Sixty-Four Years
I call her on the home phone, the one that cuts out when the wind blows. Mostly, I just want to make sure it’s still working. Mostly, I just want to make sure she’s okay. Mostly, I just want my dad back.
“I thought we would make it,” she says. The shaky scratchy voice from the surgery six years ago to remove polyps on her vocal chords makes it hard to tell what she’s feeling. She always sounds like she’s about to burst into tears, even when she’s talking about a bulb catalogue that came in the mail. I’ve opened the window in my office so that I can smell the lilacs that I worried had died in the six deep freezes we’ve had since they began to bud. But some how they miraculously survived and in a week we’ve gone from 32 degree nights to 80 degree days and an astronomical pollen count.
Sixty-four years. That’s how long they would have been married today. Three quarters of her life time. And they didn’t make it because he died three and a half weeks ago. She tells me she’s trying to keep busy by writing checks and I instantly worry whether she knows what to pay and how much. My father did all the check writing, the bill paying, the driving. She did the grocery shopping, the cleaning and the cooking. They shared in doing the Sunday crossword puzzle, supporting Democrats, and yelling at the television during White Sox games.
“I thought we’d make it to 75,” she says and I know she’s lying. She’s decided that we are not allowed to show our sadness and so she doesn’t, no matter how many times I tell her it’s okay to cry. She doesn’t. Not realizing the sadness is still palpable, like the static on the line of the phone that doesn’t always work.
The next day, she sends me a picture of white irises that have bloomed in their garden. They loved that garden. It was my dad’s goal to get better and be able to work in the garden again. “You will dad,” I told him in January, even though I wasn’t so sure. But in addition to my mother, his children and grandchildren, travel and good wine, spring planting and baseball were two of his great loves. When he found out he only had a little time left, he said “there goes the season”. We set up his hospice bed in the living room and opened the blinds so he could see the tulips in bloom, earlier than normal, but perfectly timed for him.
The irises are pure white with a yellow center. They are part of the moon garden of all white flowers that my parents planted years ago. My dad loved the moon and the stars, and all things astronomic. When we were teenagers, we’d sometimes come home in the wee hours of the morning to find my dad on the front lawn. He was never waiting to yell at us or ground us for being late. He was waiting to show us something through the telescope he had set up – Venus or Saturn or some distant star. He’d ignore my alcohol infused breath and tell me how many light years away it was. “Isn’t that incredible?” he’d ask me, and I’d always agree, it was incredible. Because it was. Because he was. He’d ask where I’d been and if I’d had fun as we looked at distant planets together, and then we’d go inside and he’d try to convince me to share some ice cream with him. He loved ice cream.
In recent years, my parents would go to the lake front at the full moon to watch the moon rise. We did that a few days after he died – my mom, my brothers, our spouses and kids. It was a giant pink moon that night. The spring moon, supposed to signify rebirth and renewal.
My mother looks for signs of my dad’s presence everywhere. In the birds chirping, in the flowers in the garden, in the Italian coin that fell out of one the letters he wrote her from Berlin when he was in the army before they’d ever met in person. She swears that coin wasn’t there earlier in the day. My mother tells me that the white irises have been in the garden for years. They’ve put out leaves but they’ve never bloomed before. “Its name is Immortality,” she writes. “How’s that for irony?” “Incredible,” I write back. I’m looking for signs, too.
