Ghosting the Party

The morning I heard the news was a Saturday in September. September 16th. Dad was dead. My sister told me. He had gone to bed with a headache and had never woken up. Very on brand for Dad. A tectonic shift disguised as a banality. I guess He won after all. He had lived in fairly good cognitive health all the way to the end of his life in spite of all suspicions to the contrary. There was one incident where one of his arms started moving on its own (“alien arm” is the “scientific” description of this perplexing condition) but it eventually stopped moving so Dad just chalked it up to “the mystery of old age”. Fair enough. The end is never easy or convenient. The way dad went out it sort of was. Dad was a DIY guy. His death was, while not a suicide, very much a do it yourself, go it alone, don’t warn anyone, just die type of death. Of course, I cried when Morgan told me but I was also sort of proud of him. He didn’t outlive me like his father had done to him. Parents should not outlive their offspring. It’s like living in a world that never really loosens up. No seasonal changes. The Indian summer of a family. Dad wasn’t having it. He always gave me what he could. Never lots of money. Not really any clear direction. What he gave me was an intuition. A sense that he truly believed I could do better than him and that he was rooting for me. That he had taken things as far as he could and now it was up to me. He got out of the way I guess is one way to put it. Maybe this is a sign of true greatness. Do what you’re going to do in life. Have a family. Build a house. Go bald. Build an engine in the living room even. Throw a TV on the ground and kick down a door like a savage. Be unapologetically Christian. Get obsessed with a hummingbird feeder. Be short. Be fine with most people… Then get calm-ish in the twilight years. Maybe have a couple of mini-strokes if you like. Go to the Jersey shore and eat raw oysters for the first time in your life when you’re 70. Let the beard get wild.

Then, when everyone least expects it, get blood on a pillow. And as it settles on one side of your skull and your body begins to cool like the earth’s crust before life, silently slip away. From the room that felt like a cathedral, in the house you built, where you lay motionless.

Bye Dad.