H.R. Labidee
1913-1988
Dedicated to Mary M. Labidee
Your legacy of strength and spirit
will carry on for generations to come.
❀ ❀ ❀
Today is Mom’s birthday. I fully intend to call her, but work has a funny way of interfering with one’s personal life.
Instead, she calls me.
“Oh, hi, Mom,” I stammer out. “I’ve been meaning to call you all day, but it’s been so busy…”
Silence.
“Anyway, happy birthday.”
More silence.
“Are you there?”
“Daddy’s dead.” I hear a deep, trembling breath.
A stunned silence. Grandpa’s doing well now, isn’t he?
“How?”
“He just … died. A heart attack, I think. Mom just called.”
“When?” All of the monosyllabic questions one ponders when struck with disbelief.
“Just now, I think. Mom just called.”
“I’m coming out. See you in a few hours.”
“Okay.” Then in a small voice, like a child, “Cathy?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not ready for him to go.”
My tears begin to flow.
I drive along the highway to my mother’s house in the country, wondering why I’m not crying. I have just begun to really know Grandpa in the past few years. Now he’s gone. Suddenly, the beauty of the red-stained sky intrudes upon my thoughts. Cooped up in the city I don’t much notice sunsets, but here in the wide-open Texas spaces the sky is big. I feel a longing for something indescribable. I wonder where Grandpa is now, and an overwhelming feeling of awe envelopes me at the new adventure he has begun.
Nine hundred miles we drive, my brother and I, and arrive in sixteen hours. We argue little—a record, I think. I feel closer to him during this silent journey than ever before.
Jim sleeps as I drive through the night along remote two-lane highways. I feel dwarfed by the sky’s black vastness. The trees and farmhouses loom then melt into the night. These images are darker even than the sky, as though they are the void and not the substance surrounding me. I feel alone in the world, yet protected, resting in some cosmic womb—once again longing for something incomprehensible. I wonder again what Grandpa is experiencing, and if he is with me. The car’s rhythmic clicking along the road comforts and soothes, like the roaring of the sea. Like the breath of God.
Jim and I drag our weary bodies up to Grandma’s door, where my uncle meets us. Forgoing a merely mundane form of greeting, he thrusts a plate toward us.
“Would you like a danish?” Doug grins as laughter floats in from the house.
Jim and I stand gaping. His grin widens.
“Or would you, perhaps, prefer ham?” More laughter.
Doug has become self-appointed food pusher for the overabundance of food brought by well-wishers about town.
Of course, if it’s there, it must be eaten. It would be a sin to waste it.
A flurry of kisses and hugs. More laughter, though under the surface flows the current of grief. Something is wrong here, I think, that we can’t freely show our feelings.
I’m ten years old again and my father has just died. Alone in my bedroom, I listen to my dad’s Simon and Garfunkel records over and over, as if the repetition will drown out the noise in the living room, the ebbing and flowing sound of chattering well-wishers. They hover out there, waiting to swoop down on me when I venture forth to get some food. That done, I scuttle back to my comfortable, lonely haven.
I used to dream that my dad was alive. I’d tell him, “I knew you weren’t really dead. I saw you breathing in the casket.” Aunt Bonnie had forced me to touch his waxy flesh, saying, “This is the empty shell. His spirit has gone to heaven now.” But I knew she was wrong, because I saw his chest rising and falling with the breath of his spirit. And here he is alive, just like I’d said. The dreams were always bathed in light, like heaven, and I would awake wrapped in the sweetest joy. I would smile, saying, “I knew it.” Then, realizing it was only a dream, the joy would vanish into an aching emptiness more bitter than before illusion had awakened my hope.
I don’t suppose I ever learned to mourn properly. The rest of my life has been about avoiding grief —suffering of all kinds, actually. But this grief, for my grandfather, I mean, is different. Perhaps because I feel no guilt.
After my father’s funeral, when the family was all sitting around the living room, Grandpa entered the room wearing my mother’s wig. That curly mess lying askew on his balding head sent the whole room into hysterics. I laughed so hard I feared I would suffocate.
Not too long after my father’s death, the attacks began. I was at summer camp the first time, when I felt tingling all over my body. My heart racing, I tried to cry out, to move—anything to beat it, to stop it from smothering me. The harder I fought the more it held me, waves of intensity trying to squeeze the life out of me. I felt sure I would die. But it passed. After the tingling abated, as on all the occasions when it reoccurred, I lay in fear lest it happen again. Sometimes it did. Sometimes over and over again, leaving me spent and trembling in the early morning light that always banished the fear. Until darkness returned.
Grandma sits at the kitchen table, telling me of her husband’s death. Gently, unconsciously, she strokes the tablecloth as she speaks, and her hidden grief lends her an air of fragility. This is my first glimpse into her depths. The Great Depression made her strong, capable, critical, seemingly devoid of romanticism, and her natural vitality and sharp tongue made her seem superhuman, particularly in the eyes of a child. Now, through 24-year-old eyes, I see a spark of her driving spirit, and love her for it.
He awakens early that morning, that last day of his life. Contrary to his habits since retiring, he eats breakfast with Grandma, then spends the morning visiting his four closest friends. “It’s as if he knew,” Grandma says in hushed tones. After lunch, he goes outside and turns on the water, but before he can begin watering the flowers, he falls to his knees, clutching his chest. A neighbor runs over to help. Grandma, working in the basement, doesn’t hear the pounding on the door nor the ambulance’s arrival, doesn’t see the circle of neighbors standing on the lawn, watching silently as the ambulance drives away.
