The Council of Dads

by Bruce Feiler

  Ben would teach them how to think.

  Which is why it was no surprise, sitting under the tree, when I asked him what message he would share with my daughters if I were no longer alive, he pulled out his BlackBerry.

  “I would share with them this quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke,” he said.

  Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.

  “It connects to BOX,” Ben said. “It connects to my way of seeing things. It connects to who you are as a traveler. There’s an African proverb that the man who asks questions is never lost. And I think that’s very much your approach to walking the world, which is that you can be in the absolute most foreign place, most exotic place, most unrecognizable place, and if you ask questions you’ll always be able to find your way. Confidence comes from the questions. So I would tell the girls to live their questions. Throw themselves passionately into the quest for new perspectives, just like their father, who would go anywhere in search of answers to his questions.”

  The sun had begun to burn off the morning gloom by now. A crow alighted on the tree. Ben’s voice was no longer cracking. It was pure.

  “What I love about the Council of Dads,” he said, “is that if your girls are too young to hear your voice, you can surround them with voices that will, in the totality of symphony, create sounds of their father. No specific instrument does it. Sherwood’s drum may be beating too loudly, or maybe Black’s or Stier’s will screw things up. But Linda will conduct the orchestra in such a way that the girls will hear enough music for you to be always present.”

  “So in that symphony of voices, what would you like your voice to be?”

  “I think I would like to be the contrarian,” Ben said.

  “The dissonant voice. I would like to be the note—not the false note, but the true note—that does not feel as if it fits into the music but is critical to making the piece perfect. Because that’s the role we play in each other’s lives. Which is, ‘Everybody else says this. But what’s Bruce going to say?’ I’ve tested an idea. I’ve tested it. I think I’ve made it work. But he’s going to ask a question that will make me go forward with greater confidence or take all the data and reprocess it in a completely different way.

  “That gift is what I would like to share with Tybee and Eden,” Ben said. “Because the people who live the answers have a lot more safety, a lot more security, and a lot more stability.”

  “And the people who live the questions are…BOX.”

  “Discoverers.”

  .18.

  THE LAST FEW STEPS

  BONAVENTURE CEMETERY, just east of Savannah, has two side-by-side stone gates at its entrance. The gate on the left has two chiseled stone pillars capped with female figures cradling crosses. It is known as the Christian gate. The gate on the right has similar stone pillars topped with Stars of David. It’s called the Jewish gate.

  On a swampy, mosquito-plagued afternoon I drove through the Jewish gate, grabbed my crutches, and climbed the few steps to the visitors’ center. Inside are sample stone carvings, assorted porcelain urns for ashes, and portraits of famous people buried here, including governors, ambassadors, and Confederate generals, along with Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Conrad Aiken and four-time Oscar-winning songwriter Johnny Mercer.

  A sign tells visitors that Bonaventure’s most famous resident, “The Bird Girl,” a four-foot-two-inch bronze statue of a girl holding a bowl in each hand, has been relocated to a museum downtown. This little-known statue from an unheralded plot was featured on the cover of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The book’s meteoric success inspired countless pilgrims to trek to Savannah, many of whom came to Bonaventure and began chipping off chunks of the statue’s pedestal.

  I gave the attendant my surname. She disappeared into a musty back room, then returned momentarily with six worn, yellowed cards. Each contained the name of someone interred at the cemetery, the date and place of the person’s death, along with the date, style, and location of burial. The names were my great-grandparents, Daisy and Melvin Feiler; my great-great uncle Edwin Cohen; my grandparents, Aleen and Edwin Feiler; and my uncle Stanley Feiler.

  I was amazed by how much information these cards revealed. My great-grandfather managed to be buried on the same day he died, July 18, 1952. My great-grandmother, who died on September 27, 1960, was relocated from Starkville, Mississippi, in time to be buried two days later. My uncle, whose body was donated to science, was buried seven months after his death, in April 2001. My uncle was cremated; my grandmother buried in a casket; my great-grandmother interred in a monarch vault. “It’s a concrete container,” the attendant explained. “Jews aren’t usually buried in vaults, just dry ground. But things are always changing.”

