That morning, I was uneasy, unable to shake a feeling that something was wrong. When multiple phone calls to my home in Phoenix home, I finally called my friend and asked her to drive to my house where she discovered my husband had died.
In another time zone, on another continent, on the other end of the line, I remember feeling detached from news that couldn’t possibly be true.
As the reality set in, I was desperate to get away from rainy, rural South Derry and back home to Phoenix, to our cozy little house with its pink door and its sun-splashed walls. I wanted to check if the anniversary card I’d mailed from Dublin had made it in time. It hadn’t. I found it nestled among junk-mail and bills in the mailbox. He had died the day before our 22nd wedding anniversary, and every year since I’m reminded that “magic and loss” co-exist, forever juxtaposed on the calendar.
I have a lasting memory of a conversation with my then-teenage girl telling me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, then twenty, then forty, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store to keep her warm. It was beyond my grasp too. Yet here we are. Eleven years later.
Keep on keepin’ on. That’s what he used to say.
Ken was her dad for less than 6,000 days. He was her first word, and it was towards him she took her first brave tiny steps. He taught her how to pay attention to things that otherwise would have gone unnoticed—a rare coin in a handful of loose change, critters in a tide pool, a hummingbird nest concealed within the upper branches of the Hong Kong orchid tree outside her bedroom window, a constellation of stars in the sky above a desert city, despair in the eyes of a stranger holding a “Homeless” sign at the entrance to a San Diego freeway.
There’s so much she wouldn’t know unless I told her – that when she was a baby, he brushed her hair with a soft toothbrush, that he did household chores with her attached to him in one of those baby-carriers, that he was there to pick her up after school entirely too early every day, but only because he never wanted her to come outside and not immediately spot him waiting in the shade of ‘their’ mesquite tree.
Together, they shared thousands of little routines and rituals that created an unshakeable constancy for the first 15 years of my daughter’s life. Carefully preserved, milestone moments fill scrapbooks and old VHS tapes that neither she nor I have been able to watch. I suppose we haven’t needed to.
A few years ago, she wrote a remembrance of her father that I will forever cherish:
My dad passed in the weeks following Samhain and Día de Muertos—celebrations of when the veil between the living and dead is at its thinnest. As we journey into December, wherein the veil supposedly restores its usual impermeable quality, I’ll continue to look for the slivers of his light that peek through the cracks. Like a hand poking through a dense theater curtain to sneak a cheeky wave to the audience, I find that signs and symbols reminding me of my father seem to slip surreptitiously—mischievously—into view during these months. Sometimes it’s a classic rock song. Sometimes it’s a dream where we chit chat about nothing. Sometimes it’s javelinas mysteriously materializing on Father’s Day to eat my mother’s plants and nestle comfortably in the muck of the flowerbed. Little coincidences that don’t quite feel coincidental, and are always just enough to make me cry with boundless gratitude.
This morning finds me transported back to that last time we spoke as a family. During a transatlantic phone call—my daughter and I on top of the magnificent Titanic in Belfast and Ken in our Phoenix living room—we talked and laughed together, unaware that it would be the last time. An ordinary conversation. He told her to enjoy sightseeing and that he loved her. He died in our home just hours later.
On this anniversary of that surreal morning, I am again reminded of the notion that we die three times – the first when our breath leaves our body; a second time when our body is returned to the ground; and, the third and final death is that moment, sometime in the future, when our names are spoken for the last time. I make a point of saying his name aloud today, to thank him for the myriad ways his life made mine better during all those years we spent together; for his good-hearted good humor and wisdom that is instantly recognizable in our daughter; for his sense of wonder; and, for his rock ‘n’ roll heart. And, to thank you, Ken, for all the love you left for me to give away.
Every time I’ve returned to Belfast since, I walk to Titanic take a moment to look up at the diving female figure, cast in bronze, in front of the building. Inspired by the traditional figureheads mounted on the bows of sailing ships, her name is Titanica, a symbol of hope and good fortune on the journey ahead.
When I see her, I am reminded of these lovely words from the poem, Epitaph, for which I will always be grateful.
Epitaph by Merrit Malloy
When I die Give what’s left of me away To children And old men that wait to die. And if you need to cry, Cry for your brother Walking the street beside you. And when you need me, Put your arms Around anyone And give them What you need to give to me.
I want to leave you something, Something better Than words Or Sounds.
Look for me In the people I’ve known Or loved, And if you cannot give me away, At least let me live on your eyes And not on your mind.
You can love me most By letting hands touch hands, By letting Bodies touch bodies, And by letting go Of children That need to be free.
Love doesn’t die, People do. So, when all that’s left of me Is love, Give me away.
