ONE YEAR

Grasping at Grandpa

A recent conversation with Cecily ::


Cecily: What happens if Grandpa gets hit by a car?

Me:  Which Grandpa?

C:  Tickle Grandpa.

M:  He can't.  He already died.

C:  But what if he gets hit after he comes alive again?

M:  He can only die once.  When we are resurrected we live forever.

C:  But we will die.

M:  Yes, because we're still mortal.  We will die and then we will be resurrected and we will live forever.  We'll never die again.

C:  Oh, it's like Rapunzel's hair.


May I comment on this exchange with some degree of earnestness?

I believe what I told Cecily.  My God, My Eternal Father in the Heavens above is real.  He gave me my own Father here in this life - the divine gift of family, because family has always been the very illuminated center of the vastly encompassing and simple plan of all our existence.  The man who is my earthly father is also a child to our spiritual Father.  My Dad and I - we are father and daughter - we are brother and sister.   Both recipients of the resurrection that Jesus Christ purchased for us.  The ALL us.  The every-human-being-who-has-ever-lived us.

In my life this is not a fantastical, wish-it-were-true fairy tale.  This is the truth by which I make every choice.

God speaks to his children.  Of whom, I am one who is listening.  Sometimes.


Cecily is fixated with the death of her Tickle Grandpa.  She is three, so her mind harbors the experience in a way I am still trying to understand.  The entirety of her conscious life has been dominated by . . . change? . . . upheaval?  I'm not sure what to call her experience.  At two she was trying to grasp the new, abstract absence of her beloved Tickle Grandpa.  Shortly thereafter she was pulled from her bed and her home to escape a flood that defined our exit from Salt Lake City itself.  From January 28th of 2011 to present she has been without a stability of spirit.

In the midst of all this the constant has been her fixation with Grandpa.  It manifests itself in strange places.  Cecily's sadness, anger, and delight can all find a voice in Tickle Grandpa.

She watches me open a pomegranate and slowly extract the arils into a bowl for all of the children to eat unhindered by the leathery skin and difficult pith.  In the motions of it I see my Dad's hands that have countless times done this same thing.  He was born to the desert, eating pomegranates from beginning to end.
Cecily interrupts my thoughts with her own.  "When he comes back alive, I think Tickle Grandpa will like to have pomegranate seeds for a snack."
"I'm sure he will, Cecily.  Tickle Grandpa loves pomegranates."
Let's just hope that he is not gobbling them up in the afterlife making himself prisoner to the dark one like poor Persephone.

____

Cecily comes to me in the morning, still rubbing sleep from her eyes, holding a little Boppy.  "Mom, I feel like I'm dreaming out of my Grandpa."

____

Cecily prays incessantly.  She is in a stage of defying everyone else in the house the opportunity to pray because she owns it.  And in every prayer is the same request, "Please bless my Tickle Grandpa to come back alive."

____

She requests stories over and over that feature baby Cecily and Tickle Grandpa.  Her favorite is simply this:
Baby Cecily and Tickle Grandpa were sooo tired.  Grandpa laid down on the couch, put Cecily right  on his chest and they both fell asleep.

____

I find Cecily at the computer looking at the screen of all our Skype Contacts.  She looks at me with terrible disappointment and says "I skyped Tickle Grandpa, but he wasn't alive."

____

In the midst of a tearful, screaming argument with Caroline, Cecily shouts, "STOP CAROLINE! You're making my Grandpa not come back alive!"


It is this declaration that has given me the most insight into her experience.  She interprets all hurt through the lens of Grandpa being dead.  The more she hurts, for whatever reason, the farther away is the reality or memory of Grandpa.  And where there is peace there is also the greater possibility of his return.

I had a dream the other night in which my Dad visited me.  When my eyes met his I refused to look away, knowing that I was dreaming, knowing that he was really with me, knowing that in the moment I looked away he would be gone.  I miss him.  I didn't want him to go.  I touched his arm and we both began to float slowly away, into the sky.  All the while I would not let go of his eyes.  He smiled and touched my hand that was on his arm, "It's ok Jess.  You can stay here.  It's ok. I'm ok."

So if any of you have been wondering - he says he's ok.

