I
Your father is dead.

My mother wearing emotions I have never seen before. I think it is fear. I hear details. Heart attack. Talking to your uncles. Kitchen floor. It all makes no sense to me and for a minute I imagine she is speaking in another language; one so full of grief and shock that I can’t decipher the dialect. There is a buzzing in my ears. I can feel my blood flowing, shifting. Unlike my father. Who is dead.

Pack a bag. You’re coming home. My mother again, somehow moved to my kitchen, washing dishes that were not dirty. I am aware that she needs to keep her hands moving; to be useful. I let her wash clean forks and a plate, feeling this is normal. This is what people do in a kitchen. They do not die on the kitchen floor.

There is a feeling of waiting. I am waiting to feel this, like the brain waits for the pain of a stubbed toe to climb up synapses and neurons. You know it will come and that knowledge makes the seconds between impact and register so much the worse. Now, the word that comes to me is hollow. An immediate emptiness akin to a great hunger seemed to begin and would last for months to come.

I pack methodically, as if for a long planned vacation. I will need something black. I will need my shampoo, pajamas, a book, a toothbrush, something black. Something for a funeral. It will be clear to me later that somehow I had always understood this night. Known what I would need to take with me. What to leave behind. The dog is jumping and licking my mother. He wants to play.

As we drive the eight blocks from my house to my mother’s, we’ve remembered my brother. He is building houses in Tennessee with his students. His new wife is in New York. No one has the number in the remote part of the south where I imagine him quietly sleeping beneath a layer of humidity and hard work. We vacillate between giving him one more night of not knowing or starting the pain quickly. I want him to suffer like me. I need him to feel this in the way only children of a dead father can feel. I want my brother home, as whole a family as we can be.

In the end, my brother will spend two hours on a dark road in Tennessee driving through the night to an airport. I think of the student driving him, perhaps wondering what this moment will one day be for him; silently thanking his god that this is not his moment. My brother will spend hours more alone on a plane; suspended between now and then. 10,000 feet above this place where he is fatherless.

II

I want to go where he died, positive that I will feel him. I don’t. Instead, I pick up his slippers from the front step where I assume they came off during transport to the ambulance. I still have those slippers along with boxes of minutia. Silly things he kept in shoeboxes, beneath the bed, still unmade. Only I knew this side of my father: nostalgic, emotional, kind. As my mother goes about the job of practicality, I sit cross-legged going through shoeboxes. Every card we ever sent to him, every ticket stub, every crumbling, water stained baby picture.

Alike in so many ways, my father and I share this hidden softness. I have my own shoeboxes and this makes me wonder who will one day keep my small memories.

His glasses are on the table. I have never seen my father without his glasses. I make a mental note to pack them for the funeral. His heart medicine, which he sometimes skipped to prove his inner rebel or disinterest in life, sits open on the same table. Playing cards, betting slips, a picture of my brother and me. A life so clearly summed on a single table top.

I need to leave. My mother remains stoic, making piles and looking for his suit. The one suit he owned, all purpose for weddings, graduations, and funerals, sits in the closet. The inside pocket is filled with those little laminated prayers cards you get at funerals. This makes me laugh, strange in a way I know he would appreciate. I take everything I can carry. I will come back for more. My brother will take nothing.

We wait for my brother and his wife at the train station. Watching people come and go calms me. I will later realize this is a habit of mine; watching other people living their lives. A sort of park bench therapy. When he arrives, we hug and cry and do not speak. It is not until safely in my mother’s house that we speak, my brother angry, me wanting to show him everything I’ve found; a morbid show and tell of sorts. It is the baseball tickets saved from a particular father’s day that finally brings my brother to his knees. He will cry for hours.

III

I am amazed at the work required for a funeral. There is the business of finding a church; difficult since my father has not been in a church of his own accord in 30 years. We finally must beg my mother’s parish for a burial. My distaste for Catholic ritual is cemented. There is the issue of a post-funeral gathering. I do not want this. It is my one absolute. There is the casket, which requires going to the funeral home, where we sit in a basement room, signing papers and choosing prayers. The casket is of no interest to me. In the end, my brother chooses the first one shown to us. I cannot remember what it looked like.

