on burying fathers
I.
Going home to my father’s funeral was as much about place, as it was about the people I met.
When people die, their secrets come to light. I tunneled out of the Rocky Mountains into Piedmont tobacco fields, full-grown. It was just the beginning of May, not yet intolerable and still cool enough for jeans at night—in the quiet corner of a large restaurant, where no one knows you or even cares that you didn’t recognize your old man in his best suit, that you had to check his name in the guest book to be sure. And nobody knows that you’re a love child, twice orphaned by the men who helped to bring you into this world and who kept you safe for a while.
At twenty I buried the man I knew to be my only father, and later fled Carolina to attend graduate school and get some distance from my family—the whole of what I knew to be my family then. Got as far as Colorado. Two thousand miles was enough ground left behind.
At twenty-eight I was told about the existence of my biological father. We met twice. Once in a restaurant and once in a bakery. Then suddenly, he was gone and I couldn’t even remember the last time we had spoken. I don’t know why, but I assumed we would have more time. I failed to learn this from the first father’s death.
So I returned to the South to bury another father and in turn, unearth myself as his secret. There was no time to think about the logic of this or to be afraid. To go was the right thing to do; and I had been invited by my only blood sibling. The first time he and I speak to one another, I sit quietly on the stairs at my job, new brother’s voice beaming out of my cell phone. Two thousand miles, three feet of stairwell and thirty-three years between our voices, separated by the length of a secret.
Spring in Carolina signals a frenzy of activity. Twister-ripped tree trunks lay flat like toothpicks, mapping new gashes in the forest floor. Jonquil tides flood Pamlico ditches. Catawba rhododendrons spark Blue Ridge hillsides. Restrictor-plate daydreams ripple in the early heat of stock car tune-ups. Outer Banks’ motel rooms get the yearly once-over in preparation for the Northern scourge. And under-the-radar bastard child comes home to roost by the lazy Yadkin.
There’s nothing like trial by fire. Nothing like standing up in front of a bunch of people you don’t know and saying, “Yeah, it’s me. I’m the one.”
When parents die, they can let some secrets go. Yeah, it’s me. I’m the one. I’ve come back to this place to let you know there’s more to this story, and some of you aren’t going to be comfortable with certain parts of it; but I’m just the messenger. Don’t shoot the messenger.
After the wake, we drove the dark, switching roads to the empty little ranch house on the last acre of the family plot—half brother, his expectant wife, and me, the just-met-you-two-hours-ago half sister. We sat around the kitchen table sifting through papers and drinking juice, looking at each other. At ease, but nonetheless dumbfounded to be sitting around the table drinking juice and looking at each other—without the old man. Well hell, what do you do in a situation like that? My welcome-to-the-family sister-in-law went to bed, and my hello-I’m-your-brother and I sat facing each other on our old man’s stale couch, talking, as midnight semis barrel up the steep asphalt ribbon edging the once meticulous lawn. You can’t prepare for that sort of conversation.
So we told what we knew to each other, blood brother and blood sister. The house smelled of cigarettes and overripe berries. The hydrangea so thick you could barely pass through the kitchen door. The fish was dying. A pair of old ladies had adopted the dog. The cache of guns carefully removed one by one, a shotgun or two left to discharge. The living room exploded with memorial blooms. The Confederate flag taken down from the porch and dutifully stored by the last Confederate daughter.
Place. There is the place in his heart. A hidden wound carried in my natural father’s chest for thirty-three years. And the place in his breast pocket where I put a picture. The place under his palms where my brother put a baseball. And the place forever unanswered. There is the afternoon tarmac and the interstate and the passenger seat, and the funeral home and the first pew amongst the family, the basement of relics my brother would later muck out alone, and the yard and the highway out front. There is the place always in the back of his mind. There is the hole in his heart of hearts. And there is the hole in the ground.
Bear Creek, he was put in the ground at a place called “Bear Creek.” Lots of people were there. For the most part, I knew none of them. They certainly did not know me. The only person who knew of me, the only person I’d honestly met before, was the deceased. And you can’t ask him for any assistance.
