Mom turned 84 yesterday, we talked on the phone for a good long while. She told me about their trip out to the apple farm where she and dad bought all kinds of goodies like a couple of little kids - cheesy crab dip and blueberry jam and a little bag of caramel popcorn and ten pounds of Evercrisp apples. She giggled with delight as she confessed these small indulgences. She praised my gift, an origami vase of origami butterflies, and described it to me in great detail, which had my eyes welling up.
Mom recently had COVID which scared me a lot, especially when she told us after the fact she was too sick for a couple of days to know what was what. By some miracle she did not infect dad who has become much frailer in these last months. For the longest time they just chugged along going to the gym and visiting with their kids and going to church and tending their garden and living their lives, now suddenly they are exposed as frail after all. I’m a tough old bird, mom laughed, and then told me how pleased she was to have lost ten pounds though of course in nothing like the right places. I still have these damn fat rolls, she complained. Dad cried at the flowers I sent him for Father’s Day. He isn’t sleeping well and his emotions are swimming right there beneath the surface like the koi pond he loved so much.
So I’m going to head home and see him for myself. If he can handle it, I’ll tell him what you said at the funeral of his mom, about how even though she didn’t treat dad well and was raving at the end, everyone knew and respected how dad did his duty by her even long after her other children finally released themselves from the misery of her grip. You were a good son, all the way to the end, is what you were wanting me to tell dad. In the end I felt too shy to say such a thing, fearing dad’s tears, maybe. But now dad cries daily, mom says. At the card I included with the flowers, praising the job he did, us three kids solid citizens, smart and kind. He is so vulnerable, being flayed by love so late in life is such a terrible, tender thing to witness. So like your father, the last time I saw him, less than a year before he died, when he said to me “I always liked you hon, we always did get along” and I hugged him and he wept like a child.
I’m going to try to share the memory because Dad loved you so. How he respected you. How gentle they are, when your name comes into the conversation, how hushed we all become, as if you yourself were standing there. A fine man, mom always says. A very fine man. Which you were. And once again I am sitting here bawling with Coldplay droning on in the background.
Two days before you died I was standing in the park while my dog ran about and I was swept with the imminent loss of you and cried so hard I had to go lean against a tree. The dog ran around greeting other dogs. There was a man standing under a tree about fifty feet away who had the shape of you, so much so I surreptitiously took out my camera and snapped a selfie with him in it, but when I looked at it later it didn’t look like anything, just a blur. But it really looked like you - so much that I took the trouble to stop crying and try to take your picture. It would have been not long after you received my final email to you, a few days before you died. I’m mad I deleted that blurred picture now, I’d like to go back and study it.
I’m still looking for signs everywhere and not finding them.
Your mom has been texting me - the orchid I sent her upon your death, the one with two flowers, is getting ready to bloom again.
I was remembering the way you always laughed at the way I said “A million dollars!” as though it came with its own exclamation mark, really dragging out that first syllable (“mIIIIIIIIIIIl-yown), something maybe only formerly poor kids would find funny.
You have SUCH FUN parties, people would tell us. Which we did, and I’m so glad, though I haven’t spoken to too many people from those days. Daryl of course but not his ex G, and Terry though not M, also now an ex. I long ago lost track of Doug and E., after he survived that brain tumor. And Jennifer and S, who were always stalwarts at every party, Jennifer one of those women who was always always there to help at the beginning and the end, bless her. Remember how you wanted to put nerf basketball hoops in the living room and for some mad reason I no longer recall I objected, so you didn’t, but oh how I wish I’d said sure, rad, do it. Now I have all that great sound equipment and music in my house, my husband has everything all wired up for optimum surround sound, you’d approve that all your stuff is in the hands of another aficionado.
It’s weird about Coldplay. You listened to them all the time, I remember so many songs in the background playing as we grilled or sat on the porch chatting with M and T or in the sunroom while we quietly read different sections of the New York Times Sunday mornings. I always thought of them as your music rather than mine, only half listening and more recognizing songs than actually knowing them. I think of those domestic scenes with the Coldplay soundtrack, me innocent and unaware how those songs will assault me with a great sweeping sadness again and again, far (but not far enough) into the future no matter where I am when I am hearing them - walking the dog, selecting onions at Trader Joe’s, in line for croissants at the croissant place, doesn’t matter, I am suddenly open-mouthed sobbing more than a year after your funeral at how unbelievable and wrong and unfair and desperately sad it all is.