Lists: They Can Keep You Living
My Father and Me. I was being treated with eye drops. My father died soon after this photo was taken.
I have been rereading a text I wrote called THE STORY OF A FAMILY. It recounts childhood memories connected to living in our family home, a frame house with four small bedrooms on the Southside of Chicago.
A paragraph on the first page reads: In a corner by our bookshelves, a dingy red fabric chair finds a stream of western sunlight. My brothers and I would climb the wide arm of that chair and jump off, hugging our bodies, knees to chest, to roll down the carpeted floor of the living room. My father, Dr. Albert Pfordresher, died in that chair on a Sunday morning one June….
A LIST OF CHORES
In retelling that story, I combine what my mother told me about that day with my own observations. I was three at the time, thus writing THE STORY OF A FAMILY a challenge. What did I remember about that day, and all the days after as I grew, guided by one loving parent?
NOW–early this morning, a father, young like my did was, died. He’d been ill for years, fighting a cancer. He has two young sons and a wife with strength to fight for him and their family until his last breath and beyond. In this post, I will call her Jane. When I heard of her husband’s death, I thought of my mother–also widowed with young children, 6, 3 and three months.
BACKSTORY
The morning my father died, he’d been having chest pain, feeling ill. He did not go to church. He sat in the aforementioned red chair and was reading the Chicago Tribune. My mother had a list–things to do that day that kept her going: Bill’s baby formula; the makings of a pie.
This is what I wrote in THE STORY OF A FAMILY–and of course this is also MY STORY, gleaned from what over the years and little by little my mother told me about that day.
In the kitchen, my mother replenishes Bill’s formula. The house is quiet. Though blocks of sunshine fall on the kitchen floor, a chill rides the wind. She shuts up the house windows so he’ll be comfortable. As she works, maybe she is wondering about her two older children who are now at her mother’s for the afternoon. Are they behaving?
Fear hasn’t found her yet, instead strength slowly builds in her. Maybe her willingness to do kitchen chores and not ask my father every five minutes, “How are you feeling?” “Should we call the doctor?” “Should I take you to the hospital?” is the beginning of her amazing strength.
Then after a while, she hears his newspaper crackle and fall. She wipes her hands on her apron and goes into the living room. He is still there, but now slumped over, his head angled against his chest. When she calls to him he doesn’t answer.
She tries to save him, rushes into the kitchen hallway where the phone is, fumbling, calls the doctor, the priest, the fire department asking for an ambulance and a pul motor, which must have been whatever equipment they used in those times for cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
In minutes, the quiet of the house is shattered: Dr. James West pounds up the front steps, moves my father’s body to the floor and gives him mouth to mouth resuscitation. He’s a personal friend, loves my father. Rev. Boyle, who is only two blocks away at our church, appears over Dr. West’s shoulder. He waits, then kneels by my father, blessing his passage. It is soon understood that the ambulance is not needed.
Eventually my mother makes her way back to the kitchen. Bill’s formula has to be finished. There, standing by the stove, her life has taken an irreversible turn.
WE ALL HAVE LISTS
I am thinking today of Jane’s strength, how she knew her husband was going to die, that she would be left to raise her boys, that she would be alone to earn a salary, pay bills, help them with their homework, cheer them at their baseball games, guide them to lead promising and fulfilling lives.
My mother did all of those things and now Jane will too. Though she knew this day would come sooner than some wives and husbands know, she is still caught up in sorrow, while trying to comfort her sons, arrange a funeral, make sure there is some sunshine in their lives, some opening to the advent of happy possibilities.
FINALLY…
Life can sweep us into sun-streaked clouds of happiness or come down on us like a hammer. I think of Jane and I also think of those burned out of their homes. Yes, there are articles in the papers about Thanksgiving meals shared by folks now homeless. They speak of tears of loss and yet gratitude. BUT WE ALL KNOW THEY ARE IN PAIN.
The only cure for death and loss–is accepting life. If you still have it, you must cling to it. And if you cling to it, it’s time to make a list, time to figure out what comes next on that list. In time, everyone who experiences loss will make this the major heading on that list:
GO ON LIVING.
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