Dad

Dad and me in Kenya

Booming voice, sparkling blue eyes, laser sharp intellect and laughter that could fill a room.  My dad was the center of our lives, all of us spokes that turned around his axis.

When I was little I thought he was magic.  For my tenth birthday, he took my friends and me to see Jaws in 3-D.  We waited for some time for the film to begin and were disappointed when they were not rolling it.  My dad got up from his seat and asked the projectionist to start the movie- and he did.  My dad could do anything.

*

Combing through my dad’s closet.  Carefully choosing the polished wingtip shoes, socks and garters, pin-stripe suit, periwinkle silk tie.  Placing them in a hanging bag to give to the undertaker.

*

My first sleepaway camp in third grade.  I linger around the cabins as the parking lot fills up with eager parents reuniting with their children. My dad, his six foot two slender frame, wide paned glasses, and sandy hair gallumping out of the car.  I sprint across the grassy meadow to meet him.  A wash of emotion I can’t help.  He picks me up and twirls me around. The whole sky reflecting in his eyes.

*

Leaving Long Neck Point in Darien, away from the house he built on the water, the bougainvillea, the carefully manicured lawn.  Driving up West Side Highway to Sloan Kettering in New York City.  Acute myeloid leukemia. The doctor explains the clinical trial again and asks my dad to have some blood samples drawn in the lab next door.  But when the doctor looks at me, I hear him say your father is going to die.

Still we hope.   We donate blood and platelets.  Except me.  Pregnant, I am excused.  I plan a party for when my dad gets well.  

*

Three hand squeezes:  I love you.  Two back.  How much?  One super tight squeeze. This much!  Our secret message.

*

ICU, tv on the golf channel, catheters, ventilators, my boombox playing sanskrit songs. That antiseptic yet sickly hospital smell. The unopened brown postal package on the window sill.  Inside is the wooden angel I had mailed several days earlier.  Dad in a coma.  Blood pressure dropping.

*

Outside our first house in Weston, Connecticut.  “What’s the magic word?” My dad asks my six year old brother Andrew and me who are basking in his attention.  “Please?... Daddy is the Best?... Abracadabra?...  Geronimo?” we cry.

“It’s timber!” he laughs as he cuts down the small tree.  We help him haul it into the house to decorate it for Christmas.  

*

6 am. November 15.  I call my brother.  “Dad is with God,” he tells me.

Only a month before.  “Julie! I read that book, ‘Peace is Like a River.’  Good ol’ dad, reading a literary novel.  I loved it!”   Usually given to Tom Clancys or biographies, he was happy to bond with me over the love of a good book. In the final pages of this last book he read, a description of a father and his child reuniting among the golden rivers and humming meadows of heaven as they dash across time and space.

10 am. Me, on the floor of my childhood room, eight months pregnant and crying. Through my tears, I hear my father emphatically say,  “I’m not the body.  You know that Julie,  You know that.”   Me, who teaches meditation, studies consciousness, and believes in reincarnation.  I am stilled.

Picking out the coffin with my mom.  The undertaker’s careful words, long pauses between questions. A tuning fork to our sensitivity. From the corner of my eye I see my dad, in that green golf windbreaker he always wore, saying clear as day, “I’m proud of you girls.”

*

Laying my baby daughter in her crib. I fall asleep.  My dad standing on a boat at his beloved yacht club.  A dream but not a dream.  The boat is sinking, but I somehow know this is only a metaphor for time -- he only had a few moments to impart his important message: “Tell your mother I’m with her.”

*

I don’t know what time is.  I don’t know what death is.  I do know that love and loss dance together in this world intertwined, without one you can’t have the other. Sometimes, in the stillness of the morning, before dawn, I can almost touch that thing I still cannot name.

My ten year old’s hand presses into mine.  Three squeezes.  I love you. Two back. How much? She squeezes until it hurts.