Ash Wednesday Reflection on the Death of my Father

Father to Son Here is how to read a trout stream How to know where the fish lies In secret, facing upstream

Tight against this bank that we two are standing on now

With my hand upon your shoulder,

and with our eyes looking out - across this field,

And the future, together.

My father’s voice echoes within me. It rumbles around in my imagination. Clear as a bell, I hear him say, “Oh, hello Bill,” on the other end of my too infrequent phone call. I can feel his voice’s faint reverberation each time I get my own vocal chords going.

At the end of his life, my father could not speak. The stumble and fall in front of the clinic where he was going for his regular blood-test ended with his head firmly striking the opposite end of the same concrete curb-stop that caught his wayward right foot. Then came a few endless minutes of unconsciousness while my sister kneeled in his blood and spoke in his ear. A crowd gathered. Next: a miraculous awakening, an ambulance ride, some flirtation with an ER nurse, laughter, a cat-scan, a seizure, a coma, and an arduous week of speechless dying.

The cat-scan was at work long enough before the seizure to reveal that the bleeding in dad’s brain had displaced his right hemisphere by several centimeters and had erased the gyri – those wrinkly folds on the cerebral cortex that allow a vast neural network to form across the expanded surface area making possible such marvels as symphonies, flirtation, reading a trout stream and saying “Oh, hello Bill!” across another, though far less artful, network of wires and towers and switching stations.

At his 90th birthday party my father, rarely the center of attention, dutifully and gratefully accepted our accolades. He held a brandy Manhattan in his hand, stood and declared, “I guess I’ll give it one more year!” Not quite. It was 360 days of falls and arguments about where was safe to live, and a brandy Manhattan every evening. He stood his ground. Of course, standing was not possible during his dying, nor was drinking a brandy Manhattan.

We set my father up in the dining room of my sister’s home. Here, like just shy of a year ago, he was once again the center of attention. Like characters out of Jacob’s dream, angels kept descending and ascending, angels with names like: Antoine, Martha and Marie, the hospice workers from Lifepath hospice care. We stood around my father: beholding this unfolding, unwanted dream and then, with slow and treasured steps, entered into it.

I wonder how my father liked being the center of attention for a week. I wonder How he liked having his hand, the left one that he could move on occasion, clasped and worshipped and examined for the slightest communication. I wonder how he felt about our hands and lips on his damp cheeks and forehead. I wonder what the occasional raised eyebrow meant. I wonder.

I wonder how strange to hear our voices singing the hymns we sang and praying the prayers we prayed. I wonder if the old Catholic altar boy was awakened from within the reluctant Lutheran when each night, we anointed his head, hands and feet. I wonder if he thought it was all just a bit presumptuous of us – if he also thought that when I said, “Dad, now we are going to pray the prayer that Jesus taught us, and then we are going to pray the prayer that you taught us,” when we prayed “Our Father...,” and then, “Now I lay me down to sleep...,” finally plunging headlong into, “If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.” I wonder.

My father died before he woke at 6:40 am Eastern Time on February 15, 2019.

Now we have these ashes, and today someone will stand before us and paint some other ashes on our forehead while presuming to speak for God, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

What remains of dad in this dust? Is there hanging out some dim cosmic sensibility? When, along what I hope will be a distant day, my ashes are with his ashes will there be a familiarity? I doubt it.

There is nothing to do with these ashes except to wait for God to speak. That is the only possibility and one thing that makes sense – literally makes sense out of non-sense. The ashes sit and wait, biding their non-sensical time until a voice will address them. For now, we remember. Yes, these ashes do call me to remembrance: that my father’s voice has been silenced - except in precious memory and a son’s likeness, that with ashes and dust we have little to do or say, that all creation waits - waits upon the voice of God.