  I thanked her, returned the cards, and stood up to leave.

  “Are you going to visit your family?” she asked.

  “Sort of,” I said. “Really I came to visit my own grave site.”

  BONAVENTURE, OR “LOVELY PLACE,” is one of the most storied settings in an otherwise storied city. Established as a rice plantation before the American Revolution, the wooded bluff above the Wilmington River became a private cemetery in 1846. The seller, U.S. Navy Commodore Josiah Tattnall, is said to have introduced the line “blood is thicker than water” into American history after aiding the British against the Chinese in 1859.

  The cemetery’s most distinctive feature is what Harper’s Magazine in 1860 called it’s “mournful avenue of live oak,” a promenade of soaring evergreens called the king’s trees because their hearty wood was once reserved for the Royal Navy. John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, who camped in Bonaventure for five days in 1867, called the specimens “the most magnificent planted trees I have ever seen. The main branches reach out horizontally until they come together over the driveway, while each branch is adorned like a garden with ferns, flowers, grasses, and dwarf palmettos.”

  Nearly every branch of these grand oaks is draped in silvery, beardlike skeins of Tillandsia, or Spanish moss, which shrouds the entire grounds with a funereal air. A cousin of the pineapple, the exotic garlands swing and sway with every motion of the wind, wrote a visitor in 1859, “not unlike the effect produced by the tattered banners hung from the roofs of Gothic cathedrals as trophies of war in olden time.”

  Covering over 160 acres, Bonaventure was part of the rural cemetery movement of the nineteenth century in which burial grounds were relocated from crowded church backyards to plush, garden-style paradises, where the deceased would retire close to nature and the grieving would be uplifted by the blooms. These “cities of the dead” were designed to be places of hope, not sadness, where death was no longer macabre but a state of “silent slumber,” “sweet repose,” or “eternal sleep.”

  Forerunners of modern-day parks, cemeteries became desired leisure destinations where people brought carriages, picnics, and amorous intention. Anyone who courted in Bonaventure on a Sunday, it was said, was sure to marry. Bonaventure is so lovely, wrote one observer, that “Death is robbed of half its horrors.”

  I searched out three family plots before heading to my own. The first belonged to Johnny Mercer, whose mournful ballad “Moon River” is Savannah’s unofficial anthem. The lyricist of more than 1,500 songs, and cofounder of Capitol Records, is buried alongside his wife, Ginger, and other family members. The stones bear his song titles: “My Mama Don Tol’ Me” for his mother; “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” for his wife; “And the Angels Sing” for himself.

  Conrad Aiken is also buried alongside his parents, though the overtones are less pleasant. When Aiken was eleven, he awoke one morning to hear his parents arguing. His father then shot his mother and turned the pistol on himself. The future poet laureate of the United States ran barefoot across the street to the police station. “Papa has just sh
ot Mama and then shot himself.”

  The elder Aikens’ graves are marked with a single monument, while the troubled writer, who went on to edit the Harvard literary magazine with T. S. Eliot and lived around the world before returning to Savannah, is buried under a granite bench to encourage visitors to stop and enjoy a drink. The bench contains an inscription that my brother has adopted as his Internet alias. One day Aiken saw a ship named Cosmos Mariner sailing into Savannah. Enchanted, he checked the paper for its routing, only to find a boilerplate entry saying no information was available. The entry became his epitaph.

  COSMOS MARINER

  DESTINATION UNKNOWN

  The third grave I visited was more personal to me.