Fallingwater

You are a place of old age, a place of cracking cement and rusted metal, old glass and old ideas.  You are a place to find metal cups in metal cabinets, orange polyester party goers, and coral lipstick.  

You are Fallingwater.

Which means, really, you are a place fresh and vibrant, ahead of your time.  You are straight out of the 1950's before there were 50's.  Born in 1936, when the world was still building boxes, Mr. Wright was building beauty, and you are IT.  

This was an unplanned pilgrimage.  Matt and I were in Pennsylvania for a CES Couples Conference  staying at a Mennonite camp retreat that turned out to be just 30 minutes from Fallingwater.  I insisted. Matt obliged. 

We pulled into the car park and stopped for just a moment before getting out of the silver Chevrolet rental.  

"I don't know that you understand just how big a deal this is for me." I said to Matt.

"How come," he asked?

"It's like doing something vicariously for my Dad that he never got to do for himself."

Matt obliged and then he engaged our tour guide so intensely that she asked him if he was an architect.  Matt is the master of questions . . . and observation.  Despite pressing our guide to the very fringes of her allotted minutes in each room she still failed to mention to us that we could be part of the "in-depth tour group" starting shortly after ours.  Matt's interest was heightened such that they should have offered and "in-depth-after-hours tour" just for the two of us.

My Dad made wood do the bidding of his hands for a living until his hands betrayed him and then he taught high school kids how to do those things.  It wasn't the "perfection of the life" he might have hoped for, but it provided for his family.  In my early years - many of them - like the years from birth to about eight years old, my Dad was a student of the Industrial arts as well as anything else that caught his fancy.  Which was everything.  Which made graduation a thing always on the distant horizon.  

Somewhere in those years my Dad studied architecture.  If you study architecture you are introduced to a fellow called Frank Lloyd Wright.  Mr. Wright is more than an architect, but I do not know his words or work well enough to render any interpretation of what he is.  

I will let him speak for himself:

A philosophy is deduced from nature, and if according as the philosophy is parallel to the truths and processes of nature, it endures.  Without philosophy there is no understanding of anything.  Man is a phase of nature.  And only as he is related to nature does he matter, is he of any account whatever above the dust.

He is well known for works such as Fallingwater, The Robie House, Taliesen West, and most notably, The Guggenheim Museum in New York City.   I knew these words as a very young girl.  My young mind was the keeper of images so unique they could vary in a hundred ways and every one of them be a Frank Lloyd Wright signature, as recognizable as a Coca Cola logo.  The lines and circles of his leaded, stained-glass windows.  

You have seen them.

They might bring to mind words like "art deco" or "arts and crafts".  While not a student of architecture myself I am pretty sure Wright can be found somewhere in the midst of those words, or perhaps those words can be found somewhere in the midst of Mr. Wright.  At any rate, there is some correlation.

I tried to  walk through Fallingwater with my father's eyes.  I tried to invite him into my fingertips to say "I have touched it.  This cantilevered thing of genius." I tried to give his ears the sound of falling water that can be heard from every part of the house as a river flows beneath it and down through Pennsylvania woods.  I took one leaf from one rhododendron that fills the forest, to put in my journal and write - Here is a living thing from a living memory that my father gave to me.

You are Fallingwater.

I know your name from my Father's tongue and your beauty from my own eyes.

How Soon We Are Put to the Test

{ Excerpts from my journal }

17 December 2009 Thursday

Mom calls me from the hospital sobbing. "He's irascible and mean. He says I'm stubborn and unforgiving. He's yelling at me and at the nurses. He tried to walk out of the hospital but the nurse finally told him he has wires inside him all the way to his heart that the doctor must remove first, and if he leaves his insurance won't pay for anything."

Way to bully the bully, Nurse Ratched.

Somehow I know that what my Mom needs is for me to take charge and tell her what to do. She and Aubrey do this for me when I call in hysterics.

"Pull it together, Mom," I demand. "You know this is up and down. You know who Dad is and you are dealing with him under the worst circumstances of his life. Don't act like it's falling apart. You get it together and be there for him. Just let it roll off right now, and give him time to make changes."

She calms down, "Okay, okay, you're right."

They have been waiting all day to be discharged from the hospital and my Dad is desperate to see the kids before we leave for Utah.

Chani comes over and we all make a "WELCOME HOME" sign for Dad. We start a fire. Clean the house.

