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December 14, 2003

Just over two weeks ago my father died, the day after Thanksgiving.  His death was neither a surprise nor unwelcome.  For roughly ten years he had increasingly debilitating dementia.  In the later years if not carefully observed, he would wander out of the house to destinations the purpose of which only his own mind could understand.  He took anti-psychotic (and many other) drugs because he was prone to paranoia, especially in the evening (sundowning), sometimes he would even mistrust his wife, and once several months ago he hit her in his delusion.  He was incontinent off and on in recent years, and was steadily so in the closing months of his life (this, I believe, was the single hardest thing for my mother to deal with.)  He had long since forgotten his grandchildren.  For years when he saw me he would ask what I did for a living and whether I had children.

In early September, my mother sold their condo in a retirement community called Clearbrook in Cranbury, NJ, where they had lived for 20 years, and rented a one-bedroom apartment in Highland Park, NJ.  She had been trying to sell the home for a long time—a year, I think.  She sensed that much as she tried to forestall the day, it was getting close to the time when Dad would need to go into a nursing home, and the one with which many years ago she had put him (and herself) on a waiting list was a long drive from Clearbrook but within a few miles of Highland Park.  Mother had taught in Highland Park High School for many years, where she had been chair of the English department and head of her union; my parents had owned a home in the town, and I believe to that extent it was a welcome, familiar place for her move.

I helped on the day of the move and stayed a couple of days after to unpack.  Dad had trouble remembering where things were in the new home, including the bathroom, but he had already become similarly disoriented in the Clearbrook home  His loss of knowledge of that home was one of the reasons Mother could allow them to make the move.

Still, while I unpacked, he would sit in the living room and watch DVDs of musicals he had always enjoyed.  While he could remember almost nothing of his past, he was often able to sing along with the songs in the movies; and one time he commented on how good an actor the king’s son was in the Kerr-Brynner version of The King and I.  On a couple of occasions, seemingly out of the blue, he said to me, “I love you.”  I expect this was in response to my helping Mom, and maybe just because I was there.  It was not the sort of thing he said in his better days, and I was surprisingly (to me) touched.

Aside from when he was watching musicals, I found he still had some vestige of rationality.  One time when he wandered into the bedroom in quest of the bathroom (which was down a separate hall) and asked me where the bathroom was, instead of answering I asked casually, “Does this look like the bathroom?”  He looked around, seemed to realized it didn’t look like a bathroom, and left the room.  He then tried the appropriate hall and found the bathroom.

During these days he tried wandering off, once successfully.  In Clearbrook, Mom had long since installed an alarm system that sounded when he opened the front door.  While this sometimes woke her early in the morning when he apparently wanted to get the newspaper from the front stoop, on the whole I gather he understood that he was waking her and discontinued the effort after a few tries.  But in the new apartment, the alarm was not yet installed.  (I thought it would take a specialist to install it, but my brother-in-law Alan was able to figure it out when he visited a few days later.)  The first time Dad wandered off neither Mom nor I realized for some time, probably 15 minutes or longer, and when we did realize we searched frantically for him for several minutes until he arrived in the elevator to his floor.  Another elderly man had apparently helped him, and when the man saw Mom and me he began to berate us for not keeping a better eye on Dad.  I thanked the man for his help and then asked him not to lecture us.  After that, Dad would still manage to start disengaging the various locks—he succeeded at least once—but made enough noise doing so that either Mom or I would hear and stop him. 

When I told him once, firmly, “You can’t go out of the apartment on your own,” he answered, “So I’m a prisoner here, huh?”  This statement struck me for both the rationality of the response and the instinct for independence.

Within a month of this move, Mother phoned my sister and me one day to seek our counsel because Dad was starting to fall down and she wasn’t strong enough to hold him up or pick him up.  We agreed with her conclusion that the time had come to put him in a nursing home.  This was hard for her—she had resisted outside help (other than from her children) throughout his decline—but she now had the justification that trying to care for him at home would put him in more danger than being in a nursing home.  Her apartment wasn’t set up to hire someone to live in and look after him even if that were financially or emotionally feasible.

