The Longest Day - Five Years

 It's interesting the way memory can warp and fade, like looking in a funhouse mirror one never knows what we're going to see, what comes to the forefront and what recedes into the shadows... thinking about this day, five years later, still brings about a flood of feelings and emotions, things i've worked my way through, it brings back memories that seem ripped from some old super 8 film shown in the living room of my family home, the smell of the film, the sound of the projector clicking away as the silent images scroll across the screen.... and what is memory? a lie? a story cleaned and scrubbed to fit our needs? is it truth or myth or both? i don't know... but we all have them and we all deal with and sort them in our own way... 

This year it seems i couldn't stop thinking about the day before this day... the struggling with an illness, dragging myself off the couch that had become and still is my bed, showering and trying to feel better, the bitter cold and sun of these two days that seemingly blend into one. Driving up to Cleveland and listening to the Soft Bulletin by the Flaming Lips and understanding, at least somewhat, how tough the next 24-36 hours was going to be and yet not understanding at all how tough those ensuing hours were going to be. Taking deep breaths to calm my nerves and my stomach as i fought through the last vestiges of an illness picked up from taking care of the boyos. How the cold seemed to help, driving west and chasing the winter sun as it set in a glorious splatter of red and orange and grey and blue. The dark parking lot of the hotel and the ice glistening on the blacktop, a hotel i'd arrive at in darkness and leave in darkness. The fluorescent lights of the gas station next to it, the sound of the early morning traffic drifting in from the freeway, the darkness and wind blowing from the north over that great lake. 

There was the drive to my father's, pulling up to his place and seeing the lamp light from his front room, dragging myself up icy steps, tossing my stuff on a chair, talking with my dad, giving him a hug and then making sure he had all his paperwork, his bag, and then both of us telling each other to be careful on the icy steps, a memory that never fails to make me smile. I am my father's son. Driving through the dark city from West Side to East... talking as we always did... if there are things that come back there is one i thing i didn't acknowledge at the time, it was my father's frailty, not in an overt way but in a way maybe only his son would notice, as if unconsciously i knew that now it was my turn to take care of him just as he had taken care of me so many times before... and to this day i feel the honor and the responsibility he placed on me to be the one to take him, the person to get him checked in and sit with him while we waited, mainly because i was the most like him, i would handle whatever was thrown our way in an easy and matter of fact manner... i am my father's son. 

Five years later... five years later and i spent the day in constant motion, shopping for the bourgeoisie, coming home and taking the I-mac to the doc, doing dishes and laundry, coaching practice with Disaster and my team, coming home to do more dishes and get the trash out, standing in the cold night and gazing at the stars, working out where Canis Major was in the night sky... at one point while i was doing dishes i looked up and caught my reflection in the window, the traces of my father's face in mine, i thought about how tired i was and how five years earlier i was just as tired as i drove my sister home and then headed to my father's apartment, an apartment he'd step foot in exactly one more time. 

It's strange this hindsight, this flipping through the mental photos known as memories, i thought about the next morning, how i got up and drove to the Circle K for some coffee and a donut, still shaking off the last remnants of illness, trying to clear my head of all that had happened in last 24 hours, getting to work on cleaning up my dad's place, driving back and forth to the Cleveland Clinic a few times a day, driving my father's car, seeing my father and his massive incision that was made for his surgery, in a way the Longest Day didn't end when the clock struck midnight and the reality was the clock had struck midnight sometime the afternoon before, when the pager the hospital gave me went off and i knew that the surgery was unsuccessful. 

