After we returned home to California, we drove up to Oregon to visit my older sister and her family. It was always a treat to visit them; both Lynda and her husband are artists, and their beautiful home reflects that. Plus, their house is built on the side of a steep hill, nestled in a stand of mature West Coast conifers. Staying at their place is like staying at The Swiss Family Robinson’s tree house. Lynda and I share an off-the-wall and very silly sense of humor, too, so we have fun giggling together, which has prompted her husband to dub us “The Pigeon Sisters.”

 

 

Then Richard had a film job on the East Coast, so he took off for New York, where the film company was based, while I stayed home for a few weeks. The film job wasn’t actually in NYC, so there was no point in my coming then. I worked on my current novel in the mornings, worked on a children’s story, too, then went mountain biking in the rugged country west of our home in the afternoons. I hung out with Kathleen and Joe, their son Patrick and their new addition to the family, Bret, and partied with other friends as well. Also in the bird department, I witnessed a hummingbird’s mating dance while I was sitting on the back deck. First I saw a metallic fuchsia glint in one of the manzanita bushes, and I thought that somehow the foil from a chocolate Easter egg had landed there. But then it took off, and I realized that it was a male Anna’s hummingbird. They love the manzanita blossoms, creamy pink bells filled with tasty nectar, and the bushes were blooming right now, so there were lots of hummingbirds around. He flew so high up into the sky, I lost sight of him. But then he came plummeting down like a freaking bullet! I seriously thought he was going to smash into the ground, but at the last minute—at the very, very last nanosecond, really—he pulled out of his dive with a piercing “pip!” And then he did it all over again.

 

Wow! If I were a female hummingbird, I would have been extremely impressed!

 

Soon it was time for me to join Richard in New York, so Kathleen kindly drove me to her and Richard’s aunt and uncle’s place in San Anselmo, and I left from San Francisco. The work in Colorado in the summers, plus the other odd jobs that we had secured here and there combined with our frugality meant that once again, I didn’t have to temp in New York. I just wrote cover copy, which was fun. I did have some interesting experiences temping, as regular readers may remember, and I loved working with Helga at The Salvation Army Foster Parent Program; but she didn’t need me these days, and it was stressful to take unknown jobs from temp agencies, given that I’m a high strung sort of person. We went to the Natural History Museum, which we’ve always enjoyed, took long walks in Central Park, and window-shopped.

 

My parents called one day while we were staying with our friends, and I noticed that my dad’s voice sounded different. He had a cold, he said, and my mother talked to fill in his frequent silences. Amazingly, even though my dad had been a paraplegic for more than thirty-five years, and never once consulted a doctor after he went home from the hospital after his accident, I had never known him to be sick—not even with a cold. Hearing him sound so vulnerable made me terribly sad, so I chattered on about this and that to cover my anxiety. That was the way my family did things. We always pretended that everything was fine.

 

At the end of the conversation, my dad told me he loved me, in a pointed way that was different from any other time he had told me this. And it pierced me to the bone. “I love you, too, Dad,” I told him, then plunged ahead into more chit-chat so that he wouldn’t know I was about to cry.

 

That night, I had a dream about him. Always a spiffy dresser, in my dream he was wearing mauve trousers and a pair of mauve patent leather loafers. Interesting. The next night, I had another dream: He was walking. He hadn’t been walking for so long that it was unfamiliar to him, but he was upright and shuffling about nevertheless. Hmmmm, I thought. In the third and final dream, he was very ill, in a back room, and I couldn’t see him because he was so sick. Early that morning, my mom called. “Your father just died,” she told me, sounding bewildered yet attempting the iron self-control she had exhibited her entire life—or at least, as long as I had known her.

 

I found out later that my dad had been suffering from congestive heart failure, which meant that gangrene had eventually settled in his lifeless legs. He didn’t want to amputate, and he didn’t want to go into the hospital. And I think the poor man was simply worn out, dragging the lower half of his body around for decades. His father and all of his sisters lived well into their nineties; my dad was 73. A Christian Scientist, he refused medication even now, including pain meds, and he was dying and in a great deal of pain. Somehow he had gotten hold of a copy of the Hemlock Society’s book about ways to exit this life when the end is inevitable and the process becomes unbearable. And without telling my mother—perhaps because he feared he wouldn’t be able to go through with it if he did, or perhaps because he felt he simply would not be able to handle her grief—he put a plastic bag over his head to end his suffering. My mother walked in to check on him and found him like that, suffocated. I can only imagine what a terrible shock this must have been to her. And because she didn’t want anyone to know, she kept this burdensome secret to herself for years. I think the shock might have been so great that she suffered a stroke. She was never really the same after that.

 

But at the time, I knew nothing of this. I only knew that my dad was gone. Anyone who has lost a parent knows what a profound experience it is; anyone who hasn’t won’t be able to imagine just how profound until it happens—no matter what your relationship to them. I could tell my mom needed someone to be with her as soon as possible, so we checked in with our friends’ travel agent to book a ticket to Kansas City the next day. We tried to get a bereavement discount, but as anyone who’s tried to get one of those knows, we soon learned that this was an urban legend. But the cost didn’t matter as much as getting to my mom, who was all alone in her house, having just lost her husband of 40-some-odd years. I remember walking to the travel agency to pick up Richard’s and my tickets, feeling as if the world around me were light years away. All the sounds of New York were muffled. I walked as if in a trance, everything blurring together.

 

That night, Richard and I flew to Kansas City, skirting a powerful thunderstorm over Indiana on our way. Flashes of lightning illuminated towering canyons of cloud, coloring them apricot and salmon pink, etching the crisp relief of the clouds’ edges that snaked about in restless rhythms. It was surreal.

 

Everything was surreal. And it was going to take some time before things got back to normal. Whatever that is.