Dying ceremonies are unsanctioned. No one chooses them. No one deems it the proper time to begin. Dying is uncalled for.
Like all of us, my father followed the ancient path, but then he couldn’t walk. Still, he followed the path, but then he couldn’t feed himself. Still, he breathed like the Ancient One, but then he gasped for breath. Now he barely stays awake and can only move his eyelids, his tongue. My wife, my mother, the workers move his body for him, keep him comfortable.
He has lost almost everything now. Beyond time, a drum beats.
Inside the closet, my brother and my son sit on the ground among our bags, a pile of children’s books, a six-pack of pale ale, snacks. Dad’s clothes hang above them. Wendell freestyles on one drum while my brother, who makes music for a living, backs him up with a steady beat on another drum. Wendell plays freely, constrained by nothing, while Jimmy cares for him, tends to him with his gentle rhythm.
I can’t tell you how enjoyable this dying is sometimes, how soothing it is to be here while Dad dies and my brother makes music with my son.
***
I'll sing you a song, it ain't very long,
About an old man who never done wrong.
How he died nobody can say,
They found him dead in the street one day.*
That’s Dad, not Dylan. Here he is again, singing to us about a dying man as we fall asleep.
Why does he keep sitting there in the doorway, playing guitar and singing to us? Why so much music in these stories?
And why so much attention to the time before sleep, the most culturally negligible time of day when nothing materially productive happens? Why is he becoming so liminal, so married to the night? Why when I think of him do I think of a full moon, of him singing with a circle of men to the Mother of God outside a church at night, of him singing to us sons in our bedroom at night, of him weeping over the loss of his career at night, of him reading us Black Elk Speaks in bed at night?
“I looked about me,” he reads to us, “and could see that what we then were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear. I knew the real was yonder and the darkened dream of it was here.”
***
Two Canadian geese fly above the hollow this morning as I write, their voices reaching from the heavens to the ground, pink sunlight on their feathers. They fly northwest where the peak of a far hill is lit like a crown while this hollow remains shadowed. I walk home below them. My children sleep by the fire, and I kiss them awake, then come back to write.
In this hollow my father’s body has been resting for a year now.
In this hollow the moon, just past full, shines in the sunlight this morning. Its edge is disappearing, the circle beginning to fade like memories.
Last night, in the same part of the sky, I saw a hunter vanishing. The rest of Orion’s body was covered by clouds, but his three-starred belt was momentarily visible when I looked up, and then clouds quickly erased it, though his foot appeared. And then that was blackened, too, and then the clouds opened up again and revealed his head, though only his head, only one point of light, and only momentarily.
My children wanted to sleep longer, so I let them.
My father lies in the ground, not far from where I now write.
My father goes on: “It does not matter where his body lies,” he reads, “for it is grass; but where his spirit is, it will be good to be.”
That’s true, though it also matters. On earth, we adore the bodies we walk among. We love that man who had a body, who was made of a body, who walked in a body.
We love him in this breathing body.
***
The drum is still going. And now a harmonica, too. Wendell is wailing on it and Jimmy allows some noisiness before bringing their song back to a quiet beat.
Our miniature schnauzer, Zobinella Puzzola Zubenelgenubi Orso, lies under Dad’s bed while he sleeps. She had been excited at first in the room, jumping at the door, wanting to go out to the community area. But Jimmy, skilled with dogs, calmed her, helped her find comfort in the space.
Dad’s neighbor wanders in, a resident in her 80s, though she generally thinks she is in her 20s. Or that she is a child. Or that she is married to my father. Or that men are working in the basement who she needs to check on – but no one will let her check on them! Or that I’m a real estate agent, and that she and my father are looking at his room as a potential apartment to move into.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter,” she says to me that day as I try to explain her room is next door. “We’ll forget it all tomorrow anyway, won’t we, honey?”
Yes, we will. Or if not tomorrow, then the next day, or in 100 years. Someday this will all be dust, which is the fundamental miracle: that what was dust or what will be dust can talk, that soil – for just a little while, for just a lifetime – can stand up and breathe, move about, experience the world as a body before coming apart again.
Anyway, the old woman wanders into the room, oblivious to the death here. My mother, always gracious to this lady, takes her arm and walks her over to my father. “She has to say her goodbyes, too,” Mom whispers to us. The two stand there, arm in arm, gazing at him while he sleeps, speaking kindly about him, noting his kindness.
She leaves. The drumbeat stops. Jimmy and Wendell come out of the closet. After dark, my wife, my brothers, the kids and I pack up and head home. My mother remains with him, sleeping in the recliner every night for as long as these nights will continue.
Back home, Adrianne and the kids go to bed, and I head up to my mom’s house and chat late into the night with my brothers.
“When the ceremony was over,” my father, in his 30s, continues reading Black Elk Speaks to us, “everybody felt a great deal better, for it had been a day of fun. They were better able now to see the greenness of the world, the wideness of the sacred day, the colors of the earth, and to set these in their minds.”
Joe, I feel like I’m there in your dad’s room with all of you. So, so beautiful! 😘
I love reading your thoughts and feelings you express in such beautiful ways. I miss your dad's physical presence very much. But his gorgeous spirit is here with me and reading your memories turns up the volume!