“Grandpa died.”
I have wandered into my brother’s dining room late Thanksgiving morning, blinking against the sunlight into the middle of an earnest conversation between my little nieces:
“Grandpa B died!” says Claire, age three and a half . She takes a scoop of oatmeal and lets this fact settle over her younger cousin Evie. When you’re three and a half, there are few opportunities to be the authority on things…Claire is taking this opportunity and rolling with it full speed.
“ I know!” says Evie, smacking her lips on the last spoonful of her breakfast.Claire milks it a little harder. “He died! We aren’t going to see him anymore.”
“Yeah,” Evie says. “I know. Now he live in my belly”
Claire isn’t sure what to do with this information. She glances up at me nervously.
My brother’s wife has a deep Catholic faith that neither my brother or I share. In the close rose-scented air of the small-town funeral home, I heard her tell the kids “Grandpa B died…but he still lives in your hearts. Anytime you want to talk to him, just put your hand on your heart and you can talk to him, he will hear you.”
“Grandpa B. lives…in my heart” Claire asserts, but with less conviction than before.
“He live in my belly!” insists Evie, pushing her chair away from the table, grabbing her pajama clad toddler tummy and calling down to it in a misguided greeting, “Hi, Grandpa B.!”
Claire and Evie spent the rest of the holiday weekend arguing about who works in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
“It’s Boompa Boompas!” “NO! It Doompa Doompa!” “NO!”
“Guess what?! You’re both wrong!” They ignore me…because what the hell do I know? I’m not married, I don’t have kids. They think I’m eight years old – ten max.
It has been two weeks. Two weeks since my dad – “Grandpa B.” died suddenly and randomly in a hotel room that he’d stopped in for the night on his way to visit my brother and his young family. I was driving back to the City from Melrose Park after a work event when I got the call.
“Ang – where are you?” my brother was using his Army voice. The one I imagine him using when he has to call a wife or a mother from Afghanistan to tell them about an injury, an accident. A roadside explosion. I can tell immediately what I need to do. “I’m in a car….I’ll pull over.” A month ago, when Eric was still deployed, this call would have sent me spiraling into terror. But he’s home now, he’s the one on the phone, so I’m not really sure what I’m in for.
Once I’ve pulled to a stop outside a toll plaza, I look up through the rearview mirror at the clear fall sky and the EZ-pass lanes as Eric drops the bomb out of nowhere. “Dad died last night.”
With that, drivers speeding by me on the ramp to the Eisenhower, middle fingers blazing, I was plunged into the state that I have named “Griefland.” Because it’s just as real as any place I’ve ever visited.
In Griefland, everything I look at has a gauzed-out sheen, like it’s wearing a halo or an aura. “I think there’s something wrong with my eyes!” I tell my sister, who informs me that the trippy haze is the effect of eye-swelling crying on contact lenses.
The official food of Grielfland is vanilla milkshakes, which is the only thing I can even imagine putting into my mouth. I rejected the idea of everything else in the kitchen – crackers? Too pointy. Leftover chicken? Too much chewing. Baby carrots? No fucking way.
After about three days, it shifts over into pies, which my entire hometown has apparently decided to bake and bring over to the Capital of Griefland – my mom’s house. And pounds of Swedish Meatballs. “What do they think we’re gonna do? Eat him back to life?” my brother asks. Whatever, these cinnamon rolls are awesome.
Griefland demands many meetings. My brother’s wife is still nursing their four month old baby, so he’s been to the church, the cemetery and now, the funeral home with all of us, adding a sweet but surreal element to a somber situation. Everyone finds themselves making faces at the baby who watches us with drooly, open mouthed grins.
Now we’re down to the brass tacks of the funeral, picking out the casket, the vault and working out the details of the service at the funeral home. My Dad happened to be a morbid bastard, so we have the benefit of his personal, handwritten instructions about exactly which music to play, which verses to read all laid out on yellow legal paper.
