4 months in, requiem (again) for the man who taught me 'requiem'

I keep a digital journal in a Word file on my computer, and when I have written 30 pages or so of journal entries, I start a new file. It's always labeled by the date of the first entry, and sometimes I add a word or two to convey mood or season. Like 'Covid.' (Or 'Second Covid Fall,' ahem).

The journal I am filling now is labeled "5 December 2021 -- JOURNAL -- Babbo." 

Babbo. Daddy.

It felt right to begin a new journal that day, the day he died. The day a new era, like or not, began.

Since then, we've recorded our first Christmas without him. We charged into a new year -- without him. And my mother has moved into a nursing home.

Time doesn't heal all wounds -- it distracts you, with new events, new worries, new frivolities. I suppose that's if you're lucky.

But there are still moments of wretched clarity. A few days after Christmas, I was listening to holiday music on the stereo after dinner -- something he would do -- and perhaps the buzz of the wine at dinner combined with the glow of an afternoon meander made me vulnerable and made it plain what I had somehow forgotten while walking, eating, tidying: He’s dead, gone, never coming back. Not anywhere I can reach. Not even estranged from me but still alive. 

“The dead stay dead,” to quote, once again, the erstwhile Bennington poet, Donald Hall. 

Put a different way: Requiem for the man who taught me the word 'requiem.'

(He loved to listen to requiems, my father).

Certain ideas become clear and they probably sound absurd to repeat but here goes one: Life was better before he died.

Well, of course, right?

But now I know that we've crossed a border from which there is no turning back. And I mean, wow, what days those were when he was still vigorous and bouncing my son on his knees.

Friends, you're wiser than me so you probably knew to savor the moment when your child bounced on your father's knee.

Driving home one day from my mother's nursing home, I thought about his voice (as I mentioned in his second obit, it was an instrument that could entertain, thunder, threaten and tease), thought about what it would sound like to hear it, wondered if he could see me crying in my car.

I thought about how interesting I found him. How his curiosity -- and the drive with which he pursued the objects of his curiosity -- was formidable, how it completely informed me. Informed my life, my personality. You could probably call me "vigorous" and it's borrowed vigor. Learned vigor.

It’s like I wish someone had told me this: the part of your life where your parents are still alive and well is what matters. Afterwards? Yeah, well, ahem...

To be sure, they will also annoy you during those golden days! Kvetching, exerting pressure, advancing opinions you don't want to hear, or, in the case of my father, mentioning repeatedly "what you ought to do." (You = me).

But what's notable: you're still making memories with them.

We've reached four months without my father, and there are no new memories. 

I've cried a proverbial river of tears. But often the sentiment closest to my state of mind -- if I am lucky -- is sarcastic disbelief. “You gotta be fucking kidding me”: that’s my actual thought when I stop and think that Daddy has died. When I spot his face in the photo on my computer background, with that smug-but-friendly smile.

Him? They got him?

Scarcely seems possible. 

And yet here we are.

Like I said, as I stumble through what we may later call 'the first year after Daddy died,' I come to all kinds of absurd conclusions -- like there ought to be a class for preparing for your parents' decline and subsequent demise. Because when I care for my mother now, I do everything wrong (or at least awkward, delayed, confused) and I believe it's because I am in some ways shell-shocked. We spent decades teasing her but now I realize we did so with the tacit conviction that she was still an awesome authority figure. Still a full-fledged adult who didn't need us to do anything but act responsible or set the table.

Now she's so vulnerable in every way and I am unprepared for it all. This situation could go on for years and I still think I would be expecting her to "be in charge." To remember that today is Tuesday (or Saturday, as the case may be), to know that Leo is in the fourth grade, to have activities she wants to pursue.

To end this blog post in a somewhat cheery way -- or grimly cheerful -- I suppose I could say, "Consider the alternative."

That I wouldn't be mourning him so keenly. And I guess that is the cost of love. Life's greatest gift, which if handled correctly will have you bursting into tears as you head for the Tappan Zee, your mother's nursing home receding in the distance.

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