Safe Passage

For a split second when I hold it in both hands, twist the stem clockwise and lift it to my ear, I believe it’s his heart I hear, not the watch, still ticking softly some 60 years after it was given to him as a young man. The second anniversary of his death is almost here, and these last few mornings I have performed this ritual with more reverence than usual, imagining Dad is still with me, the sound of his favorite timepiece the only bit of him that remains two years after his sudden death. But that’s not true. I can still hear him practicing his vocal scales, rehearsing hymns he would later sing as a soloist in church, accompanied by my mother on piano. To this day I cannot listen to the first chords of, How Great Thou Art, one of his favorite pieces, without crumbling, just as I did when the organist opened Mom’s memorial service with the same song almost six years ago. How many times did I stand at the end of the hallway while he sang and Mom played, hoping they wouldn’t notice I was up past my bedtime and afraid to go to sleep while everyone else was still awake? It was the sound of his voice that kept me safe, reminding me that I was not alone.

Grief is a strange thing. Years earlier, as I watched my mother fade slowly and inexorably away from me down the long foggy road of Alzheimer’s disease, I mourned her disappearance one small bit at a time. First it was her loss of freedom and independence—no more car, no more driver’s license. Later it was watching her struggle to carry on a conversation, to comprehend what was happening around her, and later still, to walk, to sit up in a chair, to chew, to swallow. This terrible diminution of the woman I admired, respected, and trusted with my heart and soul was an exhausting process that wore away my strength. Her death, when it came, was a blessing for me, for those of us closest to her. It was a relief, one for which I felt guilty. But grief takes a different shape when death is sudden and unexpected.

My husband and I took my dad and stepmother out for Chinese food on a Sunday evening, joking about who was born in the year of the rat (my husband), and whose birth date was so long ago that we couldn’t even calculate it correctly (my dad).