Photo by Erika Larsen/Redux
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Life Lessons
The Mourning Spot
By Lynn Lauber, September & October 2008
One never really gets over the death of a parent. The longer a mother or father lives, the harder it is to say goodbye—not only to the parent but also to the last vestiges of one’s childhood
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Everyone must love their father this much, I used to tell myself, back in those days, just ended, when I was pierced by anticipatory mourning as I imagined my dad’s passing. I had been worried about his dying for nearly as long as I could remember, most specifically since the age of 15, when I was awakened late one night by a phone call from my mother, informing me from a hospital lobby that my father had narrowly survived a coronary. He was only 42.
This event was exquisitely timed with my own teenage rebellion. There were intimations that his attack might have been exacerbated by stress—a new term then, and me its embodiment, feckless in my miniskirt, one platform shoe out the door.
A heart murmur, cigarettes, the strain of making insurance sales, were all later implicated in his condition. In the years to follow my father would survive far more virulent threats than me. Yet some kernel of blame lodged in my chest that night; the fact that he lived always felt to me like a reprieve.
But long before I reached 15, imagining the death of my father had been a frequent exercise. Even as a girl, sitting in our Chevy while we visited his rural hometown cemetery, I watched as he pulled onion grass from the apron surrounding his own mother’s grave, and I realized how his sorrow was separated only by the tissue of time from what would someday be my sorrow, for him.
Over the years our family life had become centered around my father’s dramatic surgeries and malfunctions—his calcified arteries, leaking valves, scarred lungs, swollen aneurysms. We were always gathering around during his blockages and bronchial emergencies, desperate for his survival. There was always the sense that he was a precious natural resource just on the verge of extinction. His interior, unlike his cheerful, charming exterior, was a leaky, rusted site, a collision of old skirmishes and habits. But somehow he always pulled through, bypassing, as his surgeries had, the life expectancies on his insurance charts. He reached 70, then 80.
There was always the sense that my father was a precious natural resource, just on the verge of extinction.
And still I dreaded his death, mentally piercing myself with the details: his coffin in the middle distance of the funeral home, his plumped and powdered visage, the awful hole in the ground. It became a kind of painful prelude before I fell asleep at night.
Imagining what things were like was one of the few things I was good at, the main skill I’d gleaned from my degree in English. You name it and I could say what it was like or conjure up some vivid representation. And I had written plenty of prose, as well as odes and other poems, on the loss of my father, all filed away. Yet none of this pre-experience blunted the reality of his final illness as I walked down the hospital halls of my long memory, turning left to the room where he was held captive under bright lights, tubed and tied.
It turned out that my imagination was poor in the face of his final sufferings. All those years of sticking myself with the needles of grief had done no good. Now, all I wanted to do was bear my father off to some clearing where he could pass away under a tree—a sycamore or a catalpa. But there was only a muffler shop and a drive-through restaurant featuring pork-tenderloin sandwiches within walking distance of the hospital; no trees old or grand enough for the likes of him.
For 40 years this was what I had dreaded most, and now I stood and saw it, the transformation of this beloved flesh, this old and cherished body. I held his leg and watched his loveliest of blue eyes turn fixed and his breath grow labored, the way a fish breathes when it’s pulled from water. The dark interior of his mouth seemed to hold the deepest of secrets. He turned alabaster right there before me.
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Having a parent for so long makes you secretly hope that life will make an exception with you. Then it happens, and the final layer of childhood is seared away for good. Never again that singular regard, that slice of light under my nighttime door.
But of all the scenes I’d so painfully imagined, there was one I had never visualized: myself, standing to speak at my father’s funeral. Because I didn’t believe I could ever do this, I didn’t want to believe it mattered. I hadn’t spoken at my maternal grandmother’s recent funeral. Instead I watched in disbelief as a cousin tripped forward with a hand-held microphone to belt out a popular song. How could she do it? I wondered.
I was part of the ironic side of the family—the ones who sat in the back and never raised our hands, who kept our thoughts tucked into the dark pockets under our eyes. Prudent, bill-paying people who didn’t make a fuss or expect to be remembered. But certain facts converged to challenge my silence:
After my father’s death we discovered three bronze medals that my dad had never mentioned, from his tenure as a boy infantry soldier.
And, on the day of his death, my father had whispered, “Don’t forget me.”
These events combined to keep me awake in the childhood room I’d reinhabited during his final sickness—back in the single bed, under the pink coverlet where the ghost of my girlhood still lurked. Instead of envisioning my father’s death, I now lay awake imagining a new scene—myself standing up to redeem my father’s heroic, ordinary life.
Giving such a speech was something he would have championed. He was a devotee of Dale Carnegie and the power of positive thinking, of remembering a fellow’s name and using it, of shaking hands and meeting eyes. He was a proponent of a great goodwill out in the world just waiting to be tapped. He would have urged me on.
It was also during those nights in my room that all the literature of my life flooded back to me—from tattered Norton anthologies, from lectures where I’d sat lulled, half asleep. Maybe this was the real reason for the liberal arts education that both my parents had labored hard to finance—my father sitting in a concrete insurance office, over his adding machine, a vote of confidence in a hapless daughter whose future was far from clear. Perhaps this was a consolation my father knew I’d need one day—a reminder that words connect us across time and space.
In the end, the one thing I had never imagined I would do, I did. I stood up on that most woeful of days, after taps had been played, and the shots fired, and the flag folded and placed in my mother’s lap. In my mind’s eye I was still a fearful girl, a heap on the floor, but someone else’s muscles flexed and carried me to the podium. I spoke of what a hero my father was to us, how you could count on him as you could count on the sun rising, how bighearted and true he was.
While I was speaking, I asked my tears—the hot depleting brine of them—to hold back until I was done. I wanted to be brave, to show all these creased faces from my ancient past that I wasn’t such a wayward daughter after all. To show my father, in whatever realm he was in now, that he could count on me to stand up for him.
I heard myself say how grateful we were to have had him for so long, how he would live on in my brother and me, words that felt carved out of my living flesh. Then I sat down, enveloped in a kind of shimmering disbelief that I had been able to speak at all.
In spite of myself, I had grown up and borne the unbearable—the death of a parent—like everyone else.
Lynn Lauber’s essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times and been anthologized. Her most recent book, Listen to Me, Writing Life into Meaning, was published by W.W. Norton in 2004. She lives in Nyack, New York.
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