October 14, 1923-April 20, 2006
A.E.L.
In memory of my father, who died two years ago
today. Two years ago at 10:56 p.m tonight.
I miss him with all my heart.
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
W.H. Auden
2 comments:
Ah, you know the exact date, the exact hour, the exact minute.
I don't. I never have. For some reason, the impossibility of my father's death has always prevented me from knowing exactly when he died. I can never quite name the date. I know it's coming though every year in October. For a few days before the day of his death, I'll feel low for what I think is no reason at all. And then, on the day that he died, I'll realize that it was the day that he died, and I'll say: Oh. Oh.
This poem you posted....wrecks me. I can't recall now if I saw the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral in its entirety before my father's death or not. I do know that when I heard this poem being read as a eulogy for one of the friends when he dies suddenly at one of the weddings, I sat up and listened. I felt the poem more than I heard it. I don't think I knew the poem before my father died, or I would've read it at his funeral. It's how I felt after his death. It's certainly how my mother felt. She lost her best friend.
You know, my father died around the same time yours did, if I recall correctly. We'd all spent the day at the hospital after spending the previous 3 days at the hospital watching him slip deeper and deeper into a coma as his brain swelled. On that last day, we were beginning to contemplate the reality of making the decision on the following day of stopping all life-sustaining efforts.
But he made that decision, or his body did, himself. We were in the room with him until maybe 10 that night. A nurse came in and told us that visiting hours were over and we could stay as long as we liked. We were all tired. Exhausted. Drained. We all collectively decided to go home.
My mother called less than an hour later while I was laying on the couch watching Rosemary Clooney singing to tell me that my father had just died.
Oh, Maggie. It's so hard, isn't it?
It will be 7 years in October for me. It seems impossible that he's been gone that long.
My thoughts are with you today. And my heart.
I posted a video of the poem being read in that movie for you on my blog.
I know it...we left the hospital that night (and there is a story there with the "we") around 9...they coded my dad twice...I didn't know...they left the tube in his mouth and it was still there when my youngest son and I got to the hospital...his eyes were still open and he was warm...
I was making pinwheel wraps for a luncheon at work when my brother called to say he was gone...i dropped the knife and walked very slowly, as if in a stupor, to my son's bedroom and woke him up (my husband was out of town)
and I said Granddaddy is gone--he died--and we need to go to the hospital...
I remember not wanting to delete that phone call from my cell phone, and I kept it a very long time until I realized it made no difference...keeping the number logged was not going to change anything, was not going to bring him back, was not going to make anything right,
and finally, I deleted the call with it's numbers showing the time...
ahhhhhhhhhh....we live and we die, yes, but it's what we do with all the in-betweens that matter...I just hope I can get to the knowing before my time is up...
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