June - 23
freedom
our father long since dead yet for the first time alive the body immaterial as it had been for most of his life inconvenient or worse a lie our father relegated to straight lines empiric evidence & a catholic demeanor inspite of himself now travels to places he never could imagine
looking for a father looking for a husband looking for someone we knew we look with wrong eyes and come away empty handed and heavy hearted while
he is fine and busy as all hell fact is he always believed you died when you were ready and he ain't
December - 30
end of the year posturing: a prelude
going home to maman with two of my brothers & my niece an altogether new constellation of players
I want to take The Novel but it is so heavy I think as in you must be kidding&get over yourself it is about chances not to be missed chapters coming to a close & I already miss him MyPhysicalTherapist though truth be told I wasn't there the last time I was there and he knew it called it called me out and I didn't budge
&the river hosted the bigass rains without overflowing her banks thistime
December - 31
newyear'seve
as suspected OurFather is afterall has afterall reneged on our presumption of his predictability having given it up of course when his menti lapsed and I walk into his life into where he lives and feel at home there and no less so with his meanderings and even on this gray day cannot say I find it depressing infact no one is suffering save erstwhile family now interlopers who arrive unannounced wanting something else and factis it is more honest than the airport where no one was home meanwhile I wait at my mother's kitchen table for my brothers
January - 3
life in his eyes the trajectory for the moment has changed again it's not yet a death march a swan song the fat lady getting ready to sing eachone asks the question of their own measure and all have only imperfect answers yes he knew who I was but has no idea what that means those who live with him now and care for him now know a man we never can never did never will and the proprietary wars are ill waged of course
he is more than anything a fine impressionistic painting
a jazz riff he couldn't understand
January - 4
he was annoyed impatient and soperfectly temporal lobish with that hallmark telegraphed few words full and put off by being bumped his ass too sore to manage being jostled the trip down the hall too long too amorphous too as if hijacked by he wasn't sure who and once at the table thirsty now with the egocentricity of an elder or a babe take your pick
present and participative but the drummer is his own take it or leave it and we all stand in different spots as if around a tree being felled believing it will fall that way
January - 15
it was a nice visit, so like littermates as ourbrother had said, and Our OlderBrother's Daughter smart enough to have been not only a participant but a witness to it all, an incredible part of her his story and our story was rewritten
just like our birth certificates had been, they didn't know their names hadn't changed, I remember finding out so long ago when I got mine and I hated it I think as much as those who found all ofasudden they could eat meat on Friday easy come easy go
it is never clear who what gets erased
January - 17
OurBrother wanted to know if I thought she would sit with him while he was dying in the context of discussing whether or not OurMother really wanted someone out there with her and I said when it gets to that I thought we wouldhaveto do for ourselves what it was we believed was fitting and proper and to do for ourselves what we needed rather than expect it of someone else given that no matter the all for one and one for all, in the moments, metabolizing the death of a fatherhusbandbrother wouldbe each manwomanchild for herself
nevermind the dying
January - 30
in the foreground Our Father lies dying and again it is hard to imagine
and just like canoeing in the living room made the flood no more real or the pretense of knowing where in the hell we were in the middle of that night on a freight train going the wrong direction would have made getting off at the next stop noeasier the calls the volleys the conversations to triangulate on the polestar of truth make no difference and are not helping me decide it is time to go
I wait still as if it were not really happening
January - 31
but since it is & I'm already there on the runway with him ushering him inspite of the fact he like the rest of my family couldnot imagine doesnot imagine there's anywhere to be goingto I might as well be there to be part of the goingto though there's nowhere to be gone andyet, he; mister&master of How Do You Know, I'm betting would in the end ha not be surprised to find there might be a goingto to get to