I ask to see his body and am ushered to a back room. He says he does not usually allow this. My father lies beneath a pale blue sheet on a metal table. He looks like him. The gray hair he has had since I can remember; the slightly crooked mustache which has caused in me a leniency towards men with facial hair. I have a sudden urge to pull open his eyelids. To see what death looks like in the eyes. I do not stay long. Just long enough to make it final. Just long enough to be sure.

Then there is the ultimate show; this strange funeral ritual, which I never understood and understand even less now. As we walk inside the funeral home, I can remember walking along this same street, turning away from the mourners. It seemed only right to avert my eyes from something so personal. On this day, I want to be looked at, seen. This will one day be you.

Once inside, I place pictures of my father with various family members inside the casket along with a father’s day card. He has died three days before Father’s Day. I want to touch him, but don’t. He is in his black suit; it’s final performance at his own funeral.

We line up, beside the casket, waiting to be consoled. We are all oddly calm and I wonder how much total valium trails through our collective blood. Italian by ethnicity and neurotic by personality we are known to argue often and worry even more. Again, the buzzing in my blood as each of us escapes to his or her, own, personal state of removal. The space where we are able to be here. To do this. I feel the urge to laugh, to be surrounded, to sit alone in a quiet room, to dig my nails into the thin skin of my inner arm, to draw blood. A deep breath as the first people arrive, appropriately bowed and sorrowful. The night seems to move in hazy slow motion yet ends before I am ready.
I find myself angry with the people who continue to yell and cry and wail. Inside I am pulsing blood quick. Their displays seem false, designed for attention. Real pain is silent.

Exhausted in every meaning of the word, we each head to our bedrooms. The need to be alone and in some other level of consciousness is palpable. I fall asleep with the knowledge that tomorrow will be the last time I will ever see my father.

IV

We sit watching television and waiting for the limo to pick us up. We do not speak; all eyes glued to the television no one is actually watching. In the end, television has its benefits, its distractions. A short ride to the church of the elementary school both my brother and I attended. Where we passed through each Catholic ritual, where I discovered a talent for writing and where my brother began his short-lived phase of Catholic devotion and pot smoking. Where my father will be attending church against his will for the last time.

I am to recite a reading from the Bible, chosen from a pre-selected packet of appropriate prayers given to me the previous day. I remember feeling sad for the nun whose job it is to hand out these packets of death prayers. No one is ever glad to see you. I know that I read because I remember refolding the white paper into tiny, tight squares after returning to the pew. That is my only real memory of the church. The small, tight squares folded and re-folded.

I remember leaving my father at the gravesite. My brother making strange hiccupping noises as we placed flowers on the casket. My uncle, my father’s brother, does not leave his car. He simply cannot step out of the car. No one asks him to.

Once home, in pajamas, there is nothing. The rituals are over. Everyone has changed out of their funeral clothes. There is nothing. There is sitting and staring. The settling of dust. I believed the worst part of a death was the funeral; the endless hand shaking and head nodding. The saying goodbye. I was wrong. The worst part is the nothing, the absence of action, to know there is nothing but acceptance to be offered or received.

We discuss going to sleep, instead, my brother and I decide to get drunk. More drunk than I have ever been before or since. We drink until we are sick and then we drink more. In silence. I am trying to find the feeling, some feeling, something other than the sucking wound that comes with every breath. In the end I fall asleep in my childhood twin bed, surrounded by stuffed animals and the smell of funeral lilies.

V

It does not get better. It simply continues. I am reminded of a quote, whose author I can’t remember, “when your parents die, you no longer have an audience.” This is maybe the most true statement I have heard since my father’s death. The desire to call and talk about a bad day, a good movie, does not go away. There is no one to call. The moment between wanting to pick up the phone and realizing there is no one to answer, does not ever lessen.