Eventually they get home. Dad is wonderful with the kids. He shaves his beard and mustache first thing. He looks DIFFERENT. I have never seen his hairless face. It is part of his new self he says.

Cecily and Caroline sit in his lap, as they did the night he left for the hospital. We have come full round, bringing countless stitches, weakened bodies, and stronger spirits with us. He is finally at peace, eating the best smoothie of his life and holding grandkids.

PARIS . LONDON . ROME - VEGAS . PALMYRA . HEAVEN

{ Excerpts from my journal }

16 December 2009 Wednesday (continued)

He calls Aubrey while I am sitting next to him and tells her to buy the house with the apartment because he and Mom are going to drive out in May to stay for a few months, maybe serve a six month mission in Palmyra.

Aubrey calls me a few minutes later, "Are you with him?" she asks exasperatedly. "What is he talking about? Something is going on. He sounds different."

"He's glowing," I say.

She is crying. "I know. I can feel it, hear it in his voice and I'm not even there."

He wants me to shave his beard and mustache. I'm nervous - nervous that I will cut him, but more nervous to see his face without it. As though everything has changed so quickly that taking his beard will take a part of his identity. I don't want any part of my Dad to be gone, not when these past six days have planted in me the fear of all parts of him being gone.

Grah comes and I pass the responsibility of shaving to him. We mutually decide the one razor we have is not sufficient to remove all the hair. Dad settles for tomorrow.

They are talking about fishing, all the things they will do.

"Things are going to change," my Dad tells Grah - his only son. "We're going to be doing a lot of things together."

"We're putting a permanent basketball hoop up when we pave our driveway," Grah tells him. "I figure we can play some one-on-one, half court. It's time for you to teach me to play basketball."

Grah leaves - he was visiting on his lunchbreak - promising to return tomorrow.

Dad tells me about the cardiac ICU nurse that met him when he came into emergency. She asked if he was feeling ok. "NO," he replied. She looked at him for a split second and said "You're having a heart attack. Come with me."

When it became clear that he was going to have open-heart surgery and who the surgeon would be she said "You came in at the right time. You're getting the number one surgeon in all of Nevada."

Eventually I had to leave sending my Mom back with the voice recorder trying not to miss all that he was offering.

___

Tonight as my Mom and I sit talking, eating milk and cookies in front of the fireplace before going to bed, she is crying tears of joy. "I have never been so happy before. I think this is the happiest day of my life," she says. "Always before there have been dark corners, hidden sorrows, but today they are gone."

She told Aubrey earlier "even if it all goes back to the old Wayne - I had today. I can survive on today."

Shaking Hands With Palestine

{ Excerpts from my journal }

15 December 2009 Tuesday

Today my Mom is with him. About seven hours. I did not see him, but she says he is talking a lot, and making plans.

16 December 2009 Wednesday

Twice now I have come through the Emergency Room doors as entrance to the hospital and found a grown man in desperate, hopeless tears, with someone beside him offering what comfort they can.

___

Today his bed was empty as I came around the corner. Dad was sitting in the chair having a breathing treatment.

"You're beautiful," he declares from behind his mask. "Those are nice jeans, are they new?"

"Kind of, " I answer.

"You probably wear them because Matt thinks you look hot in them."

"Matt thinks I look hot in most everything."

"Those are really nice shoes," he adds.

"Dad, I don't know that you have ever noticed my shoes before."

"Jessica, I am noticing everything today," he tells me with tears in his eyes. These are the first of many tears I will see in the next three hours.

My father is in awe over everything. He is friends with everyone. His nurse, Yvonne, has a very limited number of smiles, but she is willing to give him a few because he is too solicitous to resist.

Dr. Romeya comes in, one of the two surgeons who performed the bypass. Dad says "you have a great smile."

"Thank you," Dr. Romeya answers with a mysterious accent. "God just made me this way."

"Do you mind if I ask where you are from," Dad inquires.

"Palestine," the doctor answers.

"My niece and nephew went there and they said they loved Palestine - liked it way better than Israel. Not that they didn't like the Israelis, they just liked the Palestinians more."

Dr. Romeya is smiling again - truly a beautiful, full face smile - graciously, slightly sheepishly accepting and simultaneously deflecting my Dad's compliment.

