April Has Competition

T.S. Eliot underrated the month of October.

On the 5th, my invalid father was transported from his home to Washington County Hospital.

On the 21st, I opted for an early birthday celebration with my mother and boyfriend. The reason? The 21st was a Sunday and thus preferable to a party at the beginning of the week. Tuesday is no day to celebrate anything. Monday, either.

I received three books,. two being Peanuts-related (David Michaelis' Charles Schulz bio and the latest Complete Peanuts), and two framed photos of my trip to Camp Snoopy.

That night, my mom received a call. It was my father from his bed in the Progressive Care Unit, ringing to say "goodbye". When she reminded him that they would see one another tomorrow--my mother spent hours by his side every day--he wearily told her that, no, they would not. Eventually, the line clicked over to piped-in "hold" music.

Wracked with fear, my mother and I called up two of my sisters and drove to the hospital with two others. I've never been so grateful for the nightly inactivity of downtown Hagerstown, as red lights were blown past with a sense of familial immunity.

We arrived to find my father asleep, phone still in his hand. The doorless entrance and suspended TV set glowing forth the Broncos-Steelers game provided the sole light. It was my first time seeing him since admission, and in that time the lower part of his left lung had collapsed, necessitating an oxygen mask. He seemed thrilled to see me but expressed confusion over why mom should have been so concerned.

However, Mom's overreaction proved fortuitous. One of the sisters who joined us in the frantic rush to a feared deathbed was the same daughter he had disowned 20 years ago. Repeated suggestions at reunion were shot down by our father brusquely. But on October 21, 2007, he finally consented. Perhaps it was a sense of the inevitable prodding open that chamber of his heart he'd sealed tight so long ago.

On the 22nd, my father died. The end of his life also meant the end of a journey began seven years prior, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. The tandem treatments of radiation and chemotherapy defeated the growth within him but devastated his 66-year-old body, eventually leaving the man who spent decades in gardens and fields, pushing machinery and pulling crops, an invalid. Surgery to remove a bone infected by decubitis ulcers was in retrospect a pathetic attempt at a pre-emptive measure.

On the 23rd, I turned 30.

On the 25th, my father was buried. Never have I endured an experience of comparable agony and disbelief. Gazing down at the man who helped make me possible--hillbilly resplendent in blue plaid shirt, tan Dickies, and oversized eyeglasses--every recriminating feeling I'd honed with equal parts relish and regret dived, gracelessly, into the estuary I'd depended upon for years, where they floated further and further away from me.  My father's most distinguishing feature--that loud, barley- and tar-stained voice--was now just an echo of a splash.  The shell that remained will wash away before long.  I either hate my father for leaving us, or I hate him for taking so long to depart in the first place.

I hate that I never learned how to swim while he was alive.

The standard spirituals that piped into the viewing room gave my uncertain despair an undesired soundtrack. (Honestly, when I go, play "Infinity Girl" by Stereolab and "Starpower" by Sonic Youth and be done with it.)

It was amazing to us all that his body looked healthier with the vitality snatched from it than it had in the past five years of struggle.

On the 28th, I finished the 600+ pages of the Schulz bio.

On the 29th, PBS aired the American Masters segment dedicated to Schulz. It was fittingly low-key, but grew morose near the end with the great artists death. The screen displayed an isolated drawing of Charlie Brown, from an original strip, placed on a bench in live action. Slowly, the figure evaporated into nothing. This trick was repeated with Lucy and Snoopy in respective apropos milieus.

Effective; but Schulz and his creations didn't disappear just because he shed the shell. Charles Schulz and his half-a-century masterpiece are immortal.

So, also, is Edgar Benningfield and his half-a-century marriage and all that it made possible for the world.

I was going to finish this with some crap about how I was beginning to feel "normal". But I've just grown tired of that word, and I wonder if it's so ineffective as to be by now obsolete, devoid of any practical usage in everyday life. I'm not as fucked up as I was a week ago--how 'bout that?