A baseball cap and a kiss

We are coming around to the time of year when my father fell ill and then died. This first anniversary hits me hard, unexpectedly so. Its like slamming into the brick wall you hadn't seen because you weren't paying attention (you're texting while driving or fooling with the CD player.) I am filled with an unsettling scratchiness that doesn't seem like sadness but boredom, unease, allergies, anger. Its only when I am pulled beneath skin- maybe by the old man walking shakily down the street or the women in the YMCA locker room discussing chemo treatments) does the sadness bubble up to the surface, dissolving the confusion and agitation.

Today, I am thinking about when my mother, aunt, uncle, and myself sat in the funeral home parlor, planning the wake, making arrangements for the casket, the prayer cards, the obituary for the Boston Globe. My mother brought the charcoal wool suit from home along with a pair of bright new underwear. There was also the white cotton socks that my father favored, a cotton button up shirt, a tie whose color I cannot remember. He would be dressed up as if going out to a wedding or anniversary celebration - maybe what he would have worn to his 50th wedding anniversary which was instead spent in the nursing home where he was sent after the first strokes.

On that anniversary Sunday, he was working so hard to do everything that the physical therapist asked of him; push up and down from the chair, stand by the table and reach diagonally to the right and then the left, walk down the hall with the walker. For their anniversary, J and I gave my parents a soap stone carving of three figures holding hands and dancing in an endless circle. In our family, there are several threes that could make up that circle. My daughter wasn't there that day but would visit the next week on mother's day, to share the chocolate honey cake she and I made for the occasion. Father was too nauseous to eat but a few crumbs of the cake but E couldn't tell he was ill. He wore a navy blue baseball cap when he went down to meet her which hid his drooping head. It was hard for him to hear the conversation but he asked her the old questions about school, the dog, chess which made it seem like, to her at least, that he was pretty much his old grandpa self.

When it was time to leave, E and J. said good bye at the elevator while mom and I brought father back up to the darkened room he shared with an elderly bedridden man. Mother changed father's clothes while I waited by the nurses station offering them the left over cake. We helped father from the wheel chair into the hard back chair he liked to sit in to watch TV. He still had the baseball cap on when I went to say goodbye and with his head drooping, I couldn't see his eyes but only his chin and lips. Before I could lean in to kiss his cheek, he took my hand and pulled it to his lips to kiss. Quietly, almost shyly, he said goodbye to me for the last time.