Happy Not-Yet-Dead Day!
Journal Extract, Early Evening, March 25, 2020
(Abba’s birthday)
“How can I sing happy ‘birthday’ to him when he’s in a coma; when this could be his death-day? How do I even know if he’ll be alive tomorrow? How can I know that ‘he’ is there, inside that body with those medusa-wires coming and going, attached to monitors beeping their grim updates? ‘Life-death, life-death, life-death,’ that’s all I hear, the two times we’ve called since he went in on the 21st, and they laid the phone over his heart for ‘him’ to listen. Those monitors sounded like badly wounded birds, struggling to fly home.
I wish I could speak with Laura. I feel too weak to call her. Afraid I’d just collapse into a blubbering mess over the phone. Maybe I could email her though, later tonight.
Ah, got to go. The hospital just hooked Mom up to the Zoom call. They’ve just laid the phone across Abba’s heart and turned on the speaker. We’re ready to roll, along with about twenty other folk; friends, my uncle and cousins, colleagues of Abba’s, friends of Mama’s. The last thing I feel like doing is attending a ‘party!’ I should be grateful though that people are willing to take the time for such a crazy, desperate enterprise, especially with the odds stacked against my father. Yet, if we can reach Abba through this coma, if our prayers can penetrate the fog through which he’s moving, then I’m totally in.
Dear Laura,
Sorry, I bet you’ll be surprised to get this email from me. We’ve been pretty good about not staying in touch much; and I think we both know that’s because it simply hurts too much. Tonight though I just had to reach out to someone, and you are still the closest being to my heart, my first love on this earth, and it doesn’t matter how it all ended.
We just had a birthday ‘party’ for my father — on Zoom. I know you know that my Abba’s been in the hospital with COVID since the first day of spring, and that he might die (his doctors have already begun ‘cushioning’ us for the fall; asking if we have “plans in place, ‘just in case’.”) In fact, your mom was at the party, along with about twenty other people; sad/happy faces inside little Zoom boxes, each one reaching out to my dad as best they could. A male nurse had laid the phone on his chest, so ‘he’ could hear our voices, presumably, at some level, as we sought to pull him back to earth. And always, just beneath all the good wishes, those damned monitors, beeping like little animal chirps, pleading; and the infernal suction sound of the ventilator, something that vacuums up souls, or so it sounds to me. (The first night he was in the hospital, I was awakened, just past midnight, to a nurse with a heavy accent, asking permission to put Abba on a ventilator. They couldn’t reach my mom, so I became the default adult in the room, making decisions I felt totally not ready to make.)
It has been touch and go the past four days. Like I said, the doctors and nurses haven’t sounded hopeful. It’s agonizing that we can’t see Abba, though the hospital’s been pretty amazing about putting the phone next to him twice already, so he could hear Mama and I telling him how much we love him — if he can hear anything. I’ve also arranged for them to play music to him; mostly Bob Dylan, of course, his favorite. The music has to contend with that awful vacuum sound of the ventilator; though I guess it’s more the idea of music that we’re offering him. Who knows how these things actually work when a soul is between worlds? If Abba ‘hears’ us at all, it may be as if we’re broadcasting from another planet or something.
Abba loved — I mean, loves! — Dylan’s song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” so I made one playlist where it just repeats, on a loop. He always told me that “ancient bards had healing powers,” and that Dylan was “an ancient bard in a modern body.” But I hadn’t really thought much about why I chose this song over all others. It was only when I focused in on the lyrics that I saw how they haunted me about Abba.
“Hey Mister Tambourine Man
Play a song for me
I’m not sleepy
And there is no place
I’m going to…”
I do believe that Abba IS somehow conscious, at some level; I really do. Maybe it’s just that, any more than I can imagine life without the sun, I can’t imagine my life without him. I just can’t. I want to believe that he is ‘there,’ that he is being attended by high and holy beings (as my mom would say), and that every prayer sent his way is wrapping itself around his subtler ‘body,’ enfolding him in healing. Maybe he needed to go to this bardo space (the realm between worlds that they write about in Tibetan Buddhism; one of the many things Abba used to talk to me about, in trying to guide me through life, helping me to see the spiritual dimension of things) before he could reaffirm his life. You know, Laura, that I’ve had my doubts about any of this ‘spiritual stuff’ that Abba and my mom believe in so strongly; but hey, at 21 years of age, what do I know anyways?
“…And take me disappearing
Through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees,
Out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach
Of crazy sorrow.”
