Ten Years

Ten years ago today my world contracted, my links to so many events in my life diminished by one. My father died in the first hour of this day, September 13, 2000. His own life had been shrinking under the pressures of a failing heart and a clutch of related health problems.

I had spent the late afternoon and evening in his room at the hospital, talking to him and conferring with nurses and the doctor on duty, as efforts to stabilize his condition intensified. By ten o’clock, he seemed better, and Mother Shirley arrived prepared to spend the night with him. I went home.

At just before one o’clock, I awakened to a call from Shirley; Daddy was rapidly failing, the medical folks wanted permission to put him on life support. Shirley wanted my input and I told her whatever she decided was what should be done and I would be there as soon as possible.

He died shortly thereafter, and I arrived, supported by my beloved, who insisted on coming with me.  We shared the empty hour with Shirley, and arrangements were begun. We all went home.

So began my life without my father’s physical presence. But every day, I think of him at some random times, reminded by some event, sight, thought, catching myself thinking, “I must tell Daddy about this.” But I won’t ever do that again.

Selah, Fegi.

Ninety Years

Today would have marked my father’s 90th birthday. He died not quite five months into his 81st year, so this is the tenth anniversary of his birth for which he is absent, at least in the flesh. I think of him often, most days, especially on Sunday when, if I am observant, I follow the Prayers of the People in church, and speak his name (and my mother’s ) when the departed are remembered.

Tonight my beloved wife and I toasted Fegi with martinis, his favorite drink, which he mixed for himself each evening right up until his last night before transport to the hospital. He died five days later, despite the frantic efforts of nurses and doctors, leaving him a gaunt and yellowing icon of himself, surrounded by the detritus of spent syringes, ripped open envelopes of medical supplies applied in vain. His heart, swollen and congested, simply stopped beating.

Earlier, on that last evening as himself, I sat with him in between visits from doctors and nurses, he speaking when he could, I listening when I could, weakening consciousness on his part gradually stretching communication to breaking. I told him I loved him. He said he loved me. His attention wandered to the window overlooking the river beyond the hospital. Nighttime lights of the parking garage, streetlights and the navigation buoys on the river, red, yellow and green glowed in the frame of the window. As he weakened, his hoarse voice mumbled something that sounded like “Christmas tree, Christmas tree” as he turned his head towards the window, mouth wide to catch another breath. I don’t know if that was what he meant to say, or what my strained imagination assigned as meaning to his words.

My mother, of his heart, a woman who did not birth me but had long since won my love, for her love of my father, her devotion to him, came in from work to take over the night shift, carrying pillow and blanket. She leaned over her husband, telling that so many people were asking after him, wishing for his recovery, and asked how he felt. Turning his collapsing face to her, he sighed, “Just fine.” He seemed stabilized, no longer  in a crisis, so we thought.  I left him with his wife of forty some years, gently stroking his thin hair. I went home to sleep, by the side of my beloved, whom he had come to love.

Shortly after one a.m., my cell phone rang, and in hurried words my mother haltingly said that things had gone downhill, that my father was going, and the medical staff wanted to know if he should be put on a breathing machine. I told her I was coming, and whatever she felt best was what I felt best. We arrived to find that events had moved on beyond our decisions, and  my father’s yellowing form, face and open mouth raised to the ceiling, lay amongst the debris of the final few minutes of professional attentions.

There were tears, and arrangements, and a call on my cell phone to my youngest sister, the farthest away, the other calls to wait until the dawn had come. We all hugged, myself, my beloved and my mother (I no longer add ‘step’, she is more than that), and made our ways home.

Good night, again, Fegi, on your birthday.

Another October…

…without a good friend to everyone but himself, Billy; who appeared nightly on the boards of a thousand happy hours.

October 10, 1943 – August 26, 1983

…since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be with you all.

- “The Parting Glass”, after the Clancy Brothers

Avoirdupois, Billy, may some celestial bartender forever pour you Elysian liquor, never collecting the tab.

Decoration Day

I title this post with the original name of Memorial Day, the holiday which by federal decree is observed each year on the last Monday of May. Originally, Decoration Day, as it was titled, commemorated those who died fighting to preserve the Union during the Civil War, with the placing of flowers upon their graves. The date fixed was May 30, for no particular reason, as far as I know. One explanation I have heard is that by that date, flowers would be in bloom everywhere in the country. This Decoration Day was decreed by the head of the GAR, the Grand Army of the Republic, an association of Union veterans, and did not include Confederate dead.

Efforts throughout the South established Confederate Decoration Day, on dates that were as independent as the former rebellious states had shown themselves. Some dates were chosen to mark prominent Confederate heroes, such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. At least one, Virigina’s Decoration Day, was set on May 30, joining the Union observation.

By the turn of the century, Decoration Day was renamed Memorial Day, and eventually became a day to commemorate all fallen soldiers of any state in any war. General George Thomas, tasked by General Sherman after the battles in Chattanooga with establishing a military cemetery, selected a site close to Orchard Knob, where he, Grant and other generals had watched the displacement of the Confederate forces from Missionary Ridge, which resulted in victory.

Thomas was a native Virginian, who elected to remain loyal to the Union rather than fight for his state. This conviction, and his no doubt difficult relations with his former brother officers who felt otherwise, and went for the Confederacy, may have prompted his famous remark to his subordinates about the layout of graves at Chattanooga. Asked if the dead were to be grouped by their units, raised from each of their native states, Thomas reportedly said, “No, No, mix them all up. I’m sick of state’s rights.”

Thomas’s view was not shared in regard to the Confederate dead, and no rebels were buried in the Chattanooga Cemetery to my knowledge. Only after the first World War were all the dead of all the wars commemorated together on Memorial Day. I hope that a few old Confederates may have rested with their adversaries at Chattanooga at last. There is a Confederate Cemetery out at Silverdale, east of Chattanooga, kept up by the Chattanooga Area Relic and Historical Association.

May all the dead who died loyal to their notion of duty, and to the country they loved, be remembered every day, holiday or not.

Travelling

Like Miss Emily, I never saw a moor, or unlike my father and his cousin Miller, war close and personal. This week I received the loan of some old papers of my father’s, letters from his cousin in France in 1944, and letters from home concerning Miller’s death. I have posted about the close relationship of the two cousins before.

Yesterday I spent hours going over fragile letters, darkened downsized copies of V-Mail messages and old newspaper clippings, all concerning the death and the mourning for Miller Smith. The V-Mails were from Miller to my father, who is addressed in the letters as “Pepe,” apparently a name used between the two cousins. No answer from my father survives. He saved Miller’s V-mails, in an envelope on which the haunting message is written, “Miller’s Last Letter. In the event I am unable to do so, please mail to…” and he gives the address of Aunt Emily, Miller’s mother. Daddy survived the war and filed  away the letters and his cover envelope, which I received on loan from my mother, his widow, yesterday. Miller’s story is a family possession, which we may share but not individually own.

The letters from Miller are full of youthful bravado and funny anecdotes, told with such detail and concentration that inescapably I think of the looming reality of danger and uncertainty that was assuaged for the time it took to write of lesser things.

The letters from Miller’s parents to my father after learning of their son’s death are painful to read. Such pain, and still strength to look forward, and expressions of such love for Fegi and recognition of the closeness to Miller that was now broken. I have read many stories of loss and sacrifice from that war, and felt something of the pain involved. But reading the words of naked grief of people I knew as the elders of my family, august and sources of calm authority – such an experience brings home so much more completely the feelings and uncertainty of that time.

I will copy the letters for myself, and return them. As I have grown older, I think more and more on those who came before me, whose lives touched and informed mine. We are all the sum of our parents and other family members, a shared history and a shared loss, as it was with Miller Smith in October of 1944.

Goldengroves Unleaving

Spring and Fall: To a young child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

I have always liked the above poem, for its fall imagery – fall is my favorite season - and for the great truth so adroitly explicated there. The falling of leaves, like any evidence of death and decay, resonate with all creatures who are self-aware. I will die. Words that we accept as true, but try to keep in a mental lockbox, until we are brought up against the reality. For Margaret, in the poem, it is the golden fall of leaves to wither and crumble.

News of the death of friends touch that nerve more powerfully, bringing fear along with a faint guilt, an admixture of ego with the genuine love and concern for the other, now gone the way we will go. Not yet, not me.

It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

That is true. However real the feelings for another, we know that truth. But we do feel for the dead, and for the bereaved left behind. I read in his obituary in the Times this morning that a friend from years ago who  died Monday learned of his fatal illness just two weeks before he died. No time to prepare beyond the quick words and brief hours spent with family and friends. And for his family, and for friends with whom he worked and spent happier hours, what terrible adjustments weigh on them now.

Pain and loss mix with the need to assimilate those feelings into the lives still to be lived. Prayer may strengthen those so inclined; from whatever source I hope some comfort comes, in the face of this blight we were all born for.

Jere

I heard today, twice, of a man I knew in my twenties well enough to ask him to be the godfather of my firstborn, a son, as he had asked me a year earlier to stand up for his newborn son. Just before noon, waiting to serve as chalice bearer at the 12:05 service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Chattanooga, the Rector came in to arrange for the readings with me, and added a name to the prayer list for the sick. It was Jere. Donald said that Jere’s son, Jon, had just called to request that Jere be added to the prayer list, and that things were not going well with him, he was suffering from cancer and in rapidly declining condition.

I had last seen Jere to talk to at his mother’s funeral, sometime in the eighties. Long absent from Chattanooga, he described himself as a “gypsy,” working for a steel tube company, traversing the country. An hour ago, the secretary from St. Paul’s called me at Donald’s request to tell me that Jere had died. At my age, deaths of contemporaries are experienced more and more often. Even if it is someone who you have not seen for years, the sense of the world contracting weighs on you.