This decision came on a Thursday or Friday, and although he was at the top of the list for the nursing home (and in fact a bed had just opened up—a memory on which I mused when he died and his bed became available once again), it was going to take a few days to be ready to admit him.  I don’t know what the issues were, but Mom had to hold out for a few days longer.  Judi went to Clearbrook for one day.  I chose to stay in Madison, CT, where I was now living virtually full-time:  I was rehearsing Willy Loman, I had already missed a rehearsal when I helped Mom with the move, and it was desperately important to me to work on the role.  Whether this was the morally correct decision I leave to others to judge.  What I did do was drive to NJ to help Mom on the day and day after Dad was going into the home.  Regardless of whether I should have gone earlier, it was clearly a good thing that I went when I did.

Dad declined rapidly in the nursing home.  I’ll never know if he was going to do so regardless, but I expect that institutionalization sped the process.  The day we moved him I was struck by the glazed looks of so many of the residents, whom I tend to think of as inmates, the almost universal confinement to wheelchairs, and the number of residents dozing in those wheelchairs while placed in front of a large-screen TV in a common room.

Dad was barely able to walk when he went in, but at some level I admired his determination to walk at all.  Clinging to his walker, he would move one foot a couple of inches, then the other, and so on for however long it took to get anywhere.  (That evening Mother and I left him and went to a Highland Park restaurant, Charley Brown’s, for dinner; as we walked from the car to the restaurant we commented on the freedom of being able to move at our own pace.)  But in the  home they put him in a wheelchair and, I gather, gave up on having him walk.  What employee could be bothered to wait for him?  As a result, he apparently gave up trying to walk even during Mom’s daily visits.  At times, however, he would try to stand and walk away from the wheelchair, to which the home responded by strapping him in and keeping him near the nurse’s station so he couldn't disappear on them.

He became violent at times.  Mother chafed when she learned the home charged an extra $2 a day (among many charges for “extras”) for incontinent residents, but in my mind it was her greatest freedom when he entered the home.  When staff would try to clean him up, he would sometimes lash out with his arms and fight the effort.  His tendency towards violence when I was a child had left deep psychic scars in me, but I could scarcely blame him now: although perhaps driven by lifelong habits, in this context it seemed instinctual and beyond his rational control; and presumably the staff treated him with minimal concern for his feelings.  (On the day he entered the home, I had the general impression that on the whole the staff was competent and trained up to a point but unimaginative and secure only when following written or unwritten rules.  I also thought: what do we expect for the salaries they must get paid when the home can charge just $80 a day—though every extra cost extra—to the residents?)

Staff also complained because sometimes he cursed.  Both Mother and I found this complaint ludicrous.  Surely their daily non-work lives were not immune to such language, and in any event how could they get upset at cursing from someone in Dad’s condition?  And how could they expect anyone to get him to control himself?

Incidents like these—violence, swearing—caused uneasiness in me, however, and I assume in Mom lest the home invoke its 30-day notice right to kick him out.  I was in despair at the thought of what we would do in such a case, and I tried to live in denial that this was a possibility.

December 26, 2003

While he was in the nursing home, my father’s primary doctor now became someone retained by the home, but his specialists remained unchanged and my mother sometimes still had to take him to them.  It was grueling for her to take him anywhere; he had to be helped at both ends.

Several years earlier, doctors had inserted a shunt to help his blood flow.  The theory was that his dementia was being speeded up by slow blood flow to the brain.  We never knew if the shunt helped or if the trauma of the operation was worse than any benefit the shunt provided, and Mother, Judi and I had all agreed that we would be extremely reluctant to put him through an operation again.

But during these doctor’s visits after going into the nursing home, Mom was informed that the shunt seemed to be blocked and that a relatively brief operation—one hour—should free up the flow again.  It was a long shot whether this would help him, but Mother and I—I’m not sure how Judi felt—agreed that the risks were minimal and the potential benefit, while of dubious odds, was worth the effort.  Around early November he had the operation.  I was frustrated about the timing; Death of a Salesman would be playing for one weekend, and I wanted Mother to come to Connecticut to see it.  (Though I said at first it was for her to be able to see a son perform, I realized that I, too, wanted her to see me—as I said to her, “What son doesn’t want to show off to a parent?”)

