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06/16/2008
Perfect
I was going to write that the last time I saw my dad was this time last year, over Father's Day. But that's not quite true. The last time I saw him was at the hospital in Albany, unconscious on his back, nose packed with gauze, swollen and unresponsive.
For obvious reasons I prefer to remember the other. That week we went to lunch together; in one of our customary heart-to-hearts he talked about some of the choices my brothers and I had made in our lives and the frustration he'd felt when he'd disagreed. And, to be fair, his surprise and pride in how we'd come through our mistakes — or what he saw, black and white, as mistakes.
Someone who knew him as an equal might characterize him differently, but from my daughterly perspective this was always clear: My dad didn't have opinions. He had facts. Only rarely did he admit he'd been mistaken in his judgment, or that reasonable people might see the same situation differently. On that day he was largely true to form, giving vent to years' worth of bafflement as he talked about my misspent college days; my look-ma-no-hands moves from city to city; my decision to cohabit without benefit of clergy, only belatedly rectified by a lame duck justice of the peace who was, I'm pretty sure, drunk at the time.
But he also, as I said, talked about how proud he was of his kids and how much he loved us. He said so every time I saw him, without hesitation or qualification. It was as close as he ever came to conceding I might have been right — at least eventually — in the various choices I'd made, and the older I got, the closer it came to being close enough.
He would have liked perfection from me, but 36 years into being my father he knew not to expect it. If his pride came more from how I'd managed my mistakes than from a belief that I'd made good choices; if he never reconsidered his own opposition in light of how things turned out; if he couldn't say he might have been wrong now and then — well, I knew he wasn't perfect, either.
What an odd place to find comfort. But then I don't trust perfection. It was a perfect day last August, warm and blue, the heat somehow soft and not blazing, with a few plump-looking white clouds diffusing the harshness of the sun. I'd spent the morning flying around in my customary pre-visitor frenzy, the one that makes Paul crazy, where I'm simultaneously baking a cake, embroidering a fresh new set of hand towels, and musing aloud, "I wonder if it's too late to go rent a pressure washer to do onnnne last quick blast on the deck, because Paul's toothbrush did an okay job, I guess, but..." Knowing my family's rough timetable, I had wound down, excited but secretly disappointed that I hadn't had time to carve a fulsome message of welcome on each and every guest soap in the house — just the ones I'd put in front — and settled in to wait for their arrival. So when the call came I answered breezily, expecting them to say they were an hour or so away.
Hello, Albany. Goodbye, perfection, you deceptive sonofabitch.
The day he died was perfect, with the warm weather breaking into a coolness that made us all exclaim as we left the hospital. The day of his funeral, perfect, too, with the flags of our motorcycle escort waving cheerfully in a pleasant breeze. So perfect days are hard for me. Especially since those are the days motorcyclists come out in force, when the sun shines without glare, cool enough to ride comfortably in leathers, but warm enough that you can feel the promise of more perfect days to come.
On a perfect day, I hear the rumble of a motorcycle engine and my body's first response is panic. I feel myself seize up and have to force my body to relax. I have to quash my fight-or-flight response when a nice man selling raffle tickets invites me to put Charlie up on the motorcycle on offer. I have to haul myself out of a shudder when I see the "Motorcycles Use Caution" signs that stud the highways here during spring and summer, good weather for roadwork, good weather for riding.
When Dad died I realized that it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. And, hey, I must be doing okay, rallying, because as I typed that, I thought, Yeah, probably not the greatest thing that ever happened to him, either.
Let me start that again, with the proper reverence this time. Even at the time of his death, I understood that fact as a kind of blessing. The worst thing that ever happened. Well, if that is the worst, I'm lucky. I had a father who loved me, who was proud of me, who told me so and showed me every chance he got. It seems the price of having had that is the shock of losing it, feeling suddenly chilled on an otherwise perfect, impossibly perfect, blue-skied summer day.
Turns out it was just a mistake. We waited for months for my father's autopsy to be complete. My mother hadn't wanted it, and nor had we children, but some detail in New York law having to do with the duration of his hospital stay required that one be performed. The holdup was the toxicology work, superseded by cases more urgent than his.
The delay didn't bother us because there was nothing we needed to know. When you get right down to it, there's not too much mystery involved when a body is crushed by a motorcycle. There hadn't been a second vehicle involved, anyone else to blame. We knew his death hadn't been caused by foul play, and that there were no unexpected drugs in his system at the time. We suspected, or I did, that there might have been some sort of catastrophic event that caused his accident, a heart attack or a stroke. But there was no point, no comfort to be found in knowing that for sure.
Or so I'd thought. The report came through at last and showed...nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary. No cardiac arrest, no blood clots. No apparent reason for the sudden veer off the road. Simple rider error. Simply a mistake.
I hadn't realized until I heard this how much I'd hoped for a reason. It is one thing to know intellectually that your parents aren't perfect, and that they, just like anyone, make errors both minor and major. It's another thing entirely to experience it so viscerally. I always knew my father to be a safe rider, observant of laws, wary of other drivers, careful of weather and road conditions. But somewhere along the line, somewhere near Schroon Lake, New York, he made a mistake.
It doesn't exactly matter; he's just as irrevocably gone whether it was a heart attack that did it or an unnoticed patch of gravel. But I grieve just a little harder knowing, being forcibly reminded that he wasn't any more perfect, really, than I'd come as an adult to suspect.
We are making mistakes with Charlie left and right. Yesterday was tough. We all feel rotten, mired in different stages of the same cold. I am getting slow, heavy, and anxious, and Charlie is in the grips of a phase of flamboyant defiance. Yesterday I was not as patient as I usually try to be, resorting at times to a loud voice, an angry tone, picking him up physically to make him do what I asked or go where I wanted — all things I work hard not to do.
Today was somewhat easier. Charlie slept until the unbelievable hour of 9:30, an unprecedented luxury. We all had breakfast in bed. We got out of the house and went to the science museum, where Charlie frisked happily among the outdoor water activities until closing time. And when an evening stomach ache made him cry, the awfulness of seeing him in pain carried as a consolation the sweetness of his faith in my ability to help him feel better. His faith in my perfection, despite my many mistakes.
It's an excellence I don't claim, not by any stretch. But he believes in it, and I'm humbled. There's no way to be worthy of that faith. All I can do is try not to shake it too seismically. By the time he's my age — oh, who am I kidding? Long before he's a teenager, he'll have learned his parents' flaws. And made exhaustive lists of same. And posted them to his MySpace, making it impossible for me to secure respectable employment ever again. Thanks a lot, kiddo, in advance.
I hope I can see my faults as clearly as he will, and admit them to him, and apologize for them. But even if I can't, I hope he'll feel my love and my pride in the person he'll have become. I know that firsthand for the invaluable gift it is. Better, I think, than perfection.
