Past

Sunday morning, early, I went back to Deaconess Hospital, walked through the familiar foyer, and the lobby where I’d waited, slept and composed my thoughts, and up the back steps to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. I found Genny (short for Genevieve), one of Mack’s many nurses, tending to a patient on dialysis. I thanked her for what she’d done for my father and she bounced it back like the professional she is – thanking me and reassuring me that Mack was in a better place with God. Around here folks share their religion like last night’s football score.

I left and then dropped-in on Peter, and then Jeff and Karen, and then drove back for a 9 AM breakfast at the Marriott with Diane. The rest of the day Diane and I stayed close, meandering the back streets, napping together in the car in our favorite coffee house’s parking lot, and stopping at Borders for books. At night we met Peter and Brian for dinner and then headed back to Bellemeade to collect clothes to dress my father for our trip west. Tough stuff, sorting through his torn and stained jeans, finding the right flannel shirt, gathering underwear that wouldn’t be embarrassing to hand to the funeral director and his son. My depression-era father wore clothes until the bitter end, not unlike, now that I think about it, my friend and camping companion, Mark Queijo.

I was doing okay in this house of memories until I saw tears streaming down Diane’s cheeks as we walked together into my mother’s rooms where she wasn’t, and my father’s bedroom where he wasn’t. Too much past tense in that house.

Today, we’ll finish preparations for tonight’s service — Sarah’s coming to play her cello – and I’ll call Kansas to tell them we’ll be there to bury my father on Thursday.

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Dan called this morning to say he’d slipped on the ice on his driveway and broken his leg.