I have to get used to talking about my dad in the past tense. It’s strange, this sudden shift of tense, this abrupt reworking of reality, of presence then absence. He died last week, at age 95, and amid the swirl of the funeral and decisions about life insurance policies and Social Security, the sense of loss didn’t settle in—until yesterday, when I corrected myself, and said “Dad was…”
The death of a parent, as anyone will tell you, is never easy. It helps a little–but only a little– that my dad lived a long and good life. It also helps to feel the outpouring of support from family and friends, and the small-town rallying when a member of their community dies.
As many of you readers know, I grew up in a tiny town, population 1,000, rimmed by farmland, a mere interruption of sight lines, in northern Iowa. In a town that size, if you didn’t know someone personally, you at least knew of them. And so, as the doorbell set to ringing on Friday as the news of Dad’s death made its way along the gossip chain, faces I hadn’t seen in 20 years–a little more wrinkled perhaps but still identifiable–transported me back to an earlier time.
The bell would ring, and there they’d be, these memories of my childhood. I’d take the tupperware filled with snickerdoodles, warm chocolate chip cookies, or the delicious Norweigian cracker/cookies (that I can never remember the name of) to the kitchen and pour a couple cups of coffee for the company. Black, no sugar, no cream. The now gray-haired couple of my youth, or in many cases, the remaining widow, would profess not to want to intrude, but with a little coaxing would take a seat on the couch “only for a minute.”
Mom would retell the story of dad’s last days, and everyone would express such surprise at his quick decline, while noting the blessing it was that he didn’t have to go to the nursing home. Inevitably, they’d tell a funny story about dad, and then, tapped out of thoughts about dad, would turn to me and ask, “And Barb, are you still in Chicago then?”
The rules of behavior are ingrained and well practiced in this aging community. The acceptable dishes to bring to the grieving family are set: sweets of any kind, coffee cakes or cinnamon buns breakfast, sloppy joes or hot dishes for lunch, and rolls–always rolls. You can never have enough rolls. The mode of delivery is the same: sweets are delivered in tupperware, the hot dishes in glass casseroles, the sloppy joes in one-gallon plastic ice cream buckets. Attached to each is a piece of masking tape with “Johnson” or “Sversen” printed in magic marker, for easy return and thank-you cards. If you can’t deliver the food yourself, you send your daughter.
My dad was a well-known guy. He owned a local business and had been one of the town’s leaders. He was also a very dear man. Not everyone I’m sure remembers him that way, but you’d never know it. He had outlived most of his close friends, and many others had fled the cold Iowa winter for warmer climes this particular February. But yet the doorbell kept ringing. My brother’s friends showed up. Two of my high school friends came by. My mom’s bridge partners stopped in. A few people from church, dad’s business friends, and people who lived down the street from us years ago stopped by.
Most touching, to me at least, the parents of the two brothers who lived across the street came to pay their respects, since their boys “were working the evening shift at GrainMillers or they’d have come themselves.” Dad had always loved watching those two boys–young men really–come and go. A few years back, they’d bought the ranch-style home within viewing distance of my Dad’s lazy-boy, when they’d both taken a job at the mill and moved into town from nearby Stacyville. “Those two are hard-working boys,” he’d say with a nod of appreciation. At the first flake of snow, they’d be over shoveling mom and dad’s walk, unasked. And one night at 11pm they came running when my mother knocked because dad had fallen and she couldn’t lift him.
By Saturday afternoon, the food was piled in stacks on the counter tops. The two local restaurants were competing to send the best broasted chicken with all the trimmings, and we’d come home from making the funeral arrangements to find a plate of cheese and cold cuts arranged in the shape of a flower from the local grocery store. The rolls were going fast, and the doorbell did not stop ringing.
It’s that kind of connection, and goodness, that sustains us. It will be the support that keeps my mother from slipping into isolation and depression. It is the support that keeps people rooted to place. Small town life is not my own choice–the inward-looking tendency, its rigid rules and repressions leave me cold– but it is a tribe, my tribe, with its own sustaining culture.
My visits home now will be less frequent, my connection to place less firm. That’s ok. I’ve been slowly leaving for 30 years. But that place has left an indelible mark, a culture, that I’ll take with me.