I was angry that she might not work the schedule out so that she would feel able to come.  There was initial trouble to schedule, and then, when the schedule would apparently have allowed her to come to the play, there was some mix-up about the date or requirements for the operation, and the date was postponed.  To me, this was one more example of Dad’s needs dominating my mother’s—and my—life.  I thought maybe Mom welcomed the excuse not to come, since the trip would be arduous and she was, after all, 84.  But she did come: the operation was on a Wednesday, I think; she took Amtrak from NJ to New Haven to arrive on Saturday; while I performed in a matinee, Maxine picked her up and then brought her to the evening performance.  She went home the next day.  As it happened, the Saturday evening performance, I thought, was my best.

A week or two after the operation, Dad developed a fever and cough.  Within a couple of days—we were now about a week before Thanksgiving—the doctor of the nursing home (I think based on nursing reports, not his own visit to Dad) had him transferred to St. Peter’s Hospital, a short distance (half-mile?) away, also in New Brunswick.  He was diagnosed with a pneumonia that resulted from poor swallowing: he was aspirating food and drink into his lungs.  He was put on an IV.  He was taking several medications to deal with blood flow, psychosis, the sundowning, depression, who knows what.  Only one of these, apparently, could be administered by IV.  Mother was with him much of the time, and she had to deal with his constantly trying to pull out the IV and to get out of the bed.  He was thrashing a lot; I assumed this was at least in part because of going cold turkey on some of the drugs.

Test results early in Thanksgiving week were bleak.  His vital systems were weak.  He was, in effect, dying.  Judi, Mother and I had long since agreed not to use so-called “heroic” measures to keep him alive.  He and Mother had both made living wills to this effect.   A question arose about a breathing tube: getting one might ease his pain, but it might also become “permanent” and keep him alive when the rest of his body had given up. 

In general, despite the crucifix in his room at St. Peter’s, Mother seemed to find hospital staff and behavior sensitive and helpful, a welcome change from what seemed her constant conflicts at other times with most medical personnel.  A geriatric female doctor visited Mother and asked what she wanted for Dad.  Mom said to minimize his pain and let him be peaceful.  I’m not sure death was ever mentioned, but when Mom told me about this, I gradually realized that what was being discussed was letting him die.  (When recounting the conversation with the geriatric specialist, Mother commented with a mixture of facetiousness and irony, “Apparently I gave the right answer.”)  On, I think, the day before Thanksgiving Dad was put on a morphine drip.

Maxine’s daughters and significant others had come to our Madison home for Thanksgiving.  I had tried hard, and (somewhat to my surprise) largely with success, not to be gloomy during the festivities.  I did phone Mom at the hospital.  Dad was now, finally, sleeping peacefully, relaxed, not thrashing.  Mother said she had been sitting there feeling thankful for two things (I only realized later “thankful” was in the context of the holiday): that he was now peaceful, and that her children were so supportive.

I think she badly needed us children to agree with the decision to let him die.  Regardless of how much she rationally knew it was the right thing, she still felt she was killing him; and for Mother, not being able to count on reason’s trumping emotion has always been hard to bear. 

He never woke again.  When we had learned that he was dying, we agreed to wait until after Thanksgiving to tell friends and relatives other than immediate family.  On Friday morning, November 28, 2003, I awoke around 6—sleep, difficult at the best of times, had been especially elusive of late, and I had been taking Ambien nightly for a few weeks.  Since I was up, I began composing e-mail to explain to friends and family what was happening.  As I finished a draft, I decided to check his latest status.  I called the St. Peter’s nursing station for his floor, and when I explained what that I wanted a status update, the nurse who answered asked me to hold on.  I realized he must have died, and sure enough, after 2 or 3 minutes a male doctor came on the line.  “Did he die?” I asked.  (I have long objected to the need for euphemisms about death.  “Your father passed away a few minutes ago.”  I apparently phoned just as Dad had died; the doctor had not even phoned Mom yet.  The doctor asked if I’d like to call her.  I hesitated and then told him to call because she might have questions that I wouldn't be able to answer. 

