How to Remember

Stories We Can't Stop Telling

I don’t remember exactly when I began writing my father’s eulogy. I would catch myself thinking, as I picked out a good orange at the grocery store, “He believed that any movie could be improved by the addition of horses.” Or waiting to be handed coffee: “He liked to mow lawns in an ironed shirt.” These thoughts arrived complete and comfortably dressed in past-tense and with greater frequency over the past year or so, even though he was alive.

Dad had already begun to disappear. He had suffered from Alzheimer’s for many years and according to the KU Alzheimer’s Center had officially entered the disease’s late stage. His world had contracted significantly, his “loop” of the present closing and restarting every 5-10 minutes. He wasn’t making many new memories, had shed many of the old, and those he held onto had begun to lose their edges. One day he told us about flying a plane beneath an overpass just north of Fort Scott, KS, which was a stunt Uncle Jerry pulled in the ’60s when such things could be gotten away with.

The fact that Alzheimer’s slowly stole him over the years somewhat eased me into mourning. A powerful catalyst of grief is understanding how a parent’s death means they miss how their children’s lives continue to unfold and how their grandchildren’s lives bud and bloom. But Dad wasn’t and wouldn’t have been able to participate in our lives as he and we would have wanted. The names of more casual acquaintances had already stopped coming to him, and the names of those closer had become slippery. And since he couldn’t make new memories, however wonderful the lives of those he cared about were, he wouldn’t be able to relish them anyway.

Still, the end arrived suddenly and unexpectedly a little over a month ago. We knew that he didn’t have much time, particularly since his Alzheimer’s collided with the effects of polio contracted when he was 6 years old and a life spent mostly on crutches. But practicing for loss is not the same as losing.

The death of a parent is both the most personal and universal form of grief. The loss of someone so central to one’s current self, even through their absence, is profound. And though not everyone will marry or come to the biological end of a long-term relationship or have children, we each must reckon with the death of our parents. The poet Amy Woolard’s collection Neck of the Woods is (among other wonderful things) an extended meditation on loss, noting that grief always includes a story and a story teller. We all begin as stories told by our parents, and in the end our parents become stories we continue to tell until we become them too.

All these thoughts showing up over oranges and coffee were supposed to somehow stitch themselves into an image of Dad, a story that captures how he inhabited the world and affected it with his own gravitational pull, which was measurable and immense. His life has many contributing writers. Letters and cards and emails and online posts flooded in with condolences and love, and a surprising number mentioned specific instances where my father had helped them through a difficult time. He was a small-town lawyer for many years, a true pillar of the community in an old-fashioned sense. But here were accounts that exemplified the very real loads he had borne for others. One woman described how Dad had represented her as she sought divorce from a marriage entered into too young, and the split felt like a crisis. She talked about Dad being a steady and calm guide through the process, helping to reclaim her family name as quickly as possible so that she could return to college unencumbered by a pending divorce and a time in her life she was anxious to shed. He also secured reimbursement of attorney’s fees from her ex-husband, which, she wrote, Dad “subsequently and without comment presented to me in its entirety.” The wife of another prominent attorney in the area, an attorney Dad often sat opposite to in court, began her letter to my grieving mother: “Your husband saved us.” Dad always said that that attorney was incredibly smart but impractical, and his unexpected death left his family precarious financially. Dad worked through their estate, cleaning up their finances and dealing with harassing creditors, putting her on a firm footing that allowed her and her children to live without fear of losing their home. He refused any form of payment.

I could go on, but I need to tell the story of Dad and me. I grew up in a small Kansas town much like he did, but I was bookish and odd, always in my head. (I often carried a massive Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary with me to half-day kindergarten, e.g.) I had friends and played sports, mowed lawns in the summers when I wasn’t at the public pool, but I never quite fit. Unlike many of those in town, I wondered what thrived beyond the county line and past the low bridges under which the high schoolers drank on the weekends. The rural life and the collection of (mostly good) people in our town were enough for him, but they weren’t enough for me and never would be.

I had to have been somewhat of a puzzle for him. Not long after I started college, I switched from majoring in engineering (suggested off-handedly by my high-school guidance counselor) to philosophy. I grew my hair long and began writing poetry, much of it intentionally difficult in form and message. When I visited home, I would give Dad copies of my poems in ways I would now find insufferable, and he always thanked me for them. After he was appointed judge of a Kansas State District comprising six counties, I often traveled with him on the long drives bewteen courthouses and hearings, usually with books by Aristotle or Hume on the armrest between us. He introduced me to everyone everywhere we went and was nothing less than thoroughly and incessantly proud of me.

Our story has so many wonderful moments. During a trip to Larned, KS with me driving, I remember my father saying, apropos of nothing, “I don’t understand why people are afraid of homosexuals.” At the time I thought he was making room for my increasingly liberal valence in our moderately conservative family and quite conservative region of the country, but now I believe he might also have wondered whether I was gay and just in case wanted me to know that I was loved. Which is to say, however much of a puzzle I was to my father, he never tried to solve me.

I ask you to indulge me for just one more anecdote. I studied for a semester in New York City and met and fell in love with a woman who I eventually married and with whom I’ve built a life. She grew up in the Midwest too, but she and her family emigrated to the US from Vietnam. Dad welcomed her into our family immediately and without question, even giving her turquoise earrings and bracelets that belonged to his mother. Once when she and I came across Dad at lunch with a bunch of folks from our small (almost entirely White) town, someone at the table said to my wife, “What are you? Chinese?” Dad immediately said, “No, chickenshit, she’s Vietnamese.” He was not afraid of loving well.

Going through some of his things shortly after his death, my mother and I came across his many pocket knives and watches, caches of family photos and Father’s Day and birthday cards he had received over the years, and several notes and business cards from my wife. I also found a stack of my old poems that he had somehow kept for over 30 years.

I still catch myself drafting his eulogy. “He believed in the value of work” arrived in my head yesterday as I picked up razor blades for my son. Born and raised in poverty on a farm in Southeast Kansas then becoming a lawyer and judge, Dad had such facility with so much of life. To him, any piece of land (field, yard, garden) could be made better through industriousness, nearly every problem tractable by putting one’s hands to it, by picking up a tool. He could re-screen a door or put up a fence or advocate for his clients to be made whole or give sound judgment under the law to those who appeared before him. He mowed lawns in ironed shirts because he could move with enviable ease between the professional and the practical, and as someone who finds so much of life opaque even now, I will always look to him as I struggle to tend my parcel of the world.

In the poem “Spoiler” that begins Section II of her book, Woolard describes the time following her loss as “A decade left laid out for me like a salt lick.” Salt licks provide essential minerals like magnesium, sodium, and calcium, especially necessary to build strong bones. Animals are drawn to them, visiting them each day for sustenance, and they often become a gathering place for livestock or wildlife where they can be reliably be found and observed.

I had to look all this up; Dad would have known.