departure

time passages

One last time to Brentwood Manor (as if a fancy name changes the tired old rehabilitation facility where expiration seems to occur more often than resurrection, or maybe the concept of rehab for the elderly is supposed to embody the passage from life to death) and I’m collecting my father’s belongings, his last month on earth reduced to a garbage bag as translucent as his skin: the fleece-lined moccasins I gave him last Christmas; his favorite flannel shirt, the one he insisted upon calling his CPO jacket with breast pockets just the right size to hold his ancient cellphone, its screen cracked and smudged with fingerprints from the week before he forgot how to use it; the red thermal shirt he hated but I made him wear to keep warm; a bag of chargers and handbooks for the new hearing aids he wore exactly twice; the giant reading glasses that dwarfed his narrow face; the Father’s Day card I sent with the largest easy-to-read sentiment I could find, along with my handmade coupon good for unlimited root beer floats (“chocolate ice cream, NOT vanilla!” he’d remind me when we stood in line at Red’s Dairy Freeze on the way to Cape Elizabeth); and finally, the photo of us from exactly a year ago when he was still piloting his Subaru Outback up Route 1 to meet me for a lobster roll at the wharf and we watched the antique windjammers sail through the harbor in a perfectly aligned parade. . .

and I gingerly place the bag in the backseat of the 22-year-old Volvo wagon that was once my mother’s until her passage last year and this—

—this, is when I finally cry.

grief has no statute of limitations, nor does the word-count in today’s newsletter