The Callous Silence Of Undeclared Affection: Part 2

Fig. 1. Ron Mueck - Dead Dad, 1996-7

'And then my father looked at me. For just a moment, our eyes met and I watched as he opened his mouth, as if to beckon me closer. I did step closer and placed my hands on the rail at the foot of his bed. I waited to hear what he was going to say to me. It was like the pause after a flash of lightning, before the thunder.

He opened his mouth and then I saw a certain resignation in his eyes and the fire in them dimmed, then vanished altogether. He closed his mouth and then his eyes. My father had changed his mind. He had decided that he had, in the end, nothing to say to me.

And I knew somehow these would be his last words. To my brother he had said, "You've been a good boy, a good son." And to me he'd said nothing. He would not, at the very end, give me even one word.

And standing there, I felt a sense of loss. Not for myself but for him. He had missed so much not knowing me. He had denied himself his greatest accomplishment - to just be a dad.

Uncle Bob roared with laughter in the next room. "All their kids were cross-eyed and I was scared to death of cross-eyed folks. I would beg John not to make me do it, but he would gleefully have me follow him right past that old house filled with cross-eyed kids. Crazy, I know it, I know it. But I still don't like cross-eyed people - they're spooky!"

For a while, I watched my father sleep. Briefly, he awoke and turned his face toward the window Though he could see only the room reflected back in the dark glass, he continued to stare. I saw him shiver, then a tiny cry - a whimper - escaped him. He seemed so utterly small. Only the hospice nurse hovered near him; everybody else was in the other room. I wondered, if he'd been a different man, would everyone now be gathered around his bed, photographs scattered on the thin blanket, his favourite music playing on the stereo, laughter in the air, hands touching him? My father was dying alone, just a few feet away from his family.

Later that evening, I left. During the drive home, I thought of my friend George, who had died so many years before. He, too, had wasted to nearly nothing, just a sliver of his former self, but somehow he'd retained every pound, every ounce of his being. George had died with his magnitude intact.

The boy whose photograph I studied as a child, who was raised by three doting teenage aunts in a small white house in Chickamauga, the boy who had a drugstore all to himself and loved the Andrews Sisters, who went to Catholic military school and studied Latin and became battalion commander, who was a preacher and then a philosopher, who married my mother and terrified me so fully that I could think only of pushing him off a cliff, this man who had tumbled backward down his stairs and never healed, was, at last, dead.

I was free of him.'

Augusten Burroughs (from A Wolf At The Table)

The Callous Silence Of Undeclared Affection: Part 1

Fig. 1. Andres Serrano - The Morgue Part II (Death By Natural Causes), 1992

'The large dining room table and eight chairs had been moved out of the room and I wondered briefly where they could be stored. The sideboard was still in place, though it was covered now with the supplies one requires to transport the living into death - hypodermic needles, a plastic rack filled with small glass ampules, a portable cardiac monitor inside a padded canvas carrying case. A steel-framed hospital bed had been positioned in the dining table's place and in this bed, my father lay, his withered body wasted down to under one hundred pounds. His skin was the colour of butter and the whites of his eyes were bright yellow and made me think of a wolf's.

Two months before, my father had fallen backward down his stairs. He'd been taken first to a hospital, then a nursing home for physical therapy. But the medications had been too hard on his liver. Instead of growing stronger in the nursing home, he became weaker, smaller. And now he was dying.

A catheter bag strapped to the side of his bed frame contained only the smallest amount of urine - soon, his kidneys would cease altogether. Maybe in an hour, maybe a day.

The hospice nurse placed a small morphine drip control wand in my father's hand. "When you feel you need more, just push the button right there on the tip. You only need to push it once and you'll get another dose."

Though it was only three in the afternoon it felt much later, because up here on the mountain where my father and his wife had lived for over twenty years, the trees blocked most of the light and the larger mountain behind the house cut the sun off a couple of hours before it set.

My father's wife busied herself in the kitchen, making pitchers of iced tea, wiping the counters with a sponge, brewing coffee. My father's brother and his brother's wife had flown up from Alabama. But my father was too sick for any socializing.

Uncle Bob took a chair in the sunroom, just off the dining room. Aunt Relda had poured him a drink, three fingers of whiskey, and now sat with an iced tea on the sofa. My father's wife had finished up in the kitchen and was now sitting in the recliner opposite Uncle Bob. My brother sat on the sofa beside Relda looking lost and sad. I sat on the floor at Uncle Bob's feet, looking up at him. It was comforting to hear his full, ripe southern accent. It made me realize my father's had been smoothed out over the years, like a stone in a river.

"Now, you have to remember, Marist was the Catholic military school that we attended as boys in Atlanta. And by God, ol' John was battalion commander his senior year there. Buddy?" And here, he looked pointedly at me. "That was no small thing. Battalion commander is the top cadet. Your daddy was the mutherfucker that got to call quittin' time."

I realized I must have seen photographs of my father in his school uniform, an officer's hat perched on his head. I stood up and walked through the dining room, past my father, who gazed at the ceiling with glassy, unfocused eyes. I jogged up the three steps and walked into his office. I pulled his old photo album from the bottom shelf of his bookcase and carried it back into the dining room. Standing beside his bed, I opened the album to the first page. "I thought maybe you'd like to look at some childhood pictures," I said, holding the album before his eyes.

I imagined that if I were dying it would be a comfort to see, again, my long-dead mother, my distant childhood. But my father simply closed his eyes and rolled his head away from me so that his cheek rested on the pillow. "Well, maybe later," I said. A few hours later, while I sat in the sunroom listening to Uncle Bob tell more stories, I watched my brother step up to the hospital bed. Gently, he stroked our father's head. I rose from the sofa and entered the dining room, standing back near the foot of the bed.

In a gravelly whisper my father said to my brother, "You've been a good boy. A good son."'

[To be continued...]

Augusten Burroughs (from A Wolf At The Table)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #28: Winter In Paradise (MixPod Player)

Dmitry Shostakovich - String Quartet No. 15 in E flat minor, Op. 144

Nectar From The Most Beautiful Bottle In The World

Fig. 1. Lemercier & Duval Absinthe Label


'I remember in rehab someone saying that nine months was a turning point. It's like the seven-year itch. I think this must be because we have nine months programmed into us from our time in the womb. After nine months we are ready to make a dramatic change. Be born, or go get drunk.'

Augusten Burroughs (from Dry)*

* Click here for a downloadable PDF copy of the chapter entitled 'Alcoholism For Beginners' from Augusten Burroughs' Dry.

Your Ears Will Orgasm #27: Born Drunk (MixPod Player)

1. I Monster - French Mods Can't Drink
2. Nouvelle Vague - Too Drunk Too Fuck
3. Amy Winehouse - Rehab (Hot Chip Remix)
4. Drive-By Truckers - Daddy Needs A Drink
5. Drag The River - Booze 'n' Pills
6. Carlos & The Bandidos - Jockey Full Of Bourbon

Addendum:

Ray Milland ("Don Birnam") in The Lost Weekend, 1945 - d. Billy Wilder

Obituary: Wyeth's Last Winter

Fig. 2. Andrew Wyeth - Winter, 1946

Link: 'Andrew Wyeth, Realist and Lightning Rod, Dies at 91' (The New York Times, 16.01.2009)