"They are good people," the doctor says. And I wonder if he is speaking of the Israelis or the Palestinians.

There is a bit of conversation about Iranian missile testing, spread of nuclear technology. At the end we mutually agree we just need peace.

"We need to get together, like you and me, right here," my Dad says with more tears. Dr. Romeya deliberately, thoughtfully extends his hand and his smile to my Dad, who takes it in a kind of fraternal grip.

"Yes, we are here together. This is what the world must do," Dr. Romeya says as he takes his leave.

___

Friends, friends, and more friends.

At some point during his exchange with the surgeon a man comes in to collect the rubbish from my Dad's room. "Hi Jean," my Dad greets him by name, "how you doin today?"

"Good Wayne, thanks."

Dad compliments Dr. Ngueyn - nice hair, the pulmonologist - nice tie, Grah - nice shoes.

Goodwill and kindness springing from his new heart.

He says he has blessings to count and I want to record them to remind him later when the honey moon of new life has faded.

Nita is more than half the blessings of his whole life.

He says he needs to do more for her,

mend broken fences.

Mostly on his part.

Shave his beard to be ready to serve a mission.

And "Shhh, this is a secret, I'm going to learn to dance,

so I can dance with your Mother.

Probably have to be line dancing,

something I can do in cowboy boots."

I ask if he is seeing anything as a blessing that he might not have recognized as such before the heart attack and surgery.

Oh yes.

1 - The School District. I've been blaming them for my issues, my depression, but it's not their fault. I've had a job for twenty years that has provided for my family.

2 - The heart attack itself. It is closing doors and opening doors.

"Everything is changing," he says.

There is a glow around him; kind to everyone, grateful, hopeful.

"70 pounds in a year," he says

"In 52 weeks?" I ask.

"Well, maybe 18 months."

He doesn't argue with the dietician, a cute girl called Jen.

"For Jennifer?" he asks.

"Yes, Jennifer," she confirms.

So he sings Donavan's Jennifer, Juniper, and I sing with him.

Jennifer Juniper, hair of golden flax.
Jennifer Juniper longs for what she lacks.
Do you like her ? Yes, I do, Sir.
Would you love her ? Yes, I would, Sir.
Whatcha doing Jennifer, my love ?

Then he speaks to this Jennifer with an impressive Scottish brogue, "like Donavan," he says.

Would That I Were His Saving Angel

But at least his cherub if nothing else.

{ Excerpts from my journal }

14 December 2009 Monday

His curtain was closed when I came in but he recognized me right away when I pulled it back just a bit. Improvement. As I walked toward him my Dad held his hand out to me and said "You are so beautiful."

"So are you," I responded , kissing his forehead.

"No I'm NOT."

Today he is mean in his thoughts:

I HATE this place. This is worse than Auschwitz. They have it down to a science. They take no time getting to know their patients. Everyone is ignoring me. Who is that person - Get out of here (to unknown person). I tell you, when we got here the other night I already hated it. I was ready to turn around and go home. I was going to tell your mother to hire Scott Mitchell to sue this place - some kind of investigation - somethin'.

Then he grabs my hand as I raise or lower the bed for him, fetch the nurse for pain meds, ask for some apple juice, and he says "You're my cherub."

Later he puts his hand on my cheek and says "Ohhh, you were the one with me at the door when I said I wasn't feeling good."

I take his hand from my cheek, grasped tightly in both of mine, "I should have called 911 Dad. I'm sorry."

He just smiles.

His smile tells me its ok, because whatever did happen, however it all worked out - it worked out. He's here, smiling.

Now he sleeps. Now I will read - catching up on my Book of Mormon challenge.

____

He just woke up. "Oh, I thought I was home," he laments.

"Tomorrow Im going to try to convince your Mom to bring my lap top. She probably won't, but I would like (dramatic pause) to try."

"I don't know if they have wireless internet here," I say.

"I don't need internet. I can write. I'm a writer."

"Oh," I say. "Well, you should start something new, something stream of consciousness."

He's drifting back to sleep.

"For posterity," I say.

He wakes up as Karen, the night nurse, comes in to check on him. "Do you know how many people are worried about me and praying for me?" he asks her.

She takes the bait, "How many?"