one never is too old to be fatherless
I leave tomorrow
I know it's real the airline told me so
February - 1
I got there as it came to pass with our Younger Brother whose ambivalences had also been transcended by who knows exactly what in what turns out to have been perfect phrasing so that I was able to be part of the organicity of his dying and having said my good bye the last time I had no need for him to look back no need for him to miss a step and for lack of different languaging the oft asked did he know you were there misses the point
I knew I was there
I was there
he waited
February - 2
we three children our Older Brother biding his own sense went back to the precipice to the sideline of his dyingplace well into the dyingtime divide and sat with him sat with his shadow as it deflated and in the stillness you could decipher the sounds and when we left we knew
the come sit with him now call came at 4:52AM we piled into two cars and made the drive back to the The Villa
Our Father as would have been his wont took his leave precisely: justso we wouldn't have been there andyet nonetheless wouldn't have missed it
February - 3
the night's work just completed the morning work not yet underway, it was quiet, when we got back to TheVilla where'd he'd lived the last five years, a clearing in the perpetuity, punctuated by empty laundry bins standing at attention along side the carts, now piled with clean linens, which outlined the long hall with its many doors open on either side into the multitude of rooms full of stories but nary a stirring soul and we seven strode down the pristine hall as if we might have been a wedding procession as if the waters had just been parted
February - 4
and justthatquickly one becomes part of the bereaved family and justthatquickly becomes part of a complicated dance and justthatquickly gets catapulted along a trajectory well traveled allowing just the same for individual differences and it came to me to make the 1st call notifying our OlderBrother that our father had died
and not too much later I was only sorry not to have had wits enough or trust enough to have said our father art in heaven knowing our father would have in his notsoon to be inhabited grave rolled over
&justthatquickly we discovered it was sad but not tragic
February - 5
OurBrother told this wonderful story of how when the expected call came in the dead of night he hadn't known exactly what to do andhow relieved he was that he'd laid his clothes out because just like for the rest of us in the minute it seemed such an impossible feat to make sense of to contextualize the time is now summons to OurFather's deathbed and how he'd found himself simply&elegantly imagining what our OlderBrother would have done
so he started the cars & as we gathered in the vestibule waiting to go he handed each of us a glass of juice
February - 6
it's good there were the many it's good there was the plenty of family so that we none of us singly were thrust into deciding thrust into the dissembling&reassembling that ensues that is part of the multi faceted act of dying and it is meaningful and extraordinary that we four somehow came alone our spices left at each our own livingplaces so that home fires couldbe would be kept burning and so that we were able to reconstruct the fabric of The Marcuse family into another whole, meanwhile Our Father got a job at the university's department of human anatomy
February - 7
and it is the multitude that is involved as it, the devolving, evolves
notification
the languaging of survived by in TheObituary as gargantuan a minefield as is 1stpew rights nevermind death certificate dispersal to the many interested parties dismantling&archiving
notsomuch the estate which at this point is nonexistant since it transfers seemlessly to named beneficiaries--though we did travel en famille to TheLawyer & to TheFinancialAdvisor--but more poignantly his effects&belongings
laying to rest
there were no services in keeping with OurFather's staunch&ardent dislike of ritual nevermind his new job, but at OurMother's behest we did celebrate a two-day secular shiva
Marcuse Dr. Frederick (Freddy)
Born 1916 Passed away on February 2, 2004.
Lovingly remembered by Dvora (née Wiseman) his wife,
and his children Karl (Janet), Gary (Betsy), Judi (Paul),
and David (Jude), grandchildren Erik and Sagan, sister
Ruth Fainstat (Michael), sister-in-law Gay Bessette,
nieces, nephews, students, colleagues and friends.
