By Eric Le Roy
Sometimes a death in the family comes like grief poured over your head, a bucketful of black water. You can drown that way. Sometimes it feels like liberation. Often, it’s more of a handshake. That’s how it was with my Dad and me.
Earlier this week, a friend told me that his mother had passed. She was 93. My friend has also been subjected to painful knee surgery, which apparently will leave a scar as angry as a madman’s disappointment. (I thought surgeons could do better than that these days.) To top it off, in Tennessee, where he lives, the epic storm of 100 years is swirling around the way my brain used to when I was trying to decide whether to go home for dinner or head for trouble uptown.
Jeff is an articulate guy, among the best. And I’m not bad at consoling people. (When I’m not apologizing to them.) But sometimes there’s nothing to be said, and he and I both know that. I could say, for example, that 93 years is a lot. But not as good as 94.
As for me, I haven’t quite decided if my terror of death is not mingled with a secret desire for its arrival, like a wrestling match in the brain of a good novel’s protagonist. Nightmares when I was a child might have suggested the truth: unspeakable horror at being pursued by malevolent zombies, followed by turning round and walking to them. This is when you reach the last locked gate and the high wall. You have no choice. Death also seems glad that the chase is finally over. I remember those dreams. The exhilaration.
I think, as I told Jeff, that the feelings you are left with depend on the way things stood when you parted. Grief out of the upturned bucket I mentioned comes when important issues have not been resolved. That’s how it was with my Mom and Step-Dad.
Mom was a high-wire act as far as her nervous system was concerned. Nervous. Anxious. Her intelligence added to the acuteness of her worries. A cloud in the sky suggested an impending thunderstorm. A breeze was a baby hurricane. A garden worm had the potential change into a cobra. Her second husband, Jim, was a carefully selected opposite to her first, the one my grandmother instilled in me to call ‘Daddy Bob’. You get the picture, I hope. “Daddy Bob’ was like saying ‘Injun Joe’ in Tom Sawyer.
Daddy Bob was a handsome devil. As moody as a mountain with beautiful snow on top and lava seething within. Not violent, I don’t mean that. But he could joke with you all morning, leave you in stitches, and then go out somewhere. When he came back, you wondered how many bodies he had stuffed into the trunk of the car. Only years later did I realize that the change of disposition was usually because he hadn’t gotten any pussy. The ‘extramarital’ must have had a headache.
Jim Shumaker was a farm boy. Kind, conservative, and methodical. Ok, Ok. Boring. But that’s what Mom needed after Daddy Bob went off to Boston to become the next Van Gogh. And even that wise agreement was 15 years in the making. They had, as you see, vastly different temperaments. This was a minor problem that needed an equalizer. They found one. So Mr. and Mrs. Shumaker and their friend Jim Beam spent a lot of productive time together.
She yelled at him a lot. My in-and-out presence didn’t help. But after all that, they started to love each other more and more. He retired. Golden years beckoned. Maybe she would have gotten around to saying all the affectionate things she had neglected to say. But two weeks after his retirement, he died. The sweet things were never spoken.
My Mom died in 2006. One day, as I was rummaging through things, getting ready to sell that house in Florida, I came across a notebook in which she had written love letters to Jim Shumaker for years after his death. She called him Honey and Sweetie. She told him she had come to the cemetery that morning to visit him. About the flowers. The weather. What she had for lunch. Details of life.
I like to believe that Jeff Trippe was sure to let his mother know the love in his heart while she was there to enjoy it. That’s when death enters the ranks of the natural, the proper, and what is for the best. As we say, “It’s in the nature of things.” I can remember watching movies in which a beloved family member dies. A mother. A husband. A child.
First is the agony. Then the film moves to the church service – usually (as I think in memory), a small town protestant church (I say that because there’s always a cross on top of the simple building. Otherwise, it wouldn’t matter.) And then comes the scene after the service. The family stands together, holding hands as the rain stops and the sun breaks through, and the message is that while the love will never fade, life will go on.
Goodbye, my dear.
My father was almost 90 when he died. I can’t remember the year, but it wasn’t that long ago. 5 years? 10? I’m not good with reordering the past. It goes too quickly. I do know that Jim went in the 1980s. That’s as good as I can do.
But I should mention that the main ‘father-figure’ for me was my Grandpa. I lived with him and Grandma (actually his second wife) from around 1957 to 1967. They booted me out when I started hanging around with the black kids at my school, and the rednecks wanted to burn our house down. He panicked and sent me to Minnesota because Mom and Jim were there.
Minnesota has fallen on hard times, but it was fine then. Cold. The snot froze on your upper lip as you walked. After a conversation, you had to melt the words over a fire so you could hear what had been said. It’s true. Why would I lie to you?
Grandpa was a good man. He steered me into my lifelong love affair with sports. But he was very bitter — about what I could never quite figure out — although I seem to be getting more like him. I asked him once, after one of his tirades about people and life, if he had ever had a friend. I mean, a real friend. That got his attention. Finally, he said, “I thought I had one once.” There was a long pause. “Until I found out he was fucking my wife.”
He taught me how it was possible to hate almost everything. I hadn’t known that before.
