Grief is a collage, a bunch of vivid images thrown together without a clear order, leaving it to the viewer to decipher, only to discover that each image leads to a new one, which leads to another, endlessly elusive.
The future is the past crashing through the present, and it never stops crashing.
* * *
I have been Catholic all my life, so I am aware of the distinct, defining dryness of a Communion host. However, I have never known a dryness such as that which I experienced upon returning to my seat after receiving the Eucharist, knowing that when this line of communicants was finished, I would be walking up to that raised lectern to deliver the eulogy. (Why am I always stuck with the eulogy?) Between the dehydration of the previous night’s grief drinking—what John used to call “a high-level meeting with Captain Jameson”—and the decongestant I’d taken that morning, and the thick summer heat, and now this Communion wafer, the inside of my mouth felt like I was trying to swallow a collie. I gulped hard and used my tongue to try to peel the stuck wheat disc off the roof of my mouth. My heart was racing. Communion ended, with one of the Eucharistic ministers in tears. It was awful. We stood.
The priest completed the post-Communion denouement, then instructed the packed church to please be seated. I was the only one standing, making my way past sets of knees toward the main aisle. I took slow, careful steps toward John’s blue casket, my route entirely defined by its presence in front of the altar. Easing between its side and the front set of pews, I ascended the steps to the lectern, smoothed the pages I’d carried in my jacket pocket, took a long look over the roomful of faces, familiar and strange, waiting until I was certain I was ready, and I began.
My voice quavered. I’d known that would happen. And when it did, I turned my gaze toward the pale blue steel box that contained my friend. It gave him dignity, I thought, and it offered a sort of logic, order, something that made sense in a week filled with such a density of questions. It seemed settled.
When I finished speaking, I walked toward the crossing at the front of the nave, paused at the casket, and instinctively genuflected and crossed myself. The priest, a no-nonsense septuagenarian, was watching. I wondered if I’d blasphemed, directing my sign of the cross toward this steel container rather than the big wooden crucifix in the sanctuary off my left shoulder. I didn’t care.
* * *
The city was deep into a hot, muggy spell, and everything and everyone was dripping in a ninety-three-degree July afternoon as they made their way through a line of lasagna and chicken, salad and homemade pizzelles, brought by the friends and family who gathered at Gina’s and my house after the funeral. John’s Italian roots were deep, as the overabundance attested. If one must die, one should do so amid old-country people.
A big white tent covered our backyard, an unmistakable and ironic likeness of the one that had been there just weeks before for our son’s high school graduation party. I’d borrowed John’s laptop and tapped into his iTunes earlier in the week to make a playlist for his calling hours—eighty songs, which felt like a perfunctory sketch, yet also tracked a life story—and I played it now on the stereo. Barry De Vorzon’s “Theme from The Warriors” . . . the Jam’s “Art School” . . . Steve Earle’s “Over Yonder.” It felt like a final collaboration.
His nieces and nephews played basketball on the ragged hoop in the driveway and batted yellow balloons across the yard, and the old Italian relatives sat and sipped their red wine. As the afternoon wore on, I wilted into a chair across from my dad. He was wearing what he’d worn to the service: a soft yellow summer shirt open at the collar, khakis, and casual shoes.
“It was sad when Jim died,” he said of the brother he’d lost just a week before. “But he was eighty-nine years old, and if he didn’t die this year, he would have died next year, or the year after . . . He lived a good long life. With John—it’s a lot harder to take.”
That’s all he said. It was certainly the least hyperbolic thing that had been said that day, and also the most true.
* * *
Near the end, John and I were reduced to truncated exchanges of words in emails and visits, as though we were distilled to a code of our own making. His responses, especially, seemed like he was meting out the few words he had remaining. One night after having ordered out for Chinese, I sent John a note, and we shared what turned out to be our final written exchange:
Me: “Tonight’s House of Hunan fortune cookie, reductive and aphoristic, yet true: Old friends make best friends.”
John: “True my brother.”
15: ONWARD
* * *
On the morning my father was to leave for Frankfurt to begin a ten-day trip through Germany and France, a big cherry tree fell in his yard. He sent an email to inform me: “Can’t do anything about it right now. It won’t leave the place while I’m gone. Give me something to do when I get back.”
His departure on this more or less spontaneous adventure at the invitation of two of his nieces seems now timed as a sort of juxtaposition—maybe even an affront—to my fixation with the mathematics of death. The day his party landed in Frankfurt was fourteen days before the first anniversary of my mom’s death and seventeen days before John died. When they disembarked from the plane, a message was waiting. My dad’s brother Jim, the father of the two nieces who were with him, had suffered a massive stroke. He would die nine days later.
My aunt’s message from Ohio was to her daughters, no-nonsense and emphatic: my dad was under no circumstances allowed to change his plans. Her girls could decide on their own what to do. The daughters made hasty arrangements to fly back home. My dad continued on. If the roles were reversed, he said later, he’d have wanted Jim to have the time of his life.
