Ozymandias in reverse

Where I come from, there is no anonymity in grief.

Closing a dead man's eyes is not as easy as the movies made me believe. I thought it would be a single swipe, one and done, like passing a squeegee over a windowpane.

Turns out that’s a lie.

My dad died eleven days ago. He didn’t blink through his last breaths. Maybe he was staring at something only he could see. Or maybe he was already gone, and the lungs were the last organ to get the message.

A few minutes later — after we were sure, after we’d called hospice, after my mom in her grief had already begun to tidy up around him — I decided to close his eyes for him. But passing my hand over them didn’t work. I had to tug on each eyelid while the folds resisted manipulation — a new little horror to encounter, just when I thought his body was finally, mercifully done producing horrors.

My dad died eleven days after his last ER trip and nine days after we set up hospice care so that he could come home. We put a hospital bed where his recliner had been. He could see the pond he’d built and the fields that were home for forty-five years.

It was as peaceful as these things can be, I guess. So peaceful that we almost missed it. He had driven through the kitchen on his scooter only a few minutes before. My brother had helped him back into bed. But that last trip must have taken his remaining strength.

Right before his final cruise through the kitchen, the hospice nurse had come for a checkup. While my dad slept, my mom, brother, and I talked with her about what to expect during the final days. Death seemed imminent, but not immediate.

She left us with a pamphlet about the end stage of life — sort of the opposite of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” We didn't have time to read it. She had only been gone thirty-five minutes when I called her to come back and pronounce time of death.

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A few days before that last ER trip, I had gone to my parents' house. A buzzard was perched on the roof directly above my dad’s chair.

I'm no expert in augury, but that felt like a bad omen.

I didn't need omens to tell me he was dying, though. He had been dying for months, years — for so long that it was possible to think that he might be able to survive this too.

This time, though, was different. His feet were rotting, like Ozymandias in reverse. His mind was still active and his face gave little indication of his suffering; he could still tell stories and put on a brave face. But his legs wept fluid that his skin couldn’t contain. The flesh on his feet sloughed away and started blackening. Blood thinners caused hours-long nosebleeds. His arms flayed themselves open just from brushing against the bed rails. There was so much blood that we joked that hospice was a good way to cover up a murder scene. He had little appetite for food, but his belly was distended like a king’s after a feast.

His heart, kidneys, vasculature, and skin were all failing at once, beyond any hope of saving.

He was mostly lucid until the end, though. That was almost a miracle… if it can be considered a miracle that he was fully aware of what was happening to him. When he went to the ER for the last time, his sodium was 104. The doctor said it was the lowest she had ever seen in a patient; most people are comatose or dead once they dip below 120. And yet he was awake throughout his hospital stay, and awake for many days after that.

It's ironic that low sodium was a contributing factor to his death. The man lived on Diet Pepsi, popcorn, and fried chicken gizzards from the gas station. I took him to India years ago, and the Taj Mahal was cool and all… but my core memory is buying every Diet Pepsi at every roadside stand we passed so he wouldn’t run out. One would think that his sodium could never be too low.

But that leads perilously close to “why,” and that is a question I cannot ask or answer.

with my dad on a better day

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When emotions are too much, I turn to facts.

When facts are too much, I turn to rituals.

The rituals of death in a small town are well set. They add a series of expectations, with just enough structure to keep mourners on a path toward the future.

There is no escaping that path in the days leading up to the funeral. After all, everyone in town knows you're treading it. There is no anonymity in grief here.

We knew the woman who came to pick up my dad’s body. She teared up as she hugged us. She was sweet and sad and careful as she zipped him into a quilted cloth body bag, patterned with hearts, and pushed him across the threshold for the last time.

We called a few people so that they would hear it from us. The funeral home posted the obituary the next day, and then everyone knew. People here subscribe to the funeral home’s Facebook page to get immediate death notices. Side note: if you like enough obits and post enough sympathy messages, you can gain the dubious honor of being autolabeled as a “top fan” of the mortuary.

Announcement cards went out to all the local businesses. I always look at the funeral cards when I buy groceries. This week it was startling — and, in a ritualistic way, comforting — to see my dad's face looking up at me from a piece of cardstock while I swiped my credit card.

After the obit was up and the cards were out, I couldn’t leave the house without being offered condolences.

As we went about our rituals, nothing needed explaining. There were no annoyances with anonymous vendors or petty bureaucrats. Everyone already knew and everyone was kind.

We knew the florist who made the casket spray. We knew the owner of the pizza place where the family gathered after visitation. We knew the guy who marked the grave for digging. We knew the people who greeted mourners at the funeral home. We knew enough to steal as many pens from the funeral home as possible because their pens are the best in the county, and we felt entitled to them this week.

