Photo by Abeer Zaki on Unsplash
Three weeks into the lockdown in New York City, at the peak of the pandemic’s daily death toll, my father died at his home in Madison, Wisconsin.
We’re pretty sure it wasn’t from the virus, but he’d been in poor health for years, and at 86 years old, his was the highest of risk groups. On his last day of life, he simply got up from his chair in front of the TV and fell dead.
It was exactly the death he wanted. He dreaded being kept alive by machines, more so than ever in this era of intubations and ventilators. Among his papers was a living will, eight pages long, listing every debilitation under the law where we were instructed to pull the plug. “Please allow me to die if I require spoon feeding,” was one of the instructions. “Damn,” I thought. “I’ll have to put that in my living will.” I didn’t even know you could arrange that. I still don’t.
Like millions across the country, we were not able to organize a funeral for my father. Though he died in the last week of March, I remained on lockdown in New York until mid-April, watching the Cuomo press conferences, waiting for the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths to decline. I landed in Milwaukee just before midnight on May Day. My brother and I greeted each other from opposite ends of the car, and I got into the back seat. No hugs. Not safe. He drove me all the way to the front door of my dad’s empty house, where I was to begin my 14-day quarantine, and settle in for the summer.
Thus began the adventure of clearing out the detritus of thirty years of my father’s life.
I begin by filling heavy-duty trash bags with Dad’s most useless possessions – old yellowed t-shirts, souvenir snow-globes, a beeper from 1999, instamatic cameras, an adding machine with a little paper roll. The shoes are the hardest. For some reason, his shoes seem to carry his spirit, the imprints of his feet. The exact pressure points of gravity he carried in his bones. The way he left them ordered so neatly in an open cabinet next to his bed. The obedient way they seem to be waiting for him to put them on again. It was the shoes that made it real for me, finally. Before I know it, I am curled in a fetal position on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, surrounded by dust and obsolete office equipment.
I don’t know how anything works. Temperatures rise to the 80’s but I can’t figure out how to get the air conditioning on, so I work in the basement where it’s cool and wait for my brother to come over and interpret the hieroglyphics on the Honeywell thermostat. There are light switches that don’t seem to turn anything on. Cords plugged into power-strips that don’t connect anywhere. The whole place feels immense - both full and unbearably empty.
Mysteries crop up. Why did my father keep a 1997 bottle of Chianti from Montepulciano, Italy? What special occasion was he saving it for? What is the story behind the 140 Iraqi dinars with Saddam Hussein’s portrait on them? Why did he buy a bag of slug-killing pellets for the garden only to leave it unopened in the shed until it was covered with cobwebs? Did he have second thoughts about the toxic chemicals? If so, he had no such compunctions about setting three rodent poison stations around the perimeter of the house. These are the kind that people use in New York to kill rats. But there are no rats here. These could only be for the cute little striped chipmunks that skitter and chirp all day through the back yard. If he hated them so much, why did he keep a giant bird feed on the deck to cater to messy house sparrows and starlings, whose dropped seeds kept Chippy and his friends eating like royalty 365 days a year? Could this man, who wrote five books on gardening, not put two and two together?
I pry the eyesore of a bird feeder off the deck, unblocking the impressive view of Lake Mendota. It’s a relief until I notice the sparrows swooping in for a feed, then veering off in confusion, realizing the feeder is gone. I feel like a traitor to his memory.
If you had asked me a year ago if my father was a hoarder, I would have argued no. His house was always neat and tidy, though it was filled with what some people call kitsch, knick-knacks, or worse – “notions.” But they were, for the most part, in good taste. Brightly-colored wood carvings of marine iguanas and blue-footed boobies that he’d picked up on a trip to the Galapagos twenty years ago. Goofy souvenirs collected while writing Wisconsin travel pieces. He was enamored with the lesser known attractions and haunts of the state, which eventually led to him starting his own regional publishing house. The toothpick dispenser from The Cave Of The Mounds stays. Five huge boxes of roadmaps, lodging guides, hiking trail maps, and diner menus all get dragged to the garbage. It’s the kind of stuff that gets outdated in three months. He’d been hanging onto it for decades.
For twelve years, he was the restaurant reviewer for the Madison’s entertainment and culture weekly, Isthmus. People assume he must have been a wonderful cook, or at least had excellent gourmet tastes. But the only food in his kitchen was half-a-dozen Swanson’s frozen entrees, a few cans of Campbell’s soup and a giant canister of powdered whey protein on the counter. He could barely get himself to eat in the last few years, and had grown alarmingly thin. His chronic respiratory illness had degraded his sense of taste and smell. Eating had become a chore.