The doctor asked if the hospital could do an autopsy.  I said that I would answer yes because I knew Dad would want it—he had even referred to such a possibility when he was alive—and that he could tell Mother I said that if it would help.  She, too, however, knew that Dad would have wanted it, and okayed it.  Later she regretted the decision, though I’m not sure exactly why—the spookiness of it, the possible delay in having his body cremated and so a delay in getting closure, or something else.  Days later we learned that the autopsy was performed later that same Friday.

I assume I phoned Judi, and before long I had talked with Mother.  I can’t remember the sequence of who called whom, except that Judi and Alan agreed to go to Highland Park right away, and I said I would come from Connecticut a little later that morning.  In fact, it somehow took me 2 or 3 hours to get out of the house.  I was disoriented and had trouble organizing myself.  Maxine, I think, packed some clothes for me in case I stayed overnight in NJ.  Knowing that Mother had Judi and Alan to be with, I took time to adapt the e-mail I had been composing and send it out to several people to report Dad’s death.  Anthony made me an omelet for breakfast and a turkey sandwich to take on the drive.

I really didn’t want to drive, or drive by myself, and had Maxine’s children not been visiting I might have let her drive me.  As it was, I felt nervous about whether I was making the right—the sane—decision to drive myself, and I asked Anthony to let me talk through what I was thinking and give me feedback.  In the process I realized that I was, in fact, okay to drive; and I also realized, and said to him, that I had now put him in a lousy position—that if I did have any kind of accident on the drive, he would at some level feel culpable.  I tried hard to reduce any responsibility on his part, but I was sure I wasn’t entirely successful.  The drive, however, went without mishap.

As I’ve done since we bought the Connecticut home, I listened to a book on tape while driving to NJ—Jarhead by Anthony Swofford.  It was probably too painful for me at this time.  I listened for awhile, turned on music, reflected.  The trip should normally take 2 � hours; I think it was closer to three, with some stop-and-go traffic.  On the Merritt Parkway, in a traffic jam, I began thinking about my father’s memoirs and the gulf between his aspirations as a child and the reality of his adulthood.  His memoirs are entirely about his young life; my mother, embarrassed at who knows what might be revealed, insisted that he not write about anything after they knew each other.  I thought: when we scatter his ashes, we should do it in Van Cortlandt Park, which since childhood I knew was his childhood escape from one or another Lower East Side tenement.  I thought about his own victimhood as a child and how, in my eyes, he had been unable to overcome it as an adult.  His mother died in a hospital of tuberculosis when he was 17, and years early when I read the memoir account of this event I realized that he thought he had killed her.  Mother later confirmed that he had been tormented by that belief all his adult life. 

He wanted a happy family, but he was a tyrannical and abusive father, loving his children intensely but unable to get past his own demons and let his love override his rage when we weren’t as he wanted.  His children never went hungry, as he had sometimes done, but I was always conscious as a child of living on the edge of poverty.  I never thought we would in fact go hungry; I just always had the sense that having enough money—or not having it—was a significant issue for my parents.  In July or August of 1971 I found some poetry he had written, and I was struck with how profoundly depressed he was and probably always had been.  In the mid-90s I began taking anti-depressants, and they profoundly improved my life.  I have wondered what they would have done for his life had they been available.

He tried several “careers”—chicken farming, furrier, peddling eggs on a route to homes within a 50-mile or larger radius, home landscaping.  In his late 30s, while working full-time at the frozen custard stand we owned, he studied and passed a high school equivalency exam in U.S. history, applied and entered college, received a BA in 3 years (attending year-round), and became a junior-high school teacher for the rest of his working life.  Being who was, his seemed largely unhappy as a teacher, saying it was worth putting up with the misery to have the long summer vacation.  He chose to work with the hardest age, and, I gathered, his pupils were mostly unappreciative of his efforts.  How he performed in the classroom I never knew.

