Part II - My Father's House

Follows Part I

Aspérges me hyssópo, et mundábor:
lavábis me, et super nivem dealbábor.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean:
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

I said, “I should be beaten.” I was kneeling on the floor in the basement of my parents' house as I said it to Abby.

That incident took place half way through the morning. I had already seen my father's body, and had passed out at the sight of him, sinking to the floor with sweet, sickening ease in his bedroom's doorway. I remember hearing my mother say "Oh Lord," and feeling my aunt lean me up against the wall. Somebody put a glass of orange juice in my hand. I drank it and went to his bedside, aware of the white noise of the inflatable mattress and of one of the tinny portable radios that he always had with him when working in the yard or his workshop.

I ran my hand along his forehead and felt the death. This line has to be delivered without apology; there was still heat under his skin, but it was a remnant from hours before. He was warm. But he was no longer radiating warmth. It registered as death immediately upon touch.

I kissed his forehead, his cheeks, making the last offering that I could as a son. I'd kissed him living and dead. I knew the rest of mourning flowed downhill from this.

I kept control; further weeping wouldn't lift the grief. My father dying for months had been heartbreaking. When he was dead, it was painful. I thought that pain could be endured, loathed, teeth gritted and forced through. My mother would need me at one point, or my sister would have to let something spill over. I needed to be in one piece.

I at least wanted to get through the day whatever way my body told me to(the day was visceral, I didn't have enough sense left for thinking), and at least my muscles and skin were controlled. Tight. Only a few weeks before, out for a much needed staggering drunk through University haunts with Travis, hearing him tell me "You've been a soldier through all this, keeping it in. A grunt, you've been a grief grunt. But what are you going to do when he dies?"

I couldn't answer at the time, but knew that my final response would have something to do with hate. Grief felt - feels - like a frozen brick wall in my way, impassable and worth hating simply for existing, and worth hating even more simply because the wall doesn't care. I hated everything in that house that morning with the exception of the people within it, and I hated that I could neither help them in the way they needed or change the fact that my father lay in the back bedroom, silent and growing cold.

“I should be beaten.”

So. Back to that. The fact that I was kneeling in the basement was incidental, it wasn't prayer or accident. I hadn't passed out for a second time. I think I had crawled over a couch to get to a cupboard to liberate a case of club soda for the assembled mourners. But there didn't seem to be much of a reason to get up once I was down, it wouldn't help anything except maybe take care of anybody who was thirsty. And I didn't care.

Abby came downstairs, picked up on whatever black space I was in at the time and asked "What do you need, right now?"

I love her deeply and still had to force my response. But I was also knew that I didn't need tact around my wife, I couldn't hide anything from her if I wished. So when I said "I should be beaten," it was the most honest response I could manage.

She was quiet for a few seconds. I went further and said "I feel like I deserve to be beaten," which isn't quite accurate. I wasn’t sure if I deserved it exactly, but was convinced that it would be the most reasonable and just course of action.

I spoke to her slowly, in a newly acquired I am not a crazy, self-destructive person tone of voice. “I know this is nuts,” I told her, “but I think that I should be beaten. It’s not going to happen and it wouldn’t help. And I know it’s insane. I’m coping. I'm fine. I love you. But you asked. I just think I deserve to be beaten right now.”

I wasn't up to concealing anything that was on my mind in such a horrible circumstance. If anyone stood in the way of anything I had to do that morning, I would fly into pieces onto them.

Abby must have known it, and either understood everything or simply forgave me as she said "Michael, you don't...you couldn't...deserve to be beaten."

She took my hand and we talked about what was needed, what the day would hold and how to face what was next. She went back upstairs alone, reluctantly, while I waited for my legs to work again.

Ámplius lava me ab iniquitáte mea:
et a peccáto meo munda me.
Quóniam iniquitátem meam ego cognósco:
et peccátum meum contra me est semper.

Wash me throughly from mine iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.

I waited in the basement for an impossibly long five minutes or so, needing the time to at least imagine the scenario that would offer some relief (for want of a better term) from the dread of that morning.

The scenario I was longing for went like this; Three or four guys would come into the basement and tie me to something. They would be impassive but not entirely unsympathetic, and would begin the beating after speaking to me(I knew that the would have to say something by way of explanation, but could not for the life of me imagine what).

Once the beating began I could grit my teeth – at least I thought that I could – at the start of the attack. When the pain really kicked in, I was sure that the reasons for the beating would be self evident. That much physical pain with an identifiable source would at least be something immediate and identifiable rather than the dull and numb ache around the loss of my father. Physical pain is finite; grief dwarfs it. My father was beaten by his cancer. If I was beaten by the imaginary three or four guys, we’d be even. It might match his slow descent and suffering; I owed him that much at least. If I could suffer my body enough, the deeper pain could lift.

Years of denying a Christ complex were immediately blown out of the water.

It was crazy. I knew it. I didn’t care. I craved it. If life was insane and the opportunity had presented itself, I would have welcomed it.

I wasn’t, however, crazy enough to expect it. I knew that a goon squad to thrash me wasn't forthcoming. You can have this meltdown on your own time, the rational brain told me. Today, listen to your mother, respect your father’s body until it’s cold, carry any weight that falls in your path. You have years to mourn and only hours to endure what has to be done about his body.

I got up and went upstairs. The day went on.

But the idea that there was a further price to be paid stayed with me for hours. When I wasn't taking slow deep breaths and steeling myself to when his body left us forever, something inside me replayed thousands of snippets of all-purpose stuff to hurt me.

Memories of laughing over a rare pitcher of beer with my father at a favourite pub.

Speaking to him at his retirement party, and choking up for not knowing how to thank him for giving me room and board for years simply out of love.

The silence over the phone at the first time he couldn't force himself to stay awake while speaking to me.

The feel - knowledge - awareness - of his shoulders becoming thinner and fragile, memorized through dozens of hugs as the disease progressed.

The phrase "You're a good son," delivered by him as a shorthand for 'goodbye' over the years, hearing it for weeks by his bedside near the end.

And - of all things - a Bruce Springsteen song. From the Nebraska album. Black and white acoustic guitar and a mournful harmonica, my father's house standing like a beacon, cold and alone, "...shining `cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned."