It's four-and-a-half months since Mama died. I've visited my parents' house - my dad's house, I'm finally beginning to be able to say that - the last two weekends. I walk in, and nobody's home. I can count on one hand the number of times I've come to their house when no one was home; usually there is always someone there, usually Mama. I walk in and there are no lights on to welcome me. In the twilight, it is dark in the living room. I am briefly overwhelmed by the darkness and the stillness. I cut on the lights. That isn't much better. The house smells like old people. I cannot reconcile this. My parents aren't old. My mother was sixty-one, my father is sixty-two. Too young for the house to smell so close and elderly. It is too empty there, too. It feels sad in there. How does Daddy come home to this every day, to this gaping absence and the stillness and the emptiness?
She is mostly gone from the living areas. She picked the furniture out; it was their decision, but without her there in the chair special-ordered for her (she was short, the chair was made to be comfortable for her) to warm the room, it is obvious that the furniture needs her for it to be homey. Without her, it's just a showroom of furniture. There are plants there, mostly peace lilies from her funeral. Daddy has kept those alive these months. There are her David Winter cottages, and her pitcher collection. But everything, all the knick-knacks, they're just things now, things waiting for me to take them home when I find space. They aren't her things any more. They add nothing of her, not even memories. Her coats used to hang from the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. Daddy moved those. Her shoes beside the stairs at the bottom - he moved those, too, in the first month. Nothing is left of her there in that room.
Daddy gets home and the void is filled briefly with my children greeting him. Ronan and Liam played Game Boy for the whole eight-hour trip down, and they're dying to tell Granddaddy about all the latest Pokemon happenings. Katie, with her toddler exuberance, shows my father her new toy, and grins at him shyly when he asks for a hug. He cuddles the baby and makes her smile gummily. Dinner - an awkward moment at first when I hesitate to sit down, waiting for Mama to come in and take her seat. More talk - the kids can talk the fleas off a dog, thank god. The unsettling quiet is banished, for now.
My stomach is upset. I go to my parents' bathroom, and there is more of Mama there than in the living room. A travel bag of toiletries hangs from one of the towel racks. I take some of her medicine, OTC, for my stomach. Her hairspray and a lotion or two on the counter. Daddy told me to take some of those things, any of them I wanted, a couple of months ago. I did, though not so much to use them as to be able to smell her smell whenever I need to. He kept the rest. Other than the travel bag, her towel rack is empty. I look around the bathroom - they had just redecorated. Like the living room, the room is all her, poppies on the wallpaper in feminine tones.
The kids go upstairs to play, and it is just my father and me together. Awkward silences stretch out between us like a great empty plain. I call him weekly, email him often. Never much to say - my life is not terribly interesting, his life is not terribly interesting. So we sit down together in the living room, him looking slightly out of place, now, on the furniture bought to please her, and I begin to talk. I begin to tell him all the minutiae of the mundane details of our lives, the details that seemed too inane and picayune to tell him before, but that I jabber on about in excruciating detail just to fill that silence that yawns hugely before us. There is little in common that we have now.
It's funny and it's not funny - I used to think I was a Daddy's girl. When I was a child, I used to wish my parents would get divorced and I could go live with my dad, who was always the happy fun guy to my mother's bad cop. I relished a closeness between us that was born largely of his being out of town and at work a lot; of course our little time together during my childhood would seem more charming than the day-in, day-out of most of my hours with my mother. The closeness dissolved, by and large, when I hit my teen years, but by then, the habit of feeling like a Daddy's girl was ingrained and, though it wasn't really true any more, I didn't notice its absence. It wasn't until Mama got sick that it really struck me how much of a Mama's girl I have been all these years, how it was her I was closer to than to my father. And it wasn't until she was gone and no longer bridging the gap between Daddy and me that I realized how much she was the glue that kept the two of us together without the awkwardness that is there now.
Once I've done with the smalltalk about my little life, he tells me a little about the business he and Mama built together; his heart isn't in it without her there with him, but he has to keep at it until he's eligible for Medicare. And then there's nothing left to talk about. The only thing we have in common, it seems, is my mother, and we don't talk about her much. Oh, we don't go out of our way to not talk about her, but it's still too fresh for us to mention her to each other except glancing references here and there that make me flinch a little inside. When he mentions that she used to do this or that, or I say that I was reminded of her the other day, I have to listen and talk with only a fragment of myself engaged or I'll get caught up in missing her and will start crying, so we skim over talking about her and avoid it when we can.
We talk about food. He, being an old school kind of fellow, never really cooked until Mama got sick. When the cancer came, though, he became the chief cook and bottle-washer. She would give him cooking tips, tell him how to bread veal the way she always did that he liked, and not to add onion to the cabbage when he cooked it. They watched Emeril together, a tradition they began after she got sick. He was itching to experiment after watching Food Network, but torn between that and the plain cooking Mama favored. After she died, Daddy began to broaden his cooking horizons - mushrooms, which Mama never liked, appearing in everything. Lots of olive oil. Fresh seafood in interesting combinations. Parsley as a flourish. It's an interest he retained after Mama died; I mean, of course he had to keep cooking after she was gone, but the little cooking touches that he used to try to please Mama's sick palate, he kept up with for himself after she was gone, broadened, in fact, once Mama had died. I don't cook, but I love to eat. So we talk about food, things he likes to cook and things I like to eat.
Until the last two weekends, I was tremendously bothered by the gulfs that have widened out between my father and me since my mother died. It is a hard realization to come to, thinking that you're your father's daughter and only realizing after she's died that you are, in fact, your mother's daughter. Too, with him my only parent now, I've felt like I've needed him twice as much as I did before. At the same time, though, he's been so broken by Mama's death that he only has half as much to give to me any more. It is a sad math. I had come to a point where I felt like I had, when my mama died, lost both my parents, instead of just the one.
There is still some strain, some talking to fill the uncomfortable silences between us, but something - I'm not even sure what - happened last weekend and carried on into this weekend. We talk about food, and little else until there is nothing, really, left to say, but the lapses in our conversation are less awkward, all of a sudden, and more accustomed. I'm feeling less the urge to fill the air with words to bridge this chasm; sometimes I even pick up a book and read, and he does the same, and we are companionably separate while in the same room. There is less forcing ourselves to try to fit into the old molds, I think, and more of coming to relate to each other in our post-Mama states.
There is a long way to go. I still feel distant from him, and still feel rather peripheral to him. I could write, and have written, pages about how much this hurts, how much it has made me question myself and wonder how much he actually really even likes me. And if my father doesn't like me - he likes everybody, except my ex-husband - then what, really, do I have going for me? There is a lot of work I need to do on myself, sorting I need to do about my relationship with my dad. I am still getting used to not being a Daddy's girl, to really internalizing it rather than merely acknowledging a surprising fact. The shoes still pinch and blister, but they're more comfortable now than they were when I first walked in them, I'm saying. I can't say we're growing closer together, but we are at least growing in the same direction, parallel now and not at odds - learning to live now without Mama there to smooth it all down for us both.
Coming home, four hundred miles unwinding behind me, I think about all of this. I think about Daddy, and my relationship with him now and how to relate to him in a way I never did before. I think about Mama and how much I miss her, how much we all yearn for her - even the house seems to miss her and need her in order to function as a home. I think about sitting at the foot of her grave and talking to her, telling her about all the things that have made me think of her since the last time I sat down to talk to her: my new haircut (she always liked it short), the new baby she'll never meet, sifting through old pictures and finding one of her actually smiling. I let my mind wander to other things before I start crying. I think about myself, who I am without my parents the way they were before my mother died. I arrive home. I live my life. It gets a little easier every day.