Threnody

"We bury you, as grain in a field, and you will spring forth in another land."

The package of oatmeal cookies at the grocery store that suddenly and unexpectedly catches my eye and brings me to tears; the phrases and songs remembered, flowing out of the mouths of my children, phrases and songs singular to you; the touch of the cylinder shaped, striped, sofa pillow, so innocent, which elicits a vision of you, weary and worn by the burden of your physical decline; you, not bitter or resentful, without complaint, resting your head while we run, dance, and circle around your tired body; the memory of your voice speaking my name; your hand, weathered and aged, tenderly held in my own in those final days of your life with us; the man that you were, simple, unassuming, witty, kind, a man worthy of imitation: You come to me in my dreams. I feel your presence. I feel your peace. How thin the veil which separates us from one another.

Threnody 

Scott Cairns

The dream is recurrent, and yes

the dream can leave me weeping,

waking with a start, confused,

and pressing my wet face hard

into the pillow.  That is to say

the dream is very bitter.

The scenes are various, the gist

unchanging: my father returns,
and we all are at once elated

that his death was apparently

an error, that he had simply

been away, a visit to the shore.

Then, increasingly, I grow

uneasy about how deeply

he has changed.  He is both frail

and distracted (or it could be

that he withholds some matter

habiting his mind), and none of us

dares speak, neither of his death nor

of his sudden, startling return.

We share other confusions as well:

He has arrived in the camper truck

he drove when I was a boy, but my wife

and children are also here to greet him,

even my son, whom he has never met.

Often, in the dream, I am the one

who first suspects he cannot stay.

I am the one who sees but cannot say

his visit will be brief.  And just

as I suspected, as I feared, I wake.

Thank you to Scott Cairns for sharing this unpublished poem and offering me the privilege to post it here. The following was written two years ago, posted two days before my father died:

While your father is dying, you rearrange the furniture in his living room, pushing his familiar blue La-Z-Boy recliner from its prominent position and replacing it with a white-sheeted hospital bed. You express your gratitude to a compassionate nursing home staff and return your father to the home in which he has lived for over forty-five years. Your husband bears the bulk of your father's weight as he helps him from the car to the piece of furniture from which he will never move again. His homecoming is more subdued than the time before, marked by an atmosphere of solemnity. There are no "get well wishes" offered, no encouragement to eat more in order to get stronger, no talk of therapy, for this is not what you have been called to do. Your sole purpose is to tenderly pamper your father like a mother cares for her infant. You place cold cloths upon his feverish head, rub lotion on his dry flesh, hold his hand and remain constantly near to calm any fears that he is alone, unwanted, unloved. You become intimate strangers with hospice nurses with names like Teresa and Pam, for you know they will be the first to console you when your father's final hour on this earth can no longer be delayed.

You open the door of your parent's home and discover a mustached man donning a hat from a local grocery store. He hands you a cardboard box filled with baked chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and bread purchased by a long-time family friend. Unable to hide the tears swelling up in your eyes as you thank this nameless deliverer and utter "How kind," you are overcome again by the generosity of those who love you. Your tears become more frequent, less controlled, manifesting themselves at unexpected times like when you catch a glimpse of your older sister crying in the arms of your mother, when your husband leans down and promises your father that he will see him tomorrow, or when your children kiss their grandfather good-bye. You order a wooden casket crafted and blessed by local Trappist monks and bearing a cross engraved with your father's name, Raymond Edward Swanson. You meet with a funeral director and begin to make arrangements. You pick out a blue sport coat in which to bury your father and have it dry-cleaned. You cling to Christ's words, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

You take advantage of the few hours of rest while at home and in silence and with a cup of coffee, launch into a massive deep cleaning, and try to come to peace. You move furniture off rugs, vacuum, scrub hardwood floors on your hands and knees, the stink of vinegar saturating your fingers and hands. You pry crusted food off of your dining room chairs and pause as you clean the armed chair, your father's chair. You grieve his absence from your family table but remain grateful for all the times he was present. You revel in warm air, flinging wide open windows, delighting in a bird's song. You scramble to the park with your children, bringing home pine cones and ever-green branches. You stop to consider a hearty group of white petaled flowers telling your children the yellow middle is a belly button. Your eldest son tickles it and his siblings laugh. You set your children by your father's side and he smiles. You sing songs taught to you by your own mother and now taught to your children by you, "Love, love, love, that's what it's all about..." Your sister joins in because, of course, she knows it too.

You stare at the cross bearing Christ's broken body hanging on your bedroom wall. You imagine the God-Man with oxygen tubes thrust into His nostrils; plastic rubbing raw the skin on his ears; a catheter hanging limply at His side; cancer noiselessly consuming His flesh from the inside out. You so recently heard Him whimper, "I thirst," and dabbed his mouth with a wet sponge. You truly know that He is the Man of Sorrows, who has borne our griefs and iniquities, and that ultimately it is He who grants rest. 

You continually return to a slightly torn, haphazardly hung copy of St. John Chrysostom's Paschal Homily cemented by a firetruck magnet on your refrigerator: "He that was taken by death has annihilated it! He descended into Hades and took Hades captive! He embittered it when it tasted His flesh...It was embittered, for it was abolished! It was embittered, for it was mocked! It was embittered, for it was purged! It was embittered, for it was despoiled! It was embittered for it was bound in chains! It took a body and, face to face, met God! It took earth and encountered heaven! It took what it saw but crumbled before what it had not seen! 'O death where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?'" And while in four weeks time, on that Feast of Feasts, you will resoundingly cry out, "Christ is Risen!" you now whisper these words and take comfort.

You stand freezing in the basement of a defunct school which now serves as the location of an Orthodox mission. You move forward to receive the bread made by hands you know, bread now mysteriously transformed into something wholly Other. You place the red cloth under your chin and hear the priest speak the words, "The handmaiden of God Elizabeth partakes..." You open wide your mouth like a dying man, like your father, desperate to receive the life-giving nourishment spooned into your mouth by another and say, "Amen." You are anointed with myrrh and return back to your father's side skin fragrant and shining with it. You hold fast to your faith that even in these last moments God is still continuing a good work in the broken body of the man lying at your side. And while you cannot even begin to fathom the depths of this loss so imminent, you cling to the truth that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature"- nothing - "shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."