"Hundreds . . . hundreds of millions," he declares.

"My Dad is well known for his exaggeration gene," I tell her.

Karen looks right at him with a hand on her cocked hip, smiling just a bit and says "Oh Wayne, you've told me that a million times."

Karen plays ball in the big leagues.

Quotations For A Sunday Evening

{ Excerpts from my journal }

12 Dec 2009 Saturday

I sit beside my Dad having sent my Mom home to rest. Another attempt this morning to bring him out of sedation and remove the ventilator. Unsuccessful.

13 December 2009 Sunday

(Five days of being unconscious)

By his side again - four minutes past 4pm. My Mom got here this morning just before 10:00. The doctor had removed the ventilator at 9:15. Rumor has it he has been a bear all day. His verbal greeting to the doctor and nurses after they pulled the ventilator out of his throat was a raspy, angry "What the HELL?" But my Mom says that he nodded when she asked if he could hear her.

Things have been violent and crazy, doctors in and out, multiple nurses required to keep him down. He's shouting and grunting, mostly slurs. When I got here he had slid down the bed with his right foot on the floor. Ann (the nurse) said he liked that position and they decided to let him stay that way, leaving his legs free while his arms are still tied down.

In the two hours I've been here he has begun to emerge. He is talking - somewhat slurred but mostly understandable. Once he realized I was here and who I am he said (with the most prohibitive dry-tounge lisp you can imagine) "Jeth, do me a favor, bring me a knife. I gotta cut theethe thtraps off."

"Is your leg bothering you?" I ask.

"No," he responds tersely, "but my TIE-DOWNS ARE!"

He tries a new tactic. "Nurthe, if you untie me, I abtholutely promithe I'll be good."

So she did. She told him he could be untied while I'm here.

"Are you gonna feed me ice?" He asks me.

"I don't have any more. You ate it all."

"Yes you do," he accuses, and then demands "go get some more."

In his most imploring abandoned voice he cries "Ohhh pleeease - come on. Can we go home?"

"JESS! HELP!"

"What do you need Dad?"

"COVER ME!"

This he yells in desperation as his sheet has fallen to one side exposing the nakedness he does not know has been his common exhibition over the past four unconscious days. I have tried constantly to cover him as quickly as his restless body uncovered itself, but at some point nakedness ceased to diminish his dignity. His thrashing meant he was alive and that was more joyful than exposure was embarrassing. But not for his conscious self.

"I'm SO frustrated!" he snarls through clenched jaw.

"About what Dad," I ask in a calm and therapeutic way.

He looks me straight in the eye and says "Figure it out."

Touche'.

The nurse asks him - what's your name, your last name, your birthday, how old are you, all of which he responds appropriately to. Then she asks him who the president of the United States is. Uh-oh, I think.

"Uggghhhh," he says.

"Ok, no political affiliations." Ann deflects. "Just asking who the president is."

"Ohhh - baahma," he answers with a slurry sneer.

Disagreeable Harbingers

While we are in the midst of a totally life changing experience right now, and there is much to tell in that vein, I am not yet prepared to leave the words that will help me write about all the things of life that come after death.

Death is no respecter of persons - persons either living or dead. He comes and he takes and he leaves and we reel either way. Part of my reeling is writing. Part of regaining my balance is writing.

{ Excerpts from my journal }

3 December 2009 Wednesday

We are in Las Vegas. It is, of course, too late and I should have been asleep two hours ago. Matthew is left home alone, working feverishly to finish his dissertation for submission by December 31st. It is hard to imagine our life without the task master of "Dad's book." I wonder how things will change - but I can't let myself wonder too much yet.

8 December 2009 Tuesday

My father is at Sunrise Hospital in the midst of open-heart surgery. He suffered what seems to be a massive heart attack while sitting in his chair laughing and talking with us. Holding Cecily and teaching her to say "ta-da."

He tried to drive himself to Quick Care knowing something in his chest didn't feel right and my Mom was at a church meeting. He went to two locations - neither open - came home and called my Mom to come drive him to emergency. There they determined he was still having the heart attack. Right aorta 100% blocked, left aorta 80% blocked, angioplasty unsuccessful. They took him to the OR around 11:15pm to begin a three hour, open-heart, triple by-pass surgery.

