to live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it,
and when the time comes to let it go,
let it go.
--mary oliver
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i discovered recently you can save a voicemail from your iphone, not just leave them in your mailbox until they are deleted months later by some mysterious apple default. i have no idea how long the icon for this feature has perched next to each and every voicemail. currently i'm pretending it's recent and that it wouldn't have helped me to preserve a small set of voicemails i have long mourned the loss of.
it's not even the full content of these voicemails i'm missing, or any one of them in particular, but rather the same, habitual greeting that every single message started with: hi tania, this is your dad [small pause here before the voice continues, as if to frame the information he had just presented or because the greeting was the only part he had planned]. even before caller id was a thing, my father's deep, thick voice, not to mention his strong german accent (that i could both hear and not hear at the same time) was always an immediate indicator of who was on the other line and his opening was never necessary, but i find it's the opening i find myself surprised to miss. but of course, i miss those phone calls even more.
several years ago my father spent eight consecutive months in brain surgeries, recovery, complications, and rehab. this was the beginning of the process that, over the span of years, slowly but surely robbed my dad of his ability to be independent and to walk, then later to even operate a phone. and eventually, as we have helplessly witnessed in the past six months, it stole away even his ability to speak into one held up to him. his words slowly but steadily disappeared. each syllable more and more reluctantly given, until june, when every word became a surprise and days or weeks passed between them, and july, when only his eyes were left to talk, and even then, rarely very clearly.
the gradual process of my dad becoming an invalid, and eventually a mute one, was hard. helplessness and inevitability are not comfortable concepts to face. yet i am incredibly aware that so many others have lost their loved one abruptly or tragically even, without the time to come to terms with the loss, and if necessary, find a way to make peace with them.
to say that my father was a good father is, even now, with all i have forgiven him, hard to do. he is not the kind of father i would choose for myself, nor the kind of father i would choose for my own children. and even when we were capable of a conversation beyond discussing the logistics of something or another, our three plus decades together yielded so few conversations of substance i can count them on my hands. and yet this is not the measure by which i look back upon our time together.
did he do his best? of course. did he love us, was he proud of us? absolutely. did he hit us as he was taught to hit? thank god, never. did his broken and damaged childhood trickle down its trauma to us? sadly, yes. so while i don't feel as if these past years have been about making peace with my father, they have provided an expanse of time, opportunities between visits, to reconcile these conflicting facts about the reality of his failures and the constancy of his love. this has been not about making peace with my father, but finding peace about him.
it was not an easy process. i could not always offer the open-handed and generous love that i aspire to as a core value, that he in fact, in his broken ways, helped teach me. i found i still harbor a hardened part of my heart that may always be a hurt little girl, needing a more stable home than he could provide. i discovered by his bedside that she still hid a little behind camouflaged defenses, checked out on her phone a little too often, and found it discouragingly hard to be vulnerable enough to hug this man tightly each and every time i saw him.
even so, i tried so hard each visit, held myself accountable to the softness and grace he deserved. and these visits, these months and years i didn't think i would get during that first year of brain surgeries, they gave me a chance to try again (and again) to lay down the burden of our complicated history, receive again (and again) the benefits of carrying away a lighter heart each time.
even among the conversations i do count as meaningful conversations with my dad, i don't know that i ever had one i would honestly consider free and flowing or one of true vulnerability. so in some ways it feels strange to grieve the loss of something i never had even before he went silent. while we could discuss logistics and be easy and even caring in our words, i would, could, never turn to him for advice nor can i recall sharing or needing to process with him a significant story about my creativity, relationships, or personal life.
the closest i ever felt to him was through something we never really talked about, yet i could feel on a deep, relational level the impact of a new and unexpected understanding that i had never before shared with my father. this was during the time of my first blog, named for my treasured red dress, when every entry was emailed to my mother who would select a few to forward on to my father.
as someone completely overwhelmed by the simplest of technologies, it was a medium-sized miracle that my dad could find the link in the emails back to the full blog and then navigate through the posts to read significant backlogs of my writing. writing, much like this piece, that was honest and vulnerable to the world in a way that i never could offer up to him otherwise. i felt honored that he would be curious about my words and could overcome his deep frustration with computers in order to find them. and the one or two times it was even mentioned between us, i felt a quiet but impactful shift in his connection to who i was a person, a new softness between us.
but it wasn't until working on this piece and reflecting back on this connection that grew out of my first blog that i discovered the motif of the red dress that has been threaded into both our stories.
