Hazy, Quick, Gone

In that childhood home where I lived when my father died, there are sound shoots--channels for the traveling of voices originating from any point in the house to be heard quite clearly at any other point. Through the front door is a small entry way, beyond which is the living room separated from the kitchen by a thin wall with a narrow, arched doorway. To the left of the living room broke off a short hallway connecting my parents’ bedroom to mine and Sophie’s. Our two rooms shared an inside wall and in my parents’ room, directly opposite this shared wall, was the door to the stairs leading down to the basement and to my father’s private room. It was that room and that stairwell that began to produce the sounds a few weeks after my dad died.

Sometimes, from the basement door there was a scratching or tapping. Sometimes we’d hear a bump or clatter from the private room. Sometimes, when we were sleeping, we’d wake up to frustrated moans from the basement echoing in the upstairs rooms. Other times, so much silence that I wrote it down: “March 3rd, no noise.”

I woke in my bed one night hearing a rumbling of something like thunder. When I opened my eyes and sat up, I knew I had been dreaming a terrible dream although I could not remember its details. Only that bleeding, severed limbs lay in piles all around me and I was unable to breathe while one amputated hand clasped my esophagus closed. My back was wet with sweat, pasting my shirt against my skin.

The thunder was a mystery. It was not storming outside and it was deep into the night closing in on morning, maybe 3 or 4 am, a quiet hour even for our neighborhood. Then I heard the muffled, unmistakable sounds of cartoons seeping through the walls from the living room. I got up and crept slowly down the hall to investigate the source. Did my mom fall asleep watching TV? Only my dad ever watched cartoons. As I cautiously inched down the hall, I stopped moving and looked down at my feet framed by the brown, friction-worn carpet. It was the Smurfs. I closed my eyes as I remembered how, after watching an episode with him, my dad took Sophie and me out in the back yard to a patch of wild mushrooms growing among the grass and dandelions.

“They live down in there,” he whispered to us, pointing at the ground.

“They’re too small to see, but be careful where you step; you might wipe out a village they just built,” he said, looking at Sophie. Sophie’s eyes grew and she stared at the mushrooms.

“Can they hear us?” she asked.

“Sure they can, but they’re very tiny so their ears can only pick up certain tones,” he said, glancing at me with smiling eyes. Sophie bent down, cupping her hand around her mouth, and shouted: “Papa Smurf! Don’t be scared! Can you hear me, Papa Smurf?”

My dad laughed and scooped Sophie up in his arms.

“Let’s leave Papa Smurf and the rest of the Smurfs alone. We can watch them on TV again later.” I knew there were no Smurfs in the mushrooms, but I appreciated my dad’s game and how much it pleased Sophie.

The sound of the cartoon that night, however, was entirely humorless, melancholy, spooky even. But why was it on? I imagined his skeleton, having escaped its flesh and having dug itself out of the earth, had come home to resume his living habits and was now sitting in his chair watching the Smurfs.

I unplanted my feet and stepped into the living room facing the back of his chair and the dark, blank, mute screen of the television. With echoes of the cartoon, the repetition of soft musical phrases still humming around in my brain, I stood taut in the paralyzing darkness and silence. I stood for several minutes waiting for something to happen. Light from the window bisected a wall of shadow diagonally, leaving his chair equally divided into chill blue light and crouched darkness.

There were other incidents over the course of three months. The phone rang and, when answered, produced indecipherable shouting and moaning sounds drowning within thick static. Once my mom claimed to answer the phone and hear my dad’s voice on the other end, saying her name. She slammed down the receiver and unplugged the phone only to have it ring again. That time it went unanswered. The lights turned off and on by themselves. Miscellaneous items were mysteriously moved or disappeared completely.


Gram came over to bless the house with holy water and an old Polish prayer, asking the spirit to leave. When she was younger, Gram had bought a house from a deceased woman’s daughter. My mom, Grace, and Joe were all under age 10 and Grampa was working all the time, same as always. He usually has two or three jobs at a time; back then he was a hot dog vendor and a car salesman. When they moved into that house, Gram sometimes heard noises in the attic. Thinking it might have been stored items shifting in their containers and boxes, she cleaned out the entire attic just to eliminate that as a possible cause. That night she heard the most distinctive noise of all: the unmistakable footfalls of a person walking across the floor above.

