From Dust and Breath

Home Burial essay series: Number 14

(Reminder: During Great Lent — March 18 to May 4 — I’m publishing every other Saturday instead of every Saturday.)

Now linear time becomes the fiction. The Ancient One blows it away like a puff of dandelion seeds.

Liberated by the dying ceremony, we now sit in reality as it is, everywhere holy, everyday holy. Death demolishes chronology, deadlines, to-do lists. Sacred time reasserts itself, and there is nothing to do but die together, to let it all collapse.

My father has been dying for weeks now, months.

It’s been so many years.

“All over the sky a sacred voice is calling your name,” he reads to us in bed while Mom works the night shift at the hospital.

I leave my children with him and go to run an errand while my wife works a 16-hour shift at the memory care facility where he now lives. He sits in a wheelchair, no longer able to walk, weeks from death. Adrianne checks in on them while I’m gone. I return and my daughter is reading a picture book to her dying grandpa while my son sits by her side.

I’m forty-two years old. I’m eight years old. My older brothers lie next to me in the darkness while Black Elk speaks through my father’s voice. That man speaks through so many voices.

“It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows,” he says. “Among those men get lost.”

Indeed.

I am even younger, too young to know how young. I come into the kitchen and Dad sits alone, weeping into his arms on the table, suffering like a Michelangelo sculpture. The newspaper is failing. His dream career as a reporter is over, and he is reluctantly beginning a career in public relations.

After he is done weeping – he tells me this years later – he goes to the basement, turns on a Pavarotti record, sits on the ground and opens a bottle of wine.

“G-d damn it, Joe!” he yells at me. I’m about 11. The pitch came in hard and wild, skipped off the ground and hit his ankle. “G-d damn you, Dad!” I yell back, so angry at him, fighting tears. He immediately starts laughing, making me more angry.

Over the years I will be angry at him for many more things, and he will be angry at me for many more things, and in his dying we need not deny any of it, repress any of it. It transmutes like a shattered rainbow reassembled as a mosaic on the ceiling of the temple of his life.

There he lies, a shattered rainbow of a father. So many words he spoke, but he has come to the end of words.

There he lies like The Pieta but full of breath, in extreme humility, made extremely humble through the pulsing forces of this world. All those years he breathed, and then one day – it happens to be my son’s sixth birthday – the cosmos begins taking his breath back.

Was this breath ever his anyway? Is it anyone’s?

Anyway, he gasps for nearly an hour. For years, his will has been diminishing with Alzheimer’s until it has dwindled to a whisper, to a nothing, until this final ceremony in which his will roars awake as his Maker begins taking his breath away.

“From dust you come and to dust you shall return,” the priests all over earth will say on Ash Wednesday, my father’s dying day, which is today and everyday, though not today. It is not here yet, my son.

Extreme humility is a burden of a blessing, and he fights the cosmic forces with some will from beyond, gasping for the breath that is so clearly his own.

I will not be made to stone yet. I have no words but I am not dust. I am still here. From breath I come and to breath I shall return.

His breath returns. His body calms. The morphine helps.

We arrive with party decorations. We celebrate the birth of my son. The hospice nurse arrives, ever practical, giving us information about his condition while not acknowledging the main point, letting the main point hang in the air like a balloon.

“And how much time would you guess he has?” I finally think to ask. “I know you can’t say for sure, but what kind of range are we talking about?”

She pauses, looks at us all quietly for a moment. It must be hard to be asked such a thing.

“I’d say 72 hours,” she says.

So Friday. Or Saturday.

We celebrate the birth of my son. We celebrate the death of my father, which will be in three days. Or a few hours. Or next week. We don’t know, but regardless, the time has come. We call my brothers. They schedule their flights for the next day. We eat one of my wife’s gourmet cakes while my father begins returning to dust, returning to breath.

All over the sky a sacred voice is calling his name.