Dad in a Bag

Getting ready for my dad’s memorial party—he wasn’t the type to want any kind of memorial service, but a family gathering at his sister Betty’s place to share anecdotes about him would have suited him just fine—I pulled the bag of his ashes out of the particle-board box that the crematorium sold as its lowest-priced “urn” to see if it might fit into something fancier.

       It was disorienting, lifting that clear plastic bag full of white, stony chips into the light and trying to realize that these were the last physical remains of my father. He had been so huge in my imagination once, so limitless in strength and knowledge, so frighteningly and reassuringly potent, that it made no sense to think that he could be reduced to this, a bag the size of a head of lettuce and light enough to bounce in the palm of my hand.
       In my earliest memories, my father was a towering figure who could lift me into the air and set me on his shoulders as though I had no weight at all. Looking down from his height, I understood that the world he strode through was far smaller and less frightening than the one that loomed over me, that the mysteries of high shelves and counter tops lay exposed to him and that to him the neighborhood dogs who glared into my eyes were only knee-high pests. Once my mother hinted that he might spank me for something I’d done, and although he’d never once hit me—she was the only one who ever did that—the mere suggestion that he might turn his strength against me made me burst into sobs of terror.

       I learned to hike by following him on the trails of Glacier National Park, and I can still picture him ahead of me on the trail, rising against the sky like the erosion-carved pillars that jutted from the mountains themselves. The more I learned about the larger world, the larger my father seemed. In those years the culture of American boys was filled with recapitulations of World War II—Combat on TV, G. I. Joe under the Christmas tree, Iron Crosses scrawled on homework folders—and the knowledge that my father had fought in that war, that he had manned a giant gun on a Navy cruiser off the shores of Guadalcanal and felt the shudder of Japanese shells exploding against the hull beneath his feet, gave him the magnitude of a mythic hero.
       But somewhere along the way, he and I seem to have stepped in front of a pair of fun-house mirrors, because suddenly he looked much smaller and I looked much bigger. I remember the day, when I was thirteen or fourteen, when he and I were heading home after an impromptu lunch with a family friend and it dawned on him that my mother might have made lunch for us in our absence and would be annoyed if we came home with no appetites; he asked me not to tell her we’d already eaten and to join him in forcing down a second lunch, and it struck me that my father was afraid of my mother, far more afraid than I was. From that moment on, I think, I saw him as smaller than me and in need of my protection.
       During one of our last hikes together in Glacier Park, his fifty-five year old knees gave out and I had to rush ahead to stop the boat docked at the trail head on Two Medicine Lake from leaving before he could limp to it. It was the sort of physical heroism he’d once have exhibited for me. I began to understand his emotional as well as his physical fragility: listening more carefully to his war stories, I could hear that he had been a hero—he saved men’s lives that night off Guadalcanal—but he had also been just a twenty-one year old kid who would never entirely recover from feeling his world being blown apart around him.

       Decades later, as my mother lay dying and my father began to come apart emotionally, cognitively, and finally physically, I would have to become much bigger than he was. I comforted him, took over his finances, sold his home for him, and found him a new place to live. I became his father. He shrank into a wheelchair, so that when we went out I now looked down on the top of his head as he had once looked down on mine. His memory decayed relentlessly, leaving him smaller and smaller as a person. In his last weeks, the only sentence I heard him speak was “Hold my hand.”

       At last he became no more than an unconscious body in a bed, and then not even that. When he died he became smaller still, his chest no longer inflated by breath and the flesh of his face no longer plumped up by blood. I left the hospital room for a while and came back to find that he'd been zipped into a body bag but still not removed to the morgue. Where my father had lived for his last few days there was now a six-foot long, two-foot wide translucent plastic bag, tented here and there by jagged bones. To the very end he had held the firm jaw and closed lips that had always given him an air of strength; but now through the gauzy plastic I could see the dark oval of his open mouth below the peak of his nose, and somehow that made what was left of him look hollow and insubstantial.

       Now my father is in another bag, a bag of little chips that crunches when I squeeze it. I see him beside me, chuckling at the absurdity of it: “You mean that’s me? Son of a gun!”

       But this is how we all shrink, isn’t it? Most dramatically in the eyes of our children but also in our own. My son once saw me as the giant man who could protect him from anything and always knew best, an image I very much wanted to sustain for us both. But in the years he wrestled with his chronic migraines, as each new doctor I brought him to proved unable to help him and nearly every plan of attack I suggested either fell short or backfired, as I encouraged him to keep trying while I failed more and more to keep the frustration and despair out of my own voice, he watched me shrink.

       First Nicky pushed back against my advice with a frustrated anger of his own, but then his attitude shifted to that surest evidence that parent and child are changing places: compassion. He told his therapist that he felt bad for me because I’d become so miserable about my inability to help him, and he asked how he could explain to me, without hurting my feelings, “that it isn’t his responsibility to solve my problems.”

       It’s not just my son’s perspective on me that’s changed, of course, but my own. I felt so capable of soothing his fears and helping him through life’s crises when he was little, and for years I clung to the belief that I could help him through this one too, that his mom and I would eventually find the right medical or nutritional or psychological treatment that would restore him to the life he wanted. Jennie was able to admit much earlier than I that we seemed to be up against something powerful and incomprehensible, that we should think about lowering our expectations and accommodating the illness rather than continuing to try to beat it. I think it’s just that she was more invested in easing his pain than in proving to him that action and determination could win the fight, which had a lot to do with a mom’s willingness to look human and right-sized, while I wanted so much to see myself as powerful and heroic.

       In the end, her wisdom prevailed; now Nicky turns mainly to her for medical advice, and I don’t question his judgment.  There are still areas where he turns to me for guidance—just last night he asked me how to get payments on a PayPal account—but those areas are a lot smaller than they used to be. Just like me.

        It will be a long while before I’ve shrunk away the way my father ultimately did. I’ll still have my moments of bigness. But someday my son will also be handed the bag that contains his father. Someday he will be able to hold me as easily as I hold my father, as easily as I held him when he was little, as easily as my father held me.