I wake up in our home in Colorado, it’s abstract lines, rusted tin, and natural steel mimicking the purple mountain range behind it, on the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. I’m alone for most of the day, which is just as well since I was planning to spend the day with him. I look around the space—a house with no unfinished home improvement projects—a sight never seen when I lived at home with my parents.
We had always lived in a house that was being remodeled. Perhaps the house wasn’t as much in need of work as my father’s constant need to be working on it. Not just small projects either, sometimes rooms remained off limits for months. I always thought he held a mythical amount of strength in his tall lank frame. I remember touching more than a few live wires sticking out of unfinished outlets with either my hand or mouth. Such is the curiosity and short-term memory loss of a child. There was always exposed dry wall in need of sanding and then painting, and once a deck that remained half-finished for an eternity. If I remember correctly, we sold that old blue house at 154 Bunny Road with a half-finished deck built from old railroad ties my Dad borrowed from work.
It’s early February as I rise from bed and go through my morning routine. This home we have is the place my family and my husband’s family have spent summers and holidays in, coming together again and again no matter where we are in our lives. It is here that I keep his urn, on a bookshelf in view of my writing desk, a view of the ski runs on Keystone mountain in the distance. I see a few people ski down as I sit to write and drink coffee.
I talk to him, sometimes, to his urn sitting on that shelf. I like to think he is watching me write, though I’m not sure he can read the type so far away without his glasses on. It’s a strange thing, talking to an urn.
I remember being at the funeral home picking it out, a heavy copper and gold trimmed vase. I thought—how useless it is to pick such a thing out—what does it matter? He’s not going to see it, from the inside. Anyway, even if he did I’m sure he wouldn’t care, he’d say Hey Doofus just pick one already! Looking back, I was probably missing the point—it wasn’t for him, really. It was for me. It was for me to pick out something pretty to look at to store him, or what remained of him in this container meant to bring me some kind of peace. Or joy, maybe. I don’t know.
Regardless, it’s a strange thing to talk to an urn. I wonder—can he hear me with the lid on? When I’m talking to him? Maybe I should take the lid off, so he can hear me better—his hearing was going there at the end, when he looked more like a skeleton dressed in a suit of skin-colored-stretch-polyester. Only an awful person would think, I’m always trying so hard to lose ten pounds and he just up and lost over a hundred like it was no big deal, so I pretend not to. Now he weighs next to nothing—I wonder, as I pick Dad up and cradle him in one arm, why do the ashes weigh so much less than the body they came from? I put Dad back on his shelf and decide to ask the internet. I find that I will weigh between 5 and 10 pounds when I too return to dust. Because only the bones remain, the organs, the fat, the fluids, all burnt away. It is while considering this fascinating research that I realize I haven’t had lunch. You’re sick! Dad says as I chow down on my hotdog, thinking that what I really want to lose is the weight of my bones. Good to know.
I think he can hear me, with the lid on I mean. If he can hear me at all. If he can hear me at all, it’s not my proximity to the body left behind but whether enough of his spirit remains to remember me, who I am, who he was. I bet it’s killing him not to have a home improvement project to work on. He hates just sitting around. I’ve grown tired of sitting too, so I decide after having eaten lunch and contemplated being turn to ash that I would like to start the gas fire pit in the backyard. It, like myself, is currently buried underneath. It is covered in snow which I’ll need to dig out to get to it. I start shoveling, and Dad and I decide to kill time calculating how much snow I’ll have to shovel out of the pit. There is probably three or four feet around each side of the pit – a circular area about eight to ten feet in diameter. We do the math, and we calculate the amount of snow I will have to clear to light the fire. Volume = π×92×4 = 10173 feet. My arms, and heart, start to fatigue. I decide to take a break, sitting on the large pile of snow I’ve started, my heart pounding as I stab my lungs with the cold air I breathe in, expelling the hot air as it goes out. You’re full of hot air, Dad might have said. You’re full of shit, is probably closer. Either way, at least half the time he was right.
Hearing the wind whisper through the conifers in the Rockies is something like hearing the dead, I think. You can listen as hard as you want but the words are missing, forbidden. Their hushed secrets take no form, they are truth, but not meant for the living to know. So much of our calendars full and so much time spent being. And then one day we’ve been. Or maybe become the being. It’s hard to tell. I get up off the mound of snow (and your ass, Dad adds) and finish the stairs leading into the sunken part of the pit, and then go back inside to warm up and write some more.
