When My Father Died

When my father died, I didn’t grieve. It wasn’t because I refused to let him go or was glad to see him gone, or any of the usual reasons. I didn’t love him too much or too little, or anything like that. It was just because the feeling never came. I thought it would, I expected it to happen, but it simply never did. It was like I was sitting in the train station waiting for the last train out, having arrived just on time by the clock on the wall, and got stuck forever in that moment when you’re not sure whether you missed the train altogether or whether it’s simply late, that moment before you are forced to decide that it’s not going to come and that it’s time to find another way home. You sit and read your paper and remain calm in such moments, with a studious kind of patience. You listen for the train in the still of the night and try to keep expecting it. You remain in the moment and think of something other than the paper and train and the waiting, and you wait until the next moment comes.

The call had come in at 2 a.m., while I was warm in my bed in the middle of an early night in January. It was five years ago, and I slept through the ringing. I awoke only when I heard my wife -- or, more properly put, the woman who was my wife at the time -- cursing the darkness and the phone and the world as she padded across the floor and felt around on the dresser for her glasses so she could make her way to the kitchen to pick up the receiver. I remember her scuffling urgency, coupled with the hint of resentment in her grumbling. She always thought it was unfair that she was a lighter sleeper than I, and that it was inevitably she who had to climb out of bed and push into the cold on a morning like this to answer the phone or the doorbell or the tree limb tapping on the window. Or the babies. Or the children into whom the babies had grown.

I rolled over and drifted in a languid suspension, half awake and half dreaming, then slowly roused myself from my slumber as I became aware of her voice as she spoke with the person on the other end. It was slack in the way that early morning yawning voices are slack, with the warmth of the body making the mouth wide and loose. “Hello?” she said, half yawning, half questioning -- fully hoping I suppose even in the midst of her sleep-induced state that it was a some drunk on the other end who had dialed the wrong number, since a call at that hour is almost never good news if it is meant for you. She grew quiet for a moment and listened to the person talking and I leaned out over the cliff, readying to swan dive back into the deep warm sleep from which I was only then half aroused. I teetered on the cliff and forced myself to listen to the silence in her voice before jerking back from the edge as the next words she spoke were unintelligible to me, but unmistakable in the way the looseness in her jaw had snapped into rigid attention. Her voice became tense, then concerned, and finally dawned to some horrible unspoken realization. I sat up in bed, suddenly knowing what had happened without knowing anything at all.

“Chris, it’s your mom. You need to get up and talk to your mom.” I walked to the phone, knowing it would be bad news and that my life would never be quite the same again.

If my life at that moment had been a song, it would have been a dirge. The movement would have been one of high funereal flourish, a brightening and tensing of the instruments before the long solemn march to decline. It was as if the tensing of the jaw of the woman who was my wife at the time, as she passed through loose slackness into rigid attention, had jolted entirely and immediately through me. I was awake, fully and completely, and tense with an unknown and ancient urgency.

“Hello? Is everything O.K?” -- I picked up the receiver and suddenly became aware of a stack of bills on the counter, and the fact that I had yet to caulk around the replacement windows I had put in the summer before. It’s odd how the littlest details suddenly make themselves known when your brain turns completely on. It’s like your entire life flashes before your eyes. I knew, even as I asked the question, that everything was not O.K., and I could be pretty certain just exactly which part of it wasn’t. And yet, even with the tension in my body, I felt an emotion that can only be described as relief as I heard my mother voice. The orchestra was playing something loud and dramatic in a minor key as I waited for her answer, and I could barely hear her talking through the music as she told me how she had come into the bedroom and found him stretched across the bed, how the paramedics had been unable to revive him, how I needed to fly out the next morning and bring a suit for the funeral. There was a slight decrescendo as I took a breath and she stopped talking, and I asked the question which had to be asked. My father had had a heart attack before, several years after I had graduated from college, and had actually been dead for several minutes before being raised from the dead to live on as if nothing serious had taken place. The average number of heart attacks in my family is three for the men by the time they are 70, so I knew that there was at least the theoretical possibility that this one, being number two, was not the final in the series. I asked if she was certain, as if there was somehow the possibility that this was just another false alarm. Then I paused again and music stopped, and the orchestra laid down their horns in expectation of her reply. I noted that her voice sounded surprisingly businesslike, as if she had processed the information and was satisfied with the outcome.

“Yes. He’s Dead.”

I put down the receiver and sat in the darkness until morning.