These words also speak to me of the lonely journey Abba is on now. On one hand, he feels light-years from all of us, while in another way I’ve never felt closer to his essence. But who knows? Maybe he is already ‘far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.’ I took a Zoom snapshot of him, looking like an old Hasidic rabbi, when we last called. He is unconscious, but smiling, seemingly light-years away. If he can hear, or however it comes to him, I’m sure Dylan’s words are speaking to his soul in a whole new way.
My mom and I are both wrecks, though outwardly stable. Since Abba entered the hospital just four days ago, I keep waking up in the night, unable to catch my breath, thinking I might die. I don’t know if I have COVID, too, or if these are just empathy pains.
You know how much I’ve always loved my father. A few nights ago, I collapsed, weeping hysterically. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the times in the last year that I’d been too busy to spend time with him. I was so obsessed with trying to ‘get over’ you; and with trying to get my songs out into the world. In the weeks before he got sick, Abba kept asking when we could hang out again, and I just kept putting him off. One time he said to me, “Look, I know you need to find your own voice, Joseph, I get it. But I am always here for you — and, I just really miss you!” That’s what hurt me so bad; that I might have blown it forever. He cannot die!
For some reason, I keep getting flashbacks of when I was really little, maybe not even two years old; how Abba would hold me in his arms as we’d dance round and round the living room. I would shriek with sheer joy. My mother would join in sometimes; she is such an amazing dancer. Those were happy times for my parents, too; joyous times. Behind that one image of dancing joy though, lay hundreds of others; so many precious moments across the years with Abba. I really don’t think that most young people have this depth of relationship with their father.
Even though they have been long separated, Mom has been praying to every deity she possibly can. You know my mom very well, and her absolutely fierce determination. I tell you; she is striking deals on high; even while her friends ask her, “Are you sure he wants to come back?” That was a hard one for my mom to answer, as she had to admit that maybe he didn’t; although, the very last things he said to her, when she had to leave him at the door to the ER, was, “I don’t want to die.”
I know that he was incredibly lonely (I know because he told me, a few days before he got sick); living alone, and always working so many hours each day with troubled kids. He showed me an entry he made in his journal, where he wrote, “I can’t go on living like this, without connection and warmth. Sure, I have that at work, where I believe I’m respected and valued. But once I drive away from the school at twilight, I know I’m heading back to my little condo; to more loneliness; to just reading and writing till I drop off to sleep, exhausted. I need to rebuild my life around connection, community. I don’t know how, but I must find a way.”
Abba used to always tell me that we could “alchemize our pain through art.” When you and I split up, Laura, he encouraged me to do that with my music. The past few nights, when I’ve woken up suddenly, feeling like I can’t breathe, like I’m going to have a heart attack or something, I sit down at my keyboard and play and sing.
In many ways, I think the first song I wrote is about us, Laura, you and me; the long, slow trail of saying goodbye. Grief is its own separate season. But I also know that it’s me trying to exorcise this haunted feeling that my father is going to die.
Sometimes I don’t know if I’m singing about myself, or about him. It’s hard for me to even listen to that song anymore; it’s so suffused with pain over your and my breakup; fears of losing my dad, and even of me dying.
These are some of the original lyrics, though I changed some when I recorded the song yesterday. I just couldn’t stand how raw my pain was, so I guess I veiled it a bit.
“Takin’ a breath as I’m lookin’ around,
Eyes on streetlights, and planes crashing down,
They all run by, just staying here quiet,
Going to be here for awhile.
So I’m going back down, going back down…
…No one can know what’s behind your eyes
No one could know what’s on your mind….”
[Even though it wasn’t conscious; those words describe how I feel about Abba now!]
“…I’m fading away,
As I walk thru this pain
I’m leaving today
And I’m fading away
As I drive in the rain…
I may never see you in this town again…”
When I wrote/sang, “I may never see you in this town again,” near the end of the song, this just captured a recent moment; restlessly walking my neighborhood in the middle of the night. I’m so afraid I may never see him again. Yet, I must see him again.
To be honest, I’m not even sure if I should send this to you, Laura. I don’t want you to carry this weight that I am carrying. But even just writing this has helped me to lift some of that weight.
So, thank you for listening. You were always there for me when it really counted. I hope you know that I’ll always be there for you.
Laura, I pray that one day, after all this is over, we can sit down together as friends.
We will marvel over how we got through this time; and how, miraculously, we are all well, finally.
Love,
Joseph
