It’s not that I didn’t used to call my mother. I called my mother all the time. We would talk for five minutes, or ten or even twenty. And then she would hand the phone over to my dad. And we would talk for hours after that.
Tonight, I had my first call with her in the After times. Yes, we spent two weeks together in Albuquerque, from late Saturday night the day after my dad died to early Saturday morning on the day that just passed. Yesterday, my first full day home, we texted extensively, starting with our 10:00 AM (jetlagged) wake-up call indicating that a tornado warning had just been issued and we should proceed immediately to the basement. We collected our sleepy toddler from his third-floor bedroom and proceeded all the way downstairs to ride out a bewildering half-hour underground. With the news on our phones, we felt a part of something larger and, fortunately nothing touched down. But I suspect the incident did nothing to allay feelings of surreality that have been plaguing us for the whole month of July.
Alex and I bought a house a year ago, which is how we came by access to three full floors and a basement. We’re very lucky. And out back is a single tree in the moderately sized backyard, abutting the deck and growing some branches that are threatening to dislodge the right-side railing of the steps down to the ground-level yard. The tree was fruitless when we moved in last June, and I used Google Lens (take a picture and Google matches it up with image search) to try to determine its species shortly thereafter. Google’s best guess was crabapple, which my father said was too bad: inedible fruit and not much to look at, though better than no tree at all.
The tree dropped squashy purple plums all over the deck in the storm that brought torrential rain and high winds to the point of a tornado threat. And surveying the piles of overripe fruit like a failed comic evaluating his latest audience critique strewn across the stage, I wanted to tell my dad. I actually formed the thought “Oh, when I next call dad, I have to remember to tell him it’s a plum tree after all. Not a crabapple!” And I had just enough time to smile at the thought before the elevator under my aorta dropped.
Instead, I told my mother. We agreed he would have liked to know. He would have liked to know all the things that she thinks of and observes ten times a day. She’s grateful for all he managed to do to upgrade the house in the last year: the new toilet in the back, the fan housing on the roof, and most crucially the swamp cooler that he installed in the window of her office that today kept the house 75 throughout while a record-cracking 105 boiled outside. “It’s like he knew I would need it,” she tells me. It’s easy to see it this way now, in retrospect, and he did speak of cleaning up loose ends toward the end. That said, he’d spoken of the need to simplify, to shore up, for years. And he was always doing little things to take care of the house. To take care of us.
I am not doing well. I am not managing to avoid making every day about my father’s death. And that’s okay, that’s fine, there’s no timetable and no expectation. Least of all from myself. I do not think we can weather these things alone, or without continual rolling heartache, or without coming to our knees again and again.
We have each other. We have phones. (I’ve read enough of my ancestors’ letters – and spent enough money in the late ’90s and early ’00s – to know what a blessing and comfort unlimited long-distance can be.) And we have, for better or for worse, time. Time to think, yes, to misremember and then remember, but also to share with each other. We have time to deepen our long-distance connection, while missing the person we were so used to handing off to. He would have been happy to hear about it. I wish I could tell him.
This is the third post in the One Thing series.
#2: In the Land of Make-Believe
#1: Wistful Wisteria
Introduction: Announcement and Rules
