Winter is one of the birthday seasons in my family. Among those birthdays, my late father’s comes February 20 and then mine, March 6th. Growing up, I marveled about how both he and I were Pisces, when we seemed so different in our temperaments. Like many men of his era, Bert J. Lillian equated vulnerability in a man with weakness. As I grow older, I see that perhaps the ways in which I am forthcoming are most important to me because my father hid his sensitivity.

This week, in his honor, I am sharing an excerpt about him from my memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief.  He died in May 2001, just over four months after my son Seth, his only grandson, died.  In this account, I am writing about taking a trip from LA, where I was living then, to WA State to see my dad for the first time since we’d gathered for Seth’s funeral.

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The Small Gestures I Remember Him By

Each night when my father returned from work,
he climbed the steps of our split-level house
headed for his bedroom where he emptied
the chewing gum and coins from his suit pants’
pockets onto the top of his highboy dresser,
white handkerchief, neatly folded, too.
I heard the sound of the metal on wood
between words of their conversation, my mother
and father behind the closed door of their bedroom.
It was good the way they reunited, the way he came
downstairs in chinos and a tee shirt, his lightly
starched white shirt saved to wear one more day,
his pants and suit coat neatly hung on the valet
my mother bought for this purpose.
Then to the kitchen, where he spread a dish towel
horizontally across the front of his pants
and tucked the top of it into his belt.
I can still see the suntan on his left arm,
the one that during his long commute
rested on the rolled down window of his mustard
colored Chevy. And then the chopping as he
helped with dinner, the onions, the tomatoes,
the way he always asked, “What else?”

In mid-April, when the mountain passes along Interstate 5 in California and Oregon are finally clear of ice and snow, I pick out new tires for a Toyota Tercel I have bought from friends, and I drive to Seattle. My plan is to leave a car at my parents’ house so when I come to the Northwest to write, I will no longer have to rent or borrow a car. I want to spend more and more time in the house Seth designed, in the landscape he had planned to return to after Kristen graduated, near the kayak he’d built, the hammock he brought for us to relax in, and the beach he launched from. I am soothed by the sense of balance he put in those rooms, a sense he seems to have been born with, that brings contemplation and activity together into time meaningfully spent.

 Most of all, this visit, I want to see my father. My mother told me he could no longer remain upright, even in a chair. He leans badly to the left, she says, and sitting, grows tired very quickly. Weak as he’s become, though, he isn’t talking about endings.

“We’ve already made our wishes known about not being revived in a medical emergency,” my mother says, bravely. But that document doesn’t cover the decision she is facing now about communicating to my father, who isn’t talking about his death, that she is preparing for the end.

My mother’s angst absorbs me. She and my father have been married since they were 18. She is doing what they agreed they would do for one another, whoever needed it first: provide a home even through terminal illness. She has had doorways enlarged to accommodate his wheelchair and bought matching hospital beds so he can lie comfortably and adjust the bed for help getting out of it, and so she can sleep next to him, as she has for 57 years. She’s hired aides for during the daytime, but keeps their evenings just for them. When it became difficult to help him in the bathroom and in and out of bed, she hired additional aides until his bedtime and then to arrive first thing in the morning. Only a year ago, my dad was staying up later than she was to watch the eleven o’clock news as he always had. When I visited and sat with him, I thought of when I was in college and he called after the late news Eastern Standard Time. My time zone was two hours behind his, and he wanted to check out the student unrest he’d witnessed on the air.

“What is going on there?” he asked. I’d look out my window and give him first-hand accounts. While he’d seen video of students throwing rocks, I was seeing police with billy clubs breaking the first-floor windows of old homes divided into college apartments and dragging students to the street.

Eleven years later, he asked another version of this question when I told my parents Jim and I were separating. They loved Jim, who they had known since I’d met him at sixteen. They were afraid for Emily and Seth, then four and six. They didn’t think I knew what I was doing.

“What is going on?” My father asked in phone calls as I struggled to re-establish my life.

I couldn’t explain that I’d married a young man he and my mother approved of, who I met when I was young, because that was how I could leave home with their blessings. I couldn’t explain the marriage had turned out to be a way to delay exploring who I was. I couldn’t explain that having children made me realize that to raise them to be who they were, I had to be willing to be who I was.

I assured him that Jim and I had worked out a solid joint custody situation. He wanted to know what I would do to support myself.

“I’m going to graduate school to be a poet, Dad. I’m going to write poems.”

“But what are you going to do?” he asked again.

“I’m going to write poems,” I said again.

