Someone is making music on this river.
It’s faint at first, not even clear enough to know the instrument or how big the sound will get, whether it’s someone’s radio or a band or what. Dad and I are quiet, trying to hear.
The sound grows, floating upstream toward us as we float downstream toward the song, then clarifies, revealing a lone fiddler somewhere on the river playing a sprightly tune you might hear if your temple was made of plants.
We look up and the music becomes visible, enfleshed, and we see the music-maker — no elf, no robed holy person, just a white-bearded man sitting high in a tree that grows on a high bank over the river.
We float on, delighted by this fleeting gift as it fades upriver and we float downriver. Dad is 40 years old. I am 13, the age my Dad takes his sons on a solo canoe weekend.
He and I will talk about the fiddler forever. I can hear him still.
***
I have no roadmap for these essays, and as I write about Dad’s death and make my way to the home-based rituals surrounding it, I find myself wandering around his life, my life, our family’s life. I try to bring the story back to Dad’s dying experience, but as happened during those final weeks, a field of memories grows around the death like a native prairie, thick and diverse. It’s hard not to walk off sometimes, go look at the plants, linger.
Here lies my father, an incomprehensible mystery, like all fathers. The end of his breathing near, death becomes a presence in the room, not only in Dad’s breath but all of our breaths. And yet the presence is nothing like that folk image of the man with the scythe. It’s much more mystical, much more beautiful. Dark at times, yes, but dark in the way the universe is dark, carrying stars, planets and rivers, carrying flocks of breathing creatures, carrying incomprehensible light, carrying many dying fathers in her black, cosmic womb, who lie there and die like seeds in the ground. Time spirals, like galaxies. The ages upon ages collapse, like waves on a beach. All of the stories of his life – all of the stories within those stories – gather into a single place, and spread out there like a quilt of plants, so beautiful to behold.
I linger in the prairie, my mortal breath mingling with the immortal wind, my father’s and mother’s and brothers’ and wife’s and children’s mortal breaths mingling with the wind whose beginning we can never find, whose end doesn’t exist.
He breathes. We breathe.
It is dawn, it is twilight, and out onto the prairie walks death, proving me wrong. He does carry a scythe after all. He does need to harvest something after all. I do carry some anxiety about the coming moment after all, of the breath-to-no-breath moment. But there is no fear in this man who walks among us. His robes shimmer like a silver ring around the full moon. His face is kind, like the Milky Way, like my father’s, maybe like your own face when the time comes. What he takes will be small, cosmically speaking, and while he walks he tosses seeds from his pocket, his breath ever so gentle, more gentle than any breath I’ve breathed.
I close my eyes and try to breathe with him. I want our breaths to go on forever, but they won’t. They will. I sit with him while he lies there, each breath a memory, every memory a plant growing in the prairie. This land is unfamiliar, and I don’t understand it at all. Everything happens at once. He labors toward his death like my wife labors toward our children’s births — with breath everywhere, everywhere — the point of origin growing ever closer, all of us who were once seeds, once eggs, walking around full of breath until we don’t, until we do.
Here I sit in the prairie, a gentle wind blowing. And here lies my father, an incomprehensible mystery, like all fathers. Downriver, someone is making music, but the sound is still faint, so we are quiet, trying to hear as we float toward it.
***
The moon rises full and the plants here sing, making a low hum, a low hush, like chanting monks. A breeze blows through their sunlight-filled flesh, and their quiet song underlies everything, effortless.
I want to sit in this field forever, to tell all the stories of my father. I want to go through the biography of his life. I want to paint an icon of him with songs, to show how vessels of music carried him from childhood to adulthood. I want to tell about the lonely, little boy who showed up at his house that day with an album for my father, sick in bed; how he taught his siblings guitar; how his teenage friend who had just beat up his own father – for good reason – sat in the rain on the side of the road and how Dad picked him up while Jim Morrison sang on the radio:
Into this house, we’re born.
Into this world, we’re thrown.
I want to go on and on about these things, to gather and gather and gather, to sing and sing about the fruits of his life down here on earth, this place where rivers flow, this land where plants grow everywhere, this planet with only one moon, this realm where my father regularly sang to the Mother of God with men outside a church and which I heard once, taking a walk with my wife at night in the park by that church. I want to tell how from then on, we also sang our version of this song at home with our children, with Dad after he’d forgotten our names, with Dad while he died.
Holy Mother.
Quiet light.
Morning star.
So strong and bright.
Dying is the time for remembering such things, for articulating how the Holy One loves this world not only in cosmic, incomprehensible, trillions upon trillions of ways, but also in this way, through the song of this person.
But dying is also a time when memory ends, a time for letting go, for trusting that the seeds of a life have fallen where they will, and forces greater than us will cause to bloom what will bloom, to wither what will wither, to produce more seeds in their own time.
We can’t remember everything.
***
Dad and I floated down that river so long ago, and I have no idea what tune that man in the tree was playing.
It’s worlds away, gone forever, unrecoverable.
And yet I can hear it. It’s faint, but I can hear it.
It goes on and on, beyond memory.
Thank you! I am grateful for your reflection. There were so many things I could recognize.
Beautiful, poignant, hallowed, and true. I want to share a favorite (cherished really) line, but then I would be restating the whole essay. One must savor this intimate sharing of yours. It is a precious thing to expose your deep heart to the reader like this. We all come along and we are richer for it. Bless you, brother.