evidence of your last moments may help me once again to touch and hold for a while the permanent reality of your crazy, instant, deadness.
Alive. Snap. Dead.
Love, Dad
Lots of Memos, but Never Again Close
Thursday, April 23,in flight, Portland to Seattle
Dear Peter,
So here I am on an AirWest express flying through the rain from Portland to Seattle. From there I’ll catch the flight to Cleveland for the meeting of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries. Of course I had planned to begin the flight in Seattle. But we’ve still been in Portland dealing with the aftermath of your death. This little extra leg is one of a million things we never expected to be doing, Pete. Because we never expected you to be dead.
It’s raining and we just climbed above a cloud layer. Once upon a century this would have been the realm where we would have expected to encounter you. Our picture of the cosmos is not so simple now. So where are you, Peter?
You have been dead now for eighteen days. For the first time this morning I counted the days. Only eighteen. My God it seems like months. Except often it doesn’t seem at all like you could possibly be dead already. Yesterday was my 66th birthday, as you know. Often in years past, I recognized that when they hit their seventh decade, our friends begin to die more frequently. I don’t need to tell you, Pete, that I never expected you would be dead before me.
My birthday celebration was shadowed as is everything else. The little ones—Hannah, Miles, and usually Chelsey—escape the shadow. Miles had wrapped a present for me, announcing with proud anticipation as he offered it, “It’s a joke, Grandpa!” It was. After two years of my laying teasing claim to it, he presented me with his blanket. When he saw how funny that was for everybody, he immediately took the box back and presented one at a time another half dozen presents, each of which fit his new category of “joke.”
Hannah also presented me with a gift: a card with a noble photo of a bald eagle and a caption reading, “With the recipient’s capacity for vision, fortitude, and character, who needs hair?” Well said, right Pete?
I recalled and then Sarah remembered the joke of our Indian Guide names. Remember, you were Flying Eagle and I, naturally, was Bald Eagle. We made a drum, remember, Pete? Out of a wooden nail keg covered with inner tube rubber on top, with a neat eagle painted on the side. We were both pretty proud of it.
Sarah and Jim gave me a couple of Segovia CDs, because they had played one the other night and we enjoyed it so much. And Mom remembered how we’d once heard Segovia in concert at the University of Missouri while Mom was expecting you.
That’s the way it is, Pete. Reminders of you all over the place. Even National Public Radio last Saturday featured a guy from Todd, NC, talking about Bone Sucking Sauce, the great stuff we brought you from that old general store. You loved it and we loved the way you loved it.
This morning is one of those times when I am really sad. Missing you. Saddened that the promise of your life with us was so abruptly canceled.
I seem to be more sad about you when I am alone. Two rows in front of me are three guys in business suits talking enthusiastically about some venture in fifty million dollar increments. It is so easy for me to see the trio become a quartet with your presence. From the back, one of the guys even looks like you. But from the front, you’ll be glad to know that I think you were a lot better looking. I probably would never have said that out loud to you when you were alive, unless I would have qualified it by saying I’d forgotten to clean my glasses.
Geez Pete, when I think of never seeing your face again—Damn!
I wish I could have observed you in your working world. As we get more and more testimony about your way of working, I see more clearly how delighted people were to find a person such as yourself at a senior v-p. level. And I understand why they wanted you at that level. Maybe Mom and I will yet make a pilgrimage to Birmingham sometime before the memory of you there fades. One of the women who wrote of you so warmly also reported that you knew exactly how many days you had been away from Linda and Chelsey and how many days it would be before you went back to Portland and brought them to Birmingham. As you probably know, you only had fifteen days to go when you hit the tree. God, so close. And now, never again close.
Love, Dad
All Sad
Thursday, April 23, in flight, later
Dear Peter,
Fred, the human resources guy from Compass Bank, was so proud to report that he had recruited you twice, once for Bank of America, and again for Compass Bank. He explained how he had told people in Birmingham that you were really happy in Portland with your work, family, and the Northwest and that they would really need to up the ante to get you away. So, as Tim says, they kept throwing more money at you. In light of what happened, Fred has no idea how much he sounds like the serpent in the Garden, or the boa in The Jungle Book: “Trusssssssst me,” and “you will not die.”
But the Garden tells of the inescapable risks of being fully human. And there were risks you and I talked about, Pete, in this opportunity for you to be more fully you. We just never thought about your habitual risk in not buckling your seatbelt, dammit. There is still a lot of anger here, Peter, about you not buckling down for your family responsibilities—like Sarah’s tear-filled rage because your death has shadowed the joy of little Peter’s birth.
The other night, in the middle of the night when visualizations of you are particularly vivid, you looked so sad. A kind of guilty sadness, I thought. God, Peter, we may be really pissed at you for not using the seatbelt, but you know we love you, Pete. We did and we still do. You know we forgive you. We don’t want you to be sad. It hurts again to think of you as sad, just like I suppose it hurts you now to see us so sad. God must be sad for all of us.
Talk with you later, Pete.
Love, Dad
Love Letters from Dad
April 23, SeaTac Airport
Dear Peter,
As you can see (can’t you?) my breakfast croissant has cooled because I have been writing, so absorbed am I in the process of crafting words to deal with this multi-multi-faceted reality of your deadness, Pete. It is apparent that in the times when I am alone with your absence, I’d rather write to you than eat. But this sandwich cost five bucks and its getting cold!
So why do I want so much to write? All day long and in bed too, I am always thinking of what I want to write to you. Perhaps filling this yellow tablet with my not long legible scrawl is a careful or cautious way of releasing some of the frightening pressure from my grief-filled heart. I know God heals the broken hearted but I resist the breaking.
It’s like I used to say about bread in communion: “Notice how the bread resists the breaking.”
Perhaps my writing to you is my way of taking control of my grieving, escaping the breaking, avoiding the awe-filled power of those deep sobs. I know that the tears and the wailing are good for us. I just don’t want the pain that produces them.
Forgive me, Pete, forgive us for the ways we try to escape your death. We love you so, and we still do not want your irrevocable, unending, never again with us, absence.
Love,
