A Sense of Absence

I knew my father was dead when the helicopter flew low over my house.

The ambulance had gone past with lights and siren a few minutes before. I didn't look to see where it went, but I had a feeling.

I stepped out my back door and watched the aircraft. When it settled at my father's house, I got my hat and my dog and drove the mile to the house where I was raised.

There was no distress or panic. He was 92, and we knew he had a faulty valve in his heart. That morning, an MD friend of ours had visited him and started the process to get his aortic valve replaced using a catheter technique. He was enthused about doing the procedure. The irony.

When I arrived at the back door, the EMT's were coming out, some of them in tears. It was over.

There were plenty of people around, so knowing I wasn't needed, I went back to my house to make the necessary phone calls. There was little emotion.

I was ambivalent about my father for a number of reasons that aren't important here. Perhaps they never were.

It had been a year since I returned to the family ranch, and I was still struggling to dig out of a year of emotional anarchy which had left me gutted. Some months before, I had stood in my bathroom, naked and in tears, because I couldn't decide what to do with the damp towel – use it again or wash it. It ended up laying on the floor for a number of days before I mustered the initiative to make a decision. It was that bad - often worse.

The phone calls made, I went to bed and watched a baseball game on television. I wondered what feelings would manifest themselves in the coming days, but I didn't lose any sleep.

The next day, while changing the water in the same meadow that my father had irrigated for almost 70 years, I felt a sudden sense of loss. It wasn't the sadness that normally comes with the death of a person, it was more like the disappearance of a landmark that you have driven by for your entire life – an old tree or a creek.

The feeling was akin, possibly, to Sylvia Plath's bell jar. It was a vacuum, and given my emotional instability over the past year, I was surprised at my lack of caring.

I worried about myself the day of the funeral. I was concerned that an overflow of emotion I couldn't control would finally surface, and I'd cause a scene at the ceremony by fainting or wailing. I never knew what I was or what I was going to be. I was my own mystery.

The funeral was mercifully short. I shook the offered hands and responded to the platitudes without embarrassing anyone. It was just a funeral for an old man. It didn't feel right.

At the cemetery there were more hands and more rhetorical sympathy. The weather was good.

Still feeling an absence of something unnamed, I stayed behind when the mourners left for the community dinner. I waited for the truck to dump the dirt onto my father's coffin. I was going to see what it would do with me - maybe break me loose from an ennui I didn't think was normal.

I got my dog out of the car, then stood with my hand on his head, smoking, about 100 feet from the grave. They backed the truck up to the hole while the dog and I waited.

I was apprehensive as the bed raised. It seemed to take longer than usual, but the rocks and dirt eventually slid into the grave. There was a finality to the hollow rumble of the rocks hitting the casket. It was done, but I felt nothing.

The dog wandered off to explore and urinate on headstones while I watched a few of the local men rake the gravesite. When they finished, they passed a bottle of whiskey around – a local custom. I liked that gesture.

After they left, I found my dog and drove to the dinner for more empty banter. Nothing had been resolved.

Now, years later, it's still the same. For a few months I waited for that familiar soft feeling of sadness which would signal a normal reaction to burying one's father. It hasn't happened, and now I suppose it won't. The capacity for mourning is gone, but there's a nebulous sense of an absence.

Maybe that's enough.