There is the place by his side. There is the cutout form of the other woman, of the original woman, of the first woman of the true woman of the woman long gone of the woman forever present. There is the place of unknowing and the place of arrival.
There is the after-hours viewing room and the unshaken face of an uncle. The astonished graveside handshake of the last aunt. There is the muddy riverbank and the winding path through aging Moravian acres. The inside of his locker at work. The drawer in the nightstand that held my letter. The fellowship hall and the space between the biscuits and the deviled eggs. There is the jam-packed living room of post-burial relativity and the front seat of abandoned red pickup. There is the empty bed and the closet of coats. The airport security line, and the arms of a brother who is unsure but open. There is the space in his arms.
There is the place where voices meet. The space where sound means something, and you respond. You believe. Then there is the place of faith. But is there room? There is the place in your heart. And is there time? Time requires truth.
There is the little enough space in my double helix; and the cavernous space of doubt. There is the place of proof. How did we come to this place? Where will it lead us? This is the place of questions. And in a laboratory refrigerator somewhere, there is the vial of blood that is a percentage of an answer, a last confession. There is the space of his final breath.
II.
I miss him; but even this is muddled. I think I had always missed him, even when I had no knowledge of him, and that he had always missed me. We had spent a lifetime missing each other, maybe at stoplights or Christmas shopping at the mall. I believe that he was always thinking of me, and that I always felt as if I was being watched. He was watching me, from afar. My father of origin. Not the aged man who raised me, who knew I was not his daughter and loved me anyway—the one who tried to protect me from the mother, from the boys, from the Klan, from The Truth. He never let on, not once. He was guarding me from the consequences of the secret. They all were. But I am the consequence of the secret. I am Panny’s silver box, and the second father’s death was the shiny key washed up on the shore.
When you bury your father, you assume that you don’t have to do that one particularly painful thing again. You have survived that life experience and on your list of utterly dreadful tasks, you can cross off “Bury your father.” This tends to apply only when there is but one paternal branch on your family tree. Sometimes those details are obscured, hidden behind the hearts of those around you. Imagine finding out that the dad or mom you’ve had all of your life, is not the “real” source of your body. There’s this other person out there in the world, and that’s the person inside of you, in your blood and bone, in your future disease and in your present character; and this complete stranger is really your father, your mother.
So when you flip through those late night channels and you see those staged reunions of parent and child, don’t regard it as someone else’s story. It could be yours too; you just don’t know it yet. Until it happens to you.
My birth father had not been a very well man. Since finding out about him I’d always feared that he would die and nobody would call me. His family wouldn’t call me because they wouldn’t know to call me. Because I had always been and was still, a secret. I was not an accident or a surrendered moment of escaping, but a well-planned, precisely executed, clandestine tryst in the back room of a rural beauty salon. The objective? A baby girl for a woman who desperately needed to have a child in her future. I was a gift. A gift that he could give, but never get close to.
He managed to tell a few people—including his ex-girlfriend and his son. He died on a Sunday night. Monday morning the ex pointed the son to a book on the shelf with my name and an ancient address inside. A private investigator was called in on an old favor and by nightfall they had a current work number. The next morning as I checked the messages on the office speakerphone, a familiar drawl filled the room, stirring immediate unease. That’s a voice from home, a Southern voice. But I don’t recognize the person. What did he say his last name was? Mmmm, not good. What a pallid feeling; you already know. Bad news.
The Truth is not for everyone. Not all of us want The Truth, or have the endurance to live with it. It’s a real job to reconfigure your life story. Not to mention doing this while maintaining your regular life-before-The-Truth. His death was attended by The Truth. Most didn’t recognize it; this was the first they’d ever heard of it. They didn’t quite know what to do with it. So they just smiled and asked about it later, after The Truth had gone.
So you return home to live with your new truth. You ask a few questions in hopes of creating more truth. Others want some different truth, or more of another truth to toss and turn with at night. Some of us like to fume over The Truth, fanning the embers of old truths in hopes that they will phoenix into The Real Truth. Meanwhile you exist with these new truths, and begin to discard the no-longer-valid truths—the un-truths.
There is the blastoff, and the thrusting into orbit. There is the slingshot around the moon. There is the fiery re-entry and the solitary falling back to Earth. There is the floating in the sea in the little capsule, and the relief of having made it back alive. Someone picks you up from the airport. You go back to your house and you sleep in your own bed. You answer phone calls. You eat. A bit of time passes.
And you begin again, leaving for work every day with the notes for your new story in hand. Then you find that you don’t know how much to tell to the new people that you meet; and you don’t know how much of the new, revised story you need to tell to the people that you already know. Suddenly, hiding your truth becomes an issue, and that’s what got us here in the first place.
III.
On burying fathers, I can tell you this—it’s never the same. What retains its constancy is the lesson. People die. Then something has to be done with the body (hopefully there’s a body), and where I’m from we say goodbye to the body. But the dead linger. They linger in our homes, in our places of retreat. They haunt our beaches and roam the woods. The dead do not leave us.
And while all of that is true, the dead do leave us. They punch a hole in the veil and slip across, taking with them all promise, shading our hearts in loss. They take their leave of us. They leave us behind, bobbing in the wake of death’s great barge. Don’t take the dead personally. Unless it’s your own death, then death has nothing to do with you. The dead have nothing to do with us. Death is not a matter of me or my, but of place and station.
The Truth is that my being required specific characters to be aligned just so. There had to be a father to bear and a father to rear. And a mother to take it all. There had to be love amongst them and complicity. The child had to be a girl. Then she had to make it, out of the womb, out of the house, out of the juvenile mosh, out of the spitcan settlement and into the light.
Along the way to the light, she finds herself, often in difficult and frightening situations. She finds herself in tire swings and empty downtown Dumpsters, in hostile cafeterias and darkened gymnasiums. She finds herself in ballpark bleachers, in hooky tree stands and afterschool Camaros, crazy-eyed with fists balled growling “bring it” to a fleeing crowd. She finds herself over and over again in the pockets of teenage boys. And one day, she finds herself two hundred miles away from the very old man, eighteen and helpless to save him.
Then she finds herself in doubt, in need, in prescription. She finds herself in refusal. It’s a long way to the light.
Without warning, she finds herself searching for sandwich generation answers at nineteen. She finds herself in her car every weekend and holiday in the nursing home parking lot, annihilated. This goes on for many months while she loses herself in a cloud, far from home.
Then she finds herself burying her eighty-four-year-old father, and she is lost on the way to the light.
Each human truth has its purpose. And truth, unrestrained, has its consequence. My parents had no idea who would emerge; they only knew, somewhere deep inside, that this was what had to be done. They certainly were not thinking of my burying fathers.
I didn’t even know about the light when the first old man died. He took so long to die that there was no light to even speak of. No one told me about the light, and I didn’t see any light.
Not for a long while.
You bury your father assuming that you won’t have to do it a second time. This is the way of the world: don’t think that finished means done. Beware the lesson learned; but more so study what you failed to learn. That is the knowledge most useful when those lessons come back to bite you in the ass. Again.
I could not see the light because it was within me and I was busy slaying all those lessons. Fathers age. Fathers waste away while you blossom into the world without them.
Fathers pass on. Fathers leave you behind.
So where do all these fathers go? They dissolve deep into our bloodstream, burrowing into our cells. They permeate our tissue and become memory. We take each other on in the leaving, to embody what is no longer. Part of our being passes with them and part of them stays on within us, helping to slay the lessons and rekindle the light.
We are our fathers. I am the-one-who-raised and the-one-who-stayed-away; and they are the daughter, the-one-in-the-middle. It doesn’t really matter what the roles were or how much time we spent together. It is still a long way to the light.
And once more she finds herself at the open box, looking down into the face of a second, lifeless body called “Father.” You can’t prepare for that sort of conversation. So you say nothing really. You look for the light and in its absence, you find the lessons again. Fathers age while you grow up. Fathers cross the veil, taking part of you with them. There’s little time and infinite truth. The light is within you. The father is in you.
On burying fathers, I’ll tell you this—you may do it again and again. That is the way of the world. Our devotion lies in the meaning. You are the light and the father; and this is the only true place that matters.
This piece was just published in the spring '06 edition of The Fourth River, a literary journal from Chatham College in Pennsylvania.
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