Standing at the Grave of My Father

Today my father would be 66 and instead of celebrating, I am seated on a narrow sidewalk in Paramus, New Jersey, looking at his grave.

It’s easier to be here–it makes more sense, I mean–when I perceive myself as sitting with him physically, because he is only 6 feet away from me.

We put a basketball on his footstone, instead of a Jewish symbol as so many around here do, because it was the most important thing to him. In fact, we buried him in a Larry Bird #33 Celtics jersey, holding a basketball.

Now I’m here. My nose is running, but it’s cold outside.

It seems crazy that you live a whole life and then end up here, a vast, wide open space, clouds stretching above in every direction, the distant sounds of Rt 17 and Rt 4 on either side, the landscaping guys (respectfully avoiding me as I sit here) trimming around you. A whole life: born and a childhood and the experiences of love and hunger and sex, and the daily exuberances and secrets (if you’re my dad, or me) and growing out of your parents’ home and all that that entailed and then day camp and that side of life, and the draft, and basketball all the time, scholarship to college and a master’s degree and then teaching and getting married and having kids and moving from the Bronx to the suburbs and then the experience of the kids growing up and getting older and the trips and drugs and sex and sports and music and theatre from your kids and fishing and your van and going cross country, and having so many friends that you’re constantly running into and seeing your kids mature and go to college and more secrets as your marriage falls apart and then sickness and you can see the end long before it actually comes and you live like that but you live, and then you’re in the hospital, and then you never leave until Michael Jordan comes to visit you and you realize that you’re the owner of Nike, and then it’s over.

And what was your life is now in the hands of your kids and they do the best they can but it’s complicated and they do it anyway, and time goes on, and you’re just here, forever, in the ground.

Your mother and father are close by, as are your sister and her husband.

What I don’t know what to think about is the empty grave next to my dad’s that we own. Who’s going to go there and rest forever in this, at best, neutral place?

I mean, who wants to spend eternity on a huge field of mown grass, with no trees and a cold wind whispering through.

Oh, the part of you that would care isn’t here anymore. It’s gone on, and is in all of us, I imagine. Or I don’t, I don’t really know.

You were 55 when you died, and would have been 66 today.

I want to say I love you, and I do, but that doesn’t feel meaningful to me right now.

Dad, I wish you could know my sons, and I wish you could fill me in on all of the things that Mom can’t.  And maybe if you were alive still, you’d be calmer and more reasonable and less agitated. I never really knew you as an adult.

Here you are, so stark and anonymous. You look lonely. Do the geese keep you company?

I really have so many questions about your life and mine that I think you could answer. When you were alive, I only knew some of them, and you wouldn’t say, but maybe now?

I’m sad you’re gone. I wasn’t for a long time, but now I am. Now, I think, I’m ready to have a dad. Instead, I’ll just be the best one–the best person–that I can.

I’m going to see the rest of the family now.