Goodbye, Hello (ides of march)

*The truest moment of my life*

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The ides of March, they got me. They made pictures, relics and memories come alive, a broken guitar string ripping through my throat and tearing up my full heart as it left my mouth in a cough filled with spit and mucus. I saw the birth canal on Friday night.

A few hours earlier that Friday, I was hastily driving up the highway in a rental car, nails on fingers gripping the wheel as I hadn't even time to think about how much I hated driving busy highways. Kept looking for sunshine, but it only just barely promised over the far off mountains in the distance, promise never coming. J, the perfect driving companion, falling asleep and smoking, singing along and drumming to Cat Scratch Fever, as I remembered the comfort of him on top of me the day before. I didn't feel bad about that. I think my body would have collapsed internally without that fulfillment. An hour later, sitting in the hospital room, as I walked down the awful, sterile hallway, I knew my father could not, nor would want to walk out of this place. Either you were in full recovery or on some manner of your way out.

Shock and denial stretched across my face as I saw him, propped up so high no one could ever sleep that way. It smelled like shit and I was told he had just taken one, but though the rest of us knew it, he never could. He had died the day before last, after going downstairs to the basement in the unfinished house of his soul, the one that did him in and the final act inside his Coliseum, building and stopping, while my mother was out, moving from one to the next (he had told my mother to tell me over the phone about a week before that he was thinking about me all the time and loved me), not knowing what project to finish so starting as many as he could manage, to confuse the black cat that searched him out, on his way. My black cat died a few weeks earlier - he should have known it would be ok. The cat was probably only looking for a little attention, seeking out my father's world traveled hands.

I couldn't stop staring at my father's hands. They had thick needles protruding from the skin, but that was nothing compared to the tubes in his head and face. Other than being swollen, the hands were still my father's. Every mark, bruise and scar across them on display. Just like M's hands. Strange parallel these two men were on, like adjoining highways. I began to worship his hands, as my mother and I spoke, calmly. We didn't clutch ourselves together or wail. We even talked about channeling that into something better for him. Two days before, in the midst of his drilling and working on a countertop, he ate lunch: pasta fagioli, prosciuto, red wine...something in my mother's hands knew too. They talked- about the homeland, about the mountains. At one point soon after, he grabbed his head and uttered "I'm sick" (this was the first moment he let his body register with the oncoming and the last words he said) and fell back into the soft chair (which I've been sitting in ever since I came back to the house). Asleep. Of all the thoughts surrounding the reasons that could have kept him with us, I know that none of the answers could have kept the strength of him, the whole of him. He was no rotted apple, no yellowed page.
As I sat there with my mother, worshiping his hands and all they made, right down to the thumbnail, the nails trimmed by pliers and the black marks from the foundation of a house, the ground opened up in the quiet, curtained, sterile room, through the fibers in my mother's curly hair, which I did not inherit. In the empty spaces in between the machine's beeping its cheap grandfather clock ticking, I was partial to the worlds between. It was as if the walls in the cramped room had disappeared. We were waiting for the slow, learned, tedious process that occurred when ready to let go, or say hello. I was having an internal conversation with him the whole time. We held his cold, puffy hands a few times in between, but as we sat there, we were joined. Even my scared mother whose nature was to distrust her instincts her whole life, felt the calm. Like everything moving in distinct slow motion; a dance, during which he hadn't really seemed to be there with us until around that time.

Now he was mingling in and out, as the waters were lapping, retreating. We talked about how he worked harder his whole life than any man, and not for any man, but for himself, and for us. And, despite my mother's self proclaimed "bitching", she admitted to those houses he built bringing her a lot of fun, how it was all such an amazing adventure which he gave to her. Just us four - my father, mother, brother John and I - no others were ever truly HOME, like we were. To live nearly all of your childhood and coming adulthood in a house your father built (more like 5), it does things to you. It expands your mind, convinces your hands, and expedites your heart's dreaming early on. You see that sifting through blueprints and pencil sketching with his bold European hands, grows to carving out a naked piece of land and seeing, piece by piece, your home being born out of the patience of your mother and the strength and vision of your father, the same that spent Christmas hungry on the streets in Zagreb when he left home, the black sheep not wanting to be ruled by anyone, including his father, knowing that it was Christmas only by hearsay. That kind of love supporting your insecure child's feet from the floorboards beneath, constructed with you in mind, that is irreplaceable.