“What are you going to do?” he repeated as if I hadn’t given him an answer.

“I’m a teacher, Dad. I’ll also keep teaching,” I felt him relax, 3,000 miles from where I held the phone.

But even when I didn’t explain myself, he never stopped being there for me. When my parents came to visit after I’d moved into a 1913 house with no closets on the first floor, my father took me shopping for a hallstand saying I needed a place to hang my hat. For years, I hung a grey felt fedora I took to wearing on the hook above my children’s quilted winter parkas, red for Seth, powder blue for Emily.

Now, three days after I loaded the powder blue Tercel with my laptop, luggage and books, mid-afternoon, I pull into my parents’ Seattle-area driveway in mid-afternoon sunlight.

My dad sits propped upright in his wheelchair stuffed with pillows. He has a feeding tube now and has lost more weight. The past year, even with his swallowing failing him, he still loved to eat. But he couldn’t get enough nutrition down and we worried. He told us not to, saying he was merely back to his Navy weight.

As soon as I kiss him hello, his new aide begins wheeling him toward the door to see the car he’s worried about me driving for days. With a quick wave to my mother, I follow.

“How much did you pay for it?” my father asks in the softest voice I’d ever heard him use. Parkinson’s disease has drastically reduced the strength of his vocal cords.

“Twelve hundred dollars, ” I tell him, wishing he were standing next to me and kicking the tires.

“Let’s go for a ride, ” he says.

I am not surprised at his request to find out for himself how the car runs, and it makes me happy to show him what a buy I’ve gotten. The son of Eastern European immigrants who worked hard to achieve their American dream, he usually wants everything he owns to be new–houses, furniture, cars. But when I received a summer internship that required driving to the Goethels Bridge tolls collection unit office in Elizabeth, New Jersey, he proudly bought me a used car–and he loved the black and white Rambler I headed out in every morning as much as I did. As I economized in making my first homes and bought used furniture like he had been raised with, he shared his memories of growing up with immigrants and first-generation Americans, of boiled chickens every Friday night, of wearing knickers and not being allowed to have the long pants he longed for until he was fourteen, of having to call his siblings Brother and Sister rather than by their names. Once when he and my mother still lived in the suburbs of New York City, and I came East to visit friends on the city’s lower East Side, he picked me up at the cramped, walk-up apartment like ones he’d left behind as a youth. I saw uncharacteristic fondness in his eyes as we walked to where he’d parked. He seemed happy to be back where so many of his relatives had first lived upon entering the country.

While my mother puts together a late lunch, my dad’s aide slides him into the front passenger seat of the Tercel and takes a seat behind him, where she can extend her arm to keep him upright as I drive. Through the passenger side door, I snap his seat belt into place, and walk around the car to take my seat behind the wheel. As we drive the blocks near his house, I get up enough speed to shift from first to second and third at least once. My dad isn’t saying much, and I imagine he is remembering the first cars he’d driven, especially the old standard transmission Pontiac he’d bought when I was just born and he was finishing four years of college in two on the GI bill. I’d been surprised to learn that usually strait-laced, my dad had routinely played poker at the veterans’ Diesel Housing Unit for gas money so he could commute ten miles to the University of Richmond, where he was not only a student but also a teaching assistant.

In less than five minutes in the Tercel, my dad is fatigued and asks that we pull back into his driveway. His aide helps him into the wheel chair. He puts his right hand to the back of his head as if smoothing his short-clipped hair. “It’s a good car,” he tells me. I follow as the aide wheels him inside and helps him back to bed.

I am worried that my dad will not be alive on the day that would have been Seth’s wedding date, the date when I plan to give everyone the picture my husband Kurt took at Gold Lake, CO, where we spread Seth’s ashes on the site where he would have said wedding vows. I long to talk with my father about what happened, the magic we saw that morning in the sky as clouds parted and formed the shape of two playful orcas, an animal that Seth painted onto the kayak he built as a high schooler. I’ve brought a framed 8″ by 10″ print of the picture to present to my parents now.

“How peaceful,” my mother says when I show it to her, even before I tell her where it was taken. When I do, she tells me to take the picture into the bedroom for my dad to see right now. As he holds it, I sit by his bedside, telling him the story of the sky that day. Without comment on the story or how much we all miss Seth or how sad he is for me, he points to where he wants the picture, a spot directly in his view, as he lies on his bed, unable to turn by himself.

I remember my cousins telling me that at Seth’s funeral, my dad whispered, “It should have been me.” His response now about where to put the picture holds everything I need.