Today is Father’s Day. This afternoon I will dig a grave for my father. When I have made the hole sufficiently wide and deep, I will pour in his ashes. A willow tree will go over them. Willows have always been my favorite symbol of death. They remind me of cool lakes with sweet breezes and a soft place to rest. If there’s anything I wish for my father it’s a soft a place to rest.
It’s hard to find words to describe my father. I don’t know if I would call him brave. I’ve always thought bravery was courage in the face of fear, and I don’t know if my father was ever afraid. He swam with giant mantra rays and sailed around the world. Once he was held against his will in a foreign hospital. Knowing his ship would leave port soon, Dad climbed out the fourth floor window before hailing a cab back to the dock. Maybe he was afraid then, but I doubt it.
I only half believed my father’s stories about gangsters and working the Brooklyn waterfront. Like him, they seemed too big to be real. It wasn’t until my sixth grade teacher told the same stories that I changed my mind. Against all the odds that teacher was a long lost friend of my uncle’s. He’d been there for the shady goons with guns and mysterious shipments.
It’s no surprise to me that I write Noir. Moral gangsters, beautiful women, and high stakes cons made up my bedtime stories. But Dad loved science and science fiction too. I knew Asimov’s laws of robotics before I knew the Our Father. I’ll never forget the night we spent on the phone separated by miles but drawn together by our mutual love of monster movies. We watched Mega Python vs. Gatoroid in rapt silence, talking about how great it was during commercials. Godzilla, Cloverfield, Night of the Lepus, the list went on and on. Dad was always up for another movie.
My brother could not come to our father’s death bed. My mother came in and out, doing more than most divorced wives would, probably for my sake. The burden of his death fell squarely on my shoulders. No one will ever know what happened on Thanksgiving. Did he eat too many carbs on our national holiday of gluttony or did he take his pills a second time by mistake in the midst of celebration? The result was the same, a deep sleep that became a coma that turned into brain damage. It took a week with no brain activity for the doctors to agree he’d moved on, and another week for his strong body, always a work horse despite its flaws, to stop living.
By then I was filled with rage at so many things, I couldn’t appreciate the task of cleaning out his home. Sentimentally gone, I brought garbage bags and intended to stuff them full. Instead, in one closet, on the highest shelf I found a box sealed tightly with packaging tape. It wasn’t much to look at, a label proclaimed it held 500 pages of copy paper, beneath it, in Dad’s very tight handwriting a second label read ‘Rachel’s first book’. I’d told him at least a dozen times that it’s a manuscript until it’s published, but Dad didn’t believe it. It was a book to him, and the first printing of a book is special.
So was Dad.