when i was probably about four or so my dad would take me out of preschool to make deliveries around the south. i remember being aware even as a small child, that we didn't talk very much during the long hours on the road and that the silence was an odd state for me at that time. i also remember understanding that i was there to keep my dad company, but then thinking it was funny that we weren't saying much (and was i good company because of it?). but there was always the radio and the 80s love songs filled the spaces and sometimes my dad would sing along, perhaps more than i remember. the only song i can name for certain from that time, one that was a small peek into my dad's softer side, was chris deburgh's lady in red. i knew that this was a special song for him, knew in how he sang it, know it still, even though it's been over three decades since we've listened to it together.
in the months leading up to his passing i tried not to think about all the things i wouldn't get to do with him: share with him my own children, much less introduce him to the father of my children, or walk down the aisle with him (which, strangely, i've known i wouldn't get to do long before his brain tumor was even discovered). these have all been painful losses i will continue to face as i choose the father of my children and eventually bring them into being, but one of the hardest things for me to let go of has been the daydream of dancing with him at my wedding. not to frank sinatra (another one he introduced me to) or something classy or predictable, but lady in red, that sappy, ridiculous song that has garnered some questionable accolades such as worst song of the 80s. yes, lady in red is what i had dreamed of dancing to with my dad.
the image of a red dress has been a vibrant swath of fabric that only recently revealed itself as yet another precious tether to my father. woven quietly into the background of my childhood, it sank into the dreamy memories of riding in a car in with him only to resurface years later in my early adult exploration of a new facet of myself (reddressredress.blogspot.com). one in which my father was able to see and hear me as i saw and understood myself for perhaps the first and only time in our relationship.
i started writing down all these thoughts the day after father's day this year, the first of that holiday where i really felt the weight of the loss of my father who at the time was still alive but I already knew would never speak to me again. i picked at the words a bit in july just after my father's 73rd birthday. i had spent a quiet 30 minutes on the beach on the olympic peninsula that day. awake before my other campmates, having forgotten it was his birthday but celebrating with him all the same: sloshing my feet through the surf, admiring the tortoise-like pattern of the shadows of the water, and thinking back with gratitude to my father for fighting himself and the world so hard to live till 73.
gratitude, so much gratitude for giving us all he could during that time and for challenging the kind of world he had been taught from birth. and, most importantly, for making it to 73 by not giving up under the weight of a life begun in post-war europe, in a world where fellow kindergarteners would throw stones at his soft heart and body simply for having a german mother, and his home presided over by violent parents more broken than he would ever be.
on july 21, his last birthday, served a few precious bites of ice cream (probably the last thing my mother fed him) and mere hours away from the hospital stay that would mark the end, the sun was warm on my back and the cool water rushed over my feet, the final chord progression of radiohead's videotape (thom's live from the basement version) looped on repeat through my head. he was far away in austria at the moment, still holding on despite a growing fever and pneumonia about to tip the scales, but it felt like a fitting final birthday together. it felt like he was with me wading along in that water, silent, our music the surf and sky.
and somehow it's incredibly sad to me that it was only after his passing that i learned the reason why he loved lady in red so much. i'm not even sure how it came up, but in the day or two after he died going through the last of his things at my mom's apartment, my mom told me that when he first knew they were going to get married, she was wearing a red coat and that song always took him back to that first moment.
perhaps the red dresses woven through our stories is actually my version of ariadne's yarn: something beautiful to hold on to, leading me out of the maze that is a childhood with a parent so broken by the world, leading me eventually to a place where i could stand in the ocean and light, surrounded by all the love that was my father. love that transcended every scrap of darkness that was dumped upon him by the world. his love of that song, his ability to find me in my written words, is all the proof i'll ever need of his watchful love and care. and not just for me as his youngest child, but the whole family that he made for himself as best as he, including his deep, unconditional love for my mother that started with that moment over 40 years ago, when she stood before him in a red coat.
a few weeks after his birthday and into his hospital stay, i had a vivid nightmare that he had died and then my mother followed soon after. i remained awake a little after my boyfriend, who had been abruptly awakened by my thrashing and sobbing. my breathing was quiet again as he held me and i lay awake a little longer to shake off grief the dream had awakened. my eyes were still open so i saw the shooting star streaking down through the small patch of sky not blocked by the maples outside my window. it felt like a great gift of the universe, a reminder that beautiful, magical things are always there when you need them. and i slipped back to sleep a short while later much comforted.
