- After her father died in December, writer Diane Vadino reflects on the strangeness of going from one season of
grief right into another. - The
loss was unique to her family, but the isolation that came with it was soon reflected back at them as the coronavirus pandemic took over the world. - "I would be lying if I said I did not take comfort in this new ubiquity," she writes.
My father died in December, a few hours after watching "The Incredible Dr. Pol" with my mother. "I'm sorry," I whispered to him, in our last moments together. "But you know Mom loves this show."
My mother grew up on a farm and was accustomed to seeing animals in pain, in childbirth, in various stages of living and dying. Dr. Pol — with its "poppin' prolapses, crunchin' castrations, tearin' teats, lurkin' larva and flip'n stitches," according to an official description — connected her with her childhood, which she treasured.
My father grew up in South Philly and would have argued in favor of another show, had he not forgotten how to understand language or images. Other things he had forgotten, after Alzheimer's: my name; the dog's name; my sister's name; my mother's name; his own name; how to walk or talk or dance; where he lived; that he had a mother and brother and sister-in-law, all still alive; the chemical composition of carbon, which had once been his primary object of fascination; that the Philadelphia Eagles had finally won the Super Bowl nearly two years earlier.
I called him that night, three months after his diagnosis, to hear how happy he should have been. "I'm going to give Mommy the phone," he said, and that was that.
My father was born into poverty, with a slash through the space on his birth certificate where his father's name might have been. He fortified his home like a man accustomed to privation. He left behind a full pantry, food in the freezer, a house far from the city he had grown up in, at the edge of the woods. He would have built a moat if he could, to keep out everyone but us.
Once he died, we found him in everything we did. We ate his favorite foods — the buttered orzo and turkey pot pies my mother had bought, hoping, and failing, to coax him into eating toward the end, once he'd started refusing his meals. I printed my resumé with his printer. I lit my room with his lamps.
In the weeks after his death, we muddled through Christmas (leftovers) and New Year's (asleep by 11, on a friend's couch in Washington Heights). In January, my mother spent five nights in an ICU, recovering from surgery delayed by my father's illness. She recovered and I left, with the presumption of the unwitting, to resume my life in California.
For 10 days I went to hamburger pop-ups and dinners with friends; I wore pants with buttons. By the beginning of March, my mother was back at senior yoga and painting class, stopping by the post office, getting huevos rancheros at the neighborhood grill. "Feeling good!" she texted.
It is quite a thing to roll from one season of mourning right into another. It is like going from one party to the next without needing to change your shoes. Eight weeks later, as coronavirus swept through the country and cities began turning inward, I came back to New Jersey to hunker down, to help my mother with groceries and the dog.
The closing-up of the world echoed and amplified how my own life had rolled up a year earlier, when I'd first come home to help her with my father. I had all but moved back during the last few months of my father's life; now, my childhood home revealed itself as my actual home the way that dawn reveals morning: as a truth awaiting illumination.
For now, it's just the two of us. My mother doesn't have grandchildren. She does have my company, and she is enough of a pragmatist to make that trade, for as long as it lasts — June? August? October? — to concern herself with the here and now rather than some slippery, unknown legacy. (At one point, we watched a television ad listing the risk factors for COVID-19: "I have all of them," she said, laughing.)
She takes the dog for a walk to get the mail at the end of the driveway; she does puzzles and makes dinner. She hasn't left our house since I came home, though only under extreme pressure from my sister and me. She's stronger than she was two months ago. Senior yoga is out for now, but her painting class will resume in a few weeks — now held outdoors, with the half-dozen retirees spaced prudently across a field. She has already packed her easel and brushes into her car. She's ready for this long, ever-evolving season of loss to end.
Because I have spent so much time here lately, everything that's happened in the past months — the worldwide grief, the rancorous public debate that seems like a prelude to cataclysm — feels less like some new catastrophe than a continuation of the previous one, a restatement of it.
The loss of my father was experienced uniquely by my family, but the auxiliary losses of the isolation that awaited (or now, forestalls) death were harder to reconcile: the interrupted relationships, the lost opportunities, the seeds left unplanted. Those are now everywhere; they permeate the air that surrounds us, and I would be lying if I said I did not take comfort in this new ubiquity. All the clocks, at last, are stopped.
Throughout his illness, and in particular during the final three months of his precipitous decline, there was no hope, or expectation, only the surety that the future would hold nothing but loss. Within that, though, was a state of grace, a refuge in which it was possible to cultivate a sense of an endless present. Grace does not relieve us of our duty to act with kindness, to fight against loss, to strengthen our families and our communities. (I think of my mother, beseeching my father to eat just a little of the pot pie.) To do all that, without hope or expectation. What remains is love.Each morning I ask my mother about her plan for the day (meals interrupted by puzzles). We do not talk much about the month or two or six to come. I do not know what my life will be once this is better, how all these broken things might knit themselves together and what shapes they might assume in doing so.
Alzheimer's taught us how to live fully without hope, and how to love without hope, as well — valuable lessons, if hard ones. I do not think much about the future, but I am digging into this present — with my mother and me, and the cat and the dog, and the fruits of all my father's hard labor, trying to keep us safe.
Diane Vadino has written for The Wall Street Journal, McSweeney's, Outside, and other outlets.
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