Kind of a Why Question

Anyone who knows my family well knows that this weekend was a difficult one. Friday marked the two-year yahrzeit, or commemoration, of Don Hiller's passing by the Hebrew calendar. Yesterday was my parents' anniversary, and of course, today was Father's Day. A perfect storm of memory, sentiment, and emotion, and somehow, still, here we are, unscathed if not a little drained.

I was told after my father passed (you see? I still, still cannot write the other word, can't even say it most days) that I'd only be able to imagine him sick for quite some time. That was true. I had dreams in which my dad was totally emaciated, ravaged by cancer, unable to speak to me: which was precisely how the last few days of his life were. The six or so months--from diagnosis to our last goodbye--make me nauseated just thinking about them. Even minor moments of respite, like the one afternoon the Baptists came to the hospital room to hold our hands tight and pray with us, or the time my dad's long-time coiffeur, Tony, came to the room to give my dad a proper shave and a haircut--make me ache. But the last days. The last days were the worst, as anyone who's ever lost anyone to cancer, or any other illness knows. You pray that the hell will end, and you find you're praying for just one more day, so that maybe he can find the strength to utter just one last word to make it okay to say goodbye.

About ten days before my dad died, when he had already been suffering from dementia for a couple of weeks but before his speech was totally gone, I was sitting next to him one afternoon. I'd long given up bringing him chocolate milkshakes or anything else we thought would help him gain weight (pancreatic cancer--why should it be capitalized?--robs one of the appetite). He'd woken from a nap and asked me to find a piece of paper and a pen. I grabbed whatever was close by: and he struggled to push the pen along, staring in disbelief at his own hands. I still have the piece of paper--illegible words in cursive, save for one: problem. I asked my dad if I might write down what he wanted to say.

He wanted to write a poem, he said.

This was my dad, who hadn't written a poem since junior high. Who had worked in communications by day and who taught business accounting at RIT one night a week for thirty years. I gladly scribed his words:

The question is,
Where do the homeless sleep?

Kind of a why question.

If the home people have a place to sleep,
Where do the homeless sleep?

We accept homelessness,
And glance over it. We
as this community
Have everything: we
don't lack for a thing.

What is everybody else doing?

Dad, you sound like the Dalai Lama.

That's right. I am the Dalai Lama.
Look at how I'm being taken care of.
I am the high priest. And I am.
Stuart, Me, Aaron, all kohanim*.
We do not get ill.
We are protected.

Do you mean to say that anyone who is not
of kohanim will get sick because they are
not protected?

You're right. Take that last line out.

When the snow falls,
Who will wither?

We watch the balloon.
Wither will it go?

It will float again.
It will float again.


When he was finished speaking, dad gently glided back into a sleep state. I remember feeling disoriented; my dad had spoken a poem about homelessness and high priests, and I had no idea what to do with it. I typed it out at home that night, and put it away. Until tonight.

Luckily, when I dream or think about my dad now, he's as vibrant and handsome as ever, his perfect smile and rosy cheeks, his scratchy, award-winning moustache and sparkly, dark eyes smiling too. I've been catching myself making his corny jokes. I also catch myself looking at my daughter the way he looked at me. God, to realize so late the unfathomable proportion his love for all of us. Only one memory of his incapacity is totally clear to me today, and it will stay with me forever. It was his last day. He was finally at home with hospice care, and we were all saying our goodbyes. He somehow found the strength to hold my face with both of his hands, and said, very faintly, smiling, I can't wait. I knew what he meant.

I'd gotten pregnant about a month after the diagnosis; when I excitedly told my father, he remarked that I didn't look pregnant--and he knew a pregnant woman when he saw one. A week later, I lost that baby. I think my dad's last words to me was an affirmation that we'd conceive again and he'd be with us, somehow, to enjoy our baby. And I believe, very strongly, that he is with us every day, watching our Devi. I only have to catch her laughing at something I can't see from the changing table to know it.

And so: as always, Dad was right. The balloon, as he prophecied, floated again with my niece Nora's, and then Devi's births. I was reminded of that image when we recently walked to support the Crohns and Colitis Foundation; it was a beautiful affair that was kicked off with music and ended with a barbeque. We walked in memory and in honor of a friend who'd lost his own battle with cancer. And as we left the parking lot, I watched two balloons float from a child's hand into the pinkish, dusky sky. And I looked at my baby, and at my husband, and I knew that my dad was with us.

There's so much I want to say about that poem. That poem. Was my dad concerned about the homeless and was wrestling with his guilt about being more comfortable in a hospital bed as a dying man then they could on the streets? Given the kind of man my father was, absolutely. That poem, to me, speaks volumes about my father, and yet there's so much more to say about the man he was. Perhaps this paragraph is superfluous, but this is memoir. I need to get this out.

Heath's first father's day. We couldn't have asked for a more sweet, delicious baby. I know that daddy was the first to kiss her, before we ever did, and that I've been given an incredible gift.