She got out of bed to go look for who might be in the attic and found nothing but an old pair of red high-heeled shoes. The next day she called the deceased woman’s daughter and asked her to come over. Gram showed her the shoes and asked her if she recognized them.

“Yes,” the daughter said, “those were my mother’s! Where on earth did you get them?”

“I found them in my attic! Smack in the middle of the floor after I emptied the whole thing out! Now there was nothin’ up there, I’m tellin’ you, nothin’!” The woman stared at Gram and shook her head.

“What changes have you made around here?” she asked.

“All kinds!” Gram said, “well, I rearranged the back yard and replanted the garden, and . . .”

“You didn’t!”

“What?”

“The garden. My mother never let anyone touch her garden. You shouldn’t have done that . . .”

“Now you listen here! I’ll do as I please; this is my house!”

Gram showed the daughter out and bid her good riddance. Later that same day she went to the local butcher shop where she had an acquaintanceship with the clerk, an old Polish woman with a fine mustache, a hairnet packed with white locks, and a thick accent.

“What wrong?” asked the Polish woman.

“Oh, nothing. I got this problem with my house is all.”

“What the problem?”

“Well, I keep on hearin’ these noises in my attic so’s I cleaned the damn thing out. Next night I hear someone walkin’ up there and I find these pair a heels!” Gram was anxious to change the subject, not expecting the Polish woman to believe her.

But she said, “Oh, you have restless spirit there. That very common in Poland.”
“It is?” Gram asked, stunned.

“Oh, yes. You just need say this prayer, then sprinkle holy water from church in all corners. That make spirit rest.” The Polish woman wrote down the prayer and gave it to Gram. She decided to carry out the old woman’s ritual, though she admitted she felt silly. That night she woke up and saw the foggy impression of a woman in the corner of her room.

She shook Grampa and woke him, pointing to the ghost when he grouchily asked her what was going on. She says he jumped and yelled out when he saw the ghost, but he claims he never saw a thing. Gram swore it was the truth, and that after the ghost hung there suspended in the air of their bedroom for several minutes looking at them, it simply faded away, never to return. This was why she came to our house packing holy water and the prayer.

She walked into the house looking very grave.

“Gram!” Sophie yelled and ran toward her. Gram held up her hand palm out and put her finger to her lips.

“Shhh! You’ll disturb the spirit,” she said. Sophie stopped, looked hurt and confused.

“What is she talking about?” She asked me softly.

“Dad,” I whispered. I shrugged and winked, reassuring her with an amused smile. Gram walked into the middle of the room and carefully unfolded her paper.

“Spirit of unrest, hail. Hail, holy Lady, most holy queen, Mary, mother of God, commands you now to leave this place.”

“Gram, I though it was an old Polish prayer,” Sophie said. Gram shot her an angry look and pressed her finger squarely to her lips. Sophie again looked at me. I nodded and winked, gestured toward Gram who had returned to her paper.

“You were chosen by the most high father in heaven, consecrated by him, with his most holy beloved son and the holy spirit, the comforter. On you descended and still remain all the fullness of grace and every good. To our Lord I commit you. Go now. Amen,” she read loudly, holding the vial of water out in front of her. She uncapped the vial and walked, slowly and deliberately, to each corner of the room where she splashed some of the water out and mumbled, “hail, oh spirit.” She repeated this for every corner in every room in the house. We followed her and watched; waiting for any sign of the ghost of our dad. When she had sprinkled every corner in the house, she capped the vial and slipped it in her pocket.

“That’s it, girls. You won’t have no Spirit in this house no more,” she said.

“Gram, I thought that prayer…” Sophie began.

“It is a Polish prayer, dear,” Gram said, sounding annoyed, “It’s what the old lady wrote down for me and it works!” She insisted. Sophie didn’t say another word.
I never understood why she addressed the ghost of my father as Spirit, when it was so obviously my father. Maybe that’s the reason it didn’t work. I thought he would have respected the authority of holy water even if Gram didn’t. She claims to this day that it did work. Perhaps there was a short period of rest directly following her ritual, but it didn’t last. On the day of my first communion, about 13 weeks after his death, we had the worst time of all.

