Dogs go on with their doggy life

On the last day I remember my dad being coherent, I told him the story of how when I was very young, and he was taking a nap, I would climb on his bed and put my ear to his heart to hear it beating, and to try in my young way, to make my heartbeat match the rhythm. i reasoned that if i could do this, he and i would live exactly the same amount of time, so we would never have to live without each other. 

He said, "that is so sweet," as if it were a story that didn't involve him, as if he were not connected to it, as if he were hearing it told about someone else. 

I think that is how he was, though, placing himself a few steps back from the rest of a family that was trying to be part oh his life, a few steps back from the rest of the world. He didn't, or couldn't, see himself as a real participant or important member, and thinking of him now, that is the fact that undoes me.

The last thing i asked him before I left that day was if he remembered dancing with me at my wedding. 

"I do," he said. 

I kept pushing, "that was a nice time, right? that's a good memory?" 

He nodded. But he was somewhere else entirely, beginning to slip into the unconscious days that would follow. 

When you grieve the loss of a parent, you are (I am) in some cases grieving the parent you wanted him to be, the parent that could not--due to undiagnosed depression--be present with you most of the time. The parent who shrank back from the world emotionally, even though his physical body was there keeping to itself, reading newspapers and magazines while his daughters literally fought each other for his attention. 

His physical body was there. It was a commanding 6 feet tall. It lumbered up and down the stairs with a sluggish, choppy gait, because his feet had lost their natural arches from standing too many hours behind a pharmacy counter. There was no way not to notice. 

I have let a lot of time go by in this blog, before writing about him again. It has been a month since he died, and there are still images of him as a sick person that cycle on repeat in my head. So it is hard to have any perspective. If someone you love has died at home, you will know the trauma of watching. 

Slowly we unpack our newer lives. My mom goes back to their house. My sister goes back to work. I go back to figuring out my own path forward, knowing that at any moment, it could stop short or go backwards. I work on some freelance, I try to write some poems, though I am not even sure I am a poet anymore. 

I do these days think on Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts," and remember to keep going: 

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

-W.H. Auden