From Grandpa, I learned the facts of life in delightfully crude language. Accounts, I guess, for my love of dark comedy. Profanity. I have a PhD in that. I can string them together like a necklace of exquisite beads. Thanks, Grandpa.
I guess I just never had much luck with fathers. Therefore, I have never understood the enormous bond — perhaps even the total fusion — that clearly exists between many fathers and sons. I read about it, see films about it, and witness it with my own eyes. Something in me wants to respond; something else in me draws a blank. I admit, I have inadvertently searched for ‘father figures’ among various bosses and ball coaches, even among men who were numerically younger than me. Neediness, of some sort.
When the son is ready, a father will appear?
Dad never gave my mom a nickel in the way of child support — in those days, there was no mechanism to force ‘deadbeat dads’ to pay — and we managed without him. He would show up once in a while. I remember him taking me to the zoo in Washington, D.C. And later in life, after one of my more spectacular drinking binges, he bought me a bus ticket to get back to Florida from somewhere way up in Canada. A big list of things.
But there was a lot more to him than a monthly check that didn’t arrive. I knew him in New York City when he was attending NYU to get his Master’s degree. He showed me Greenwich Village, took me to some Off-Broadway shows, and introduced me to the Metropolitan Art Museum. Dad had his aviator’s license, and he flew me up in his small aircraft to tour the rooftops of the Big Apple. He floated me all over New York City, right past the top of the Empire State Building and so near the face of the Statue of Liberty that I could have almost reached out and grabbed her nose.
Later, he led me to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to see the great New York Yankees of Mantle and Maris, Berra and Ford. I remember it was in 1964. Maybe Berra was gone by then. It’s hard to believe I saw those Yankees half a century ago.
Dad was a powerful, handsome guy without the bad habits of tobacco and booze. A sex chaser, as I have said. He could be one of the most entertaining, charming, and, even in his younger days, wise men you could ever hope to meet. But he could switch out on you. You never knew. I said that.
Another thing that used to piss me off was that Dad was the hero of every story he ever told me. The others were the chumps. Even then, I think, I was a better artist than he was. That’s because I wasn’t afraid to be the loser sometimes. At least, I saw the hellfire in me, burning under the stars. And I saw how they gave light to each other. I don’t think he ever understood that.
Well, we all have streets inside us where the bogeymen strut.
But I give credit. He was never weak that I could see. He was not quite as sophisticated as he liked to pretend after his years in Boston and New York — there was always something of Morgantown, West Virginia, leftover, and probably that’s why he ended up in a small place in North Carolina with a pretty little woman of traditional values instead of some hot Manhattan gal.
He was a Dreamer but also a Do-er. The rest of my family were not Appalachian hillbillies, but they knew what a hillbilly was. Dad came from poor coal-mining stock in West Virginia. He could have settled. He could have disappeared into a literal black hole, wearing a spelunker’s helmet instead of an artist’s beret. (He never wore a beret.)
Dad got younger as he got older. Most old guys just burn out, go soft, and sit on their ass. Or start hating everything, like my grandfather and me. Not Dad. He was a philosopher and giver of advice as he aged, and I was the beneficiary of my fair share. Over the phone. He had children, and they had grown up with him, whereas I didn’t. It made a difference, I suppose.
I have never been a family man. I love a few people, but have very little affection for the human race. I live in Bulgaria now. When I look back at America, I realize I miss my dogs more than the people. A lot of folks imagine I am joking when I say that. I’m not. I wonder if it’s why I was never worth a shit as a Dad myself. Or maybe it’s just an excuse.
Unlike me, Dad could also use his hands as well as his imagination, and once, when I visited him in North Carolina, I saw that he was in the process of building an entire house. His wife and one of his sons still live there. He did it with his own mitts. Hammers, measuring sticks, and the help of a couple of workboys. It was impressive, and I know it was the very first time that the idea of ”love” entered the equation on my part.
He was like the old American storybook folk hero that they called ‘Paul Bunyan.’ I think the key to it all was that he finally met the right woman — Traci, now his widow. I guess she sort of made a ‘progressive’ out of him in some ways. Not in others, which is good. For the memories, I mean.
He was the last of my full-blood relations. They are all in eternity now, and I will never even visit their graves. What would be the point? They are the past. Once upon a time in America. Anyway, I can see them whenever I want to. It is my business in my own brain.
Dad and I had many phone conversations during his last years. I think he was proud of what I was eventually able to achieve — some results, finally, after a wayward life. We laughed a lot. Then his body started to die, but the brain never lost its ripeness: it only grew slightly wistful among its riches.
We all struggle, especially those of us beset with the inner demons from which angels occasionally spring. In a totally loused-up world, my Dad figured out how to live and how to love. Sounds simple, but it ain’t. Take it easy, Dad. I’ll see you down the road.
As for Jeff, I hope that he mends well. Creaky knees are one of the many curses of getting old. But there are blessings too, and spring and summer come. Old bastards that we are, we are the boys of summer. Always have been; always will be. I hope Jeff will have many more. And that he made sure to say all the things he needed to tell his Mom.
That’s the way we shake hands with death.