This is . . . surreal. I have not cried yet. I am afraid of opening the flood of tears. Chani and Scott came to the house and are staying the night here.

OR doctor called the house during surgery to get my Mom's cell phone number. I asked if he was at liberty to give any information. He said "No, but everything is fine, he's ok."

"So, he's alive?" I asked.

"Yes."

I cannot wish this away. I cannot let myself feel the reality of it.

It is 2:20 am. I go to bed now. My Mom is not home yet. Wait to hear more in the morning.

9 December 2009 Wednesday

Matt will be here in seven hours. I want his presence desperately.

My Dad is ok. Still sedated, still un-present in his current circumstances. We can't go to him, not even my Mom. She went to the hospital and was able to look at him through a window and see him sleeping, but he can't know she is there. He's an agitated fighter - in danger of pulling out all the carefully placed tubing.

I spent the day talking and talking and talking. I took my Mom's cell phone and answered every call that came to her throughout the day. She gave me a list of everyone she wanted to know, none of which she could bear to talk to herself.

What I Wrote Before I Knew

I have things to say about my Dad.

First - I miss him.

Sometimes at night, I cry into a pillow on the couch while everyone else is asleep. I do this because the kind of crying I give myself to, the crying that comes with saying "My father is dead", is not the kind of crying that is easy to do in front of other people. There is an abandon to it that makes other people so unsure of what to do. And the truth is they don't need to do anything. Except Matt, who needs to hold me occasionally while I cry the cry that would be humiliating if it weren't making the tears that fall to my Father's grave.

My journal keeps my memories for me. Once I write down the goings-on in my head, I can let go of them mentally. Thus, it is always a bit of a surprise to go back and read. The details of my life live in the pages far more than they live in my head.

There are a series of entries I will share. They are the spiritual prescience of saying goodbye, while goodbye was still still beyond the horizon.

Here is the first - written just as Jonah was getting over a severe facial tic that seemed devastating at the time:

02 Sep 2009 Wed

I have periodically wondered at the goodness of our life, and how I will react when something threatens that. I fear now that I am fragile, in a way I was not familiar with. This has been only a brush with trial - not actually trial itself - and I have nearly fallen apart. What I know is that I was recovering emotional strength before Jonah was recovering physically. I DO have something in me that can move past fear and carry on with life. I must foster that ability in preparation for whatever hits next.

03 Sep 2009 Thurs

Television is bad.

05 Sep 2009 Sat

Two hours on the strip in Las Vegas reminds me why we make so much effort, work so hard to remove ourselves from the world. Hedonistic indulgence offers me nothing - it cannot persuade me. I am a daughter of God. I am a woman of virtue pursuing something very different.

06 Sep 2009 Sun

Matthew -- tomorrow I regain thy presence. Always a sweet reunion.

What Can Be Built

Wayne Allen Leavitt

November 18, 1949 - January 28, 2011

They say you stood in a hole deep enough to cover your head, frozen in the northernness of New York’s early winter. They say you worked nearly as hard as my Mother all that day laboring the labor that builds a habitat for humanity. A house; cement and wood, and walls to keep the snow out and the babies in their beds.

They say your bones hurt at the end. You returned wanting warmth and the “sussies” that keep you going. Your last pleasure. When the camera caught you your mouth was almost smiling, your right arm pulling Nita in close - her littleness fitting snugly beneath you. You were both clad for keeping cold out. White long johns and wool socks. You were standing in my sister’s house, your oldest daughter. New York was the wake of the first time your heart stopped.

Lonely is the wake of the second time your heart stopped.

My body is lying in your bed, trying to sleep through the wrongness of being here. My husband is asleep beside me, my baby in a cot at my feet. Three of my children, the three that know your name, that have squealed in delight at the mercy of Tickle Grandpa’s tickles are in beds two thousand miles away.

It is morning. February sun glistens in February snow filling your room with winter white and the blue that could be summer if it held the sun higher in the sky. Ewan is smiling while I lay him on your bed to change his diaper. He is smiling and I am thinking how pissed off you must be that here he is - the only grandchild you have not met. You were getting antsy. You were content with New York, but for your little ones in the west getting less little every day. And this littlest one was calling to you. It is the babies that have always fit perfectly up against your chest. I can’t help feeling like our being here is mocking your yearning. I wish we were here eight days ago. I wish you could pull him up to smell the babyness of him, and see the blueness of your eyes in his.

