fear seem to live in him once again. His face also expresses another emotion: hurt. As he tells of that awful moment, my Dad's brown eyes look like those of a faithful dog that just got kicked for no reason. The bottom line of the story, which is that I was fine (if a bit wet and unhappy), seems to have made far less impression on my Dad than the awfulness of what might have happened.

That was forty years ago, give or take a year or so. I was two or three; now I am 43. And now, the positions are reversed. A big wave has come and engulfed my dad, a wave of impending mortality, and I feel the same impotence and shock and yes, outrage, that he must have felt all those years ago in Michigan.

My dad and I are very much alike. You could say two peas in a pod, but my father has never particularly liked vegetables. When my brother, aged five, looked at his plate and commented, "Another damn pea!" it was generally felt that he had heard it from my dad. To say "two beers in a case," or "two nocturnes in a suite," or "two gutterballs in a row," might come closer to the mark, because my dad and I share a pedestrian taste in food, a romantic taste in music, and an amazing mediocrity in athletic pursuits.

I haven't gotten to spend much time with Dad. Divorce, distance, remarriage, and more distance had the effect of driving invisible wedges between us. My dad had a child with his second wife, and that child seemed, to me at least, to lay claim to all my father's paternal energies. As the years passed, it seemed that my father viewed my older brother and me more as old college chums than offspring. We would get together, occasionally, in motels, or sometimes just for lunch, and talk about politics and other absurdities.

Each time we met, I had the feeling of never having been apart. I still have that feeling, even though my dad is in a hospital bed, with tubes of various descriptions stuck into him and monitors that tell you everything except what you really want to know. Rather than useless information like pulse and oxygenation, why can't the monitors tell me how many minutes my dad has left on this earth? Why can't it count the regrets, the words not spoken, the hurts that were buried under a stoic exterior, the beers that we never drank together? Why can't the monitor tell me how much my dad loves me, has always loved me, and always will? And why can't the nurse, poking my dad full of holes in search of a "good" vein, because my dad's veins have been worn out by the thousands of punctures from the series of long illnesses, stick him with an IV full of the love and pride that I, with all my clever words, have never managed to express to him?

I think my dad thought that I loved my stepfather better than him, but the two were apples and oranges to me. I loved Tom, and I still do, but we hold these truths to be self-evident, that your dad is your dad. People talk about soul mates, in the fatuous way that they tend to do, about people they met on the Internet a month ago who happen to like the same football team and own the same type of lawnmower. According to them, a soul mate always shares your best qualities, and never has any bad qualities at all, until, of course, you divorce him, but that's another story. What about a person who looks like you, walks like you, sweats like you, even smells like you? What about the person who has been kicked by life too many times to trust in its innate goodness, but still finds the will and the courage to drag himself up again? What about a person who is too proud to say he wants you in his life, too self-critical and humble to think you might want him in yours? Just like you?

William Markel

I don't like labels. Soul mate is a label. So are father, daughter, illness, life and death. I can't define what my father means to me, in part because I'm only just discovering it, in part, because I don't want to. Saying that something is this is tantamount to saying that it's not that. My relationship with my father is not static, it is an evolving entity, and it will continue to be so.

I believe in eternal life. I believe in the continuation of the personality. I believe in reincarnation. I don't believe because it makes me feel better to believe. I do not believe, for example, that I will ever be rid of cellulite, or that Obama's Health Care Reform will solve anything, even though I would like to believe those things. But I do believe in God and I believe in the eternal soul, and I believe because I have done one hell of a lot of research on the subject. I believe because I have had too many experiences with the Unexplainable not to believe.

I believe that my dad and I will always be together, somehow. I believe in a merciful God. I believe in the healing power of love, and beer.

Several nights ago, I had a dream. My dad was in the dream, and I forget who else, and there was also a little girl in the dream, pacing up and down on the bleachers where we were sitting. She kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye, like, "Aren't you leaving yet?" and I realized, at some point, that the sturdy little girl with the bowl haircut and solemn face was me, the two year-old me, the same me that was engulfed by the Big Wave. And I knew, when I woke up, that that me still exists, and she has never left my dad, in all those years that those other mes were wandering around in our parallel universes, busy with other things, things that seemed so important at the time. And that stubborn little chunky clingy possessive me will be with my dad always, holding his hand, to guide him through the Big Wave and bring him back safe onto dry land, safe and sound, in the arms of God, or, as I prefer to think of it, firmly planted on God's barstools, as we always have been and always will be, together.

I wrote this for my dad. My mom read it to him in the hospital, and he demanded to hear it a second time, and then, two days later, he closed his eyes and did not open them again. Sometimes I wish I could have said these things to him face to face, but that wouldn't have been me, and it wouldn't have been him.