What I Always Knew

You hear the stories.  One spouse dies, and in very little time the second follows.  In fact, there was a column in the New York Times just this summer about “Broken Heart Syndrome” and the real stress that loss puts on the survivor’s heart.

My friend Marie told me that her father died in the mid 1960s and was buried with a full Catholic mass, dirges, crepe draping, the works.  Just a week or two later her mother died.  Marie went to the priest and wept.  “I can’t go through all that sadness again!”  But in the interim Vatican II had changed the liturgy, and funerals had become a celebration of the deceased’s life.  The second funeral was brightness and light, lifting the mourners’ spirits.

As a single, middle-aged woman, I have been fascinated with the idea that a person might love another so deeply as to simply die after a loss.  Imagine being so cherished, so vital to another.  I thought it was beyond my ken.

And then my father stopped eating.  And a few days later he died, seven weeks to the day after my mother died.

My parents, star-crossed lovers?  I hardly thought so.  Sure, they’d been married over 57 years.  Of course through caring for four children, numerous cats, birds, rodents and fish, they must have bonded.  But I could not have predicted that life would take the course it has.

My father was not a macho-man.  We rarely watched sports on tv.  There were no souped up cars in our driveway.  As an artist, he appreciated good form and design.  Our friends’ homes were done up in Sears’ best colonial reproductions.  We had a Scandanavian Design teak dining table, and modular living room furniture from a Hyde Park store named Form.

But Dad took care of all of us.  He travelled a great distance every day to do his work designing the interiors of grocery stores, offices and banks.  He struggled every summer to bring a bit of color to our shady backyard, eventually giving in to the lack of light and re-imagining it as a lush shade garden.  He fed the birds, and the inevitable squirrels, and created an intimate pond with goldfish to be enjoyed through the dining room window.

In many, many ways, he brought beauty to our home.

I never questioned that my parents loved each other.  At the same time, I don’t remember ever witnessing any public displays of affection from them beyond a pecked kiss and cheery “love you!”

But I guess I didn’t get it.  They shared a common mission in life, to make the world a better place.  As artists, a beautiful place.  As social activists, a just place.  As congregants, a spiritual place.  As parents, a safe and happy place.  They pursued these goals throughout their 57 years together, creating, protesting, praising and disciplining. 

Their bond stretched from mind to mind, from heart to heart.

When my mother’s health challenges began, Dad was there to get her to the hospital, to clean the house, to pay the bills.  When Dad’s clarity faded, Mom did the driving, took over the budget, made sure they were fed.

And then in the space of just a few weeks, life changed.  I just read a quote – “Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope – a slight change, and all patterns alter.”  My mother fell and broke her leg, setting off a snowballing series of events that culminated with her death seven weeks later.  

Dad was devastated at her loss.  Initially he tried to keep going.  Though stuck in a nursing home, he ate, and he went to physical therapy, and he tried to work up some hope.  But the ache was too deep and too raw.

Just after Thanksgiving I visited and reminded him that his birthday was a week away.  He told me “it will be my birthday, and I will die.”  Startled at his directness, I asked if that was really what he wanted.  Yes, he said, it is.  And he began to refuse his meals.

So here I am, on my father’s birthday, November 30. Yesterday, seven weeks to the day after my mother died, my father took his last breath and escaped the endless pain of his broken heart.  A brilliant rosy pink sunset filled the window beyond his bed as I sat with him for the last time.

And now I know what it means to be vital and cherished.  Turns out I’ve known for a very long time.  All my life, in fact.