And so he did. He’d prepared almost boyishly for this trip, buying a new pair of shoes and a walking-around bag which he called his “murse,” claiming he was there to find a “Fifi,” and if he did he might not come back. In truth, he had two specific destinations. The first was the Troyes Cathedral, the second oldest cathedral in France, a spiky edifice with stonework as busy as needlepoint and astounding stained glass dating as far back as the twelfth century, which was being restored by a cloister of nuns who reside in the monastery there, and whom he had been helping with a small fund-raising campaign back home. The second was his old army base, Anderson Barracks in Dexheim, which he hadn’t seen in half a century.
He’d left his cell phone at home, intending to live fully in the moment. For the next ten days, his guides were a young grand-nephew and his wife, a military couple stationed in Frankfurt. Together, the group hiked tirelessly through cobblestone streets and hillsides across Germany and into France, eating and drinking, touring castles and cathedrals, visiting sidewalk cafés and beer gardens, through days sunny and pleasant. Each evening, my father returned to his hotel, a short walk from his hosts’ house. He was the only guest in the place. Before turning in for the night, he made handwritten entries on notecards—a simple engineer-like record of what he’d seen and done that day, the meals he’d eaten, small observations.
Fri. To Karl & Nicole’s
Checked in Hotel St. Paulishof
Went to Neuleiningen
Visited old guys in man cave
Drank wine & told lies
Dinner @ Eubelius Schnitzel
In the mornings, he chatted with the housekeeper, whom he’d befriended even though she spoke virtually no English and he spoke limited German. Then he set off up the road for the day’s adventure.
He visited the World War I battlefield at Verdun. Drank cognac in Troyes. Posed next to a giant sculpture of a human foot in Trier. Toured the Anderson Barracks. Ate enough Weiner schnitzel that he returned five pounds heavier than when he left. Attended a two-hour Mass in an ancient Catholic church. Visited with the Mother Superior at Troyes Monastery, posing with her for a snapshot on the monastery steps.
Two days before my dad’s return to Ohio, Jim died. Dad came home in time for Jim’s funeral,
then John’s funeral six days later. I spent that whole summer measuring every milestone by these events—my mother’s death, my uncle’s death, my friend’s death. I don’t think he did this at all.
16: HIS MARGIN OF PROPHESY
* * *
Gina and I found ourselves taking turns causing each other to cry, and it became something like a parlor game between us. We got really good at it.
In the kitchen one morning, she asked if I remembered the night I’d spontaneously handed John an entire loaf of French bread from the counter because he was hungry, and how he’d set off toward home on his bicycle in the dark, munching away. Of course I remembered. We both started bawling.
I knew which songs would cause Gina to break down within two bars (Wilco’s “Jesus, Etc.” took only the first stroke of the violin), and I would play them on purpose.
When we deleted phone messages from the answering machine, we always had to save the one from John, the last one he’d left, and inevitably, one or the other of us would play it: “Hey. I wanted to remind you I have four tickets to the National tonight in Pittsburgh, plus Dirty Projectors. You can have all four if you want. Gimme a call. I’m not gonna make it to that show. But trying to find someone that may be able to use ’em.”
And off we’d go again.
Sharing grief was uplifting in an unexpected way: she had lost him, too, and while lots of people had lost him, we were the only two people who had lost him in our own unique way, together, and so sharing his absence was a bond between us. Gina had made a big pot of Italian wedding soup at the point when John was barely able to swallow, and she had split it into two containers, one for him and one for us. We recognized the fact that now each of our freezers contained identical halves of that soup, in identical plastic containers, and for some reason that was a bridge of comfort. But it also made us elaborately sad. Eventually, knowing when the crying was coming actually made us laugh. But we still cried.
Everything that summer had drifted into limbo. In late August, my dad and I made a date to meet in his workshop for the first time since we’d routed the boards for the sides, and I was glad for the distraction, for something to do with my useless hands. Our next step was to join the boards, brushing glue into the grooves and along the tongues, fitting the whole puzzle together, clamping it tight.
When I entered his workshop that day, the midmorning summer sun was pouring through the only window, which in turn revealed the sky, enamel blue, sponged with lazy white islands of cloud. The sunlight spilled onto the workbench where my father stood over a half-finished birdhouse he was making for a friend, carved in the shape of a baseball player’s head.
“Hey hey,” he said without looking up.
“Hey hey,” I said back.
He was holding the freshly glued bill of the cap where it met the forehead. He nodded toward the end of the workbench. “I made us some drawings.”
Before him, masking-taped to a scrap of the test-stained oak, were two new graph-paper “Designer: ME” sheets. I set my bagged sandwich and water bottle on the router table. Dad carefully laid the birdhouse aside and picked up a pencil, turning to the sketches and using the pencil for a pointer as he began explaining the plans. The first sheet contained three different drawings: one labeled “PLAN VIEW/CORNER,” showing how the four corners would be formed with a lap joint; the next showing how the “BOT. EDGE” would be fitted and trimmed; and the last an elaborate detail of the decorative oak trim that would wrap around all the corners.
“You’ve lost me,” I said halfway through my dad’s explanation.
He grinned. “Okay. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. But don’t worry. You’ll see.”
I was at the point of no return regarding the question of whose project this really was. It was not an entirely clean collaboration. But nothing with my father ever had been. I’d learned so much from him, more than I could even quantify, but he’d actively taught me very little. I’d learned because of a fascination for him and the ways he worked. I’d learned from watching him and mimicking, and I’d learned what questions to ask and how to ask them. Now that I was approaching fifty, I’d come to a certain kind of peace that I would never equal his example and would always need him as a guide for this kind of pursuit, but there was also the constant nagging awareness that someday I wouldn’t have it.
A number of years before, I’d set out to replace the rotten wood floor of a basement foyer with brick I’d scavenged from a house that was being demolished. I’d thought my plan was pretty brilliant. This foyer led into the yet-to-be-restored billiards room of our ridiculous Tudor, and I had determined that the brick floor would both solve the issue of decay and offer a stately rusticity to the wide cherry-trimmed hallway. While I hauled brick and figured a way to pour a concrete pad, my dad stopped by with a sketch of a brick pattern adapted and improved upon from a photograph he’d seen of a Spanish wine cellar, and it was far more intricate and interesting than anything I was capable of imagining. I was planning on a basic running bond, which is to bricklaying what chopsticks is to piano playing; his plan was more like modal jazz. Which meant that the floor would be better than anything I could have done on my own but also that it was no longer mine. He was right down there with me in high rubber boots with a shovel the day I poured the concrete subfloor. And I did learn. I realized this a year later when I rebuilt a set of brick steps and applied the arcane tricks of mortar mixing and bidirectional leveling and joint spacing, all things I’d learned from him.
Dad had laid out a set of the routed boards in their prescribed order across a pair of workbenches. Two eight-foot-long pine boards, eight inches wide, with a three-quarter-inch strip of the stained red oak in between.
“We have a little problem,” Dad said, directing my attention to this arrangement. “Somehow we cut one of the boards an eighth of an inch short.”
“How did we do that?”
“I don’t know. I think we confused ourselves.”
“What do we do about it?” I asked.
“Well, the beauty of this is no one will ever be able to see the front and back at the same time,” he said. “We’ll trim as best we can and chalk it up to imperfection.”
Dad had a long wall rack for his dozens of clamps, which he’d fashioned from a length of black iron pipe. It displayed a wide constellation: short steel C-clamps; long iron and steel furniture clamps with orange rubber protective covers on their ends, some with threaded hand cranks, others with triggers that guided the ends toward tightness. Our first task was to raid it for all the long furniture clamps, laying them out along the span of the first set of boards so we could apply them quickly once the glue was spread. I picked up the big bottle of carpenter’s glue and shook it upside down to move the viscous yellow fluid toward the spout. Dad grabbed two clean glue brushes and handed one to me.
“Ready?” he said.
“Yep,” I said.
“We’ll need to move fast. It’ll start setting up quick.”
He held one of the pine boards on edge, and I applied a bead of glue. He followed with his brush, spreading it evenly. We continued the whole length of each board, working briskly. When everything was evenly coated with glue, we clamped the three pieces together. Excess glue began to ooze from the joints.
“Not too tight yet,” Dad said. “We want to get all the clamps in place and then tighten uniformly.”
The hodgepodge battery of clamps found their places. Some of these clamps had been in his arsenal for as long as I could remember—heavy lengths of iron pipe with orange sliding tails and round black cranks. Others were much newer, shiny steel with fancy plastic triggers. He’d accumulated his tools over the years, as the countless jobs themselves accumulated. His current favorite was one he’d inherited from his brother Jim.
My own workshop at home reflected a similar history, stacked, jumbled, and adorned with tools from my childhood: a Boy Scout hatchet, my first framing square—and tools I’d bought for specific jobs: a power planer f
or my many ill-fitting doors, a rubber mallet for bricklaying—and tools my dad had passed down: a heavy steel pipe wrench, a string level—and tools from my grandfather: a machete, a meat saw—along with a few I’d borrowed from my father and brothers and hadn’t (yet) returned.
As the boards slowly pulled together, the final fit taking shape, the imperfections revealed themselves. One stretch of board contained a gap where the pieces didn’t meet cleanly.
“Wood filler,” I joked.
Dad scowled. “Not if my name’s going on it.”
We cranked harder on that section and the gap began to disappear. But we also saw that the whole configuration was beginning to bow from the pressure.
“We’re gonna need to strap some stout boards crosswise and clamp them down to keep it flat,” he said.
We were fighting this thing in multiple dimensions, trying to make it parallel and true even as it heaved and kicked and angled in resistance. Dad quickly rooted through his boxes of scrap lumber to locate appropriate pieces, long and stout, to force it flat and level. Before working them into place, we cleaned the excess glue as best we could with sopping handfuls of paper towels. The we set the boards perpendicular to the joints and pulled them tight with C-clamps, the wood groaning in protest as we forced it to go the way we wanted it to go.
Furnishing Eternity Page 10
