I remember Mama’s voice low that morning, in the early hours while she was getting ready for work. She pulled me close, her breath smelling like coffee, her perfumed hands holding up my sweater as I threaded my arms through the sleeves—
Don’t call him Daddy. He’s my Daddy. Call him Grandpa.
But you call him Daddy. Why can’t I?
Her eyes widen as she leans into my face. It’s a look that says, NO. I drop my eyes to the floor as she tugs on my collar, straightening my shirt. She spins me around by the shoulders, brush raking my hair. As the bristles drag across my scalp, tugging my head back, I tell myself I can call him whatever I want when she’s not around. He’s the only Daddy I’ve known, I’ve ever met. It’s his name—it’s who he is.
There are whole days I spend with Daddy at Fort Sill. Young, baby-faced soldiers snap back salutes toward him. I sit across from his desk, in a high-backed, tufted leather chair, watching him sort through various papers and files. My eyes gaze through his window into row after row of fatigued soldiers marching in perfect cadence and beat, all under the shadow of that fat water tower marked with the criscross yellow barrels—the U.S. Army’s unmistakable sign for artillery.
Daddy, the Lieutenant Colonel—it’s a memory I hold close, like so many others, knowing these moments frame the very picture of who I am.
***
On an ordinary night at his house, after a long day on base, he kicks off his boots, makes his way toward the shower as I catch sight of his left foot, the tiniest toe black as night. Before I can mention it, he’s in the bathroom, door closed. Mama arrives and we move through the ordained steps that invariably wind down the day, lead us closer to sleep—cleaning, cooking, preparing for tomorrow.
I hear Mama fuss over him. She takes him in the bathroom, drapes a towel around his neck, and with tiny stainless steel scissors grooms his ears, neck and eyebrows. I stare up at Mama’s gentle hands, Daddy’s head bent low as she lathers his skin and drags the razor slowly over the slope of his neck. She fusses at him about his sugars discussing numbers. Which doctor said what. He tries to say something and she shushes him, pulling back the razor from his skin. She wipes the foam away with a warm cloth, and he checks it in the mirror as Mama goes to get his clothes from the dryer and press his uniform before we leave.
I stand at the sink and find his wallet. Inside, a picture of Mama at seven years-old on her first communion day—the only image I’ve seen of her in church--frowning, in tilted tiara and veil, holding a handful of fake flowers and white candle. Next to this, needles with plastic orange tips and a vial of insulin near the faucet. I hold one of the needles under the white light over the vanity mirror and I see the tiniest red speck of his dried blood.
My stomach tightens, I feel ashamed, like I shouldn’t have seen it. I shouldn’t have peeked in on his mortality. I shouldn’t have seen through that veneer of invincibility I had believed in, as if I had uncovered his drunken, nude form and mocked him. I secretly worry, like Mama--about him, tarry to ask about those needles lest I learn some secret I didn’t want to know.
I think about his tiny insulin vials, his sugars. As I stand in the bathroom, the mirror still covered in steam, the walls perspiring with shower heat, I fear what lay in wait for him. What darkness is already possessing his body, destroying his flesh, what secrets did he keep from Mama, from me, from himself.
***
On a hot day in late September, I trail Daddy to his pickup and make way toward Fort Sill. The skyline bounces over the dashboard as we tumble through the makeshift dirt road ruts. The truck follows the dips and climbs of the hills as county roads in wide grids open up before us. Wichita Mountains are heavy with miles of blonde pasture as tractors with wide arms comb swaths of prairie, making uniform lines in the brush, billowing up dust and grass. Windmills turn sluggish rotating fans in the low afternoon sun. How I wish that southern cross head would spin around with the cool weight of winter’s icy air.
As I stare ahead into the white glare, the windshield frame of sky, as grasshoppers make furious arcs with their bullet-shaped forms from the wild grass that grows along the road toward the truck, I realize that Daddy is the same as me, the same as Mama. In this awakening, I stumble upon the most beautiful moment I would ever know with him, acknowledging in some clarity of being, how very much our minds made the same circles, how his blood pumped across my heart and through my own veins—and I saw myself in his face, his mannerisms reflecting a mirror-like image of my own. The deep rungs of laughter in his voice, his face, always upturned in a squint—they all looked like me--exact compliments of a puzzle whose completed picture framed the only family I knew—Mama, Me and her Daddy.
And those deep, black walnut eyes that look just like Mama’s roll over to me,
Whatcha thinkin’ about, kid?
What’s our name mean? Where does it come from?
He leans over, eyes locked on me. My back stiffens under his stare.
You’re a Schott. Never forget that. You’re one of us. Nobody can take that from you. Nobody.
