*Please consider recommending The Incompatibility of Being Alive if you like my work. Also consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $30/year ($2.50/month). Spread the word!
**I posted a little note on my other stack, Sincere American Writing, and added a link there to a piece on my Dad from six weeks back. Check it out if interested. CLICK THIS LINK HERE.
***Also, a new post on S.A.W. about Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. CLICK HERE FOR ANGELOU.
Well. Things feel OK at the moment. Sleep was on and off last night but overall I slept fine. I kept waking up thinking of Dad, seeing his pallid, cold face. But I’m slowly getting better at not obsessively thinking about “it.” My O.C.D. is sluggishly starting to lessen as well, it seems, which is a welcome situation; the intrusive, repetitive cognitive looping in that area has, not surprisingly, been up for the past couple weeks. I wrote a piece on my Harm O.C.D. here.
Yesterday consisted mostly of moving things around. I took the bed frame apart, the bed Dad had lived his last weeks on and died in, and took the frame pieces and the mattress down the steep stone steps and left it in a corner of the garage. Mom had me put a light blue sheet over it. She’s going to trash it: The mattress has blood and food stains from Dad. Mom rearranged the room and added the orange and yellow chairs where the bed had been. It was very strange not having Dad and the bed in there anymore. But I knew Mom couldn’t keep that stuff there.
We then went through Dad’s closet in his old room—the room Mom has been sleeping in the past six months—and picked out some jackets and shirts I’ll keep and added others for a giveaway bag. We trashed some old stuff and kept some other stuff. After this we tackled the downstairs office, going through old former house trusts and deeds and wills and powers of attorney docs and tax docs etc. And more jackets. An old paper shredder. Some notebooks—nothing resembling “prose” but rather just random notes he’d jotted down here and there. (Mom is keeping all of those.) Pens, pencils, the printer, jags of thick unused white paper, old ink cartridges, his Pickleball equipment in a small bag. Several random empty carry-bags. We trashed some stuff. Recycled others. Kept still more.
Going through this stuff was helpful: We both needed the healthy distraction, and it gave Mom something to control and focus on. We chatted and recollected memories as we went. Throughout the day we received several plants and orders of flowers with cards. One, thoughtfully, from Britney. Mom and I both received many emails and texts from all kinds of people, from the present and the deep past giving condolences, remarking on memories, asking if there was anything they could do. Many people responded—all kindly, lovingly and compassionately—to my Sincere American Writing post about Dad’s death.
I walked the dogs around 2PM when two of Mom’s friends stopped by. I didn’t feel like being social with people I didn’t know. I parked down in the hood a few blocks north of the S.B. Bowl, as always, and listened to The 5th Column while we trudged north all the way up to the Mission. It was a gorgeous sunny day, clear blue sky, and many people were out and about. It felt like summer. It reminded me of this lovely moment I’d had right after Dad died. It must have been maybe 15, 20 minutes after Dad stopped breathing on Friday, so a little after 4PM. Mom was crying out in the kitchen.
I had stopped crying for the moment. The bedroom side door was open and it was sunny and nice out. Very quiet. I stood against the side door door-frame and heard some birds chirping joyfully and then some wind rushed through the wind-chimes dinged lightly against each other and it just felt like this very spiritual, very serene natural moment. It felt like it was Dad smiling and waving goodbye and letting us know he’d always be in our memories, and in our spirits.
Around 4:30, 5PM I went downstairs and collapsed onto the bed, emotionally exhausted. I passed out. When I woke it was 7:20PM. Groggy, I stumbled up the wooden stairs. Mom was sitting in her large white chair in the area by the kitchen next to the deck, gazing out at the city and ocean below. I took a seat in the large white chair four feet from her. We chatted about Dad for a bit. Mom talked about her fear of the impending loneliness again. Fifty years. They were in their early and mid-twenties when they first got together, and now Mom is almost 73, and Dad was almost 78.
