Tender man and gentle boy

I don’t know how we live through grief, I really don’t. One of these days, maybe even today, I’ll get a picture of my dad posted. I’ve got one of him when he was a boy, and I swear, you never saw a gentler looking kid. The look on his face is sheer kindness. The other one in this room of mine is a blow up of one of those square black and whites with scalloped edges. It’s framed over my bookshelf. The garage of our old house is in the background, my dad’s shirt is hanging over the clothesline and he’s bending under it, or maybe under my weight. I’m about three years old and my body’s slung over his back and my head’s laying on his, and my chubby fist is beneath his chin. I’m wearing a dress with puffy sleeves and he’s got on his work pants that always hung low on his hips, and a wife beater undershirt, and he’s pointing at something off in the distance and I’m looking where he points.


It was just a favorite picture before he died but after my daughter blew it up for me the Christmas after, and all the minutest details were revealed (the clothes pole in the background, the cyclone fence, the vines growing up the side of the garage, the kitten on the narrow sidewalk beneath our feet) and that finger pointing — mainly that — it grew into something more. He’s pointing. I’m looking. That whole way-shower thing. Someone who might tell you to do exactly what you want to do. He was like that.

But what do you want to do? What do you want?

Of course, that’s not what starts the grief on a night when your dad’s the furthest thing from your mind and it opens its jaws like a shark and bites off one of your limbs, not swallowing you but leaving you feeling like you’ll drown. And then like every happiness is still touched with bittersweetness. And you just want to say “this is what grief looks like,” and you don’t know why or what you’re saying, or what you look like.

I don’t understand my grief. Can’t say why I feel it. Don’t mind when it comes really. Don’t mind when it’s gone either.

It’s just that when it comes it feels so big and broad, as if it’s totally about my dad and more total than that, and like there’s nothing more total than that. Than death.

I didn’t think of him when I wrote about Poets for Peace this morning. Didn’t think, “Dad was still alive then.” He’s gone almost three years but I didn’t think of that when it came to mind – that it was before Dad died. I was being my usual self. Irritated over a small thing. Or so I thought.

Later in the day I retrieved one of the books I bought that night from the friend I borrowed it to – Mary. I lent it to her after her dad died. It’s called “Early Morning.” Kim Stafford wrote it after his father William died. I didn’t have it this morning so I’d pulled out the book of poetry, “All Wars Have Two Losers.” I opened it. Under the heading Editor’s Note I read:

“In editing this unusual book, I have chosen in many instances to represent my father’s unpublished writings exactly as he penned it in the early morning, alone with his thoughts. The language is sometimes very compact, the thought line intuitive, and the effect both intimate and challenging. The poems are represented as revised and published them, and most of the interviews he had a chance to review. Some of the Daily Writings, however, were never revised, and they live here with you in their native form. I invite you to read these as they were written: attentive, deliberate, in a spirit of welcome as thoughts come forth.”

Was that it? Was that both what it was that night all those years ago when I was moved to feel so lucky to be there? Where the poets read for peace and Kim read his grief? Was it the heart of a son still mourning his father? Saying the words, “My father” as if he was still alive? That tender heart of his? Did it fill me then like a prescience of the broken heart of grief and of the child, so innocent in it, and so ripped open?

So that this morning I did not know that tonight I would be awash with grief again?