Love dub, love dub

14

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

Summer begins. Two and a half months to dance, swim and hang with friends before college. But this isn’t a typical summer. I spend most days alone or with my old, beloved mutt Raisin, poring through condolence letters, writing in my journal, wandering aimlessly around the house. My feet barely touch the ground. A hazy escape from reality might lend itself well to more time at the ballet barre but instead I feel shaky and weak and often exit class before center adagio.

Mom encourages me to go to therapy to “work with my grief.” It will take decades to realize why talk therapy doesn’t often lead to breakthroughs. I have developed an almost second-nature ability to sense what people want to hear, what will appease them, what will make them feel good about themselves. Therapy is just another place for me to make sure my shrink is sleeping well at night. You want me to cry? Ok! You want me to write a letter to my dead dad? Well sure! You want me to breathe into the achy bits and tell you what they say? They are sad. Right? And angry. Yes, of course. Angry. You want me to make a sound with that anger? Rar! My breakthroughs are cashed in at $80 a session but the only one losing sleep is me.

My scruffy old therapist Raisin listens patiently and hears words my voice doesn’t dare express.

I am also losing a grip on reality through magical thinking. In my journals I talk to dad as if he never left. Late afternoons, I sit on the edge of the dock and imagine the golden sun glint is his energy and that same shimmering light surrounds me everywhere I go. I distrust my senses and decide that my eyes lie to me. Even though I can’t see him, dad is most certainly, most definitively, right next to me. In fact, he’s even closer to me dead than alive. My conclusions are a great, suffocating blanket for the rage and confusion I feel but don’t allow to surface. Magical thinking lives up to its name. As soon as a thought, accompanied by an unwelcome emotion arrives, I shape shift the thought into a happy ending. “Dad’s dead” transforms into “Free from his physical form, dad is even closer to me. He’s with me all the time.”

One night I lay awake in bed. Many nights since dad’s death sleep escapes me. My window is wide open and I hear the gentle lapping of water on shore. Light from a full moon casts blue shadows across dance posters on my bedroom wall. The house is hushed except for familiar pops and creaks of shifting logs and rafters. But there’s something more—a sound I’m not accustomed to hearing. Is it coming from outside? A red fox and her cubs yipping in the trees? I get up to investigate. Leaving my room, I tiptoe silently as if it’s the only polite way to walk amongst sleeping giants.

When I reach the loft, I kneel at the railing that overlooks the family room below. Everything is illuminated by moonlight and mom sits in the middle of it. The old, black rocking chair shifts under her weight. It has been in the family for as long as I can remember. Usually draped with a sheep skin rug, this was dad’s favorite place to sit and read Anne Rice novels or watch Star Trek. I don’t however, ever remember mom sitting in it, much less sitting. Tonight, her body and the chair are one shape, turned inside out by the sound that escapes from it. I have never in eighteen years seen, or heard, mom cry like this. Anguished, unhinged sobs fall out of her. I’m not sure I have seen her cry, period, except for the one time I came home from third grade and saw her sitting on the sofa (unusual) watching Little House On the Prairie (even more unusual) with tears rolling down her cheeks.

Tonight, her wails echo throughout the house and land in my rib cage. I don’t know how such tortured sadness can simultaneously feel reverent, but it does. In this moment, I am certain that even through all the tumultuous chapters of mom and dad’s life together, it was founded and grounded in a profound and abiding love.

Dad’s ashes sit in the meditation room for the entire summer. Occasionally I go in, sit cross-legged on the carpeted floor and take off the lid. The tin is heavy. In movies, the ashes drift away as if the spirit of the deceased person is finally released on wings of angels. Dad’s ashes are more like gravel. Small, white chunks of bone and grit. Couldn’t the alchemy of fire transform the weight of dad’s depression?

