Here I am, lost in my father’s house, a ghost among ghosts. His college ring hangs clunky on my finger, a constant reminder, as though I need one. I always told him I wanted the ring when he died, but now I do not want this ring. I do not want this ring or the refrigerator full of Joys bars (not Almond Joys, but Joys, a chocolate-covered jelly candy made in Brooklyn, his favorite). I’m afraid to eat them, frankly.
We got the call last night, late and ringing with an unusual urgency. Something had happened. In the car, Lily babbled until she fell back asleep. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. The ride was silent, and my body felt nothing.
Then Lily, still half asleep, groggily asked which two colors make green and then drifted back before she could hear the answer. Seth and I, for a brief moment, thought green was a primary color, and then we remembered blue and yellow.
Another call. This one with a more official voice. At first, all she said was her name. “Hi, Steph. This is Marge Gordon.” That was enough. A new kind of sobbing. A real, eternal, deep sobbing that I had never known. It felt like driving over rumble strips on the highway but inside.
Nothing. Crying. Some quiet, some loud. The car kept moving.
Ginger wasn’t crying. She did cry, but she wasn’t constantly crying. She remembered poignant details. Ok, I’ll tell you one I’m embarrassed to admit: He died laughing at the kids on that new Steve Harvey show. At least he died laughing, she said. As he lived.
Ginger couldn’t get him out of his chair to give him CPR. She tried, but he was too big, too massive, too dead. The paramedics got him out of the chair. They cut off his jeans, right through his new belt. They took off his shoes and his socks and put them in plastic bags, but where did his shirt go? His glasses, his wallet, and an iphone watch with a Mickey Mouse background lay on the kitchen table. His. But where did his shirt go? Was he wearing his Chai chain, and where is it?
I’m sitting in the chair right now. The chair he died in yesterday. Yesterday right around this time in the evening. We avoided the chair all last night and most of today. We put a heavy box in it, as if to suggest that no one should sit there. Today, I circled the chair. I ran my hand along the leather at the top of the recliner. I gave it a hug, and it did smell like him. It helped. Finally, just now, I made the decision to plop into it, and plopping into it helped me. In a way, it does feel like he’s with me. But he’s not.
In fact, his body isn’t even here, in this town. They took him to Pittsburgh to retrieve usable organs. Not his heart though. And not his kidneys. But maybe some other useful things. He would want that. A doctor his whole adult life, he would most certainly want that. But they took him off to Pittsburgh thanks to some kind of snafu, the kind that shouldn’t happen when you’ve just lost your husband or your dad or anyone, really. Anyway, they say they’ll have him back to Chambersburg by tomorrow morning, at no cost to us.
Where to lay him to rest and how to do it are our decisions to make now. Weird decisions. He was Jewish by upbringing but never observant in my lifetime, as if he were in some long feud with being Jewish, but a quiet feud that he never really shared with me. Maybe all those hours in shul took the wrong toll, maybe something about his Dad passing so early, maybe it was because of his mom, or maybe god let him down. I don’t know that, and I don’t know what he would want now. All I can do is guess. And grieve.
