In Memoriam

Would you do something for me?

Would you please read this through to the end before you comment?

Because there is something I have to say to you, and it's hard for me to say it. I have been putting it off for several weeks now. And after I've told you what it is, you might say, "Is there anything I can do?"

Well - yes. There is. You can listen to me. You can listen to me tell you about my Dad. Because my Dad died this month. And I miss him so much, and I am grieving, and I wish I never had to tell you this at all, and that when I went to my parents' house this weekend, on what would have been my father's 94th birthday, my Dad had been there in the kitchen, spreading out his arms to me and saying, "It's my daughter!" like he always did, every other birthday of his, ever since I can remember.

Everything's the same as when he was there. His workbench downstairs, with its row upon row of neatly organized tools, some of them so old they can be called antiques. My father was, by profession, something called a "service engineer." To this day, I don't exactly know what he did each morning when he took his Thermos of rather weak, milky coffee and his brown bag lunch containing three pieces of German black bread folded around, respectively, some thinly sliced German salami known as Mettwurst, a thickish schmear of liverwurst, and some pungent, crumbly blue cheese, along with a cored, quartered Golden Delicious apple, put on his cap and jacket, and went off to work, except that he fixed machines.  I tried to get him to explain it a couple of times when I was young, and we both quickly became so frustrated by his inability to articulate the finer points of repairing delicate machinery that, apparently, existed only to manufacture other machinery, and my inability to visualize anything other than big robot machines attempting to give birth to smaller robot machines, with my Dad functioning as midwife, that we decided to go to Morgan Park and climb the rock walls near the jetty instead. I must have been small, indeed, for those walls loom in my memory as simply enormous - pyramid-sized, in fact - and I remember my jubilation when I'd managed to clamber to the top, then boastfully danced up and down, preening to my father's praise and applause.  The last time I visited the park, I looked at that enormous wall and was crestfallen to see that it only comes up to my shoulder now.

But he could fix anything, could my Dad, and this I believed, with all the pure faith of a child. So it was with absolute confidence that I once brought him the dead baby robin that had tumbled too early from its nest in our maple and begged him to, "Fix it, Papa!"  How hard it was for him to persuade me that there were some things even he couldn't do.  I think, at the time, I accepted his decree that we couldn't fix the robin, but secretly believed that it wasn't so much that he couldn't as that, for some mysterious, grownup reason known only to himself, he wouldn't.

Yes, everything is still there in my father's house - everything except my father. The mug he drank from, with its picture of the Esso tiger (unbelievable, that Exxon used to be Esso, and that they gave you things like mugs as an incentive to get you to buy your gasoline from them!); the smooth, thin, rectangular wooden boards, brought from Germany, on which we ate our open-faced sandwiches on a Sunday evening (china plates were for hot meals, and hot meals were served at noon on weekends, with a bite of Abendbrot in the evening); and, of course, my mother - maker and server of innumerable cups of coffee and countless breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and holiday meals over the course of more than six decades.  Sixty-one years is a long time to do anything, but sixty-one years of being married?  My Dad, who liked to shock when the opportunity presented itself, frequently responded to congratulations on their wedding anniversary with a poker-faced, "Ja, ja, fifty years, a very long time.  But you know, war years - those count double, so it's really a hundred." Mom would punch him in the shoulder, sputtering, "Be nice!" and Dad would double over laughing, and so would my brother and I.

I know I am lucky to have my father for as many years as I did.  I know how lucky I am to have had a father who worked hard, who always showed up for me and my family, who was utterly dependable, and who loved my mother, my brother, my own son Caleb, and me with all his heart.  I never had to wonder if there was such a thing as unconditional love - I knew it existed, because I got unconditional love from my Dad. Even if he was in a temper because I'd decided that the huge forsythia in the backyard, the pride of his garden, would make an excellent playhouse if I sneaked the garden shears out of the garage and cut a nice big hole in the side of the bush for a doorway, I never doubted he loved me. He may not have loved what I was doing, but he always loved me.  And after he'd calmed down, and told me to ask next time before I helped myself to the garden shears, he got out a bit of paper, made a couple of sketches, and went off to the lumber yard. The next weekend he started work on a treehouse - only, he claimed, so that I would leave his forsythia alone from now on, dammit!

And I know I am lucky that, when we were told Dad was in congestive heart failure and it was a matter of weeks or days, my Mom was able to care for him at home, with the help of our beautiful, selfless friend, Almaz Kelib (the mother of my son's good friend Noel Yohannes), who is a home health aide. Almaz left her home on the Upper West Side and moved in with my Mom for several weeks to help see to it that Dad was comfortable, well-tended, and never in any pain. I do not know how we would have managed without Almaz, and I can never fully express my gratitude to her. I'm lucky my brother Ron was here over Christmas and had ten precious days to be with our Dad, and I'm lucky that my son Caleb was home from college and got to say goodbye to the man whose eye-apple he's been since the moment he was born.  I'm lucky my husband Jonathan never hesitated a moment to drop everything and drive out to Long Island with me over the course of my father's illness, no matter how tired he was from commuting to work in the city all day. I'm lucky I was given the gift of having time to sit with Dad, talk with him, and tell him, "You have been the best Dad in the world, and if your body isn't working anymore and you need to get out of it, it's okay. You raised us good; your work is done, and we will take it from here. We'll look after Mom, so don't you worry about us. I'm gonna miss you like crazy, but if you have to go, it's all right, and I love you for always."

Until the Twin Towers fell, they were always there, and you had no reason to think they wouldn't always be there.  You might not go down there every single day. But you knew they were there, and whenever you wanted to, you could go, and they would be right there.  And now my Dad is not here anymore, and my towers have fallen again.