A Series of Bungee Cords: Part Seven
by Fiona Landers
I can’t decide whether or not death gives the dying the ultimate privacy or no privacy at all. I think it’s both. You get to have some eternal secrets that your family gets to try to figure out. Like, for example, my dad had a bowl full of keys on his dresser and I have no idea if this is just another one of his parting pranks. Like, “I gotta a bowl fulla keys that lead to nowhere! Have fun pondering this for the rest of your life, Kiddo!” He pranked us so many times during hospice. Sometimes it was a straight-up prank. How he wanted a padded toilet seat so he’d be more comfortable when taking his seat at the porcelain throne (to poop, you guys). So my brother-in-law, Kevin, installed one in Dad’s personal bathroom and one in the main bathroom. It was a prank because once they were installed, my dad said, “I gotta stick around long enough to use that thing at least once.” And once is exactly how many times he used it. While WE, on the other hand, used the padded toilet seats a whole BUNCH. It was very funny because the padded toilet seats were too small for the existing toilets so we looked like a bunch of big dumb adults who just decided to go through potty-training on a lil’ soft BIG KID potty seat all over again. Great prank.
We are his heirs, Lily and I. We get his stuff. His earthly possessions. Most of them. The shoes are the hardest, my husband says. He’s right. And the handwriting. I found his shoes under the bed, ones that were from 1994. The white Nikes he got, along with other Nikes (the orange ones), because he was on The George Carlin Show — my first introduction to the wonderful world of industry swag. I sold girl scout cookies to everyone on that show, including George Carlin, who also signed a script thanking me for being his friend (!!!). Sam Simon, Alex Rocco and my dad all worked on that show. They didn’t really keep in touch after but they all died from the same cancer within months of each other and I don’t know what the fuck this life is about. I found the white ones, he still had them. They were yellowed and the rubber actually held up pretty well. He’d do that, he’d space it out. He wouldn’t wear one pair of shoes over and over again, he had many shoes for many years that sort of held it together — kind of like a series of bungee cords! Eh? Just tying that in there — like a shoelace! I’ll stop.
Holding his shoes, that’s hard. Holding his hand was a privilege when he was lying in bed or lying on the futon on the porch or when we’d stop at the first landing of Lily’s stairs to rest in a lawn chair she’d put there for him. I held his hand as he looked down to the ground or into my eyes. Whenever he’d look at me, I’d think, “Remember this, don’t forget this,” as if the memories would be stolen from me when he died. I remember the specifics, I remember the details of many moments in his last twenty-two days. The twenty-two days we spent with him. His eyes, his hands, his smile. He was the most beautiful dying man, “Still handsome,” Arlene said, as she kissed his forehead. It was sad. It was beautiful. He was living out his last days. With us. It was us, “Our soul-cluster,” he’d say. We reunited and we’ll reunite again in a little while, he thinks so. I hope so.
But back to the privacy. He wanted peace, he wanted to only see who he wanted to see. Joe and Arlene. Mike and Kathy. Stanley. Mom. Family. And call his girlfriend, Keira, on the phone to “Keep the streak alive,” which they both did. The visits had to be short because he was “Weak as a kitten.” They had to know how weak he was, how long visits would take a toll. We knew it, we learned. We had watched the hospice video thanks to Lily. We knew some of the signs. You can’t rush a dying person, respect their energy levels. They need to conserve their energy or else they are uncomfortable. They may become apathetic. Dad showed signs of that. He only cared about certain things. Sometimes he talked about our childhoods. How he was so proud of Lily and me in different ways. He was proud of me as a songwriter, quoting some of my lyrics, saying I was a “great little composer,” and proud of my high school softball career. We were his life’s work, I don’t take that lightly. When I eventually get good career news, I’m gonna wish that I could call him. If I’m ever pregnant, I’m gonna wish that I could call him. I didn’t call him often, and I regret that. But he made it pretty difficult. And I knew, instinctively to break our ties a little, because he was gonna be gone. He knew it. He didn’t really like us all grown up. He liked us little. Because then he was still in charge. He never wanted us to grow up. I can understand that. He sat at the table that used to be our dining room table to write his will. There he was at the head of his table again. It was right. It was part of his story, part of his return the bosom of his family, his soul-cluster. He left me all of his guitars. Lily got the one she wanted, and he left the rest to me. I don’t take that lightly. He didn’t leave them to anyone else, he left them to me. He’d sing my songs while riding his bike through Central Park to go perform in Perfect Crime, a horrible show which he hated doing but needed the money. I always think of that image, him riding through the park singing my songs a little too loudly.
We have his stuff. His earthly possessions. The shoes, the hard drives, the clothes, the hats, the little boxes, the Native American jewelry and blankets, the school pictures, all of the pictures, the notebooks. That’s what I mean. No privacy anymore. We get to read any scribbled thought. Any journal entry. We get to know secrets, what he thought about mom, us, the world. How we weren’t on his list of reasons to live. How he needed to make a list of reasons to live. How seeing us grow up more with kids of our own, his potential grandchildren, wasn’t a factor. Maybe it was because he knew he would die before that happened. Maybe that’s why he cried when I told him I was getting married, because he knew this was it. His last party. His youngest daughter grown. It was the end of our little family as he knew it. He knew. He must’ve known. Does he now have no privacy or the ultimate privacy? We’ll keep finding out secrets about him, and some secrets we’ll never know. And some helpful information will be withheld. Dad, Joel thanks you for the banjo but where is the key to the case? Only Dad knows where the key is. Maybe it’s in that fucking bowl of keys. He has the ultimate privacy because no one can physically track him down or call him on the phone. I can imagine what he’d say or I can feel the energy of what his response might be. Or is. If he’s somehow there.
When we scattered his ashes at Thornton Broome beach, where we camped right on the sand as a family when we were all younger, I felt him asking me to throw him farther. “Farther.” I thought I heard. “Farther, Fiona, farther.” My dress got wet because I waded in farther to get him farther. My mother drew a heart with his initials in the sand, and just as she did a wave washed it away. It was perfect. It made sense. We all scattered his ashes, handfuls of him. Lily, Mom and I. We listened to the waves, it was like he was saying thank you. We walked back to the car and sat there a minute with the windows down. Bob Dylan’s ‘Shelter From the Storm’ started playing. Lily started the car. Mom grabbed Lily’s shoulder from the back seat, “Oh my god that’s a whale, don’t go anywhere.” It was a whale. It was so close. It was where we scattered his ashes. It was a goddamn WHALE. Three whales. Two big whales and a baby. Our jaws dropped, we cried, stunned euphoric tears and said things like “OH!” and “HOLY SHIT!” It wasn’t just three whales, then there was a seal. Then there was a dolphin. Then there was another seal. That was the seal that stared straight at us. “Does that one look like Dad?” “Holy shit that seal DOES look like dad.” That fucking seal, the one that looked like Dad, felt like Dad’s energy, stared at us amidst the glittering sea show he had perfectly orchestrated to ‘Shelter from the Storm’, starring three whales, two seals, one dolphin, flocks of seagulls and the whole of the Pacific Ocean. He stared right at us and Lily was right. It was like King Triton in The Little Mermaid blessing Ariel and her new legs, her new life on land with her new gay husband. He was blessing us from the sea and the sea was now his home. His home was everywhere.