It happened at St. Wenceslas Church. My father had been baptized there, attended mass there, married my mother there, had Sophie and me baptized there, and was laid to rest there, his grave marked by a small metal cross like all the rest, distinguished only by the name etched on the memorial stone. Walking by that churchyard in my little white dress, I felt consumed by the awareness of his dead body contained in that very ground. I wondered at its process of decay, how it might look at this stage and if the glue they used to keep his eyes shut in the coffin had worn off, allowing the lids to pull back, revealing swollen white orbs, the pupils rolled up toward the top of his head. I couldn’t look; I kept my eyes riveted on the face of the main church building.
Stained-glass, Roman Gothic window panes, German style towers, and common, rural America bricks. Although my first communion took place in that same building, unlike my dad, we did not attend regular mass. My connection to it, I knew, was through him.

At the house, following the Communion ceremony, Jamie and I were sitting together on the couch in the midst of about six or seven family guests including my aunts and uncles. The front door stood open allowing a fresh breeze in and serving as an open invitation to any newly arriving company come to congratulate me on my initiation to the Catholic Church. While sitting around in the living room, the radio on the mantle kept turning on and off randomly. Jamie looked nervous and glanced around the room:
“Someone got a remote control for that thing?” he asked.

“There’s no remote for that radio,” I said.

“You know about Jane’s daddy,” my Aunt Grace said, “he’s still hangin’ around here is all.”

“Why don’t we go into the kitchen, everybody?” my mom yelled out, overhearing the conversation. We all filed into the kitchen while my mom stood with her back to the door and her hand on the door handle. When the room cleared, she pulled the door closed, leaning into it and whispering through clenched teeth loud enough for me to hear: “Cut this shit out!”

I took Jamie into my bedroom while the adults finished their coffee and cake calmly around the kitchen table. After that day, we began plans to move out of my father’s house and back into Gram and Grampa’s four-flat.

Jamie didn’t take the news well. It was the very first time I ever witnessed him cry.

“I’ll never see you,” he whimpered. He stepped on a clump of grass; a shock of green sprang up around his shoe.

“Nonsense.” I grabbed his hand.

“In the summer we can ride our bikes and meet halfway. And when it’s cold we’ll take a cab…”

He dropped my hand, shoved both of his into the pockets of his beat-up jeans, kicked the dirt. “Where do we get money for a cab?”

“We’ll take the bus, then.”

He looked down. So much sadness about him. I wanted him to come with us. I didn’t know what to say.

“Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard, oh lord why don’t weeeeeeeee?” I bellowed, out of key.

He looked up at me, mouth curved down, eyes laughing. He looked back down. “I’ll miss you,” he said.

“Love you.”

He looked up. “Love you, too.”

His friendship filled me like blood. Words we found and spoke to one another, the pulse.

The Origins of Guilt

Two weeks after Missy died, Sophie and I were approaching our apartment building after our first day back to school. I could sense from a block away that something was very wrong. I slowed my pace and considered turning back, unwilling to face whatever was waiting for us at home. The first thing I saw was my mom sitting on the front steps, my Aunt Grace close beside her. When Grace saw us approaching, she placed a hand on my mom’s shoulder and said, “Christine, the girls are coming.”

I took Sophie’s hand as we approached. My mom came to us and stooping down, put her arms around our shoulders.

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

“Is it about Daddy?” Sophie asked.

She looked at Sophie silently for several moments, watery gleaming eyes fixed absently on her face.

“Daddy’s gone, honey. He died today. He had a heart attack.”

As these words formed and spilled from her lips, the tears, fat, bulbous drops, slipped from her eyes. Her face was red.

Sophie began to sob and my mom turned to her, embraced her. I walked out into the road, past the people, past the sounds, the weeping. I don’t know when my walk became a run. It happened fluidly, my feet gliding above ground between falls. I closed my eyes and kept running. A dark ledge against a dark void. I leaned out just far enough, peering over to regard plain, white points of light, some steady, some madly rushing to catch each other, some unbridled as chaos, some darting toward collision, and others standing silent as sentinels, overseeing the whole melee, unable to affect or change the course, but destined to watch until even their own light dies. A wave of vertigo hit me and I carefully pulled my eyes back open, sought out a deep breath; instead I listened, imagining I could hear the low moan of the wind as it slipped between buildings, increasing in speed as it lifted the breath from my gut up through to my throat. I ran, the grass beneath my feet a blur of green.