Through the 1960s, at the University of Chattanooga, various restaurants, beer joints and other places a floating group of young folk gathered and talked, laughed and shared their youth. I knew Jere in that place, and later Linda, his future wife. We talked of many things, as the women came and went, talking of other things. Jere went to Viet Nam. I did not. He joked about his time there, talked of fighting the war from a typewriter, although I think he saw combat during his tour. I think most men who spend time in war zones joke about their time, talking little of the grim realities they faced. My father did.

Jere and Linda married the year before I did, and their son was born close to my wedding day. After mutual godfather duties, life expanded and got more complicated. I moved out of town and a few years later Jere and Linda were divorced. Some years after that, I was as well. Years have gone by, as more and more I dwell on the years I was twenty and knew everything. Laughing with Jere and other friends over the follies of our parents’ generation. Now we are the generation which finally came to know how much we didn’t know.

My world contracted today, even though time and distance had combined to freeze memories twenty years past. Much more, the life of Jere’s family, his son and grandchildren, have grown a dimension smaller. I think of his son, and the grandchildren (when you have grandchildren yourself, that is an immediate thought.)

Ah, Jere. Selah.

Last Call – Again

The heat of summer is beginning to lose a little of its punch, as August has given way to September, leaves are beginning to turn, and in this long-running drought, to fall a bit earlier than normal. As I do in these weeks every year, I remember my friend the late Billy Phillips, actor, comedian, raconteur. Sometime in the small hours of August 26, in 1983, Billy died in his sleep. The following October 10th would have been his fortieth birthday.

He was four days out of the hospital, after a three-week stay following a cluster of heart attacks which required two rounds with a defibrillator. Billy had arrived at the hospital emergency room a month earlier, feeling the onset of something very wrong, barely had time to tell the admissions clerk that he thought he was having a heart attack, and at that moment collapsed. The emergency staff hustled him into the nearest treatment room and began the intensive care that prolonged Billy’s life for three weeks and four days.

Friends and family gathered, and once Billy was moved to a room, that room became “Club Billy” for the rest of his stay. Billy entertained his callers, in his element, able to forget his looming mortality doing what he did best, telling stories, making jokes, putting on a few of his many characters. He was a performer. He may have suspected that this was the last play, and when this particular performance closed, his personal theatre would go permanently dark.

Since the patient was without family in town, or funds, friends volunteered to house him and watch over him in his convalescence, which officially commenced on a Monday. His father went home to Pennsylvania, and the first watch went on duty. Calder, the husband of the host couple, had been practically a brother to Billy when they were young. Calder’s family had given the young Billy a home, so that he could finish high school in Chattanooga, following his father’s transfer out of town. Billy was home, again.

Friday came, and the second shift of friends were on deck to take Billy in. The night before, his first shift had stayed up late with Billy, who had other old friends visiting that night, telling old stories, remembering good times and laughing much. Billy mentioned that he had a toothache starting, and was pretty tired. The friends wished each other good night, and so to bed.

The next morning, Calder and Betsy, his wife, went to work, careful not to wake the sleeping Billy. Betsy prepared Billy’s lunch, covering the plate and leaving it in the refrigerator, with a note reminding Billy of a follow-up doctor’s appointment that afternoon.

Betsy called to check on Billy at mid-day, and there was no answer. She called again. still no answer. Uneasy, she called her son who worked close to the house, and could get there quickly. A short wait which seemed long to her, and her son called back to say that Billy was in bed, blue and cold. Sometime after taking his toothache to bed, Billy had died.

Twenty-five years ago, and I remember hearing of his death as clearly as if it were yesterday. The news rippled out through the extended network of Billy’s friends, and funeral plans were made and carried out. A memorial service in Chattanooga at the funeral home, and burial the next day in Augusta, Georgia, the home of Billy’s mother’s family, where the family plot in an old cemetery had room for another member.

This upcoming October 10th, Billy would have turned 65. He would have had witty things to say, jokes at his own expense mostly, and mordantly funny references to mortality. But on that August early morning long ago, his own last call stopped age and decay and all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Billy usually finished his many evenings on the town at David’s, a bar now defunct, a few blocks away from his apartment. As the bartender called “last call” Billy would down his final beer, and with a lopsided, confiding sort of smile wend his way into the darkness. I have always thought it was probably around that same time, two-thirty a.m. on August 26th, 1983, that he made his final exit.

Selah.

Memorial Day…The last letter

Last year, I posted about the letters my great-aunt Emily Miller Smith posted to her son Miller, who died in World War II in France. Each Memorial Day Aunt Emily would provide the local newspaper an essay in epistolary form, addressed to her lost son. In these letters she commented on the world, nation and local matters, as though telling her son how life went on for those he left behind.

Aunt Emily’s last letter was published in 1977.

The Poppy Fields

Although my great-aunt Emily did not lose any of her men to the first world war—the second world war would see to that—she put a framed copy of the following poem on the mantel of her bedroom at Kensington, the farm in North Georgia her father left to Aunt Emily and my grandfather.

You can read of the circumstances of the creation of this poem at:

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm

In Flanders Fields

By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.