In parallel with my father’s return to schooling, my mother, who had a couple of years at CCNY, herself went back to college and became a high school English teacher.  This example of not giving up, of being ever ready to change one’s lot in life, was a powerful example to me, and though I said this to my parents more than once, I don’t think they ever took it in.

Thoughts like these were going through my mind as I inched along the Merritt Parkway that day of his death, and I became teary as I reflected on the unfairness of his childhood and my own inability to forgive him, or at least not to feel rage towards him, for how he had treated me when I was a child.  These reflections turned out to be the start of a process that reached a climax 10 days later when we scattered his ashes in Van Cortlandt Park.  For all I know this process actually extended back decades, but probably only in the sense that all historical moments can be traced backward indefinitely.  For me, I think his death was breaking an emotional logjam: I hadn’t felt able to afford to let go of my fury, of which I became conscious in my thirties, and at some level clung to it to continue to punish him for his abuse (as a child, I unconsciously achieved this punishment by constant sulking, which drove both my parents but especially him to distraction), and then seeming lack of repentance for how he had treated me.  A process was now beginning that would not lead to my forgiving him—I’m not sure I even know what that would look like—but to mourning the losses he and I both suffered in our failure to connect deeply as father and son.

Somewhere during the drive I talked on my cell phone to Judi at the hospital.  She had just viewed Dad’s body and said that the staff wanted to know if they should hold the body for my viewing.  I knew at once I didn’t want to see his body.  Part, or most, of that was squeamishness about seeing a corpse.  But I couldn't believe it would do anything to help me, and I think at some intuitive level I had seen enough of Dad in terrible physical shape for so many years.  Mother got on the phone and reassured me, with strong feeling, that it was fine if I didn’t want to see him—that thinking she would never have the chance again she had chosen to see her mother’s body and largely regretted the decision.

December 30, 2003

After I arrived at Mother’s, she and Judi and Alan and I spent much time making plans.  We ordered pizza for dinner.  The mood took wide swings.  We decided to have a memorial ceremony for Dad in the next few days, first meeting in Van Cortlandt Park (an idea Mom had independently) and then going to Judi’s for food and a chance for people to say something about Dad.  I mentioned in passing that I was going to have to work on figuring out how to say something that was neither hypocritical nor disruptive.

The next day we moved the event a week later, to a week from Sunday: there was a question of when the ashes would be ready, and various people who wanted to attend could more easily come at that time.  I was annoyed, but I think that was a function of my own need to get closure. 

The following week moved very slowly for me; I felt as though whatever mourning I was going to do was being held in limbo.  Perhaps to fill the time I composed an announcement, then an agenda.  I thought I was going out my way to consult with everyone (Mother, Judi, Alan, Maxine, David, Steviann—all by e-mail; David and Steviann were in Arizona on the weekend after Dad died, but when they returned to LA I included them in the e-mail discussions) to get agreement on what we would do and what each document should say, and I was surprised when Judi in particular seemed cold to what I was doing.  Late in the process Maxine pointed out that what I was really doing was giving people hassles, forcing them to read at length and make minute decisions when they didn’t want to be bothered by minutiae.  I probably could have prepared nothing and the event would have gone just as well.

A major snowstorm was headed our way.  We kept putting off the decision about exactly what to do about the ceremony.  On Saturday we decided to defer the ash-scattering and on Sunday to convene at Judi’s for the food and memorial statements.  David wanted to scatter the ashes the following Wednesday.  I could not bear the thought of being in Manhattan at Maxine’s one-bedroom apartment that long, and I also felt annoyed at the way I perceived David as having a habit of calling shots based on his convenience.  (I also had parked at a Connecticut train station and assumed I had a huge digging-out job facing me there.)  I said I couldn't promise to be present then, that I would return to Connecticut on Monday and that if I felt up to the drive on Wed., I would drive down to Van Cortlandt Park.  David wanted me to attend, and Judi insisted on it.  We ended up agreeing to scatter the ashes Monday morning, after which I would catch a train to Madison.