I texted Britney and asked if she wanted to talk and she said yes so I gathered my wits and put shoes on and snagged a small water bottle and headed out. I put my ear buds in and called, heading up to A.P.S.—Alameda Padre Serra—and winding my way as usual up, up and around to Las Alturas. Britney and I’d texted after Dad passed but this was our first time talking on the phone since it’d happened. Even though she religiously reads all my posts, she kindly let me unfurl the whole morbid, sordid tale from 24 hours before death until he passed and then everything after that. She listened and asked gentle, thoughtful questions. We talked about the bizarreness of being in the room with a dead body for almost five hours; the intensity of Dad’s finally passing; the past two years of caregiving; leaving New York City; etc. At one point she said it felt weird referring to my Dad in the past-tense. Yes. It did.
I walked all the way up Las Alturas to where it flattens out and meets with Highway 192, which is what I usually do, and then turn around. It’d been a little before dusk when I set out and now it was almost completely dark. The whole end-of-life experience was so odd and blurry and hangover-like, LSD-like, surreal. The incredible ephemerality of life.
When I got home I was shocked to discover it was 9:15PM. Mom had already eaten dinner but she’d made me some: Two thin hamburger patties, no bread, and fries. (Bad health-wise, at least the fries, but so tasty!) Mom said she was profoundly exhausted and so, after heating up my patties and chatting with me for ten minutes, she went to bed. I stayed up a little longer, washed the dishes, and went downstairs for bed. In bed I tried Substacking a little and wanted to read my Rousseau book but images of Dad kept flickering across my mental radar screen. I knew I’d be processing this experience for months, if not years, if not for the rest of my natural born days. I’ll probably be 90 and still wondering, What was Dad thinking in those last conscious moments before we drugged him up with high doses of Morphine from which he never recovered? (Which is what he’d wanted us to do.) Had Dad felt like after my sister and brother-in-law broke down weeping and after two years of this journey it was at last OK to go?
Some of these questions will of course remain forever unanswered. And that’s OK. Part of the wanting to know is because I deeply, unapologetically loved my father and needed to know; part of it was pure grotesque curiosity; and part of is the creative writer in me. I have been writing my experiences down for the past two years, and I got down 100 pages or so of a “fictional memoir” about Dad which I ceased working on when he got sick the last time and spent three harrowing weeks in the hospital. Likely I’ll return to that at some point. But I need time. And processing. And grieving space.
This morning I got up around 7:30AM. No rush. Mom and I sat in the same large white chairs by the kitchen and deck and slurped our respective caffeine and looked at the digital picture frame photos as they passed one by one. Mom got on a jag about the 2017 Thomas Fire in Ojai—I was in Mexico City at the time—remembering how she and my father had had to escape town with the dogs in two separate cars and how Dad had just barely made it south on Highway 33 before it got closed down, and how Mom had taken Highway 150, the “back way” and how they’d driven up to their old close family friend’s house in Santa Barbara.
My folks only moved to S.B. in June, 2020, just three months into the Pandemic. They’d had their house on the market for quite a while, on and off. The Thomas Fire had convinced them they wanted out of Ojai, though we’d moved there from Ventura in 1991, when I was a wee lad of eight. And so, ironically, they found the right house in S.B. in spring, 2020 and moved in early summer, literally at the exact same time I was leaving the dangerous violence of Pandemic East Harlem in NYC and moving to Lenox Hill in the Upper East Side. Read my fictional memoir account of that Pandemic Harlem experience.
Today the agenda is: Finishing going through the office, and then tackling the shed and garage for rearranging and reorganizing. I must admit I am not looking forward to this but it’s what Mom wants. And I respect and understand that. I head home to Britney, the animals and Lompoc tomorrow late morning. I’ll be back Wednesday to take Romey to her dog physical appointment and Mom asked me to spend the night then. Her good friend is staying with her Monday after I leave for a couple nights so she thankfully won’t be alone. There’ll be a time when Mom is going to be brutally, starkly alone. But not yet. She’ll get through this. She’ll survive. What choice does she have? But it won’t be easy. For me, either. But especially for her. Fifty damn years. Half a century. That’s really something.
You two look so happy in the photograph. Alas, with some things, the only closure can be found is within, without closure. Take time, as much as needed, to grieve. Hugs.