Song of the Whippoorwill

August 1996

At dawn, on the last day of my father’s life, a Whippoorwill sang beneath my window. His song carried toward the fields of golden corn to the south and to the woods on the west. The gray bird’s melody was lonesome as it drifted sharply into the warm August morning. It sounded like a farewell message, and indeed it was...an ugly stake driven deep into a daughter’s heart with a sledgehammer. It was a beautiful yet sickening song about living, loving, and dying.

My loving, handsome father was gone by 7:30 that morning. His quick demise from this world seemed fitting. He wasn’t a man who cared much for sterile, impersonal hospital settings, detested it so much, in fact, that he wouldn’t see a doctor unless he thought one foot was in the grave.

A heart attack 24 hours earlier left him in the dreaded hospital bed with a wall clock ticking away the final minutes of his life. Red and blue lines on vital sign monitors slowed to a crawl and then stopped completely. The clock continued to tick but my beloved father’s heart was still.

My father died luckier than most men. To say that someone died lucky is, I suppose, an arrogance only the living can afford, yet my father lived 84 years. Eight years more than the predicted male life span but a million years less than I wished for him. He lived through the stock market crash, the Great Depression, world wars, racial eruptions, social revolution, a less than perfect career, and a stormy marriage. He was blessed with a loving wife, four children, and a several grandchildren who loved him beyond description. It is a terrible thing to watch someone so beloved collapse and drift toward certain death. Nothing makes it acceptable and nothing makes it easier. He was my father and I loved him as much as one person can love another. He was born with a zest for life and a powerful will to live each day to the fullest. He grew old gracefully and he died gracefully.

My father’s ashes were laid to rest on a Saturday morning in lovely old cemetery in Northwood, Iowa. His was a private farewell attended only by family members and a few close friends. The air was heavy and sweet that day, filled with the heady fragrance of old roses and freshly cut grass. The promise of an early fall tipped the leaves of Maple trees beneath a cobalt blue sky. It was a dripping 82 degrees by 11 o’clock that morning, yet it wasn’t difficult to distinguish the sweat from the tears. I couldn’t forget that August had always been my father’s favorite time of the year, a time when he should have been fishing instead of dying.

In the fierce silent heat of the day, I concentrated on the huge billowing clouds hanging in the eastern sky. I wanted the service to begin and end quickly for there wasn’t anything left to say...except good-bye. I fought the will to break down and fling myself upon the tiny opening in the earth that would forever house my father’s remains. I wanted to let fly with the grief that filled every inch of me. I needed to kick and scream and weep and smash the sterile, white foam containers filled with flowers. I wanted to strike a bargain with God and beg Him to give me back my father because he’d been there for a lifetime and I couldn’t imagine the rest of my life without him. I wanted to hold him one last time and tell him he’d been the most wonderful Dad that any daughter could have.

Acting like a jerk at my father’s funeral wouldn’t have been a good move for my exhausted, aging mother. She needed all the strength she could summon from each of us. I swallowed my grief and stood like a statue among the heaps of flowers and the single, long-stemmed roses covering a cemetery marker already in place. The hunk of cold granite with a blank date-of-death space had marked an empty grave site for eight years...pre-arrangements, you know. Get it taken care of early so a survivor’s burden of losing, burying, grieving, adjusting and moving on is easier, as if that was humanly possible. My mother had made the pre-arrangements without the cooperation or approval of my father. He stayed in his chair and watched the Chicago Cubs that day. It seemed like the sensible thing to do. The Cubs were playing a respectable game of ball that season and Dad had no present plans to die, not then or ever. Certainly he wasn’t remotely interested in discussing such a loathsome event with a perfect stranger dressed in a mortuary gray suit. Dad never cared for the notion of a pre-engraved cemetery marker buried in the ground before he was...and he never again visited the cemetery until it was time to retire there permanently.

With an exhausted heart, I looked around the semi-circle of family who had gathered. My two sisters, my brother, our children and grandchildren. I wondered what the future could possibly hold. My mother couldn’t stay alone in the huge house she and Dad had shared forever. It didn’t seem likely that my sisters, both divorced, would move back to Iowa. My brother was married with two girls at home and, although we lived in the same community, neither did it seem likely that Mom could, or would, live with them. I was not only the oldest daughter, I was the oldest child. And she was not only my mother. She was my friend and the one person left of two who had given life to me. I didn’t want her alone and I didn’t want her in a strange place. I lived on a lovely acreage with my husband and a teenager who insisted on torquing his digitals to the max. We had two aging dogs, a 21 pound cat with an attitude, and a Whippoorwill who lived beneath our bedroom window. It was like living in a zoo, yet I knew then that this was where my mother would live, too.

This is the way to the zoo

The crazy house is nearly full

But there’s room enough for you...