During the days before the ceremony there was a sub-drama, a family power struggle involving Rebecca.  Most of us felt Mimi, who lived in Montana, should come if she could.  But early in the week before the ceremony, Rebecca apparently told her not to.  My first temptation was to leave this alone.  But Mother in particular felt Mimi should come, and because she believed Dad would have wanted it she offered to pay the air fare.  So I called Iris (I can’t remember if I called Rebecca first), who told me that when Rebecca told Mimi not to come Mimi cried.  This news pressed me to push for Mimi’s presence.  I’m not sure how clearly her mind was functioning—she had had a stroke a couple of years earlier that hampered her speech—but she was clearly broken up about her brother’s death and wanted to be present.  So Iris and I agreed that she, Iris, would check whether medically it would be OK for Mimi to fly, and if so Iris would arrange the flight.

I don’t think Rebecca was happy about this; the next time I spoke with her, about general arrangements, she seemed especially cold to me.  Then, with the snow storm in the offing, she had Mimi cancel her flight.  When we learned of this, Iris and I again consulted.  She managed to find a replacement flight.  It meant driving Mimi a few hours to another airport in Montana, but Iris insisted the family was used to the drive and would take the opportunity to have a day out.  As it happened, the snow in the east was so bad that the flight was cancelled.  Ironically, however, the original flight Mimi would have taken would likely have landed—David and Steviann had a flight from LA that arrived about the same time Mimi’s flight would have, and it landed without trouble.

Jan. 6, 2004

A few days ago Mother told me that Rebecca recently visited and “explained” that other forces had been at work, including the cancellation of the second flight not because of closure at La Guardia but closure of some stopover airport en route—maybe Minneapolis—and that changing planes, required to get from Montana to NY, was too hard on Mimi.  I still don’t think Rebecca should have let Mimi decide what she wanted to endure—especially since Rebecca had arranged for her mother to visit NY a few weeks later.)

Perhaps it is especially fitting that such family dynamics should play themselves out at a time like this.  When we had the ceremony, we dialed Mimi and Iris via a speaker-phone, and they were able to listen to (and participate in) the entire event.

Jason recorded the Sunday ceremony on a digital device and, as I write, is planning to burn CDs to distribute to people who want them.  So I won’t try here to cover what was said.  But there was a dynamic that is worth recording.  David had spoken with his rabbi, who suggested a ceremony that would address experience of Dad for both good and ill.  “Make sure you're burying the right person,” the rabbi advised.  While I already felt a need not to be hypocritical in whatever I said, I was uneasy about structuring the ceremony according to a particular point of view.  Among other things, I pointed out that if the rabbi did this at a funeral, he could be a detached leader whom people could trust to guide events, whereas we had no one in the family to play that role. 

There was a brief period during the planning when Mother thought she would like a rabbi, and David offered to try to find someone; but for whatever reasons, Mother changed her mind.  The ceremony would be the improvisation of those in attendance.

I told David that I felt he didn’t need to agonize over what was or wasn’t appropriate to say—that he should trust his instincts.  It was easier to give him that advice than to take it myself.

In any event, Mother knew that the ceremony would not be a simple eulogy or collection of eulogies.  And she composed a magnificent statement of her own—she said she wrote it only the night before the ceremony—that while loving and intense overall it nonetheless included some criticism of Dad.  I felt she was doing this to make it easier for David and me, and indeed she said something like that when we discussed it later.  This concern was not atypical of her; there were other moments I remember when she went out of her way to ease a difficult way for her children, and I intend to mention them elsewhere.

Since Mom sent me a copy of her statement, I’m going to include it here:

Attendees at the memorial ceremony were all Dad’s children and their spousal figures, Sammy, Rebecca and Larry and their two children, Jason and Annie, Sol and his partner, Richard, Heidi and Marty, Jane (Annie’s mother) and her partner Paul, Laura (Maxine’s elder daughter; Karen, the younger, wanted to attend but was recovering from foot surgery) and her husband, Anthony; and by telephone Mimi and Iris.  We also had some statements that we read from other family members and friends; they should all be on the CDs that Jason is preparing.