Whether he can hear me or not, it’s not like I’m not saying anything worth telling or that I haven’t said before. Sometimes I even pick Dad up and take him to the window to glance the peaks of the mountains and maybe a skier or two. Sometimes I kiss the top of his forehead, but then realize it’s just the lid of an urn, and when the cold metal surprises my lips I feel silly. I don’t know where you got that from…Mom, probably. They should give you an instruction manual when they hand you an urn, you know. How is a person supposed to know how to interact with it otherwise? What are the acceptable actions and what are considered inappropriate or frowned upon urn activities? And anyway, when they hand you that Urn with what’s presumably your loved one inside – how do you know they gave you the right person? Maybe they mixed them up with someone else, or worse, mixed them up with someone else. Again, only a terrible person would think these things, and again, I pretend not to.
Warm and rested enough to go out and start unburying again, I head out with my shovel and take a deep breath, letting out a heavy sigh. Dad asks, what do you think you’re doing?
Shoveling snow, duh.
When did you learn that trick? You never used to be able to shovel, especially when I’d ask you to help me do it!
Uh huh. Maybe if I’d had an essay to write I would have shoveled to put it off. But I only had shoveling to put off, so I played games instead. It’s not so bad though, sometimes work feels good.
No shit, Sherlock.
I have these conversations with my Dad, when he’s on my mind. Sometimes I get so damned busy with my own life I forget to talk to him, just like I’d forgotten to call him when he was alive. At least now I don’t blame myself for forgetting, in his being absent he’s constantly present.
He was right though, I think, as I offload a scoop of snow that makes me wonder how my back will feel tomorrow. I used to think he was wrong about so much. The shoveling – for one. It’s easier to be happy if you get your heart rate up every now and then. And reading before bed, and sometimes just the silence. I used to hate the silence, and now I find solace in the absence of sound. The slow rhythm of the dryer and the wind hitting the house. I do a lot of things now that I’m sure Dad would have wished I’d done much sooner and more often, like talk to him.
Around 500 cubic feet into shoveling I break again. I feel the familiar chill that comes with realizing I am seeing things the way my parents did, do. It’s not like you’d imagine it, well, not like I’d imagined it. I’d think, absolutely not. I will not wake up one day and trust people less. I will never enjoy any kind of labor. I will never enjoy spending time alone. It’s so lonely. Then instead I wake up one day and realize there is value in protecting my family and there is value in myself. Why we learn these things or how — I haven’t figured out. I only know that I still know almost nothing about everything.
I take a lot of breaks in between shoveling. I take a lot of breaks in between writing, too. When I had chores as a kid, ones I’d dodged too many times and finally had to buckle down and just do, my dad would tell us, No breaks! Probably because back then, our breaks were a way to keep putting off the finishing of the task. Like how I can’t finish my essay because of all the shoveling I need to do. I almost hear him this time, Geeze, you have an excuse for everything. This clearing of the snow is exhausting. This grief feels heavy in my shovel.
After a few more heart pounding exertions and whispering breaks, I finally dig enough out from around the pit to be able to start the fire. I turn on the gas at the side of the garage, always a little nervous that it might explode during any step of the process, and then walk back to the line. I slowly start the flow of gas. There is something primal and intimate in fire. In lighting or making fire. Almost a kind of gift a father gives to his son, fire or knowledge. And yet, I have still burned off parts of my promethean eyebrows during the moment it catches flame and like a chain reaction ignites the gas into a rapid—fire explosion. So. I duck low, watch this Dad! as the fire gently booms into a cloud of flaming gas and a flash of heat strikes my face. I come to my feet gently and set my shovel down again to take a break and let the snow start melting around the edges. The warmth of the fire slowly fills the pit. Sometimes this clearing away gives way to more and more, sometimes the shoveling helps melt what is underneath, making it easier to chip away.
After a moment I begin chipping away at what I’ve exposed. No time to stop now, maybe I can finish the excavation, clean it out and never have to worry about it again. And yet every time I think I’ve finished, think I’ve found some peace with its absence, I find something more. Some part I hadn’t seen or didn’t know was there. And so, I go to the task again.
At a point in the afternoon I decide to stop. I’m fatigued, and my progress has slowed because of the ice. If I could somehow melt the rest, I might finish the job. And maybe someday I will, but not all in one go like this. The sun has begun to fall behind the clouds, and Dad has grown silent. Perhaps he smells the natural gas burning off the fire, perhaps he listens to the wind beating the pines, perhaps he gazes at the azure peaks of the mountains, perhaps he tastes condensation in the air. Or perhaps nothing.
After a time, I turn the knob to cut the flow of gas. There is more room to stand in the fire pit than when I started, but there is still more to clear. As I go inside, I hear the weatherman on the television in the living room tell the great state of Colorado there is snow in the forecast for tomorrow.