  Jack Leigh was the photographer who took the image of the “Bird Girl” that appeared on the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A native Savannahian and a graduate of my high school, Jack dreamed of being a painter but abandoned that for photography. After apprenticing widely, he returned to Savannah, took a haunting shot of a swan in the city’s most touristed fountain, and believed for the first time that he could see his hometown in a fresh way. That image now hangs on our bedroom wall in Brooklyn Heights, a symbol of a private stroll Linda and I took around the fountain moments after we were married.

  Jack went on to publish five books of precisely focused, finely observed images of dying worlds along the rivers, swamps, and inland waterways of Georgia’s low country. In 2003, in his early fifties, Jack was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. He longed to spend his final weeks in the place he loved most, Tybee Island. My parents offered him their beach house. Jack experienced his waning days in the place where I spent my weaning ones. When I was struck early with cancer, the parallels with my longtime friend, who also had two daughters at home, were painful. I was curious about his state of mind as the end of his life neared.

  “Jack’s primary work as a documentary photographer,” said Susan Patrice, his ex-wife, who spent the final months at his side, “was really the work of being an open human being who could show up in any situation and be truly open and engaged. And while you’re developing that skill as an artist, you also develop it as a human.

  “What I found remarkable,” Susan continued, “is that as we were driving out to Tybee after Jack had been in the hospital for months, he kept saying, ‘Slow down. I’ve forgotten how beautiful the world really is. Do you see it? Do you see it?’ I kept thinking, ‘He sees it because he’s visited death, but also because he’s cultivated this capacity to see. He may not be strong enough to lift the camera, but the camera has become irrelevant.”

  Jack especially loved Bonaventure. When his daughter Gracie was young, the two walked around its grounds for hours, every day. For several years before he was diagnosed, Jack’s health began to deteriorate. During that time, he began photographing hundreds of stone angels around Bonaventure and other cemeteries. “I believe he was unknowingly trying to reclaim his spiritual tradition,” Susan said.

  In the months before I was diagnosed, Linda began observing that I was restless, sleepless, irritable. “You weren’t yourself,” she later said. Jack’s family noticed a similar pattern, and it colored his work. For the first time, he began to forgo the hyperfocused style that had been his trademark and started taking blurry, unfocused images—especially of water.

  “Jack never did anything that was unintentional,” Susan said. “And his most deeply personal work was always focused on water. He had this reoccurring dream that he was somewhere photographing, that he wouldn’t be paying attention, and suddenly he would realize that the tide had come in and washed all his camera equipment out to sea.”

  What did it mean? “As an artist, I think he feared that his work wouldn’t be remembered,” she said. “But the peace he got to around his dying is that while your camera may have washed out to sea, while you were busy creating the art, the art was creating you. And you are left with this amazing life that you participated in.

  “When Jack was dying,” she continued, “he would ask me to sing him a lullaby I often sang to the girls when they were little. It was a song about the river and how it carries us home. The night before he died, I fell asleep briefly lying next to him and was instructed in a dream to tell him that dying was like floating in a boat on the river. He was just to relax and let it carry him. Afterward, I found a box of Polaroids next to his bed, containing all the last images he shot. On top was a blurred photograph of a canoe, sitting on a dock, alongside a river.”

  THE FEILER FAMILY PLOT is located at Lot 570, Section Q, just off Nunez Way. It’s shaped like an oblong trapezoid, sixteen by eleven paces, and is lined with a low granite coping wall. Two live oaks grow on either side, their trunks speckled with lichen. Some mushrooms poke up from the ground.

  The six existing graves are spread along the back. My grandfather had asked that his tombstone be engraved “HE DID WHAT HE WAS SUPPOSED TO DO,” but after his suicide, my parents decided that epitaph would be inappropriate. His stone now reads “BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER.”

  I quickly tallied the ages of the deceased—sixty-one, sixty-two, seventy-seven, seventy-eight, eighty-two, eighty-nine. Forty-four seemed gulpingly young.

  A stone bench sits in a corner with the inscription “MAY THE BEAUTY OF THEIR LIVES SHINE FOREVER / MAY OUR LIVES ALWAYS BRING HONOR TO THEIR MEMORY.” I sat down to take in the scene.

