Dean Wilson Zellar

Black Book 60, August 14, 2007: Trapped in the undertow and remembering my dad

Five years ago tonight I walked out into a world without you in it, and the planet has been wobbling beneath my feet ever since. I’m not blaming you; you gave me everything I needed, and plenty more than that. I watched you long enough that I should know how to go through life with plenty of grace, good humor, and compassion to feel pretty good about my place in the world. And anybody who spent any time with you and logged long hours in the hospitals where you both lost so many years of your life and got so many years back should have gained enough perspective to spend every day counting their blessings.

It’s been hard, though, and doesn’t seem to get any easier. What I lost when I lost you is, I realize every day, impossible to replace. It’s for sure the honest-to-God truth that I’ve never met anyone even remotely like you, and I’m trying to accept that I never will. I’m also trying to accept that some of the things I thought my life would be—and that I know you thought my life would be—probably aren’t in the cards.

Your last words to me were, “I love you. I’ll see you soon,” and those words have haunted me. I wish there had been more—in general, of course, of you, from you, and for you. You had enough, though. You had more than enough.

I remember reading something by Thomas Carlyle, long ago. An essay, I think, about heroes. A hero, Carlyle said, had to be sincere; not merely earnest or honest, but fiercely sincere. And a hero had to have heart, had to be stout-hearted, compassionate, capable of real love.

I might be making that all up tonight, or confusing my writers, or even just once again imagining things at three a.m., even though I’m not having much luck making things up or imagining things these days. I do know, though, that using that definition, or any other definition I can come up with, you were a hero.

My hero. Ours.

I never wanted to lose you, but tonight, most crucially, I can’t afford to lose you.

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It is a fine thing to be the apple of your father’s eye, even if your father had bushels of apples in both his eyes, even if he could miraculously squeeze apple after apple from his eyes and juggle them one, two, three, four, and five at a time, his head thrown back and his heart wide open, and as he laughed maniacally, his laughter like the rattle of Yahtzee dice, or ice in a martini tumbler, or the stuttering song of the most exotic, most contented bird on an island he might have created and visited in the dreams he never shared with the world.

You figured he would keep those apples in the air forever, the moon somehow bouncing sparks off a mouthful of teeth that was tilted toward the sky, the orbit of the apples of his eye becoming a dizzying pinwheel of light and shadow and stardust.

It is a fine thing to be loved by a carnival moving about the world disguised as a man with pennies in his loafers and no socks on his feet, a carnival whose memory can still summon the smell of barbecue smoke, the sounds of a baseball game, the trajectory of a Wiffleball, and the ringing of bells—church bells, sleigh bells, the distant bells and mysteries of some other world only he could see. A man who brought home salamanders, stray dogs, penny candy, arrowheads, and—one time—an owl. A man who will forever remind you of the image of him coming home from work, greasy, and spending ten minutes at the bathroom sink, rolling a gritty bar of Lava soap in his hands. A man who was a constant reminder of the wonder of resurrection, the resurrection that is available, time and again, to mere mortals who are nonetheless wired to believe in nothing more fiercely than life and now and the possibilities of tomorrow.

It is a fine thing to have the counsel of a man whose wisdom was of the most compact, distilled, and devastatingly effective variety; whose wisdom was assembled from faith, experience, empathy, and belief in the potential magic of every moment, all of it condensed into something that could be communicated with little more than an arm thrown across your shoulders and a few simple words—"Hey, fella, what’s going on in that head of yours?” Or, even more simplified: “Atta boy.”

It is a fine thing to remember your father as a dense, sprawling, blinding constellation of pure memory, a memory composed of so many strands of individual memories that are so tightly entwined that to even attempt to tease them apart is almost a violation of the solid, ceaselessly sparking wonder that was his life’s great creation: The man he became. The dad he was.

It is a fine thing to recognize—to remind yourself time and again—that a spirit like that can never die, can never be broken up or dispersed for as long as the world he loved keeps churning through space. Everywhere he ever was, he’s still there—there, there, there, here—and still scheming for happiness, his, and ours.