Time after Dad

September 24, 2018

Greetings from the timekeeper,

                                

“I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.”   Jayber Crow

Time is heartless.  

It rushes at us, by us, hapless commuters on the station platform, terrified at its power.  We watched the moments just before pass as if they were weeks and knew in our hearts it would be that way forever.  And Time arrives, as it always does, to instruct us on the truth. 

I saw my Dad as a young man, paint splattered t shirt and pants.  I saw him washing our car in the driveway, the Tigers playing on the AM radio sitting nearby.  I saw him at the dinner table, surrounded by family, saying: “Eat up, yer at yer Auntie’s"

He was in our living room, dancing the Highland Fling to raucous bagpipe music, red faced, yelling “Whoop!” as he whirled around with his family, the house literally heaving with their joy.  Stopping to quench his thirst between laughter; “Och, it’s a braw bricht moonlit nicht the nicht.” His brothers called him ‘Oor Hume.’

Then there was this swelling of the moment, pages of the calendar whirled in the vortex, Time roared between us, and we were scoured by it, moved to stand in new places.  My Dad was not a young man and I was not a little boy.  We were new versions of us, taught and formed by Time.  We became father and grandfather. 

Time kept up its relentless work and in many ways Dad remained separate from it, other than the lines etched in him, the grey that snuck in, the thinning and thickening.  He was still full of mischief.  He seemed to collect friends wherever he smiled.  He was always positive and formed a simple, satisfying philosophy about his life.  Even when the apocalypse rolled in.

We watched as disease first tested him, then punished him, tried vainly to humble him, pushed by Time at a pace that astonished us.  Even as I write this it’s hard to believe how many years it took for Parkinson’s to gain an edge and how slow and fast those years passed.  Time was inexorable, but no match for my Dad.  For a while.

I leaned my forehead against the window in one of many anonymous places in the hospital.  Behind me my Dad pushed back against Time, somehow slowed it until one tick of the clock was the same as a season.  We all stood in a doorway between wanting Time to wait and to please please please take the moment away.

We drew in a breath, and Time, merciless, shuddered to a stop altogether.  Our eyes raw, our hearts twisted in knots, we teetered in that tiny moment that went on for my Dad’s lifetime.  And then we breathed out and he was gone.

Fifteen years ago, Oor Hume passed away, having filled more than seven decades with the unique story that Time will not dull as long as we exist to remember it.  And to grieve his loss.

Instead of knowing his presence in our lives we were given an ache to fill that place.  We talked about it for a while, laughed and cried the stories out.  We kept Dad with us, alive and not alive, and in a way made the ache worse and better.  We talked to everyone about him for a while and then less and less and then only to ourselves.

Time is kind. 

One day piled into another and there was an avalanche of weeks and months and now fifteen years have passed.  The only way any of us who miss him has lived with the loss is that Time has made it possible. 

We can share his memory, live out his legacy, but we don’t stop grieving.  It just becomes part of the texture of his life with ours.  Only Time, merciful, makes it unbearable and then tolerable and then livable.   Time sands the sharp edges of grief, slowly wears it down to something we can hold in our heart.

Yesterday morning I stopped on my run to watch the sun warm the east.  It was a morning just like the one fifteen years before.  The leading edge of fall, clear sky, the promise of warmth and chill.  I looked out on that morning from a high window in the hospital and watched a ladybug fly past.  It shook me a little that Time had already dissolved that many years in just the moment since Dad put down his burden.

Time is heartless and kind.  It flows by too fast and too slow.  Its truth is that all of life is filled with this paradox, and our only hope to solve it is to live it.  To live in this moment and carry the last with us.  To know pain and joy.  To grieve and be grateful. 

See you on the other side, Dad.

Hope this finds you in time,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith