Christmas, 2014

We were driving to the mall
for last-minute Christmas shopping,

small things,
things you could fold into a suitcase,
things that would survive the flight
to Austria.

We had just come off the freeway
when the call came.

My father was dying.
Or maybe already gone.
Someone held the phone
to his ear.

The truth is
I had already said goodbye
two weeks before.
But that had been rehearsal.
This was the real performance.
This was the moment
when a life stopped
being a problem
and became a fact.

I don’t remember what I said.
I’d like to think
I said something true,
something a son should say
at the edge of his father’s life,
something shaped enough
to carry the weight of it.

Probably I didn’t.

I know I said
I love you.

Which was true
and not true.

Or true in the way
these things are true
when love has been damaged so long
it can no longer stand up straight.

I said it because he was dying.
I said it because he was my father.
I said it because a man
should not leave the world
without hearing it once more,
even if the words arrive
fractured,
even if they are carrying
hate, duty, pity, memory,
all braided together.

Then it was over.

That was the whole event.
A voice in a phone.
A car turning toward the mall.
Traffic.
Holiday errands continuing
as if nothing had happened.

And afterward
I grieved at a cold kitchen table
in Austria,

in a country that was not mine,
with snow outside,
and a girl I barely knew
trying to comfort me.

I can still hear her saying
I’m so sorry.

The phrase was small,
ordinary,
almost nothing.

And yet it helped.
Not because it explained anything.
Nothing could explain
how a man I loved
and despised
could suddenly be past all argument.

He was gone.
That was the only clear thing.

And there I was,
far from home,
which no longer had the same meaning anyway,
sitting in winter,
under a foreign sky,
realising that whatever boyhood remained in me
had ended.

Not with wisdom.
Not with forgiveness.
Just with death.

And snow on the ground.