And Speaking of Grief: Nothing Undone

I often give my composition students a quick diagnostic essay. They are to answer this: What's on in your car?

Invariably I get the duh essays: "When I get in, I turn ON my engine. If it's raining, I turn ON my windshield wipers. Sometimes my radio is ON." "My radio has factory presets, which I changed when I bought my car. I now have the radio set to reach the following stations at the touch of a button: WDUH, WDUM...."

OK, I'm exaggerating by being too kind. The essays I get are far worse.

What do I want, then? To be jerked to tears by a tale of boyfriend woe, reconnoitered in the lyrics of one particularly venomous Alanis Morissette song. To be captivated by an account of driving and crying. I'd like to simply be there, in the car, hearing a song I hate by a band I don't like, listening to some thoughts that actually count.

I want something like this:

"Lightning crashes/an old mother dies," Ed Kowalczyk of the band Live sings quietly through my speakers. "Her intentions fall to the floor."

Don't I know it. I had been meaning to mail my mother-in-law a thank-you note for those baby clothes. I had been meaning to visit my grandfather in the apartment he moved into a year earlier. I'd been meaning to take that bag of clothes to Goodwill, clean out the basement, finish painting my sister's house. Et cetera.

I wondered if my father-in-law had any intentions. He had seemed pretty content to live out the rest of his days sleeping late, taking care of his wife, looking at pictures of his newest granddaughter, and staying up late to have a beer and a smoke in front of "M*A*S*H" or "Green Acres" or "Taxi"—depending on how long it took him to get rid of whomever was still awake.

Bob Miller was a man who did rather than meant to do. He'd have argued that it takes more energy to think about things like writing letters or making telephone calls than it takes to write the letters or make the calls. So when he died, he probably left nothing undone. Except us.

The baby was napping, and my husband and I were enjoying our coffee when Aunt Margaret called. Dad was in surgery, the situation "grave." And then we were packing frantically. Diapers and clothes and toys and sundry accouterment seemed to throw themselves into the car. And then Mom called. She was home from the hospital.

We listened to nothing but our baby, Serena, and our own sobbing all the way to the Eastern Shore, two hours away. In moments, children who hadn't been together in so many years would be flying in from Connecticut, Alaska, and England to comfort each other and the surviving member of a pair who had never been apart. Well, 51 years is as close to forever as I can imagine.

In the little room where he slept, where Serena would be sleeping, were his wallet and comb. In the brass dish called, "Dad's Change," there was $23.47. I opened his wallet to the picture of Serena, made a little shrine.

In the garage, where he took his Camel breaks, a fresh, filter-less cigarette was waiting for him in the ashtray next to a pack of matches and the scissors he used to cut off the burn ends of the cigarettes he didn't finish.

In the kitchen, on top of the refrigerator, were two unopened packs of Camels, an open pack, and $6.18 in change. In the refrigerator, stacked two high, were Mom's ginger ale, some regular Coke, and my Diet Pepsis. No matter when I arrived, cold soda awaited. When I drank one, another would magically appear, always below the cold one. Who would rotate my soft drinks now?

That year was one of life-altering events, beginning with the birth of my daughter and followed by the deaths of my dog, my grandmother, and my father-in-law. Joy and pain are forever linked now, just like in Live's song. "The angel closes her eyes," it goes. "The confusion that was hers/belongs now to the baby down the hall."

Perhaps the band had been reading Carl Sandburg, who wrote in "Under the Capitol Dome": "When one confusion transforms itself into another/there has been a death and a birth/though the newborn confusion/becomes known only across time and silence."

The poet and my daughter were born on January 6th, Twelfth Night. And that's perfect, because I had been meaning to have an epiphany.

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Bob Miller died on September 3, 1998. He would have been 81 on February 19th, 2005.