By Deborah Churchman
Special to The Washington Post
My father died in January 2004, but we didn't get around to burying his remains until March, and the ghost didn't show up until April.
The burial was delayed because my father wanted to be planted at Arlington National Cemetery. Like any true governmental bureaucracy, Arlington moves with all deliberate speed, which means you have to take a number and wait. The ghost showed up later for a different reason entirely.
My father had been in fairly vigorous health most of his life, outliving two wives, until he caught a flu that was going around. He swore he was recovering but he was still coughing when I saw him one Sunday, and he seemed awfully tired. We arranged to go to a movie that Thursday night -- "The Fog of War," about Robert McNamara. My father had interviewed the then-defense secretary several times as senior editor for U.S. News & World Report. Through the years, I'd gotten into a number of fights with him over Mr. McNamara's war, fights that were the thin end of a wedge that drove deep into our relationship and never really disappeared. I think I was hoping to drag him to the film and have a meaningful discussion afterward in which he would admit I was right and he was wrong. Then we would somehow miraculously resolve all of those other, unstated disagreements. Some inner children never grow up.
But that Thursday morning he called and, between coughing fits, told me he didn't think he was well enough to go. I froze. For my father to admit sickness was tantamount to saying he was dying. I suggested a doctor. He suggested not. He'd already looked up the diagnosis in his medical book and knew what was wrong, he said. I asked him if he'd looked under "s" for stubborn. I brought out my ultimate weapon and called my older sister. She called me back 10 minutes later, and called our father a stubborn, pigheaded, unreasonable Scotsman. We both sighed, inclined to give up. But my father loved the movies. He'd never turn this down if he could drag himself out of the house.
I made a doctor's appointment for that day, went to the grocery store and bought some chicken soup and a cookie, and drove over to my father's house. He was sitting in the sunroom, reading a book. I gave him the food. He ate the cookie. I was trying to learn to knit, and brought out yarn and needles. We talked about the weather, which was cold. We discussed the upcoming Democratic primary. After about an hour of this, I mentioned I'd made a doctor's appointment. He glowered.
On the way over, he gave a running commentary on what was wrong with my driving and which route I should have taken, and after some discussion, I parked at the spot he insisted on instead of the closer one I preferred. He shuffled into the lobby -- and collapsed. An ambulance took him from there, and he was booked into the hospital with pneumonia.
I visited him twice a day in the intensive-care unit, my knitting in tow. By the third week, I'd dropped about half of the stitches and the whole thing just unraveled. The family gathered, and we took turns sitting by his side in that tiny room until he died.
When my father's number finally came up at Arlington two months later -- wonderfully, on the ides of March -- they held quite a to-do, including soldiers marching about and a chaplain giving what sounded like a sales talk on the benefits of dying for one's country. During World War II, my father had made four amphibious landings and been captured and held in a German POW camp for 18 months. He'd managed to survive all of that and thrive until the age of 86, so this dying-for-your-country stuff was somewhat delayed, in my opinion, if not beside the point.
The chaplain had asked us, two minutes before the ceremony began, whether we wanted the standard Christian service. This was a conversation-stopper. I'm a member of a peace-based religion and had agreed to a military burial only because my father had asked for it, lending a whole new weight to the expression "Hey, it's your funeral." My sister is a born-again atheist. She wanted the chaplain to delete all mention of God from his talk. The chaplain gulped a couple of times, changed a few lines in his script, and went forward.
We sat down in front of my father's urn. First, the chaplain gave his semi-edited pitch. Then a line of soldiers marched stiffly around, turned with their guns -- and aimed right at us. This was somewhat unnerving. As a peace activist, I am accustomed to facing lines of uniformed people carrying weapons; it's a tense but necessary part of the work. However, I didn't expect to have to look down the barrel of a gun at my father's funeral. How ironic is this? I wondered, waiting to be shot. The guns went "boom." I did not die. Life goes on.
The next month, we put our father's home in Arlington up for sale. Shutting down the family home is an exercise fraught with emotional land mines, and I was grateful to be with the one remaining person on the planet who also had experienced the house as a dependent child. We divvied up the furnishings we wanted and set about finding friends, relations and organizations to take the rest. We spent weeks sorting through the lifetime of files, photos, letters, notebooks and other accumulated papers, trying to decide which snippet was worth holding onto, which one we could let go. It was exhausting, and a little crazy-making, I think.
And then the ghost showed up.
The week we put the house on the market, I went to the grocery store as usual. As I wheeled down the canned vegetable aisle, a can on the shelves to my right fell in front of me. It was a little irritating. I picked it up and put it back on the shelf. As I proceeded down the aisle, a can to the left of me fell. Whoever had stocked these shelves certainly had done a poor job of it, I thought, as I put that can back, and moved on.
At the far end of the store, I saw a bin of pillows on sale, two for $7. I needed two pillows for our guest room so I picked up the top one. The whole bin seemed to explode, with pillows flying everywhere. Fortunately, no one else noticed. I picked up the pillows and placed them carefully back in the bin -- they were slippery in their plastic covers. Then I took my two, paid for the groceries, and left.
It being April, I thought I should get some cucumber seeds to plant in the garden. I wandered over to the hardware store and spent some time looking through their seed display, trying to evaluate how important "burpless" vs. "early" is in a cucumber. Finally, I picked a packet. As I walked toward the cashier, a box of plant food fell off the shelf, knocking me on the arm.
This was getting weird.
I paid for the seeds, went home and started to put the groceries away. A box of cereal toppled from the top shelf and whacked me.
Okay, I thought, that's enough.
I called my sister, related this whole chain of events and said I had really had it with our father. What does he mean, hitting me with cans and boxes and exploding pillows?
But she wasn't buying my theory. Our father was an atheist, she reminded me. Actually, I didn't remember this, but never mind. He was eminently rational and totally scientific and would never do something like this, she said. It's got to be Mom, my sister pronounced. She was the one who believed in table-knocking and Edgar Cayce.
Right. This made perfect sense to me at the time.
After I hung up, it started to occur to me that grips were being lost. This isn't a ghost, I thought -- this is some weird psychological manifestation. This has something to do with grief and love and feelings of being abandoned, that strange sensation when your last parent dies that the sky itself has been lowered and you're now standing on it. I'm just grieving, I thought. It's not really a ghost.
But what if it was?
Not taking any chances, I drove over to my parents' house, let myself in, stood in the living room, and had a long talk with my mother. It had been more than 15 years since she'd died, so we had a lot of catching up to do. I explained why we were putting the house on the market. I told her in detail about each of her grandchildren, the ones she'd known and the ones she'd never known, mentioning especially the things about them she would have found so delightful and amazing. I took a deep breath, and tried to talk to her a bit about how I'd been processing the worst of her parenting and was even coming to appreciate some of her better qualities. I told her how I thought those qualities had played out in our family, thanking her for her humor and her perseverance. And then I said goodbye.
And that was the end of it -- no more stray cans or boxes falling from shelves. Was this exorcism or therapy or just better inventory control?
Honestly, I have no idea.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 61_pf.html
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