Something might have been carrying me for hours to pound out old rhythms in staccato breath; to rain blows in hammering footfalls meant to detach from the earth rather than to connect; a soporific series of repetitive motions--satori.

I was aware of a large knot lodged in my chest, rising, indicating the tied-up presence of a great pain that contained so much. I could not move but to move twice as fast; there was no such thing as slow. I had made my way down the Chicago River. Every so often I looked around and registered the beauty, the amazing face of air, water, earth. My hands were stiff, fingers unmoving. I wondered then if I had left my body; if my spirit had just leaped up above my head to hum and vibrate with the other realms.

The sky turned dark and the moon appeared. That moon and those clouds, even the stars and that night sky were all tattooed with images from so many years. A constellation of pain bodies holding little girl guilt in its seams. As I ran I was certain I had come through some real and terrible time warp, some rip in the fabric of space where he was alive and—

No. Forget it. He was dead.

No time passed, it seemed, between that run and the wake. They are bumped up against each other in my mind like a single memory, separated by a semicolon or a dash. Sophie and I were in dresses. Mine was dark gray cotton with a white collar and white cuffs, the left one smudged with my mother’s red fingernail polish. Sophie wore her Easter dress, a poly satin blue garment with pearl-white beads along the neckline. My mom put on makeup and what she called her black mourning clothes.

My dad lay there in a gray three-piece suit. I had never seen him look so dressed up. Sophie and I stood and stared. His hair had been washed and made to lie neatly, not one strand out of place. His face had an artificial healthy glow provided by expertly applied cosmetics. I thought about the people whose job it was to tend to his hair and makeup and wondered what they had thought of their work. Did they imagine that this was the way he looked while he was alive? Did they think his natural appearance included shiny, soft hair and glowing skin? And how would his yellow-specked hazel eyes have appeared if he were to open them at that very moment and smile?

“I feel like he’s going to pop up any minute and say: ‘Just kidding!’” my mom said to the funeral director.

I became aware then that I had been standing on my toes, bent slightly forward over the coffin, rigidly studying him for quite some time. I sank back on my heels.

We were taken home after the wake because our mom didn’t think we should attend the funeral, but if anyone lacked the means to control her emotions, it was she.
I was both angry and piteous toward her for going alone. I felt too weak to resist, too weak for temper. I remember feeling helpless, it was a strong desire to stand aside and just let the pieces fall, their effortless migration somehow mesmerizing; events giving rise to still more events, gaining force and strength through their motion, shaping in each moment a new subset of possible outcomes. Bound as I was to that formula, the fate of my life in its cold calculation, I had not the momentum of will to catch up, to hold on. There was nothing at all to hold. All surfaces had become round, slick; nothing could allow capture or grip, only sad, hollow grasps.

Later that evening while my mom sat with Sophie, I walked over to my grandparents’ house where he died and stood outside. I remembered how Gram told Grandma that he was going to die if they didn’t help him. That house, tall and skinny, the temple of his death, stood as a testimony from that day forward, ominously affirming how utterly without help he remained until the very end. I saw people standing in the driveway, weeping. I saw the strong, wide back of my uncle and the buxom frame of a woman I didn’t know, her head darkly lowered, patient tears slowly seeping out of broad eyes. I witnessed them as if softly praying (hardly able to find a normal breath, the verdict so irreversible) for her to be comforted. He just let her weep. He did not offer false hope.

I felt the ground holding me up, as if the earth alone were capable of enduring, bravely and quietly, the unsoothable, constant hum of human grief. Suddenly I felt a great although contradictory desire to praise God. The matter of a body unliving will disintegrate into dust and soil, just not right away. Eventually it will join the surface of all creation, absorbing and upholding the byproducts of life, hope, the disappearance of hope, the fullness of endings, the absence of feeling. No despairing, just holding until it is time to be exposed and dispersed, fused with the basis for all sensation. What I know now and didn’t know then was that it was in my recognition of this unending cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth that I found God: A process, a funnel of energy, the outer lining of which is uncertainty and within which all life gets sucked and spun, broken apart, shaken out and unraveled across time.