He must’ve known what I needed, must’ve known I had no identity outside of Mama. He could see I didn’t know who I was. I shared his name, just like Mama did. It tied us all together. They were the only people I knew as family. The name was more than a word; it was a bond, an idea that solidified our connection; made us whole, kept us together. It told me, I belonged.
If I had known the words to say, I would’ve told him how much he meant to me. How his words would shape so much of who I am and what I know about myself. How much weight his words carried across my waking hours and how they hollowed out nests in my mind on sleepless nights. Settling into those deep places of self, burrowing in the cornerstone of who I was to become.
But, I am five years old and do not have those words and cannot see the cruel limit of our days. I can’t see death’s shadow looming in our rearview, holding close that clock that counts down our numbered moments. Maybe he could. Maybe he knew his shaping held such worth. Maybe he knew, like Mama, he would live on in me.
All the words I can manage to muster up to his great image, tremble out of me under the view of his great black walnut eyes—
Okay, Daddy. I’m a Schott, too, that’s what I’ll be.
Alright, then.
Our taillights move on through the dusk, riding over the darkening Oklahoma hills, heading back toward Lawton, back toward Mama, back toward home.
On a day when the winds turn cold, and the sky billows grey clouds in great folds, blotting out the sun, the phone rings and Mama’s voice goes flat, leaves her body. Words hang in the air around her head, like a language she’s never spoken. Sentences break open, never finish, I see her face contort. It’s one of the few times I’ve seen her cry. She returns the receiver to the cradle,
My Daddy’s in the hospital. He’s collapsed. He’s in a coma.
Within minutes, we pack up for the hospital, and I sit in the car and watch Mama from the back seat, punching the steering wheel over and over again, crying those tears that say what we’ve known was coming for years: Daddy’s dying.
Our days and weekends see hospital after hospital. Sterile white space. This room, this floor. Follow the blue line to the green line to the elevator up two more floors to the red line. Nursing home. Assisted care. Visiting nurse. V.A. doctors. I see Daddy grow paler and paler, until he seems to fade into the starched white hospital sheets, only his black framed glasses and walnut eyes remain.
We stand silent in an elevator,
Mama, I’m hungry. My stomach’s growling.
She bites her bottom lip. Eyes move up to the glowing numbers as we pass floor after floor. Her voice far away,
Okay. Wait a minute.
Mama fusses. I walk in her shadow, desperate to keep her pace. She stops at the nurse’s station, asks to read his chart. She demands to know his sugars, his diet, his care. She folds her arms, puts a finger to her lips, calculating. Minutes stretch into long hours.
In his room, I spy his lunch tray set on the bedside cart, I steal a can of packed peaches and saltine crackers and I eat them in the hallway under the curious stares of passing nurses. Mama at her Daddy’s bedside, rubbing his arms, massaging his legs. Filling his ice water pitcher, pinching his toes,
Can you feel that, Daddy?
One weekend she no longer pinches his toes. He’s deep asleep in post-surgery slumber, Mama motions for me to stay quiet, finger against taut lips. She pulls back his white sheet to reveal a stump, red and swollen, covered with dozens of staples, next to a healthy leg and foot. Cut above the ankle, that black foot gone, replaced by frankenstein stitching and heaps of betadine-soaked brown gauze, staining his white leg a maizey yellow. I look to his sleeping face, his eye lashes and brows white, his face transparent, ashy, anemic.
I know this will kill him. Kill him faster than any gangrene, diabetic coma or old age. Daddy is a man that does, and when he could no longer do, he would no longer be. Maybe Mama knows that too. She slaps the sheet back over him, face tight, eyebrows drawn low. She leans in and kisses his forehead under heavy snores. We leave for the day. It’s the first time I see her pull away, stone-faced, silent. It’s the first time she can’t calculate, can’t control, can’t fuss him into compliance.
Daddy is losing his battle, and Mama is losing her battle to keep him going.
Daddy is the first person I have ever loved who is dying. There are some firsts we run toward, meet with great anticipation, jump over them as hurdles striving to some greater goal. And some we cower from, firsts that we will never celebrate, their markers pang our days, peel back layers of memories to reveal a poignancy so potent, they never quite heal, never quite leave--painful firsts creating a presence throughout all our days.
And every other event of the like--every other death--will remind us of the first--when we first lost Daddy. It will ring again and again, a death tolling, never silenced. Its presence always lingering, like drips from a faucet that never quiet. Its steady beat echoing through the rooms of our minds, disturbing our quiet places, keeping us awake at night.
