Going West With Dad
My mother always said you’ll never understand a person’s life until it comes to you. Well, my father’s life has come to me, but too late. He died in July.
I thought he lacked ambition, as he tinkered around the house and coached ball teams instead of outsourcing the mundane and embarking on a career. But he proved a different sort of ambition, and ended up far richer in far more important, and practical, ways than the obvious collection of trophies and stuff. Oh, he did have quite the collection of trophies and stuff, of a different sort, and my brothers, sister, and I have been going through it all as Mom prepares to sell the house. It’s been sadly striking to discover how much of life we just box up and put away, only to be pulled out and opened after we are gone by family members both enthralled by the memories and perplexed by the questions of what to do with all of it now.
I’m not taking or keeping much of anything, and this whole experience has led me to pare things from my own life. We can only handle so much, and what we choose to keep can leave little room for much else. So, all cluttered, we live in the past.
In the past my father and I watched westerns, each one with a helpful, friendly Indian, crucial against the savages, and a white desperado with a Spanish name. One even had a white actor with taped eyes playing a wandering Shaolin monk, righting wrongs, settling scores. Transfixed we sat enthralled before the vast, empty silence of the landscape from which, like the whistling echo of a gunshot, any phrase whispered must be profound.
I saw Dad with so little of the things that didn’t matter, and so much of what did. But I grew older, more materialistic, and I gazed over empty land toward a city smitten by gain. Driven by acquisition. I raced to the top. By someone’s criteria I was a tremendous success. That criteria is not mine anymore. It never was my father’s.
Last night in a cabinet in Mom and Dad’s basement I found a chapbook I’d written years ago stuffed with greeting cards and scraps of paper on which I wrote apologies, confessions, love declarations, and suicide notes during the worst of my struggles with manic depression. These things Dad saved as so many times he saved me. He had this preternatural ability to sense when things for me were at their worst. Even over great distance he knew when something was terribly wrong. He’d reach out, call, and save me. There was a time when we were both very sick. For both of us, as life seemed not worth living at all, we convinced each other that is was, and so became alike. And so became simple. And so again gazed west to a mythical self-sufficiency our relationship disproved. Two loners connected in a way that settled it. No one can survive alone.
He stayed simple. I didn’t. And now he’s gone, as I sometimes want to be.
During the last few years he’d reach out as if something was wrong when nothing was. I thought he’d lost it. But what was lost, lost over so many years of the self-absorption of mental illness, was my empathy. I didn’t realize that what was wrong was wrong with him and he needed help. Like so many fading seniors he’d turned angry: at the news, at the misperceived other side, at the future, as if as when one gets closer to God one gets more like Him. More judgmental and less relevant to an increasingly secular world that looks upon the remnants of the past and discards them.
Dad spoke of the many ways he wanted to ride into the sunset. I don’t think he ever climbed on a horse. I don’t think he was anything close to the lonely outriders we idolized while laying on the shag carpet watching cowboys settle things with a finality that Dad has found at last. I’ve found he wasn’t that outrider at all. He was anchored home by so much stuff we now box up. He was anchored home by so many people he needed as they needed him. Dad and I were intimately connected. Now we’re not.
We bury our dead and place above them a stone inscribed with a name that, over the years, evokes memories, true and false, of a life fully lived. Fully formed, as you are barely born. You can come to this place and consider who you are now that this person is gone. This is where it ends, from this spot you finally begin, and you can return here anytime but you will always leave alone.
Look west as the sun sets and the sky turns the colors of the autumn leaves that cling desperately to swaying trees. You must have those who are close to you, and they must have you. The leaves will fall but Spring will come again. Some of what is here now will not be here then. Others will box up all we have and decide who we were. Maybe, in all that stuff is who we are, but I doubt it. Who we are, who we were, hides in a memory, perhaps of a kid and a father watching sagebrush tumble across a dusty tube TV, a single cowboy on the screen, still to find that the lesson is not in the expanse but in the limits, in what you already have.
We so rarely get to say goodbye, and rarely should we.