The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—

Chris’s father died just over two weeks ago, and we have all been just where Dickinson means when she describes how “The Feet, mechanical, go round.” Driving back and forth every weekend to see him throughout the holidays and January and on into February. The very long ceremonies, the visitation and funeral and burial and church supper all in a row on a single wearying day. The odd pauses afterwards, like realizing that because we’re late having Laura’s birthday picture made this year that Dad will never see it. The kids getting Valentine cards from Kay with only Dad’s name on the return address label. My very first irreverent thought: that I didn’t know you could mail cards posthumously. Then I got a little freaked out for a second—was it really something Dad had written? But the envelope was addressed by Kay and the handwriting was hers and it was a pink card and the day before Valentine’s and anyhow if Dad had written something intended to be mailed after he died, surely he would have mailed to his son? And so forth.

We are all exhausted still, I think. Well, Chris and I are. Laura has the resilience of any eleven year old, and Will’s just this side of oblivious. They both have other things to deal with anyhow; Will was so thrilled by signing his own Valentine cards that he actually did sign every one of the sixteen he needed for his class. And Laura had a dizzying week of pre-teen romance. The night before Valentine’s Day, she asked me to braid her hair so it would be wavy the next day, and then the next morning she locked herself in her bedroom—unusual for her, at least up until now—and spent forever getting dressed. She came out wearing a pink shirt that looked short-sleeved with a little crocheted red shawl over it. Unfortunately the highs were only supposed to be about forty degrees that day, so I nixed the short sleeves—only to find out when she took off the shawl that it was actually a sleeveless shirt that she’d worn last summer that is now way too short. My. The grumbling after the prohibition. The lengthy negotiations required to find a suitably warm and unrevealing yet charmingly seasonal Valentine shirt. Whew. She came home that night with a stuffed frog prince and a box of chocolates and a blushing confession that she had a boyfriend, but by Thursday they had already broken up because he smart mouthed the teacher. We aren’t exactly sure how long they “liked” each other before Valentine’s, but it certainly seemed short-lived to me and Chris. So naturally she hasn’t been dwelling on the darker side of life, except for the cruelty of parents. And perhaps the impermanence of romance. Dark enough, I suppose.

Whereas I taught the elegy the week before Chris’s dad died, which was perhaps not the smartest lesson plan decision I ever made. I recommend Andrew Hudgins’ “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead” (but you have to scroll down to find the poem), a lovely attempt to reconcile the postmodern doubt bedeviling a son and a father’s vision of the afterlife as something like a cruise. The poem has an appealing lightness to it, probably something the author could afford since the death was hypothetical. I didn’t do as well with the other examples of the genre, and it wasn’t even my father. Chris and both his brothers all spoke at the funeral, something I could never in a thousand years have done. We’ve all known for a year and a half that his father had cancer and would die from it, so we have certainly had time to mull over the prospect, and to have whatever conversations seemed important to us, and to imagine what things would be like afterwards. But I could never have stood up in front of that church and talked about one of my parents. All three sons spoke well. Characteristically, Chris’s few minutes at the lectern ended up being more like an Evening at the Improv, though, as he went over his checkered history with his dad, including being outed as an eight-year old shoplifter and arguments over mopeds. About five hundred people attended the service—Chris’s father was an extremely well-respected man in his church and community—and it seemed like about 499 of them were in his Sunday School class, the seventy-plus crowd. They weren’t real sure about the direction Chris was going at first, I don’t think, but even they had to admit it was pretty funny, and they warmed up quite a bit at the end when the message went from subtle to more overt. Lots of people sent Chris cards, and my work sent a lovely fruit basket, of which only a couple of apples are left now. But there’s such a silence afterwards, “the Hour of Lead.”

Fortunately the clothes still need washing and the bills still need paying (who’d have ever thought this could be fortunate?) and Laura had a dentist appointment and Will had to tell us all about the helicopter his school arranged to have fly in so every kid at the child development center got to sit in the cockpit before it flew away again. In one of the greatest and truest platitudes, life goes on. You can’t stay too preoccupied or sad when your three-year old tells about the way the steering mechanism in the helicopter was a gun, and when your eleven-year old gets all outraged that they would let little kids into the cockpit with guns! Nothing can cheer you up like having to offer reassurances that you are positive that was not a gun, it just looked like one, that you are completely confident that Ms. Pamela and Mr. Jonas would never let the kids near a gun. (But you still mention it casually afterwards, just to be sure.) Chris had to get the newspaper out, I have papers to grade and a final exam to make up, Laura will have some horrible math homework tonight and William will be honor-bound to interfere while she works on it. The feet, mechanical, still go round, until eventually I imagine it becomes somewhat less leaden, no longer just a “Quartz contentment, like a stone.”