I watch as Mama fades into the grey mass of autumn clouds, leafless branches and dead prairie grasses. Her voice wanes into a whisper, arms limp, face pale. Depression moves in and takes up residence. Mama says it often, in all facets of the word, she uses them to sum up her days, I’m depressed, this is depressing, I have depression. Depression looks like lying on the couch all day. Depression sounds like angry outbursts and quiet sobbing. Depression tastes like navy beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Depression feels like dying, whether it’s you or not.
Mama and I pack the car for a weekend hospital stay. Mama preps me for the visit,
He doesn’t look good, Chelsea. He can’t hear you. I don’t want you to be upset when you see him.
When we arrive at his room, his body lay under a sheet and blanket, hands at his side. He rests in the glow of machines, beeping and ticking, spitting out scribbled paper. Tubes weave under his blankets, through his nose, invade his veins, bags filled with dark urine, oxygen and saline. A heady salty smell hangs close, pierces my sinuses. The blanket covers his thin form, down his legs, over his knees, just one foot, flat expanse of the bed where the other foot should be.
He doesn’t sit up to see us. He doesn’t quiet the overhead television with his bed remote. His face is motionless, skeletal. Eyes closed, like a carved statue, cut of white marble. Mama pulls back the drapes, hooks scraping across the curtain rod, sunlight basking down over his bed. Dust—disturbed and stirring moves like down, falling softly to the floor. For a moment, I fear he may vanish in all that light, his presence so delicate, so frail. Like the seeds from a dandelion stalk, the slightest push blowing them in all directions –up and away forever.
Mama pushes buttons on the side of his bed, raising him up. She pulls back his gown sleeves and begins rubbing his arms, her hands moving over his wax paper skin. Her voice low and soft, talking to him like he hears every word. His throat moves, lips quiver, guttural and indecipherable. Mama takes his hand, leans in close, other hand petting back his white hair.
Yes, Daddy, I’m here. Daddy. Can you hear me? Daddy?
Mama leans in again, holding his hand, bathing in his presence, knowing its fading like white stardust of a falling star on a black and heavy night. Its grasp so slight and transient.
I know what she knows—those days, where we walked through the prairie grass together, those moments where we laughed and fussed and fell into that easy comfort knowing we at least had him now, that time—that precious time—like his body was passing forever. Minutes drag on into hours, into eternal waiting, the sunlight finally dimming, twilight like a grey shroud hanging in the room. Mama moves into the hallway to read his chart.
In some instinct, some divine providence, I draw up to his bed. I take his cold hand and hold it, skin and bones so light against my own. I move up his forearm, feeling the slow pulse of warmth that remains. My palms moving across the back of his hand; I keep my voice steady and speak to Daddy, speak to him like I always have, refuse to whisper, to cower to that fear he doesn’t hear me or know me.
Daddy, it’s Chelsea. I think we’re about to go. But, I want you to get better. I love you. Okay? Goodbye.
And the walnut black eyes that had watched over my youngest days, flash open, look directly in my own. His fingers tighten their grip over my hand and in his voice, the one I have always known, speaks over me, voices his last words he will ever say-
Goodbye, Chelsea.
He lays his head back into the ridge of the pillow, his hand loosens it grip, his body relaxes again. I move quickly into the hallway—nearly yelling.
Daddy talked! He spoke! He looked right at me.
Mama quiets me like some imaginative child.
Hush, Chelsea. Quiet now. It’s impossible. He can’t speak. He didn’t even know we’re in there.
But, he did—
That’s enough, Chelsea.
Mama’s voice tightens, her hand raised and I return to his room, his bedside. He doesn’t move again, pulse beeping across the screen. I close the curtains, the growing night sky--black and formless, waiting at the edge of the horizon, marking off this life’s last day.
***
When our truck converges on the driveway after midnight, headlights bouncing across the house, my stepdad meets us at the doorway. His face weary, burdened. In deep tones, he tells Mama and me what words we have dreaded to hear spoken into sound—vibrations and wavelengths falling across our ears with leaded, grey weight,
The call came just after you left the hospital; you probably were in the parking lot.
His voice cracks, words heave out of his chest.
He’s gone. I’m sorry.
Mama collapses in his arms. He holds her figure as her knees buckle. Face buried in his chest, her shoulders shake under her sobs. My eyes flood with tears I thought I’d run out of, spill forth from my body already dried out and withered. My soul as thin as the wind, my heart snaps in two like some dead cold branch.
I move to my room. Numb. Mute. Hollow. All I can feel is his absence. I don’t bother undressing. I don’t bother climbing into bed. I lie on the floor, head against my arm, desperate for that cocoon of sleep where escape beckons us forth in its repose of slumber. Casting off those webs of worry, tangles of dread that thread our days. The sleep that forgets, that sleep I long for.