The ceremony lasted nearly two hours and worked well, in the best (as opposed to whatever the worst might have been) Yanowitz family tradition of doing something original and getting it right.  Heidi wrote me that she actually appreciated the franker statements about her Grandfather because it helped her see him with some sense of reality, and Laura told me that it helped her because she was concerned about how to approach issues with her own father, with whom she has a checkered history.

At home that evening I told Maxine that while I had said things I meant (I deliberately had not written anything down other than a few notes, though I had been thinking since the day of Dad’s death about what I would say), and while I had said been honest, I felt that something was missing.  I didn’t know what it was, what I might have said differently.

The next day a small group met at Van Cortlandt Park: Mom, the children and our significant others, and David’s friends Bruce and Ellen.  As it turned out, for me it was good that this was a small and separate ceremony, and that I didn’t miss out on it.  Alan reconnoitered and found the lake that was probably what Dad described in his memoirs.  We met at a Burger King, drove to the lake, parked and walked a short distance through the snow, probably at least a foot deep, to a metal bridge.  Causing Judi considerable unease, Alan crept down to the water to crack the ice so that moving water could take the ashes.  First he used a gardening trowel, then he came up, borrowed Mom’s cane, and returned to the ice to break it with the cane.  This interaction, too, was utterly typical: Alan doing a good deed but ignoring any disquiet caused by the way he did it, Judi fruitlessly protesting.

December 31, 2003

We all stood on the bridge above the ice Alan had cracked.  Dad’s ashes had arrived in a small, heavy cardboard box, perhaps 9 inches on a side.  With help from a knife Alan provided, I opened the box, nervous about exactly what was inside.  It turned out to be a silvery can with a removable top.  Gingerly we pulled the top off: inside was a thick, transparent plastic bag.  We cut the bag open.  The ashes were densely packed.  It is hard to believe that a full human being can be condensed down to the contents of that can.

Judi had brought kitchen scoops.  First Mother scooped some ashes, dropped them into the water, and tearfully said something like, “Good-by, darling.”  Then Judi used the scoop to spread some ashes.  I’m not sure if she said anything.  David reached in with his hand, grabbed some ashes, scattered them and said something.  I hadn’t wanted to touch the ashes (I had read on the web to expect small bone fragments, an idea that I found disgusting, though in fact I could see none), but watching David made me feel it was a good idea.  Several times I dug my fingers into the dense material, resembling chalk in its look and firmness, to scrape away dollops of dust.  When I had a reasonable handful, I dropped it in the water.  I felt as though I should say something, but nothing seemed right, and so I stayed silent.  I can’t remember if anyone else spread ashes after that.

It was probably at this point that David recited the Kaddish, as he had done the day before at the memorial ceremony.  It meant nothing to me either time.  But now I took the time to look around.  The day was cold.  The park was filled with snow and the water was largely ice.  A couple of people were visible in the parking lot 30 yards away, but otherwise no one else but us mourners was present.  Other than the background sound of David’s Kaddish, intense serenity and quiet surrounded us.  I tried to imagine Dad as a boy of maybe 12, in the Depression, coming here in spring or summer to soak up the utter sense of peace I was feeling in the same place this wintry day.  He writes about how his visits to the park brought him to, or maybe grew from, love for nature.  But I was seeing an innocent, oppressed boy seeking sanctuary from the poverty and emotional misery of daily life on the Lower East Side. 

These thoughts continued when David finished and others began conversing—the kind of conversation that emerges after intense emotion has played out.  I wanted to stare at the ashes in the water—most of them had been spilled in a large lump after we all had finished our turns, and they were partly hidden by the steel girder that formed the side of the bridge, maybe two and a half feet high.  I have a great fear of heights, and although we weren’t more than 10 feet above the water, probably by instinct I leaned forward to prop myself angst the girder and be able to look down without fearing that I would fall in.  I learned later that others who watched me, especially Judi, were fearful I was going to fall in, or maybe even jump in.)  I in fact felt quite secure. 