Introductions and reunions for another time.

You didn’t stay long enough to see the house built up around the foundation you laid that day in Rochester’s cold dirt. You would have carried a pencil tucked in your ear, making graphite marks on 2 x 4’s that you would cut as you have ten thousand times before. You would have dazzled them with your know-how, making them think what good fortune was theirs to have this seasoned wielder of hammers and drills and saws building a house for them. As it is, someone else will build the walls that keep those babies in their beds.

Lucky then, isn’t it, that you have already hammered enough nails and to spare to keep your legacy standing for a long time. The legacy you built keeps out rain, and wind, and snow, robbers, thieves and liars. The legacy you built keeps out Satan. It keeps me warm and right. You set the nails carefully and struck countless blows that taught me to know God and know myself.

Here is this nail - upon which the blow will resonate with curiosity, this one faith, this one ears for music, this one voracious reading, this one a fierce love of spouse, children, cousin, sister, brother, grandchild, parent. I am steady and strong, built by your tender intensity. In me you have built a habitat for humanity. My mother, my father, with their heart of gold, have gifted me their humanity.

Forefathers and My Father

I know that everyone knows this part by now - the part where I can do almost nothing but sit on my bed. This pregnant body betrays me . . . or is true to me. I can't tell which one. I read recently a woman who at some point in her seventh pregnancy came to this realization; I can grow this baby as long as I don't do anything else. That's how I feel - capable of this thing my body does by itself with no conscious effort from me, but nothing else.

So, to get three kids in the car and go to the Utah Museum of Natural History is, well, a bit ludicrous. But I have a Community Exploration card good through the end of August that grants us free entrance into the Natural History Museum, Discovery Gateway, Red Butte Garden, and the Fine Arts Museum. Never mind that my belly is contracting, my feet swollen, my back tight and aching - we will eek out these free experiences before the baby comes, and before my kids go crazy in the doldrums of summer.

Side note - Discovery Gateway has been permanently removed from my list of worthwhile things to do with the children. Unless the establishment would like to grant us a family night all our own.

Insanity. Times ten. With pigtails and petulance.

"Other people's kids."

That's what Matt always says. As if ours were . . . well they aren't. But we like them best.

On this trip - to the museum, where there are things of actual interest, we listen to music. Jonah and Caroline demand songs from the MP3 as soon as we get in the car.

"Play such and such."

"No, play this one first."

"No, I don't want that one."

"You always pick first."

"I never get a turn."

Until we end up with some Miley Cyrus (I'm embarrassed that this is on the MP3, but there is a reason outside my own music taste, and now that I have an Apple computer, I can't remove it) song, that makes me cringe. Where did they gain such an interest in Top 40, pop, teeny bopper music?

But not always. Sometimes it is Fleet Foxes, Mykonos. Or Sufjan Stevens, Decatur. The Eagles, Waiting in the Weeds. Or Feist, Joni Mitchell, Ingrid Michaelson, Jennifer Warnes, Kings of Convenience, Loreena McKennit, Landon Pigg, Hungry Cloud - music being passed to them intentionally.

Today it is Dan Fogelberg - Forefathers. This is Caroline's choice, taken from the playlist I made in December for my Dad, when I thought he might die, when he wouldn't wake up, when his heart quit working.

A massive heart attack took him from upright to open heart surgery, to unconscious for five days. My Mom and I took turns sitting by his side nearly every hour of each of those days, but he was not be woken peacefully. Like a bear he was, like a lion in a cage, thrashing his big body about such that there was no choice but to keep the sedatives dripping into his blood and his captive consciousness. We felt very tearfully helpless.

Aubrey felt the most helpless being three thousand miles away. In her geographic impotence she offered a suggestion that I think made all the difference. "Take him some music. Just play his favorites for him, soft things that will help subdue his subconscious while they try to wake him up."

I did. Within a few hours I had collected the music that lives in my Dad's soul, the music he would set on the turntable under the alchemy of a needle that would give us song and just a bit of crackle at midnight when we should all have been asleep, but were instead being infused with the stuff that brought musical magic into our home. I put it all on my MP3 player in a playlist titled For Dad.