I think about those words that passed between us, Daddy and me. The words no one believed could happen. How those words—that word, my name--held such weight. Names passed on from Daddies to daughters, holding them under their protection until marriage. I had stayed true to his words, held onto being part of his clan, held onto that piece of him that would remain in my identity for years to come. And I realize the last word he said on this earth—was my name.
My name.
It moves over my lips like a prayer, floating up through my window into that night, those blackened heavens, wrapping around that moon face as it climbs up through nebulous clusters of stars, eternal light moving through timeless space, resting on the ears of heaven’s newest star, Daddy, tracing his steps toward that distant rest in our eternal Father’s presence. Taking his seat among the lights that guide my life, steering me toward some great purpose in the distance whose name will be my own.
On a morning in the dreary days in early January, a week after Daddy has died, Mama and I stand graveside at Fort Sill National Cemetery and watch young army men lower Daddy’s coffin into cold Oklahoma mud. I am thirteen years old and still don’t know the pain a day can bring. We stand silent as an elderly priest mutters rites over his grave, hand arching the shape of the cross, under the recorded bugle playing of Taps. The funeral concludes and people move away toward their cars out of the wind. Mama moves to the priest, thanking him and he places something in her hand, folds her fingers over it, cups her hand in his and leans close to her weeping face.
I stand there in the biting wind, tucking my face low in my scarf, breathing against the wool, trying to make heat. Family in huddles move away, heads down, groups of hats and coats file away silently, gravitating back toward that rotation of life, away from the grave, the reminder we will all rest our weary orbit one day, walk down into that cold cave never to rise again. I think this is what death must be like: distance from the living as they carry on throughout their days, no warmth to be found, no sun shines through grey sky. My eyes stay on Mama, her whispering words between the priest. Freezing rain begins to sprinkle down, crystals against my peacoat, a few rest on my face. I watch as the soldiers break down the awning, fold up the chairs.
Mama nears me, and I weave my arm into hers. We walk to the car and she pulls from her coat pocket the gift from the priest—a string of ivory rosary beads, delicate opaque beads with dangling cross, and the figure of the dying savior. Mama’s whispers over the beads, her breath visible in the cold air,
He remembered me. He was our priest when I was a little girl.
I feel like God is far away, turned his face from me. I can’t find his presence, I can’t find my own presence. Our car moves through the cemetery, passing row after row of white stones, carved names, lost faces.
Daddies once here, now gone.
That night, I fall asleep under the great ache of a lost child. Stuck in this grey, cold world where everything is dead. I open my curtains to draw in the night, look up into stars, but it is a starless night that looks back on me, winter fog so thick, the ceiling so low, there is nothing but empty black space moving through the night sky, moving through me.
On a Sunday in September, I ask Mama about mass.
Mama, could we go to church like Daddy used to?
I never thought she’d say yes or leave the house with easy steps down the porch, clicking across bare pine beams in her only pair of black dress shoes, the same shoes she wore to the funeral. I never thought I’d see her walk through the dew damp grass into the rising morning sun, look back toward me with hand-shaded eyes, beckoning me to quicken my pace, knowing she hadn’t set foot in a church since her own childhood.
But she did.
We sit like strangers among family in the last pew in a long barrel of the church. Massive wooden trusses frame the skeletal backbone of the building. Its ribs are lean, wooden pews. Its skin and meat are all paintings of hard-faced saints. It’s breath heavy with incense and dying flowers at various altars.
Mama moves through the prescript motions like a dancer through steps of a movement long dormant. The muscles recalling variations, poses long forgotten by the brain, rote exercises held deep in her memory, seated in her bones. Requisite holy water, sign of the cross, bow at the statue, kiss that one, kneel here, pray there. I stumble to keep her pace. Under the blue rays of stained glass windows, I watch Mama singing in her off-key and treble-heavy soprano,
Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again…
I watch her move in and out of the words with such comfort and reverence. I know how mass must have brought some piece of her Daddy back. In my mind’s eye, I see her in tilted tiara and frowning face on her first communion day. I see him near, resting his hand on the back of a pew, in a dusty sunbeam, his deep voice echoing over my head, through my mind.
The music lifts up and over our heads; the push of many voices as one. Lifting up high into that depth of blue sky, under a coming fall breeze with feather thin clouds.
Up into that distant heaven where Daddy walked—over all our singing and shaking voices, heavy with tears of mourning and joy--
Of peace and loneliness, of love once had and now lost.
Mama and I lift our own voices, hand in hand, clinging to the promise of mercy to follow all the days of our lives. Voices ringing out desperate and longing, flying away…
Up, up, up—like flycatcher wild and free into a white, hot Oklahoma sky.
***
AGLSP Confluence © 2015 AGLSP – Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, All Rights Reserved.