After several seconds I started crying, spasmodic sobbing that forced its way out of me.  I felt self-conscious, assumed people were watching, but worked to let myself feel and do whatever my body wanted.

January 6, 2004 (resumed)

I let the crying come.  Two hands touched my back; I realized later it was Judi and Mom.  I kept looking at the ashes and around the park.  I mumbled half-sentences like, “Why didn’t?…”  I started walking slowly further across the bridge and through the snow into the park, paralleling the lake.  50 yards later a scream tore out of me.  I heard Judi call out in concern, but without turning around I waved my hand to indicate I was okay.  I continued plodding and muttering half-sentences, then started looping away from the lake toward another, smaller body of water and then back to the bridge.  No one said anything as I passed and headed for the cars.

Maxine was with a couple of other people at the cars.  I took her and started walking down a snow-covered path.  For a moment she hesitated, not wanting to walk in the snow, but I asked her to walk with me and she did.  A few steps further Alan hurried up and started to ask a practical question, maybe about dinner, but I waved him off.  We didn’t walk much further, Maxine and I, but I did say that I thought maybe I should to stay in the City that night; I had been thinking about this as I walked to the cars, but I felt embarrassed to say it outright, especially after all the fuss I’d made about wanting to get back to Connecticut.  She agreed it was a good idea.

What I think happened was not that I mourned my father’s death but the loss of a father-son relationship.  I felt sorry for myself; I felt sorry for him.  I imagined the boy Dad was with hopes and fantasies about what kind of adult he would be, and I saw how much, in my eyes, he had failed.  Mostly I was focusing on his failure to me as a father—his inability to be patient, to watch me be different from what he wanted, to love me regardless, together with the need to hold me to standards that had helped him survive as a child and adult.  I saw the deprived child he was and the deprived child I felt I was—I speak about emotional deprivation here, though scarce money certainly exacerbated both our situations.

For some decades, since realizing how angry I was at the way my father treated me as a child, I had felt that to find peace I would have to forgive him.  But maybe not.  On that day I didn’t forgive me, but I did get past the rage, or at least anger, that I always nurtured if any sympathy for him ever started to rear up in me.  His abuse was too momentous and horrible.  Oh, I had often been pleasant with him when I was an adult, even sometimes admired something he did.  But I could never let him, and more importantly myself, I was now realizing, off the hook.  Now, without consciously forgiving him, I was letting the rage recede, replaced by a deep sadness of what he had never had, what I had never had, and what we had never had together.  These thoughts have been often on my mind in the weeks since that Sunday.

So instead of having Maxine hurry me to a train station where I could catch the next New Haven train, I (and Maxine) joined the others to go to a Chinese restaurant for a late lunch.  Mom treated.  Chinese food was what Dad and Mom had always taken us for when Judi, David and I were children and we had anything to celebrate.  The mood during the meal was fairly light.  We talked about ordering an honorary dish of shrimps and lobster sauce, Dad’s favorite, or of setting an Elijah-like plate for him.

Although I did talk that evening with Maxine about how I was feeling, what was most important to me, intensely reassuring, was just knowing she was there.  Although we had been living together 8 � years, I was still surprised at how emotionally dependent on her I had become.  (I don’t say that disapprovingly; I know it’s a good thing in the right proportions; but it’s always a little surprising and perhaps a little unsettling to re-discover.)

Before leaving for the train the next morning, I made a series of phone calls to find out if the car was still in the lot in Milford, Connecticut, and how snowed in it was.  I was eventually told yes to the first and a lot to the second.  During my various phone calls to Milford I asked if anyone knew a person who would shovel out the car for a price, but no one did.  I joined Maxine to help get Karen, on crutches because of a foot operation, to her doctor across town, and en route I bought a snow shovel.  Eventually I took the train to Milford, found that the car could actually be driven forward with no shoveling, and returned to Madison without incident.