We played it over and over until Aubrey's prescription lulled him into a kind of dreamy awakening. So many tears for the familiarity of songs that have marked the moments of living for him. Which he seemed then determined to do - live.

Forefathers is the first song on that list. I cannot summarize the poignancy of this song that harbors the foibles of synthesized bagpipes and other sundry sounds of the 80's, but still makes me cry every time I listen to it. The words are a means of bringing me into the center of my familial tapestry. Within it I am placed soundly and happily in all the roles that are the mortar of my identity.

And Caroline says "Mom, this makes me think about Las Vegas."

"How come," I ask.

"Because it sounds like Tickle Grandpa."

"Yes, it does. I have always liked Dan Fogelberg, because I've always thought he sounds like Tickle Grandpa."

And I can see Tickle Grandpa, my Dad, lying in a hospital bed, with a tube down his throat, a machine heaving his mighty chest up - then down - then up, eyelids fluttering from the movement beneath.

I see him sitting up in the same bed, awake, raspy voiced, professing CHANGE on every front. "A mission" he says, "God" and "gospel" woven through all the days that will follow. Professing mistakes and a hushed decree that he will learn to dance - for my Mom - he will learn to dance.

Yes, it sounds like Tickle Grandpa, who is an active forefather, granted time to become so much more to the generations he has borne thus far.

Good choice Caroline.

"Now Join Your Hands, and With Your Hands Your Hearts" --William Shakespeare

My brother's wife is pregnant. The baby is a girl. The girl has a heart, and this little heart has somewhere on it an "abnormality."

"Down syndrome" they are whispering. It could be...but there are tests, and then there is waiting.

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My big sister has a heart. She thought she left it four states away yearning for friends and home seven years in the making. Sometimes she thinks her heart got left a whole country away. Out there past plains and rivers that cut down the middle, through forests and deserts, over the Rockies, just hibernating, waiting.

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My little sister wed her heart to someone else who left it by text message slumped on the floor in the hall pumping anguish just as readily as it pumped joy a year before.

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My Mom has a....well...the biggest heart you ever done saw. I think her heart makes her tears. It makes lots of them. Reserves from which she dips for every happy thought, every sympathy, every bout of consuming laughter, every hurt, every passion, every moment with the divine. I don't know that she lives a single day without dipping into that pool.

This week her reserves are dangerously low from excessive use.

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My Dad has a heart. On Tuesday it betrayed him.

Or, rather, he has been betraying it for too many years now.

While I put my children to bed in an otherwise empty house his veins were refusing access to his heart. Well, we know what to do with veins like that. We bypass them...if we are surgeons, if we wear gloves and know how to open chests, and make microscopic stitches.

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I have a heart too.

I'm not sure about mine.

It could break under the right conditions, which I would likely label the "wrong conditions" were they to occur. But that's just it - nothing is breaking my heart. I feel the fast and fluttering empathetic beats that come with troubling news, but I am still whole, still...happy...mostly.

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These are hearts made alive by mingled blood, flesh of my flesh. They are as surely and intricately connected to one another as they are to the veins that are wound about each one delivering life.

Miracles are the stuff behind seeing my Dad and my Dad seeing me yesterday. Grace is the approbation for questionable words that might not leave his mouth on better days.

"Oh please...let me go home," is his invocation to all the life that comes after this, the life that would not have been his without a bit of sacred serendipity.

All our hearts break, and all our hearts heal.

My brother and his wife have no less love in their hearts for a child with down syndrome. My big sister was smiling today as she talked about the life she builds next door to the Sacred Grove. My little sister loves with, and is loved by a better heart than she has known before. My Mother ate cookies with me by the fire last night, her heart making new tears to cry over happier things, and my Dad...

...my Dad beckons me to come close enough to hear a dry, slurred whisper, "Jesse, help me. You've got to bring me a knife. I've gotta cut these things off."

Yes, his hands are tied down because they are connected to arms that might be better described as sledge hammers, which are in turn connected to an oddly functioning brain at present. In short, he can pack a mighty punch, of which nobody wishes to be the recipient.

But the knife bit tells me he's on the mend. He's really stretching to gather his wits about him...such as they are.

Oh, alright, Dad. You've got pretty impressive wits. And you may brandish them at will in no time.