And yet if there was one thing that still stings from that day it was the fact that i was recovering from an illness due to someone's lack of compassion and empathy, someone who pretended to care when they didn't give a shit... the Breadwinner. The fact she refused to take care of a sick kid knowing that in less than a week my dad was having surgery and had asked me to not only be there but to drive him. The sheer callousness of saying that if i got sick i'd be better by next week, the look on her face as i felt the illness coming on and how distraught i was, not because she cared but because she knew she looked and more correctly was an asshole. I've never actually told her what she took from not only me but from my father, a man who was nothing but great to her, who wanted to spend the night before his surgery sitting in his place and talking to his son as they had done so many times before. For all her talk of the sacrifices she makes it was this act of pure selfishness that still lingers, there have been times when i want to ask her how she'd have felt if the tables where turned, had the day they called and told her to come home as her mom was dying i decided it was too late to drive and that we could leave in the morning, a morning her mother wouldn't see. We'd most likely be divorced. I guess one could say i've forgiven her mainly because it gave me a crystal clear insight into the person she is, yes she'd claim she feels bad and that it was a mistake, that's fine. But that sting? it still pops up from time to time... oddly, i feel it had a lot to do with the way my father left instructions upon his death, that if for some reason something happened to me before he passed that my part of what he left would go directly to my sons, his grandsons. Yet he still never said an unkind word about her, he just knew. 

So five years later the Longest Day has come and gone again. It hit me the other day, why i don't know, that from the day of my dad's surgery to the day he passed was almost exactly three months. Three months and three days to be exact. I'm sure Robert Anton Wilson would have a field day with that, the whole numbers thing. For one of those months i would live in my dad's place, i'd drive over to see him, first in the hospital and then in the assisted living residence, i'd organize and clean his apartment, donate clothes, bring him his favorite pizza... it was a beautiful time, we'd sit in his room and talk just like we always had, we'd discuss the news, the boyos, life, death, we'd laugh at the absurdity of it all, and my father would say those brilliant words... "don't you worry about me son, i'll be dead, take care of the living, take care of my grandsons and tell them i love them, be nice to your mother and sister, they may be crazy but they mean well, i don't worry too much about you boy, you fall out of bed and land on your feet." He gave that familiar chuckle as he said the last bit. 

Five years. The rituals of the living are how we deal with the loss... i still swim laps for my dad, i still talk to his ashes which one day i'll drive to Tennessee and spread over his family's old farm, i still tell him about the boyos, when i catch a traffic light just perfect i'll say "thanks dad" as a joke, as if he's still out there in the cosmos looking out for me... and yet i know my father is gone, the physical part at least, and i also know that he's still here, in his son, in the boyos, we are pieces of a larger puzzle... five years on and the only thing i really know is that i miss the guy, miss talking to him, but i also know that's how it goes, i know i was really fucking lucky to have him as my father, understand that he gave me the blueprint on how to be one to my sons, that neither he nor i are perfect but that we tried and that we loved unconditionally and completely. I was a lucky kid. Five years later and i still whisper to the stars, "thanks dad, i love you." 

-----

The Longest Day was Feb. 13... that first week i returned home on Feb. 16... i left early so i could be home in time to pick the boyos up from school, ages 8 and 11, i missed them during the week and explained to them what i was doing and they understood, understood how close their father was to his and how their father hoped to cultivate the same type of relationship with them... driving east the sun was bright and glistening off the snow, i picked up the I-mac and took him home, his smile upon seeing his dad, his talking all the way home in the car... then i went and picked up Disaster, the big smile when he saw my car, his Seahawks hat on his head, the hug he gave me... it would be on this same street that exactly three months to the day my sister would call and tell me my father fell... i wanted to tell her then, he didn't fall, that he was gone, that i knew he was gone... but i let her go, she handled things differently and when she finally called an hour or so later and told me what i already knew i told her, i know... The Longest Day... it was the beginning of the end and the beginning of the beginning... my world would change but the world is always changing... it was another chapter in this book of living, chapters i'll keep writing until i do not have the faculties to do so... and thanks to the Kid... for planting the idea, about writing about the same day, year after year.. (my dad was about 5'10.. the I-mac is now almost 6'3, Disaster almost 5'11, they'd both be taller than him now... he'd have loved it.)