My Dad passed away on June 30, 2010 between 8 and 9 P.M. He was a
scholar, a salesman, a raconteur, and a man with a deep enthusiasm for
life, and for the unknown. He read Shakespeare aloud happily (and well),
became an expert in antique prints in his retirement, and he lived with
great heart. Dad was also sentimental about things, a fact not everyone
appreciated or valued. He had an immense curiosity and welcomed
technology in the 50s and 60s...not so much later on. But we were the
first to own a television set, and the first to have an advanced tape
recorder, a two-reeler the size of a large suitcase in 1957. He was a
believer in exploring things and didn't settle for the status quo when
it came to subjects arcane to his friends, like UFOs and past lives. I
remember hearing about Bridey Murphy around the supper table. Dad
introduced me to Edgar Cayce when I was 12, beginning my lifelong
admiration for that amazing and beautiful American prophet. Dad
also introduced me to poetry and literature and classical music. I remember
playing his 45 rpms while I did my homework in the sixth
grade--Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Chopin's
Nocturnes, the Meditation from Thais, Enrico Caruso, Schubert's
Unfinished Symphony, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, the William Tell Overture,
Gypsy Airs and more. The last 45 he bought me was Bill Haley and the Comets, a
concession on his part to the era. I learned to love that music later on,
but at the time, Dad's other gift of Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade meant
more.
The last year of his life Dad spent in a nursing home as
Alzheimer's made its way through his brain. A desperate disease that
brings us to our knees in witnessing what it can do to someone we love.
But there was another side, something I knew every time I visited, for
seeing Dad I knew he had chosen this path, and whatever reason he had,
it was his path to take, and it was sacred, then. And each time I left I
felt as if I had been on holy ground, for there was no question his
soul was close to God in the midst of this affliction.
Dad was
buried in a military ceremony on Tuesday, July 6, 2010. The place is a
reservation where there are plaques in the ground, shown in a photo
here. You can't bring flowers. I wish we honored our soldiers another
way--maybe by not sending them to war in the first place. The location
where Dad is now is pretty far away from where his parents and sisters
and brother lie. I'd always imagined him with them, in Malden, MA or
Everett, MA. But he is in Bourne, far to the south. In the photos,
Forestdale is where his mother and father are, Salvation Army officers
who began their married life and service in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire,
England in 1905. His sister Mabel and brother Horace, both born in
Gainsborough, are in Woodlawn Cemetery. Dad's sister Muriel was buried in North
Carolina. He had another sister, Maisy, who died in Malden when Dad was
ten, and Maisy was 7. How did they survive that, that small immigrant
family?
I have thoughts and memories of my father I want to write
down. I don't know if they belong here. I'll see. But he gave me many
gifts.
One late summer evening a few years ago, before the nursing
home, I arrived to find him sitting on a folding chair that he'd
placed against the wall of a neighbor's house. He was watering his
side lawn with a spray hose while he sat in the chair, wearing the straw
hat he did love, patched as it was. I sat beside him and we talked a
while. The light was that last pearl light before dusk. The birds had
been going on a great rate. Then Dad looked up at the sky. I asked him
if he wanted to go in, and he said he was waiting. I said waiting for
what. And he answered that every night if the weather held he'd sit
there and listen to the birds as they got ready for the approaching
night and sleep. He'd stay until he heard the very last bird call out,
and then he'd go in.
Photos
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