The family extends a special thanks to all the people at
TheVilla. In honor of his express wish and love of teaching,
his body was donated to the Department of Human Anatomy
at the UofM.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in memory of Fred
to Doctors Without Borders
February - 8
it was an untold pleasure an amalgam of riches absent the ambient anxiety we all anticipated that we all dreaded absent overwhelming sadness absent an absence that we all foretold instead so reminiscent of the memory of wholeness that we darednot hope for
we sat around the kitchen table without which there can be no life and over time drank 2 bottles of auchentoshan scotch and retold stories and recreated a history and totally missed OurMother's cue when she asked if we needed more scotch
it was with abiding sorrow that we took our leave and broke up the set
February - 9
it's a long way back, going was so much more direct(sic), now I have decisions to make onceagain coming back to a world that has no father
rather than capture it the dissolution his devolving in words I opted for yarn and a crochet hook, hands to heart head bowed, what are you making they kept asking making nothing I was instead capturing a pattern the sum total of the random acts that comprise a dying
the design is different for each of us each with our own marks to show
&so there'll be no agreement on the epitaph
February - 10
againthankfully we're of an age three...four...five...of us losing in the last month a parent andyet for the day in day out of it all there's a vast difference in the road we each traveled to arrive at the ways inwhich we will have celebrated the loss & incredibly unpredictable asit turned out the ways it was worn shared made available to others ornot
for all my words I have yet to capture the depth of it and perhaps it is just that ineffability which allows me license to share it without fear of breaching the personal&profoundly intimate details
February - 11
I'm coming to see how language may have steered me in the wrong direction or may have obfuscated handily the point of being there which I had been so fussy about -- it was not somuch to be part of his dying but moreso to participate in my living to understand to incorporate to embrace a father's dying--my father's dying--as an integral part of any child's living, and fact is I have learned before no matter the soundness of the reasons in the minute for not being there in the long run they don't withstand the test of time
February - 12
the winter rains are back glad I wasn't seduced by the touch of faux spring to be in the garden ahead of it's time and I can't say it's unwelcome more befitting the ambient gentle sadness I'm left with a sadness that feels like a calmness a peacefulness a way of being for the nonce that precludes an ability to rush to be rushed to hurry along andso glad the sadness the tenderness for a better way of saying it was not preempted by anxiety by cowardice by any other name anger or broken teeth & yesterday's stale crusts of bread
February - 13
he died all bones
and my dreams are full of reconstruction of deconstruction of outer converings over the course of time slipping away leaving only the barest outline yet he left for us on his face the hint the precursor of one of his grins and I could hear his laughter again once his bones were silent
it was not a peaceful death yet he died in peace and just the same it had not been a peaceful life; he would be the last to say he lived in peace, but I know OurFather would do it all again inaflash
February - 14
he was so big in so many ways so immovable so fundamental so much as it turns out instrumental in me not being but becoming me that it is hard to imagine as in it misses the point to say he is gone and closer to the truth--his rolling over in his not soon to be inhabited grave notwithstanding and how I know equally notwithstanding--to say it was only the flesh he gave up and his indomitable spirit in keeping with the spirit (sic) of things did not degrade but became MC squared andso there is light after death
February - 15
and Our Mother stepped up Our Mother was in the best sense and with impeccable taste and timing center stage conductor choreographer glue grain of sand cum pearl kvelling swelling holding to as opposed to fast or steady
our mother stepped up and with impeccable taste&timing stood her watch Our Mother stepped up and in the best sense and with impeccable taste and timing mothered us steady as we went through the shoals amazingly there were no foul winds which is not to say there are none
amazingly there were no ghosts which is not to say there are none
February - 16
and there is an abiding...thumbing through the words...vulnerability sadness not melancholy tenderness wistfulness longing yearning I think of stretching reaching, I'm talking here about time&space, shifting altering changing redoing renewing ofthe landscape of my heart and by default the world as I live in it not to mention ofcourse a different perspective since the wheel has turned
and in the background faux spring just come&gone it is raining again and we those of us who know these things don't need no stinking weatherman or computermodels to tell us these rains, the river won't host, without breaking the bank
February - 21
andso I think of the manyways there are tobe a dilettante &for allofit wonderwhy it took me, mistress of standing OnTheLine that I am, solong to cover the distance
in the end or the beginning the metaphors the lessons the ways there are of interacting with ones passions remain the same, showing up or not, with glee or not with ambient anxiety or not with expectations and chatter or not with litany&refrains or not
thingis afterall is said&done what's gone missing is a life'sworth of ambientanxiety that seems to have dissipated with my father's perfect death what a perfect epitaph