The county sheriff spoke, impromptu, at the funeral. He led the procession to the cemetery without us asking, flashing his lights to clear the path. Another deputy blocked the highway so that the whole procession could exit the funeral home together behind the hearse.

My dad’s last employees were among the pallbearers, wearing their old company shirts as a final memorial. They work for the county road crew now, and they made sure the gravel and dirt roads between my parents’ house and the cemetery were freshly graded before the service.

The Garden Club and PEO got together to provide a community lunch after the burial (yes, there was jello salad).

On the night before the funeral, the visitation line stretched for almost three hours, no breaks. If I've referenced someone in this newsletter before, they were probably there. Cousins, county officials, classmates, coworkers, competitors, and all the other people who made up various parts of his life — they all showed up, telling stories that my dad would have loved.

Friends we knew in Ukraine thirty years ago sent flowers. People we hadn't seen in years came from hours away.

Even his favorite servers from a nearby restaurant stopped by. They were some of the last non-medical people he had seen outside the house. After our last meal there in March, he hadn't had the strength to go anywhere else.

They all talked to us before standing in front of the open casket to pay their final respects. Fun fact: the funeral home building used to be a grocery store. I don’t know who planned the remodel, but kudos to whoever decided to arrange things so that the casket sits where the butcher counter used to be. I didn’t joke about it (much) during the visitation, but I know my dad thought it was funny.

I drove 70+ miles to get my dad some hot and sour soup (extra sodium, please!) while he was in hospice. My fortune cookie was a little too on the nose.

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The rituals are mostly over now. The food offerings have dried up and the floral arrangements are fading. I have to go back to work. Five more obits were posted in the last week, pushing my dad off the front page of the funeral home website. Everything here is beautiful and lush and green, except for the mound of dirt in the cemetery that hasn’t had time to sprout weeds.

I wish my dad could have seen all this. I wish he knew how much people loved him. I don’t think he fully accepted the impact he had — mostly because he wished he had done more. He was prone to grandiose visions. His ambitions for his business and his community were always too big and never quite realized. They were often thwarted by bad economic timing, but also thwarted because he didn’t sacrifice his family or his integrity to get ahead.

But he was also never satisfied with good enough.

Love and ambition do not sit easily together. It’s an uncomfortable way to live — especially for the people around you — and probably an uncomfortable way to die.

I have the same urges. I fear I’m running out of time for everything I want to do. It looks like I’m not going to write the Great American Novel and get elected president and revitalize my hometown and make a billion dollars and give it all away and deepen all the relationships I want to nurture.

It doesn’t help that my dad was only sixty-eight when he died. Do I only have twenty-five years left to change the world?

Will I die like my dad did — betrayed too early by my body, wishing I’d done enough to be remembered for?

Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” offers the counterpoint:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The king is forgotten, as even kings eventually are. Give us another couple of decades at our current pace of brain rot and the poem will probably be forgotten too.

There will be no statues for my dad (although if there are, I hope the legs are stronger than his were at the end). But the impact he had on others will continue to ripple in unexpected ways. Many of my dad’s best accomplishments were rooted in love — for family, for community, for people who needed help. That’s a legacy that tends to linger.

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Writing about my dad starts to crystallize my grief — starts to mark the line between "life" and "death" in indelible ink. The present tense becomes past. The stories no longer evolve.

I am still in the amorphous phase of grief — the place where I am sad, and angry, and bitter, and relieved, and guilty for being relieved, and full of longing, and dwelling in memory, and everything else all at once. I find myself not wanting to crystallize what I feel. I find myself avoiding friends’ messages for the same reason.

For me, writing is what makes something real. I’m not ready for “real” yet.

But if I don't start writing, I fear I will forget.

My dad's stories were what made me become a writer. He could make a story out of anything. He was so curious about the people he met that they became stories too. His stories were often embellished, or inaccurate, or straight-up fantasies — but they were always memorable.

I think he would say that it’s better for me to write down what I’m feeling — and risk getting it wrong — than fail to share because I’m worried I can't get it right.

Or maybe he wouldn’t say that. He was more likely to say, if you wish in one hand and shit in the other, all you have is a handful of shit. Which is another way of saying I should just get on with it and do whatever it is that I intend to do.

There’s more to this story than I can tell in a single post. There’s more to grieve than I am capable of this week. But it’s my story now. I guess I’ll have to make up whatever comes next without his help.

With love,

Sara

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p.p.s. I once wrote about how obituaries are a vital part of the public record here. When I was writing my dad’s obituary, my brother and I decided that we should pay it forward to future gossip-mongers by including sufficient details about our family tree. Somewhere, someday, someone will be delighted to use my dad’s obit to figure out my cousin’s wife’s name.