Hours later, when Grandma returns alone from the hospital, she finds the hose lying on the ground, water flowing uselessly onto the grass. She walks numbly to the tap and turns it off.
That evening, the night of grandpa’s death, my aunt is preparing to go home for her father’s funeral, when she hears laughter drifting down the hallway of the Benedictine monastery where she lives. Voices call, “Come quick!” She joins the others on the lawn and sees a gorgeous sunset—reds and golds radiating above the jagged, black outline of the New Mexico mountains. The circle of people stands on the lawn, gazing in hushed amazement at the glorious scene above them. This is a rare occurrence here; the mountains usually hide sunsets.
Susan recalls childhood days when her father would share with quiet joy some newly discovered beauty—a flower, a sunset.
“It’s God’s earth, Susie,” he’d say. To his last days, he never seemed to lose that awe of nature.
“Thank you, Daddy,” Susan murmurs as she stands on the monastery lawn, weeping like a child at what she has lost, and what she has gained.
I’m not sure when the rains begin. They become so omnipresent that one feels they have always been. It rains for days, almost nonstop. I think it’s Doug who says it first, that Grandpa is making sure his flowers are watered.
After days of rain, it begins to beat on your brain, like the rhythmic click in the car, like the roar of the ocean. You stop noticing the sound.
The morning of the funeral dawns gray and listless. The drizzling rain makes it hard to wake up. Sleep sucks me back into its blissful death—a welcome relief from waking death. But in from the kitchen floats laughter—another escape with a stronger pull, for no nightmares hide in its depths. I arise to join the group gathered round the kitchen table.
Doug’s wake-up call has just been delivered—a four-foot box of danishes. The group, stifling giggles, heads to his doorway. Susan leads the funeral procession, carrying the tray over her head like an icon. Doug groans at the prize awaiting his sleep-drugged eyes, and we all laugh heartily. Perhaps too heartily.
I’ve heard it said that you learn a lot about people from the books they collect. Grandpa loved them, filling every nook and cranny of his house with books on every conceivable subject. Grandma told us all to list the books we want, so I’m down here in the basement trying to scan all the titles. The task is rather futile, considering the fact that he has more than 6,000 of them. Books are part of the house, its look, its smell. But until now, I had rarely noticed them individually. As I consider the vastness of the collection—history, philosophy, science, religion—my amazement grows at the knowledge this man must have carried. A lifetime of learning is gone, and I never suspected it existed. He was just Grandpa, who was born, raised, married and died in the same small, South Dakota town. Grandpa, who liked to make silly puns and returned home from work with grease-blackened hands.
Then I thought of the hopeful young man I had seen in pictures. A football scholarship took him to the University of Wisconsin, away from his hometown for one year. After he returned home for a summer job, a large oil company offered him management of his own station. It must have been a painful choice, but during the Depression, young men couldn’t afford to pass up such opportunities.
I run my fingers lightly over the books, patting them as though I can comfort him through time and space, sadly sure that this library symbolizes his grief over education lost. Yet it must also have been his salvation. Resourcefulness brought the university to Grandpa. He may have been better educated than many college graduates. Why didn’t I appreciate him more while he was still here?
“Maybe he is still here,” I murmur. An uncanny feeling ripples over me like a breath of air.
“I love you, Grandpa,” I say out loud, in case the dead can’t read minds. “I can’t wait to see you again.”
And I believe I will.
I enter the church, and see his body for the first time. Pain hits with amazing strength. Seeing him lying there as though asleep, it strikes me that he is truly gone. I never realized how animated his face was until now, when death has robbed his features of their spirit.
Grandma strokes his hand, and I am touched because I’ve never seen her treat him so tenderly. I feel again the sensation that there is much more to her than I ever suspected. My grief is strong for her. She has lost her partner, her love.
The rain continues streaming down the window, as tears stream down our faces. The family no longer laughs, but grieves—together. My brother plays guitar, sweetly, softly. His face is serious. The service is beautiful, as Grandpa would want it, in the small, intimate church he had attended most of his life.
One prayer I ask, that the rain will stop for the burial. That the sun will shine on our last good-byes. But as we emerge from the church into the beating rain, it seems fitting that the earth should mourn one who loved her so.
At the cemetery, the rain slows as the burial service ends. As the crowd begins to disperse, the sun breaks through the clouds. A faint, watercolor rainbow arches across the sky. I stand gazing it until everyone else has passed me by.
It is now the night of Grandpa’s funeral. We are all laughing again, though I no longer hear an ominous undertone. I suspect it existed only in my mind.
In the flurry of funeral preparations, we all forgot that today is Doug’s birthday. To make up for it, we crowd thirty-nine candles onto one danish and light it up. The candles circling the danish are so close together that the individual flames merge into one flame. In the time it takes us to carry it to him and sing, wax melts all over the pastry. We gather round to watch him laughingly blow out the fire, leaving a misshapen lump of motley-colored wax with candle stumps and burnt-black wicks jutting out in odd directions. It is hideously beautiful, and Doug, an artist, decides to preserve it as a work of art.
The night of Grandpa’s funeral, I sleep soundly. My dad comes to visit me, here, in Grandma’s house. He sits on the couch talking with my sister and me. This time, I know he is dead. As with the previous dreams, I wake wrapped in joy, but this time no bitterness waits. The feeling lingers the entire day.
Whether or not Doug’s lump of wax can be considered art is debatable, but Doug finds he never has to preserve it. Years have passed now, and it refuses to deteriorate.