This isn’t wholly how I remember dad. But I do know he struggled—constantly trying new medications, going off them because of side-effects, and then starting up again. He often returned home from long hours at the hospital feeling defeated by the medical system. His vision for cardiac heath was too progressive for a midwestern hospital in the 1980’s. Following a triple bypass surgery the hospital would serve his patients a double cheese burger and fries and his stress-management tips were pure quackery.

At the same time, one of dad’s favorite quotes was, “Beer and franks with cheer and thanks is better than sprouts and bread with fear and dread.” Dad was a living paradox. He was a responsible surgeon and a capricious husband. He devoted his time and intellect to progressive, medical sciences but his friends were hospital janitors and Harley Davidson bikers. He revered the complex, mystical mechanics of sentient life but he was reckless with his own. Another favorite quote of his was “Take everything in moderation, including moderation.” With a blood alcohol level of .12 at the time of the accident, that one may have killed him.

Dad often said the best part of being a cardiac surgeon was “doing rounds.” I proudly wandered the hospital corridors by his side—his magnetic, 6’6” presence eliciting adoration from hospital staff and patients. He would kneel at a patient’s bedside so he could be closer to them. A hand pressed comfortingly on their forearm. His deep, resonant voice a salve for healing tissue. This is what he loved to do.

The operating room was more mechanical. As a teen, I watched him perform surgery and nearly lost my lunch while they cut through the torso of a large man, ribcage unfurled to meet dad’s gloved hands. Everyone in the operating room knew their part—a strangely beautiful, well-choreographed ballet. In the finale, the patient’s heart took center stage. Stitches in place and bypass complete, dad looked over at me and winked as the technician turned off the cardiopulmonary bypass machine. The room fell silent. Everyone waited. And waited. And then, a miracle. The little lump of red and blue flesh, jiggled and wriggled its way back into a beat. Lub dub. Lub dub. Or in dad’s medical terminology - love dub, love dub.

Dad revered the complex, mystical mechanics of sentient life but he was reckless with his own.

August presses a sweaty hand on my back. Lake Winnebago turns from dishwater brown to green to unswimmable so I drown myself in memories of dad as my physiology wrestles with grief.

I close my eyes and remember.

Dad and I are driving down Lake Park Road, music blasting through car speakers. I’m sticky with ballet sweat, he’s sticky with depression. We work it out through the music, throwing our arms into space, conducting the notes into crescendos that pull the tiny hairs on our arms into unison. Sadness, disappointment, muscle ache, heart ache—all are welcome.

I want the music to last forever; the road’s long, straight arm reaches into a blackened horizon, then the County Highway 114 intersection. We turn left, hugging the lake at 55mph. We pass Fire Lane 8. Fire Lane 9. Fire Lane 10. Practical emergency routes become imaginary runways for boys and Big Wheels. We pass Fire Lane 13, the stabled horses are steady and heavy-lidded, trading speed for silence while flies keep the balance.

We reach Country Side Bar—fried cheese and smoke fill my senses. Turn right onto State Park Road. Our orchestra becomes fast and furious and our arms rejoice the home stretch. But just as my stomach gurgles and my mind fixates on a bowl of cereal, dad abandons course. A secret, mischievous minuet inside his chest needs air. There is no right turn, but he takes it anyway. The cows see grass for grazing, he sees a runway for flying. Farmer Don Mielke looks up from his newspaper, startled by headlights blasting through his pasture, but then dismisses it as the onset of a migraine. Windows down, the tall grass throws a fist-full of life into my nose. Dad laughs out loud and throws a fist-full of life into my heart.

He slows down when we reach the other side of the field, finding a shallow ditch to navigate us safely back to concrete. He turns off the ignition but my mind is ignited with sensation, with freedom. In my imagination, we are still driving. No, flying. In the damp, oily stench of the garage we listen to the hypnogogic clicks of the engine. One machine and two time-keeping muscles are joined in the dream state. One longer click. One shorter one. One longer, one shorter. Lub dub, lub dub. Love dub, love dub.

NEXT CHAPTER

Lake Park Road to State Park Road to Don Mielke’s cow pasture to home.