And so calm grew to appreciation, and at those moments, we did not need to cry. The term choking back tears is true; I never experienced that closing of the throat as your whole body is being made by your invisibles to hold itself up, rightly. My mother's legs were shaking "from the inside", as she put it, and she was overdressed for the weather (my father collapsed on the first day of Spring). Her face was flushed and red. I've never seen her try so hard in all my life. We knew my brother was having his own discussion with my father from inside His home, his head. I had begun thinking 'I will not waste time, will not fail', more importantly will not cease trying, will give the fullness of energy and love to this life and to those particular ones I had a feeling for. Something seemed so loud and clear...when I had a son, his name would be Ivan, the name of my father as a child. Without an inch of vanity, I felt beautiful. Clear and deep seated in my mother's almond shaped sockets were my father's big brown eyes of truth. Looking back at me and the world. I was a little fearful. Amidst all this otherworldly design, I thought about what A had told me. About her father recognizing her before he died. I knew the lack of oxygen left my father's brain near gone, and they told my mother from the moment he arrived in the hospital that there was no chance the massive heart attack would leave him with any ability to wake up. This man who had spent the freezing night in a sleeping bag in the woods with his grandfather and a bunch of found grenades during WWII in Croatia (and got a beating for it), who had stood atop his house's Spanish tile roof on the Gulf of Mexico at 50 years old, with a farmer's tan and hammer in hand, who kept building the foundation to this last house in the winter woods after he was told all of that was behind him, he wouldn't stand for much more of this tubes and needles business.

We thought Last Rites would be good, since he was raised Catholic (and mainly associated the traditions of it with the happiness of his youth and village more than anything else. He didn't need all that to speak to God). The priest had been at the hospital and couldn't come back out until later that night. Our natures looked between my mother and I and we knew he'd prefer it as being just us- his priests, his relics, his church, his stained glass windows, his evening sky. We talked about being awash with appreciation, thinking of the old men of the villages in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, who were massacred like pigs and left strung up in the trees outside their homes for their families to find, and of so many young, vibrant people without fathers or a chance, who had to endure this end alone.

My father had been given morphine. We had our own, coarsing through our veins, like stars mining for the gold of its onlookers. They began to take out the tubes and vessels from his face. He had no teeth. We would have laughed at him had it been a normal Friday night. His gums flapped and his body grew warmer. We each held a hand. I was on the left side. His face looked so clean, more perfectly shaven than he ever managed. We started talking to him- my mother lost her embarrassment and spoke to him in Croatian, telling him to go home, that mamma (his) was waiting. I thought I felt something from his hands, but disregarded it. His face began to have a natural color and he looked alive again, in charge. His brow was sweaty and his hands clammy. It felt so good to feel the warmth of his hands. My mother had called my father 'daddy' throughout their lives; the old-fashioned style, and somehow I adopted the sense of not calling him daddy too often. I was sad to know this was going to be the big reveal, but proud to know I wasn't afraid anymore.

All of a sudden, we felt his hands clutching us; my mother teared up for a moment, exclaiming "I can feel him gripping my hand". And we kept talking and clutching. She told him that I was "here", that my brother John loved him, I said that my best friend CD and the boy M loved him too, and she made mention of my cousin who recently got to spend time with them. My father picked up my hand and pulled it up and across his chest to my mother's, with so much strength that I could see the bones and muscles in his arms light up like olive branches growing in the Mediterranean summer sun. I leaned into my father and said "I love you Daddy" and kissed him on the cheek. He sat up about a half a foot in his bed, turned to me, saw me with the black star eyes that hid beneath the clouded, sickly glow of his failing eye sockets, while I gave him one more kiss on the cheek and said "Goodbye, Daddy". And as if arms were easing him back down into the pillowed ground, the door was wide open. The grip held tight, my mother told him to go home, I told him to go get the homeland, and my father slowly went unconscious, with his eyes caught towards me, before sliding back like a snake's, half-closed, looking at me, with a bright, new tear surfacing in the wrinkled pool around his left eye. His breathing slowly lowered, quieted. His grip gently became looser. His color faded and his warmth lessened. My mother kissed his forehead and I kissed his hand, before we sat back down, in the calm. The breathing was barely audible. I listened to his chest but just heard one or two heart beats. After a few more minutes, a beautiful doctor came in and told us that she thought he may have passed. She examined him and I chuckled to myself, thinking that in his last official breaths, he got a feel from a beautiful lady. She looked over at us sweetly and nodded. And we saw him walk off, and our hands smelled like the last of his energy that came back to us to say goodbye, and the last of his structures stood.

The door closed. The noises returned. We said our less intimate goodbyes to his body, and walked off together to find J, with a faraway message of a few frustrated but pure words of love from M, who I wanted to hug so desperately then, and later that night a jug of wine that would have made my old man proud. As we exited the hospital, the sun had come out. It was swirling through the glass doors down the distance at us like a passage to rebirth, welcoming me to a place completely free of childhood. My father was light as a feather, sketching and blueprinting the clouds. I knew he'd have a lot of work to do, but I knew he had been ready, and I was ready to help him. He would soon be working from within me, and I felt like the luckiest little girl in the world.