The Mississippi on her Knees Chapter Seven

September 21, 2005

I buried my dad today.

That is an entirely misleading statement. I actually had very little to do with the burial. I got out of the limo at the gravesite and I walked over to the tent that had been erected and I sat down in a folding chair on the right side of my mother who was front row, center. She was in a daughter sandwich. There was a platform stretched over the grave itself but from my vantage point, I could see the clay and the marks from the bulldozer and the deep deep hole. And yet, I didn’t cry. I didn’t really feel anything. Mom got teary eyed and Grace boo hooed and I just sat there, staring straight ahead, at the casket. And not feeling and not thinking about what this graveside service meant. And then I saw that Will wasn’t crying either. And I remember thinking that it was just his body. And that what we were putting in the ground was just the vessel for his spirit, which had already left us. And that this was just a ritual. And I couldn’t get too broken up about it so I didn’t muster crocodile tears. I just let it all play out and tried to mask my ambivalence for the sake of everyone else.

I remember being surprised at my reaction. I started to feel bad because even the funeral director was crying and it felt like I should cry. But I decided not to feel bad about my indifference because he knows I love him and I know that we didn’t put my dad in the ground today. I know that my dad is in heaven and in my heart.

After the readings from the bible and the words were said and it was time to leave, we didn’t stick around. My mom pulled three bunches of roses from the spray on the casket. Apparently, that’s tradition? And we had to walk around the casket to get to a little walkway and my mom paused next to the head of the casket, bent down, and kissed it. Then we walked off. On the way to the service, Will had to ride in a different limo with all the other pallbearers but he rode back to the funeral home in our limo, just the four of us: the women holding our flowers, and Will scarfing a petit four from the cemetery ladies.

We headed over to grandma’s and we ate and Mr. Lee teased me about my uncomfortable choice of shoes. Of course, there was tons of food and tons of soda and people milling around. We hung out for a while. I talked to Dr. Nichols, our family dentist and one of my dad’s friends from high school and there were a couple of times where he just looked at me and his face screwed up and he looked like he was just going to start crying. Then, we headed over to Granny’s where we looked at pictures from some recent vacation and visited with Yvonne, their old housekeeper and our great uncles we’d only met once before: George Donald and Bill.

We left Granny’s and headed to the church. The service was absolutely gorgeous.

I was sitting in the front pew. Mrs. Jan came out to play the piano and the whole church full of people seemed to be talking. And Mom turned around a couple of times. And I just wanted to sit there and collect my thoughts, listen to the music, and remember my Dad. But all the talking kept me from doing that. And I got sooo mad. I was just thinking, “Don’t these people understand that the pretty flowers don’t exactly matter right now? That all that matters is my dad and what a wonderful guy he was?”

I wasn’t prepared to see the church choir without my dad in it. That was rough.

But as soon as the singing started, I thought, “Oh my god. This is perfect. This is beautiful. This is my dad.”

The tears didn’t start til the first prayer and the phrase “perpetual light.” And then I just cried for the rest of the service. It just bowled me over. How much I’m going to miss him. It really struck me when we were singing the hymns. So it got to the point where I just couldn’t sing anymore. I tried as hard as I could but all I could do was sit there and not even cry, but sob.

There were endless hugs afterwards. I wrapped my arms around Nik and he squeezed me and I didn’t want to let him go.

I’m a pretty cynical person. Throughout my Dad’s illness, I felt pretty angry toward all the people that I thought were trying to insinuate themselves into our pain. I expected to resent everything and everyone even more after he was gone.

Surprisingly, I was wrong. I found nothing trite. I believed everyone when they said they were sorry for my loss.

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My dad died on a Sunday morning in September. My mom came into my room on the 18th. She shook me awake gently, and took my hand in hers. I was lying flat on my back, staring up at her face on one side, and my brother’s face on the other. And she said, “Allie. Daddy’s dead.”

And I don’t know why this happened, but my response was, “You’re joking.” As if she would joke about that? As if she’d had any levity in her life for the past three months. Because it was exactly three months from the date of his diagnosis to the date of his death.

“No, I’m not," she said. And she left my room crying.

I got out of bed. And walked down the hall to the living room, where hospice had installed a hospital bed in front of the window so that he wouldn’t have to lift himself to get readjusted.
And he was just sitting there. Looking much the same as he had the day before. Merely absent of life.

“I wanted you to have a chance to say goodbye,” my mom said. I sank to the couch cushion next to my sister. Once again, the last to know, but somehow kind of glad for it?

I tried not to look at anyone else. I tried to get used to the fact that he wasn’t going to be sitting up and saying any more “I love you”s.
“He had trouble breathing this morning,” Mom started. “And so I left Will with him and got the oxygen machine. But then, he just....” Shuddering breath from my mom. “He just quit breathing.”
“He looked at me,” Will said. “And he whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’”

My mom and brother had already called the funeral home before waking me and my sister. They arrived pretty quickly to collect him. Did they? I don’t know. They came to collect him. When they got there, Will asked Grace and me to go back to our parents’ bed room so that we wouldn’t have to watch him being transported to a gurney and rolled out of the front door of our home. We sat together on our parents’ bed, crying. I saw him smiling at me from pictures and his baseball cap hanging from the mirror above their vanity and I cried more.

When the activity was over, Mom came back and said we could come out again. And I sat on the couch again, next to my brother this time. And the empty hospital bed just clobbered me. I couldn’t look away from it, but I couldn’t find what I needed in it, either. He was just gone. I knew he would be gone but he just…wasn’t there. He would never be there again. I’d known for three months that he was dying, but I’d not understood what that meant. I’d never mourned anyone before. I’d only ever been to one funeral before. When I was eight. And I saw my great uncle’s glasses sticking out above the casket opening and got so frightened that I wouldn’t go in the parlor. My dad sat outside with me on the porch.

I’d thought I was prepared for my dad to die, but I was astonished by how shocking it was when it happened. I was wrong. My life with my dad in it, even a sick dad, was so different from the life I would live now that he was gone. There was no way I could have prepared for my dad’s death. Because there was so much I didn’t know about it. I didn’t know how empty I’d feel. I didn’t know that it would feel quick. It felt crazy. We’d had three months of knowing that this was happening. But surprisingly, it had felt instantaneous. There’s a difference between knowing it will happen and it actually happening. It’s over? His life is over? When did this happen? It can just happen like that? While you’re asleep under the same roof?

I started talking. Saying that the night before, when I’d gone to bed, I’d started thinking about all the things I wanted him to know before he died. That I’d imagined going out to the living room and sitting down and letting it spill out. And then, I got this strong feeling. That I should do it for real. Something was telling me to do it right then. But I put in my headphones and rolled over on my side and thought, “I’ll have time for that later.”

My brother looked at me, amazed. I thought it meant that he was convinced that I’d lost my mind. But then he looked me in the eye and said, “I felt it, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And I came out here. But then, he just…he looked so tired. I decided not to tire him out any more.”

There should have been something we were supposed to do, but for that first hour or so, there was nothing to do. But sit around and ponder the many ways our lives would change.