the next dream that night gave me started off a bit chaotic. it walked very close to reality as my 7 year old niece came running into the bedroom sending me into a humorous panic because my boyfriend and i were in bed naked and what was she doing in here?! go away! it was chaos for a few fleeting moments as she ran into the room and to the end of the bed, but in the way of dreams she abruptly disappeared just as i realized the my dad was standing at the end of the bed instead. the entire dream instantly shifted and became still as the chaos fell away. all previous shame of my boyfriend and i lying naked in bed disappeared as well, and i knew as soon as i saw him standing and able to talk that he was there to say goodbye. i sadly don't recall any words exchanged or anything really beyond the image of seeing him well again and the absolute certainty of the goodbye filling my entire being.
that moment, that glimpse of him, that knowledge that he picked a night my boyfriend, completely unplanned, would be laying beside me, the certainty that it was a goodbye was all i was given to remember. i awoke later that morning sad and filled.
in the following weeks he kept getting sicker, kept pulling through, and was eventually returned to his nursing home on september 10th, the day before my flight out. in the days before i got on a plane to see him what i knew would be for the last time, i kept thinking he didn't need to come to me in my dream, i'm going to make it out to him. but my mother woke me an hour before my alarm on september 11th. i had only gotten 3 hours of sleep packing for my trip and didn't put together why she would call me at 5am. my half-asleep brain assumed it was something about the travel arrangements.
the words dad died about an hour ago crashed into me. to this day i can't dwell on the memory of next long minutes of sobbing. they took over my body. i clung to the quiet on the other end of the line an ocean away. all the knowing this was coming, all the emotional work of the past 4 years, all the warning he gave us in the previous weeks could not prepare me for the storm of the moment. i had agonized so much over the timing of my trip, felt so certain these dates were correct, and yet couldn't comprehend that i had missed him by less than 24 hours.
in writing this i realize there is still a sense of loss i can't contend with, probably transferred from the loss of my dad himself. it's the wish that i had gotten to hold his hand one more time, thank him in person one more time, and tell him for eternity, whatever that eternity looks like, that i love him. but another large part of me knows, trusts, he chose his time to go very carefully, that he had wanted to be home from the hospital, that two of his favorite nurses would be there, and that even my mom couldn't be there for the final moments that were painful and violent.
as a result of the fluid gathering in his brain, motor functions like walking and talking were long gone, feeding himself too, till just simple bodily functions like swallowing were too much. it was so hard on my mom to watch him struggle to swallow then cough and then choke at the hospital. he didn't want her to have to hold that as well as his passing. i don't even know the names of the nurses at the home nor do i speak enough german to tell them how grateful i am that they knew and loved my dad and could be there in the final long minutes standing by his bed and holding him in that final struggle and helping into the dawn.
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it's been a long few weeks though often the days are so normal i realize my heart can't comprehend what my mind knows: that my father's body is gone (who knows what happens to the other 98%). his slow fade from our lives makes it hard to remember he's not just out of reach, silent but alive at the nursing home. i gathered as many things from him that i could bring back with me: stacks of notes about who knows what with his stylized, old-world handwriting, cds of music he listened to or that i gave to him, sweaters, flannels, and belt buckles. i brought home an email i wrote to him almost two decades ago that he printed out, saved, and wrote my name across the top of every page. tania. with that "t" i'd recognize anywhere, like his voice. i think the thing that i grieve most at the moment is that in many ways i'll hold him closer to me in death than i ever could while he was alive.
during my trip i gave my mother her first iphone. in the process of showing her the ins and outs of her new device i realized that my deleted voicemails go all the way back to 2016 to a time when (i think) my dad was still able to operate his cell phone. my heart beat fast as i scrolled through over a 1000 messages hoping each flick of my finger would give me what i have been longing for and yet, i still couldn't find one from him. i went through the list twice. i'll probably try again a third time. i'm not even sure why it's so important, what message of love i'll find in a voicemail that i can't find elsewhere. i can't seem to pick at the specifics too much at the moment, my heart is too raw at the loss of that simple expression of his care for me, and the quirky redundancy of the statement: hi tania, this is your dad.
so instead, i'll hold on to the dream as much as i would have held his hand once more or his voice on a recording. he knew what his timing would be even before i bought my flights, knew all the things i would have to let go of in the coming weeks and year and he made sure to take care of me this one last time, made sure i got to say goodbye.
