Risings

It is Holy Week, and I am thinking of life and death, and my father.  This year, the anniversary of his death falls the week after Easter, but in 2001, April 11 was the Wednesday before.  We held his visitation on Easter Sunday and buried him on Easter Monday.  Four weeks after my mother laid to rest the love of her life, I clutched her arm and walked down the aisle toward mine.  My mother and I stepped forward with steady resolve, our eyes fixated on the crucifix hanging at the front of the church where my husband’s parents were married and where my husband had buried his mother.  One of the first things my husband said to me when I met him was “My mother is dead, you know?”  We were in a thick of dancers in the living room of our good friend Karen—she’s dead now, too—and we had been drinking too much and he kept circling me, teasing, trying to get a reaction.  That was 1999, ten days into the season of Lent.  When he told me about his mother, I stepped back, temporarily off-balance from the weight of his words, but eventually I righted myself and a year later, we were engaged.

When my father learned he had terminal cancer, he stopped watching NASCAR—one of his favorite television pastimes—and tuned into home and garden shows instead.  I took a leave of absence from my life as a doctoral student in Connecticut and traveled home to Illinois to help my mother and siblings care for him.  I knew I couldn’t let him die without my being there.  I’ve always had trouble letting things go without bearing witness to the departure.  When I was a teenager, my parents and I were halfway home from the veterinarian’s office when I demanded that we return so I could hold our old mutt Ginger as the vet’s assistant put her to sleep.  My parents were attempting to spare me the scene of her death, but I owed that dog my presence, a final act of love.  And I needed to see it.  Otherwise, I knew that, for the rest of my life, I would imagine other (im)possibilities: She had suddenly recovered, bolted out of the office, and attempted to make her way home.  I would see her everywhere, in other dog’s faces, in other unlikely places.  I would never stop looking for her.  I had no idea what it would mean to watch my father die—how utterly shattering it would be to watch him leave the world—but I needed to be there.

One afternoon, not long after I arrived home, my father was watching a pair of television hosts renovate a garden shed as I absently flipped through wedding books on the floor of his hospital room.  I wasn’t much for wedding books, or for fairy-tale-dreaming about the “best day of my life,” even without my father dying in the bed next to me.  As I scanned the book, I lighted on a page of pew decorations that struck me as beautiful for their simplicity: white paper cones filled with lily-of-the-valley hanging from bent metal hooks.  “What do you think?” I asked my dad, interrupting the shed construction to show him the page.  He looked down.  “Very nice,” he offered, and I knew then that those paper cones would be hanging from the pews at my wedding.  It was the first and only time, in all the wedding planning, I said to myself, “I have to have this.”

In one of his last parental acts, my father called a buddy who ran a local machine shop and arranged to have the metal hangers made for my decorations.  I bought the paper and the ribbons, and though his fingers were fat with fluids, my father sat in his hospital bed and helped me fold the paper into cones.  Later, after we had buried him, after I was back in Connecticut making final wedding preparations, I reminded my husband that we needed lily-of-the-valley for the cones.  I had to have the lily-of-the-valley, even though it cost a fortune and he had to get up at the crack of dawn on the morning of our wedding to drive to a remote warehouse in northeast Philadelphia to buy them.  Of course he got them.  By the time my mother and I made our way down the aisle, though, our faces were tight and we could not take our eyes from the cross.  I didn’t even notice the pew decorations.  We had only made eight anyway, enough for the first four pews on each side.  We ran out of time.

The night my dad died, we passed the hours and fought off fatigue by singing along to a tape of old Lutheran hymns on a portable stereo my mom had set up in their bedroom.  Somewhere during the first verse of “Abide With Me,” my dad began gasping for breath.  Hours earlier, his last word before he had slipped into a coma, was a question: “Why?”  As the space between his choked breaths lengthened, we fought against the horrific violence of his final moments, our voices rising, desperate:

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;


Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.


Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;


In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

By the time we reached the last verse, he was still.  We sang that song at his funeral, and weeks later, when my mother went to his grave to see the headstone set in place for the first time, the bells on the nearby cemetery chapel began pealing, the wind carrying “Abide With Me” to my mother, standing over my father’s grave.

Sometimes, the difference between a miracle and a coincidence is the thin stem of a musical note or the thread-breadth of a shiny green plant leaf in the shape of a giant tear drop.

The first spring we moved into our house, I noticed a large patch of lily-of-the-valley sprouting in our side yard.  Here in Philadelphia, it grows like a weed, and this year, thanks to a warm winter, it will bloom early, like everything else.  Already the pointed pips are poking through the earth.  Soon the green leaves will follow, then the delicate white upside-down bells hanging from the stem.

Lily-of-the-valley is sometimes referred to as “Mary’s Tears” or “Our Lady’s Tears.”  In Christian legends, the plant springs from the tears of Mary that watered the ground as she wept during the crucifixion.  Other gardeners call it “Ladder-to-Heaven.”

I think about my dad often in this journey, how he would have accepted our birth family without fuss, how he would have cradled my sister and me amid the upheaval in his silent but ever sure way.  I think about meeting a biological father without the ghost of a deceased father hovering over the moment.  Mostly I just miss him, for myself and for my mother.  But I don’t weep for him anymore.  I am out of tears, the ground beneath me long dry.

Yet, still those blessed flowers grow.

Here they are, this Holy Week, already breaking from the earth.

Here I am, eleven years later, so many more lost, so many more found, still climbing the ladder, my feet on the white bells, clanging out the “Eventide” as I clamor toward the sky.