Readers of his books and articles on gardening assume he must have had a fabulous garden. When we were children, he did, and we were put to work in it regularly, weeding, mulching, filling bushel baskets with zucchinis and green beans. He once picked a cherry tomato and gave it to me, saying “the tomato plant does nothing all day but transform sunlight into sugars. When you bite into it, you are actually tasting the sun.”
But in the last seven years of his life, he could barely get up and down the stairs. He hired a guy to clear away leaves and debris from the yard, and never went out there himself at all. He even stopped planting geraniums in the pots he had always kept out on the deck, because it was too much trouble to water them. As he poured his passion for green and growing things and lovingly prepared food out into the world for people to read, it all drained away from him. In the end, he had none of it left.
There is a limit to how much purging of my father’s things I can do in a day. This is archeology, a test of my emotional capacity for just how many photos I can scan, how many boxes I can pack for the thrift stores, how many pieces of my family’s past I can drag to the trash. In the evening, I help myself to my Dad’s ample liquor cabinet. He was particularly fond of Kentucky bourbon, so I teach myself to make Manhattans and watch sunsets over Lake Mendota from the deck. It could be worse, I tell myself. But I am tasting his loneliness now, the years between the death of his wife and his own death, how they must have stretched out endlessly as he sat, looking at this same sun setting on this same lake.
I give myself the project of getting the garden in shape, scraping 15 years of moss and packed dirt off the cobblestone walk, trimming back sprawling shrubs, planting flowers in the empty patches. I tell myself the work is necessary to get the house ready to be sold, but really, it’s just an excuse to be outside. Having a patch of ground that belongs to me – literally belongs to me is an incredible feeling, and I want to make the most of it, even if it’s only for the summer. I fret over the slow growth of the begonias and curse the chipmunks that dig holes in the flowerbeds. No longer do I wonder why my dad wanted to kill them.
When not in the garden, I’m sorting through shelves and shelves of books. My brother has no problem with me corralling all the 19th Century English literature, so I give him all the natural history. Twenty boxes go to library donation. In a creaky metal file cabinet I find a fat folder containing seemingly every letter I ever wrote that started with “Dear Dad,” with postmarks from dozens of different addresses. I’m ashamed to say that I saved hardly any of his. My perpetual moving to different cities made casualties of the mementos that mark the life of his generation. I can see from the return addresses on the envelopes that I had six different addresses in Minneapolis alone - then three in Boston and two in New York. They go from actual letters to email printouts around 1990. And then, around 2005 is the last one. They just stop. What happened after that? Did he stop archiving them? Did he join the digital culture of ephemeral exchanges that vaporize into the air? Partly yes, but I am eaten inside by the other, deeper knowledge, that we simply stopped writing to each other. Writing became phone calls, as long distance bills disappeared with unlimited mobile data plans. Then phone calls became text messages. I still cannot bring myself to delete his last text message on my phone – a corny joke about pandemic toilet paper hoarding, dated four days before he died. I was frantically trying to manage the work of moving my three classes online and simply never replied to it.
On my last week, the house now mostly cleared out, my brother and I take a roadtrip to scatter my father’s ashes on the lake where he rented a vacation cottage every summer. The ashes are sealed in a kind of oversized, hand-decorated paper envelope. Stuffed inside is a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, about the size and shape of a small pillow. It is surprisingly light. My brother sprinkles half of them into the lake, and I drop the other half, steadying my nerves by muttering a Hindu mantra under my breath that I learned at a yoga retreat. A sudden cold wind whips up from the lake, blowing some of the ashes back onto my jeans. My brother hangs onto the empty envelope, releases a deflating breath, his shoulders dropping. He’s had this package in his apartment since the beginning of April, and I can’t even imagine that. When we get back to the cottage, we burn the envelope in the fire pit out back, taking turns feeding the fire with Maker’s Mark bourbon. Only then do we hug, and it’s the first hug I’ve experienced in two months.
The Hindu mantra was about death; the prayer for it to be as gentle as the plucking of a berry from a twig. I realize then, that if anyone had ever achieved such a death, it was my father. We promise each other to organize a real gathering, with all his dozens of friends, as soon as it’s safe. Then we pour out the dregs of the Maker’s Mark into the licking flames of the fire.
It wasn’t my father’s favorite brand, but we think he would have forgiven us. Like everything else, it was the best we could do.
Rebecca Minnich grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and has an MFA from the creative writing program at City College of New York. There she received the Meyer Cohen Award for Excellence in Literature. Her writing, both fiction and nonfiction has been published in The Coffin Factory, Promethean, Sweet Tree Review, The Woven Tale, Waxing and Waning, POZ, MAMM and Z magazines, among others. She lives today in Brooklyn and teaches Composition, Creative Writing, and Literature at City College of New York. She is author of the Blog, No Life Without Books. (Twitter handle: @rminnich7)