  The afternoon light was just sieving through the trees. I could just glimpse the Wilmington River and beyond it the bridge toward Tybee. A hawk circled overhead. John Muir had observed bald eagles roosting in the live oaks; today those same trees were buzzing with cicadas.

  Linda arrived a few minutes later and joined me on the bench. A few weeks before I learned that I had cancer, I finally got around to updating my will. At the time, I asked Linda where she thought we should be buried. She chose Bonaventure. We were married in Savannah, she said; our girls would come here their entire lives. This sandy soil was our touchstone.

  Today was her first visit to this spot. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, slipping her arm around my back.

  “It reminds me of a line from Genesis,” I said. “After each day of Creation, God looks at the sky, the water, and the land, and announces that it is ‘good.’ This place is good.”

  I kept scanning the ground, imagining where my parents would someday rest, as well as Linda and me. But I couldn’t settle on one spot. It was like a nightmare in which you are about to die but wake just before the decisive moment.

  Thunder clapped, and we looked up at the sky. Ominous charcoal clouds had swept in quickly over the marsh in the familiar choreography of coastal afternoons. Soon, thick dollops of rain were piercing the canopy of leaves. Within seconds, we were caught in a downpour.

  We stood up to go. As we did, I began reciting the words from my favorite poem, Shel Silverstein’s “This Bridge,” which I had long ago asked Linda to read at my funeral. It tells of a road that leads around the world, through Gypsy camps and spicy Arab fairs, through wondrous woods where unicorns run free. It ends with a searing image.

  But this bridge will only take you halfway there—

  The last few steps you’ll have to take alone.

  Just as I finished, Linda pressed her lips to mine. “You don’t have to say that,” she whispered. “You’re going to be here for a long, long time.” Tears were streaming down our cheeks, salt trickling into our mouths. The rain was matting our hair. My crutches tumbled to the ground. And in the darkened cathedral of a Bonaventure thundershower, we clung to each other, pressed our foreheads together, and kissed on the land where we would one day rest forever.

  .19.

  CHRONICLES OF THE LOST YEAR

  volume VI

  April 14

  Dear Friends and Family,

  The cheery clarion of sun wakes us up most mornings these days and lingers well past dinnertime, though chilly showers still puddle the ground and keep our coats and mittens close by. But the pear tree ac
ross the street has just erupted into full blossom, our own private promise that spring is here to enliven us again.

  Those blossoms have come to signal another yearly milestone for me. Four years ago tonight, Linda and I ventured outside from our apartment in Manhattan. Then, as now, we mazed our way through a protracted, nine-month ordeal, full of doctors’ offices, endless tests, and the occasional outburst of anxiety. Then, as now, one of us was just being allowed up from three months in bed with the occasional foray onto the couch. And then, as now, we had counted the minutes until the arrival of spring. That night we sat in a neighborhood Italian restaurant, ordered flatbread pizza and our first glass of wine in months, and simply enjoyed being out of the house. What I most remember from that evening was looking into Linda’s eyes and thinking, “She’s ready.”

  It was April 14, 2005. The next day she would give birth to our daughters.

  We tell time around our house by the girls’ birthday (and trust me: it comes up hourly, no matter the season!), and this year is no different. After nine and a half months, twenty-nine nights in the hospital, one hundred visits to the doctor, a thousand pills, and several thirty-pound swings of weight, my chemotherapy has come to an end. I’m done. As promised, the last several rounds were challenging, as my body got weaker and the cumulative side effects worse. The short-term pain in my leg became intense with each dosage. And by the end, as I waited for the results of the final blood test that would either send me back into the hospital or absolve me from any more visits to the clinic, I was holding my breath. “Your numbers are great,” the nurse reported in a call. “You don’t have to come tomorrow.” I put down the receiver and broke down on the couch.