BY JAN HAAG
A FATHER'S DEATH
6-28-97
Papa no longer is.
I wake in the morning
with that
thought.
No sorrow, no grief,
just the glimpse of a
void
where that dear
old man sat
for quite a number of
years
in his certainty
of enjoying the day
go by, watching
the flowers bloom,
the tempting food
arrive on his plate.
He
was very witty from time to time.
I'll miss that.
He saw the
world with a slant,
an uncomplaining chuckle --
most of the time.
Well, so he's gone
leaving me an orphan at sixty-three
That's a fairly good
age to become an orphan.
I sort of know what it's all about.
One expects to be an orphan
sooner or later.
Papa hung around to ninety-one-plus
helping me, us, I think,
get used to the idea of his leaving
O, I'm familiar
with human aloneness --
almost since birth.
I'm used to that idea:
the isolation, the solitude
of the human condition.
But to do without he who
always knew how to spell every
word;
who knew where the
countries were;
and where to fix your car;
when to prune the
trees,
and some of their Latin names;
who used to walk with me in the mornings
and point out the buildings,
the
landmarks,
some of the history
he had lived through,
and some
further back.
So there is a void,
even though he couldn't remember
that for fifty
of my sixty-three years
I've been honing my craft as a writer,
for twenty-two of those years,
I've stitched
extraordinary stuff.
When my needlepoints
finally hung on the
Seattle Asian Art Museum wall
he was excessively proud,
but, by then,
he'd reached an age
when any thought, if remembered over
night,
constituted a miracle.
Nor could he refrain from making
remarks,
when I was already well over fifty, such as:
"You're
still
a good looking woman,
you should get married."
Not once realizing
that my early life of angst and anguish
had been blissfully
resolved when I realized once and for all,
along about forty-nine,
that I, twice married and twice loved,
(I still don't know
what that means)
was a loner,
a happier-than-I-had-ever-been
celibate, hardworking
loner,
in
love with my craft and my art,
and perhaps an occasional
kitten;
that I, like many of his family,
found peace and
occupation
in thinking about
God -- the origin, the meaning of
life.
But then I didn't really get his profile
together
either
until I wrote his obit --
how much he had done, where he had been
how the luck and the love of the angels
followed him most of the days of his life.
So I wake up thinking:
Papa isn't anymore.
And I miss him.
Copyright © 2000 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
A Father's Death
Phillip Morton Smith
Pursuing Her Father
The Origins of the World
Gifts
India
Khajuraho
Lung-gom-pas
Nothing
BY JAN HAAG