One thing I discover is that I really enjoy having a funeral director that looks like a badass. Kris Kokotovich is Northern-Michigan beefy. He has a dark, close cropped beard and a cut-to-the-chase manner that I find comforting. At the cemetery, he will wear a black trench coat, black leather gloves and a look that would melt a mobster. At first, I’m a little put off by his tendency to keep bringing up “Dad” as in “now, did Dad have a cemetery plot reserved?” and “On the day of the visitation, we’ll have Dad right in the big room here,” and “We’ll take dad right down the aisle of the church, through the front door and just start the procession from the West.” But I get used to it.
“Do you want to see Dad?”
My first thought was Yes! Do you know where he is? Until I realized what he meant was “Do you want to see your dad’s body?”
Oh. Right.
Here is the first question I ask: “Will he be wearing clothes?”
“No,” Kris says gently. “What we’ll do is have him covered in a sheet up to his neck, you'll just be able to see his face.”
“Oh. Well then no thank you.”
My brother speaks up from the other side of the table. “I kind of…do…want to see him.”
“I do, too.” Says my sister Erin.
It’s not like I’m not prepared to deal with the reality of death. I mean, I inherited brooding morbidity straight from Dad himself. I can clearly recall being about three years old and asking my mom what it meant when you felt homesick when you were already home…so desperate to put a feeling on the existential angst that was bubbling up between Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers.
When I was seven, I remember being on the phone with my best friend Erika who had just told me her worst fear. She’d seen the story of Adam Walsh on the news, a chubby-cheeked Florida kid our age who had been kidnapped from a toy store and had his head cut off by Stranger Danger.
“You know what scares me the most? I said in my most practiced, church- serious voice…”Eternity. Because you may be dead, but there’s NO end. And then what? Where do you go?” “I have to go, my mom’s calling me.” said Erika, and slammed down the phone as my spine prickled at the thought of the abyss. Of an infinity of nothingness.
It’s not the nothingness. It’s the indignity. Dad was a larger-than-life figure in our small town. Sort of a cross between Clint Eastwood and Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society. He didn’t suffer idiots and was loved for it as a teacher, coach and play director. We were going to have to have two funerals – one at the church and a larger, all out Kennedy funeral production at the high school. Going out to lunch with him at home was an ordeal on the scale of having dinner with Mayor Daley at Gibson’s on a Saturday night. He basked in the attention.
But just as I don’t like the idea of seeing my dad clad in only a sheet, laying still and unnatural on a table in the next room, I don’t like the idea of my siblings going in to see Dad without me.
The six of us follow Kris down a small hallway and into a brightly lit room: my brother and his wife with baby in tow. My sister, her husband and me. I’m the last one in. And we gather in a circle around the semi-shrouded body of my father.
Kris had prepared us for the purple bruises on the bridge of his nose from his fall to the bathroom floor – reassuring us that the lack of swelling meant that he died almost immediately from the undetected blood clot that shook loose from his leg to his lung. For the autopsy scar that curled up from the base of his neck. He doesn’t look like he’s sleeping. He doesn’t look particularly peaceful. He looks like what he is. Dead. My brother puts his arm around his wife’s back , Erin leans into her husband’s shoulder, tears streaming down her cheeks. And I stand there staring. Alone.
The last year of my Dad’s life was a tough one. He and my stepmom divorced after more than 20 years of marriage, leaving him bewildered and vulnerable. One of the toughest parts for him was attempting to weather the little outrages of life – unexpected credit card fees, spotty Internet service – things that my stepmother used to just deal with for the both of them. “Dad, this kind of stuff happens to everybody.” I found myself saying. “Don’t take it so personally, you’ll figure it out.”
It was hard on us both. “It’s like I’m married to my dad.” I used to complain to my friends. But in the weeks before his death, I was trying to figure out how to convince him to move to Chicago. Maybe rent a place in the neighborhood. I’m cooking for myself every night anyway, maybe it would be nice to have him over for dinner a few times a week. I imagined him texting me from Simon’s on Clark Street, urging me to come have a drink.
It doesn’t seem possible that none of it will come true. That he never will figure it out. This is how it ends.
“Dad, where are you?” I find myself repeating it over and over again. Out loud even.
I wish I believed that he lived in my heart. That whenever I want to talk to him, I just talk to my heart and he’ll hear me. Hell, I’d even settle for him living in my belly. All I know is, he’s gone.
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