Much Is Taken, Much Abides
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Dad closed the heavy Norton anthology and slid it onto the table in front of him, before picking up his wine glass and leaning back against the house and looking at me in the candlelight. It drove Mum crazy when he leaned back on the chair’s rear legs like that. She was always afraid he’d either fall or break the chair, maybe both.
I could hear the late-summer crickets chirping in the deep darkness and thought once again of how early sunset came these days, as the world rushed towards Labor Day and the fall. Dad and I were on the back porch in Marion, candles burning down, the napkins of the rest of the family crumpled on the table. Mum and Hilary had gone inside a while ago, and Dad had pulled the old Norton out of the front room bookshelf to read. He loved Tennyson and so do I. I was going back to my senior year in college next week, and I had almost chosen to write my thesis this upcoming year on Tennyson. Ultimately I’d chosen to write about motherhood and poetry in the lives and work of three twentieth-century poets, but Dad and I had talked a lot about Tennyson as I made that decision. He’d read me Crossing the Bar (the poem he’d always told us he wanted read at his funeral and which his own father had also adored) and Ulysses more times than I can count, and others, too: he loved High Flight and had recently re-read the Inferno for fun and wanted to talk constantly about the incredible imagery of light and dark in Paradise Lost. “Read” is not really accurate, actually, since he recited long parts of these poems by heart.
As I grew up and got married and had children of my own, Dad and I kept talking, about life and the world and poetry, too. I didn’t really understand the meaning of those Tennyson poems, or, perhaps, of those candlelit evenings where we sat in the dusk with poetry and late summer rising around us, until the fall of 2017. My husband Matt’s father died in late September of that year and two months and three days later my father died, too. Matt’s dad’s death was quick but expected; he’d been battling a variety of health issues stemming from a successful heart transplant in 2002 for years. Dad’s death was sudden and shocking; he died of a presumed heart attack three days after hosting Thanksgiving for 30, after a run and before he was coming over to our house for dinner.
Dad’s December funeral was surreal until I heard the familiar words read by one of my family’s oldest friends,, Liz. She stood on the podium and began to read.
“Sunset and evening bell, and one clear call for me,,” I looked up from my front-row seat and felt as though I was floating in the rafters, maybe above the driftwood cross that hung from the ceiling, watching myself.
Then I could hear my father’s voice, which felt as much a part of me as my own heartbeat. “But such a tide as moving seems asleep,” Dad recited Tennyson’s words by heart.
Liz stepped down from the pulpit and returned to her seat. The silence in the church was heavy, punctuated by sniffling and rustling. I heard someone sob quietly in the back of the room. The last time I’d been in this church with Dad was just over 17 years ago, when he walked me down the aisle towards the man who would become my husband a few minutes later.
***
Days passed in a haze. I’ve always found the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas to be a blur, but this year was different. Life was a standstill and also moving fast. My son Whit’s school has a tradition in which each student is require to choose a poem to memorize and recite in the fall. Each English class chooses a winner, who moves onto the “finals,” and then there are two school-wide winners.
I was so distracted I’d completely forgotten about this assignment, until one day during dinner Whit told me chose Crossing the Bar. These months had been a huge transition for him, as well: his sister had moved out of the house to go to boarding school a few weeks before his father’s father died and now my dad was gone too. It made me dizzy when I thought too hard about all the changes that had happened in his life in the last few months, but most of the time his good nature and humor was steadfast. I have often described him as the “sparkle in our family” and he is.
“Can you film me saying the poem? I want to practice it.” Whit stood up from the dinner table.
My iphone shook slightly as I took a video of him reciting the lines I’d heard over and over again like a chorus for much of my adult life. Again, Dad’s voice filled my head. “I hope to see my pilot face to face when I have crost the bar.” Like my father, Whit knew the poem by heart. I listened to the rhythms I knew so well. Words that evoked the sea, hard work, and long voyages. Words that brought back, for just a moment, my father and my husband’s father and my grandparents. Words that defined and healed our broken family.
***
Days flew and crawled by. Our family gathered for Christmas Eve dinner. My mother had asked me to give a toast before we poked at our take-out Chinese food and tried to make a celebration in the midst of our suffocating sadness. Matt’s mother joined us for dinner, and my head swam when I considered the collective loss that sat around that dark wood table in that room we’d been having dinner in for 20 years. She had also asked Matt to sit in Dad’s seat, which I know was almost as challenging for him as making the toast was for me.
I began with the Tennyson line that had run through my head almost every day since Dad died. “Though much is taken,” I said, “much abides.” I held my teenage daughter’s hand in my right and my mother’s in my left. “Much has been taken from us all this autumn,” I stopped talking to swallow, and to tamp down the tears that threatened my voice, and took a deep breath. “But what abides is sitting around this table, and I know John and Dad would want us to remember that.”
I looked up at my mother-in-law, Marti, sitting across the candlelit table to the right of my husband, still incongruous in my father’s seat. I looked left to notice that my mother was staring glassily at the candles on the table. Dad had died less than a month ago. The loss in the room was palpable, so big I wondered how those of us standing here, Matt, me, our two teenage children, my mother, and my mother-in-law would steer around or through it.
Crossing the Bar may have been the poem we all knew Dad wanted read at his funeral, but it’s Ulysses that I think of all the time now. The morning of Dad’s funeral, Matt and I had walked to the yacht club at the end of our street, site of our wedding reception and more sails, dinners, and drinks with Dad than I can possibly count. As we stood on the quiet dock, watching a muted sunrise over the harbor that my father had adored, it was lines from Ulysses that rose in my mind: ““Come, my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world … for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset…. to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” I stood there on the end of the dock next to Matt in the dawn quiet, on the same spot where I’d stood only ten days earlier with Dad. Is he beyond the sunset now? I hoped so.
At the reception after Dad’s funeral, at the same yacht club, one of his lifelong sailing friends had struck the cannon during ceremonial colors in his honor. As the mourners who had gathered with us stood silent, this friend said, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” before striking the cannon. My arms erupted with goosebumps since I’d had those particular lines in mind all day. We hadn’t discussed what he was going to say. I guess I’m not the only person who thinks of Tennyson when I think of Dad.
Now, almost nine months after Dad’s death, it’s Tennyson’s phrase that “though much is taken, much abides” that I think of most often.
What has been taken? A great deal. Two of the three most important men in my life, my biggest champion and fan, the person whose opinion I sought before all others, my certainty that a day will pass smoothly, my confidence in the safety and enduring-ness of those I love most.
What abides? My children, now young adults, growing faster than I can believe and in whose existence itself I see reminders of both my father and my father-in-law. Our mothers, who inspire with their resilience and forward momentum. My sister and sister-in-law, with whom I share sorrowful anniversaries and deep life experiences. And Matt, who’s been by my side through it all. More things abide, too: my work, which I love. Poetry, where this all began, which reminds me of my father. The sky, whose colors roll on, mute, implacable, everlasting, and moving. And this beautiful world, full of heartbreak and beauty, this life for which I have a new and profound appreciation. I never knew what Tennyson meant until I did. And now I really, really know it.
Much is taken. Much abides.
