2018.08.26 Dear Dad

Dear Dad,

You would be 107 today were you still alive. Happy Birthday wherever you are, Dad. I miss you. I’ve read that images of loved ones fade overtime, and that the face is the last to disappear from the mind's-eye memory. I still remember your face, Dad. I can see without a photo—lucky  because the scan of a very old photo didn't work. I also remember your personality and your influence on my life.

I wrote a lot about you in my memoir, especially the moments of spiritual understanding you gave me, times when you’d call me Lynda, the name you chose for me at birth. You chose the spelling, so you could call me Lyn, but then you and Mom called me Lynnie.

You called my Lynda when you were mad at me, like the night I tried, almost successfully, to sneak out to meet my teenage boyfriend, just to see if we could get away with it. We didn’t. You spotted my absence and hollered into the night from the front door of our suburban house: LYNDA!  It was louder than the blast of a train’s horn. I tore back home, feigning annoyance, but feeling secretly protected. Getting caught was less threatening than teenage sex in a car.

You called me Lynda when we had political fights, and then too when I told you I aspired to be ordained an Episcopal priest. I stammered to explain my sense of vocation. You stopped me and simply said: “I understand, Lynda.”  I was almost forty years old then, but I felt adult. I suppose a parent always feels like a parent even with a grown child and the reverse, but this time I felt truly dignified. Thanks, Dad.

Yes, I remember your  sarcasm. I’d been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. You said:  “There must be some mistake” then immediately said you were kidding, but it stung. I will say, however, that I didn’t give it much pain-time or credence, knowing that nasty humor was martini-generated. I also knew it was probably a critique you, the fifth child of a mother who abandoned her own aspirations to be an opera singer in order to have children, had heard about yourself. You and I, however were worthy of praise.

There was one time though when your silence, not your words, hurt me and shaped my self-image. I was five, a shy child, an introvert, like you. I wanted your praise and Mom was always in the way with excesses of adulation—compensatory for your silence, and mine I think. She complained to you about my refusal to greet the cheery doorman with cheer.“What’s wrong with that child?” she said.  You, Dad, said nothing.

You could be too quiet like me, but when you spoke you were honest. Do you remember the time you and Farmer Kurtie worked together with cattle prods to coax an angry bull onto a ramp and up into the truck that would take him home after the stud affair? You were a city guy. This was not your thing. I watched in horror, sure that ferocious bull would charge and kill you; instead he relented and ran onto the truck. I was so relieved and impressed. “Daddy,” I said, “”you were so brave! Were you scared?”  You said, “Scared as scared could be, Lynnie." I hugged you so hard, just for telling the truth.

So, Dad, on your natal anniversary, I will remember you in these ways:
    I will sit in your huge red leather chair and pound the arm with my fist, as you used to when you wanted to make some point. I love your chair, and I love that I have it.
    I will say your favorite phrase: “What’s the point?” during the day and in my prayers. It was the last thing you said to me when you were dying. I will resist trying to answer that question and assume you know the answer, and that you were wise to ask it over and over.
    I will re-read my memoir chapter:”The Old Sweater” about how I wore your old torn golf sweater around for a couple of years after you died. The sweater’s sleeves hung down to my thighs when I let them. You loved that old sweater, Dad, and I loved you.

Today I discovered the answer to “What’s the point?” Celebrating my 80th birthday with my four adult children with me in the middle (Robert William III, Jill Barlow, Beverley Ann, John Thomas) was a perfect day—good weather, good food, good conversation, good company, good laughter, good sharing, good love and Love. That’s the point, isn’t it, Dad?

Love,
Lynnie

2015.11.08 Tender Scene Remembered

There is no birthday or anniversary of Dad's death right now, but this poem emerged. I suppose I have not quite moved off the mood of death remembrances: Halloween/All Saints/All Souls—aka The Dark Triduum. And I suppose too that this arose out of spending the day yesterday as facilitator of a retreat day focused on grief. I offered a bit of education and some suggestions and then people dispersed to be in silence and solitude. At the end of the day we gathered as a group. I invited people to share anything they wished. The mood wasn't grim or gloomy,  just vulnerable, hushed. My heart was swollen—not inflamed or painful, simply enlarged as we sat together under the valley of the shadow of death, not overshadowed.


Tender Scene
    by the Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman

I knew my father was dead.
The 6 a.m. call told me so, but
surely he wasn’t dead. Like a detective
I needed a body. Some crime had been
committed, a crime against my heart. All
crimes need proof, don’t they?

I rushed to the scene and saw Mom
making Dad’s bed, neatening, purging the
death-bed of death. This bed where my father
had lain dying for a week, groan by
groan, wrestling his demons, like Jacob, to the pillow—six days exactly—
and on the seventh he rested from all the work he had done.

Dying with purpose is no easy work.
What was Dad creating? A life better than one with no esophagus?
From what did he rest on this cold Sunday in January, 1983?  

There remained
not a shred of evidence of his presence—not even the bedpan, I looked.
Where’s Daddy? The funeral director took him, said Mom.

Cry thief.

I turned and saw proof: Dad, cradled in the arms of Mr. Ahern,
the burly undertaker, his limp body draped across Mr. Ahern’s upper body. 
Dad’s bare legs dangled over the undertaker’s right arm; one of his arms hung loose,
the other tucked neatly against his bearer’s chest.
Dad’s head did not hang loose. Mr. Ahern made sure of that— as you would
carrying a young child off to bed—sound asleep after swearing
he could stay wide awake for “just this one more show”—dead weight.

Or a Pieta.

I’d never seen my father’s body so unclothed—
not quite naked but bare enough.
Doesn’t death deserve clothed dignity just like life?

How in the world did those spindly legs play golf? 
Honestly, you think the damnedest things sometimes. 

My Daddy, Dad, father chose death on the seventh day
in the barely-risen morning. I saw him leave
 on Mr. Ahern’s arm—soon to be ash and bone chips.

I was grateful for the raw viewing, yet . . .what?
I rummaged through Dad’s drawers, found an old golf sweater,
took it, scowled at my mother,
left.

I wore the sweater on and off for
two years—caught the scent of Dad’s soul.