Resurrections
I collect stones, and now also beach glass, as we walk with our dog along the lake. When we moved to Evanston I jettisoned many pounds of rocks from other places—Berkeley, Big Sur, Provincetown, Ferry Beach, Star Island—and kept only a few. I forget where most have come from, but when I look at them and hold them, I cherish the sense of history and pleasure emanating from the colors and textures of their faces.
This winter, as the anniversary of my dad’s death approached, I wondered what I would feel. He had been diminishing for twenty years through the slow erasure that was his Alzheimer’s disease, so when he died, I cried, but I had wept so deeply so many times before, I felt my mourning must be over. So, in January and February, I wondered. Then I forgot about it.
I began to miss Connecticut like crazy—the walks in the forested hills near our house, the little house itself, with its too-much yard work, and its constant needs for fixing we just didn’t have the skills or time for. My sadness grew, and I couldn’t figure it out: I am happy here, I love the lake and our apartment, and I love this church and congregation. But I felt such a mournful missing of that home.
When March 2nd came, I understood that missing Connecticut was mourning my dad again! It had come at me sideways, but that’s what it was. When he was my age and younger, and healthy, he loved hiking with our various dogs. When he mowed the lawn, I was sent ahead to clear the way of sticks and stones.
Imperfect putterer that he was, he could spend a whole day figuring out some home maintenance problem—taking lots more time than you’d think a mechanical engineer would need, probably enjoying the solitariness of problem and material—being with himself.
Dad also collected stones—on his walks his eye would be caught by some small wonder and he would take it up to bring home to show it to me, and to keep it.
I am my father’s daughter—all our arguments and misunderstandings notwithstanding, that is who I am. And, though he is dead, he lives on in me—in my memory and in my gestures, in the things with which I struggle, in my collections of small wonders, and in my enjoyment of poetry and music, even in my voice, this aging soprano sweetness that his tenor genes, combined with my mother’s alto genes, passed on to me.
If this is not resurrection, I do not know what is. Bodies do not survive death. If minds and souls do, I do not know where they gather. But I know that love is stronger than the grave. It survives, and it abides, and all the dead rise again and again in us, giving themselves to us for as long as we will receive them. Happy Easter—may it arrive, and you know it truly.
- Resurrections - November 12, 2014
- Reunion - September 1, 2013
