A Walker in the Suburbs

It’s a day of pranks and foolery, only I don’t feel like laughing. Used to be people wore black armbands, heavy crepe. There was a period of mourning, a time set aside for grief.

But we live in a 24-hour news cycle. The days pass in a flurry, blur one into another. Emotions are fluid. We go back to work, we soldier on.

Grief lingers, though. It is with me in the morning, when the house is quiet. It is with me at night, when I wake up hours before the alarm. It shows up in the work day, too, sometimes when I least expect it.

It’s not an efficient emotion, not something that can be rushed through or even measured. And it has no short-cuts. Perhaps because it concerns itself with eternity.

So I guess it’s up to each of us now, to give ourselves the time we need. To give grief its due.

The return to routine. A dull knife, the kind that doesn’t cut. A balm perhaps? We’ll see. At this point it’s drudgery on top of sorrow. But it’s early yet.

And speaking of early, I’ve taken to watching the clock, waiting for 7:08 a.m., the exact moment of Dad’s passing. It’s become magical to me, a time of movement from one world to the next.

In fact, the whole hour is that way, the hour from seven to eight a.m. It’s permeable now, bridging the now with the hereafter.

And so, because I’m in that hour now, and for Dad’s sake, I take some deep breaths, I square my shoulders, I move on with the day.

They came in the evening and they came in the morning. Good friends, coffee buddies, nieces, nephews, cousins, neighbors.

They came bearing photos and family trees, casseroles and sandwiches. You have to eat, and you have to talk, and the physical comfort of friends and food eases the grieving. Doesn’t banish it, of course, but softens it.

The last few days have been a whirlwind of calls, visits and rituals. Of looking through photo albums and sorting through papers.

It’s better not to stop too long.  

The days that follow death are filled with rituals and details and their own to-do lists. Soon these busy hours will give way to ones of raw loss. I know that.  But until then, I’m still coasting on tales of my dad shared at the wake. On the love and support of family and friends. On the Brahms German Requiem in my ears as I walk. And on transcendence.

Two stories from my girls at the time of their grandfather’s passing. One sat down two hours later — unaware of what had happened, five time zones away in Africa — and wrote him a letter.

Another snapped this photograph of our street as she was leaving to fly here and be with me. It was taken in the exact hour of Dad’s passing and is as radiant and other-worldly as I’ve ever seen the place.

Coincidences? Probably. But today I’m believing otherwise.

(Photo: Claire Capehart)

My father died on the first day of spring, just as the sun was rising — the sun that would be up all day in a cloudless blue sky.

Blue skies were Dad’s specialty. Not that he didn’t have plenty of storm clouds. But he endured them or ignored them or sometimes just opened his umbrella and danced through the rain.

One of my first and fondest memories of Dad is walking outside with him one morning on a family vacation to Colorado. Dad loved the Rocky Mountains, had spent time in Denver when he was in the service, after he’d flown 35 combat missions over Europe as a tail gunner in a B17 bomber. So as soon as he and Mom had a few dollars in their pocket, they drove my brother and me out west. I was five years old at the time, but I distinctly remember Dad looking up at the whitened peaks and the blue beyond and saying, “Look, there’s not a cloud in the sky.”

So I looked and saw and remembered — and I learned from his example. I learned that there is almost nothing so dire that it can’t be remedied by a good laugh. I learned that you can never tell someone you love them too many times. And finally, to quote a favorite movie of mine, I learned from his life that “no man is a failure who has friends.”

Dad was the youngest of six and the last to go. He leaves behind a wife, four children, seven grandchildren, many nieces, nephews and cousins  — and lots and lots of friends. He never knew a stranger.

I write this at an hour when Dad and I, both early risers, would often be up alone together. This is my first morning to wake without him in the world. I have no complaints. He was on this earth for almost 91 years. But I wish he could be here 91 more.