The Counting-Downers (3 page)

At least we had him for a while.

At least.

As if.

As if even the darkest clouds are lined with silver.

As if we’ll ever be the same as a family.

As if I’ll ever be the same as a person.

I mean, we all knew it was coming. How anxious must his co-workers have been to see him arrive smiling that morning with thirty minutes left to live, knowing his earthly departure would happen right before their eyes and they could do nothing? How must they have felt to be aware their morning greetings of hello would in minutes become goodbye? How they must have wished he had listened to my mom’s subtle hints and pleas for him to take a fateful and final sick day.

My father knew everything about all things. Though I’d long since passed the age where children believe their parents to be omniscient, I knew he knew and he knew I knew. Nevertheless, although my stubborn dad was aware he was walking out the door to his demise, he refused to stay at home for his final hours, even hypothetically.

“Business as usual
,” he’d said. “
Life goes on, the show goes on, and business must always go on as usual.”

His mantra was that every day could be the best, the worst, or the last day of your life. You never knew which, so it was your job to wake up in the morning and hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. The world would keep spinning and time would move on without you so you may as well go with the flow.

As I smooth down my black dress and put the last flower in my hair, I smile small.

“
Go with the flowwwwww, Tilly dude
,”
he said, mimicking a surfer as he made me giggle with the wave motions of his hands. I tried to copy, causing him to smile. Suddenly sobering, he looked out at the ocean before turning back to look into my eyes, saying, “Always remember to move with the tide instead of fighting against it, okay? That gets you nowhere. Relax and let it take you on a journey to the inevitable.”
Though I was only eight, he was my everything. Alpha and Omega, Poseidon and Aeolus. His word was, and would always be, Gospel.
“Okay, Daddy dude, go with the flow and move with the tide.” I beamed up at him, eager to show I was listening to his teachings, even if I didn’t understand all of them. He leaned across and picked up a stray seaside daisy, which had somehow landed on the sand where we were sitting side by side, hand in hand. Planting it into my beach-weathered braid, he smoothed his hands over the top of my head before kissing it in reward for my diligence. “That’s right, Angel, and don’t you ever forget it.”

But I was worried I
would
forget.

The time would come when I could only remember the blurry outline of his face and form, like imagining a character in a book, with vagueness, no details.

The time would come when I would forget the sound of his laugh, or the perfect balance of salt water and sandalwood that made up his scent.

The time would come when I’d forget the words he’d said, the moments we’d shared, the laughs we’d had, the memories we’d made, and the life we’d lived together as a family.

The time would come. It always did.

For me and for you. For laughter and tears. For melancholy and joy.

Time comes and goes as it pleases and yet with perfect rhythm. Like the moving of the tide or the rising and setting of the sun.

Now the time has come to say goodbye.

Lacing up my black Doc Martens, I take a deep breath and whisper, “I miss you, Daddy,” to the loud and somber silence. Taking reluctant steps downstairs, I join my mother, Genevieve, in the living room, where she is trying to wrestle my baby brother into a black bow tie.

The heavy thud of my boots must have alerted her to my presence. She hasn’t turned around, and remains frown-faced in concentration, but her shoulders slump with relief. “Oh, Matilda, thank goodness you’re here. Maybe you’ll have better luck putting Oscar into his bow tie than I’m having.”

She’s been doing that a lot recently. Using our full names, as if the formality is a lifeline in her world of disarray. Or perhaps, she can’t bear to have any reminders of
him
and the way we all used to be. Carefree, happy, relaxed,
together
.

Previously, we were only Matilda and Oscar to our parents when we were in trouble. What I wouldn’t give for my dad to come back and tell me off for something trivial.

Though having said that, he was never the disciplinarian, always the good cop to Mom’s bad. Instead, his method of expressing disappointment was far more effective than punishment, at least for me.

But sometimes Mom gave him a practiced look of silent communication that all the best soulmates use. One that said ‘we’re a team and you need to back me up.’ He’d reluctantly tell me off, then wink behind my mom’s back if he thought she was overreacting and slip me some chocolate when she wasn’t looking.

We were the real team, he and I. I guess it’s true what they say about there being no ‘I’ in team, because I’ve never been more alone than I am without my former teammate.

Turning toward me, Mom takes in my appearance as I take in hers. I realize to my distress that I have been looking at her for the past week without seeing her current state.

Looking at
everything
without seeing. Eating without tasting. Hearing without listening. Breathing without living. Senses dulled, feelings numbed.

My timelessly beautiful mother has aged over the past seven days. Lived and died a thousand lifetimes. She’s grown world-weary, with the wrinkles of the civil wars she’s fought written across her skin, and reflected in her soul-sapped eyes.

“Oh, Matilda, you’re not wearing that are you? You look like you’re going to a rock concert rather than your father’s funeral,” she says with exasperation, referring to my flowing black dress, floral DMs, and black leather jacket, accessorized with my signature messy blonde braid full of daisies.

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing? It’s black.” I’m trying not to become frustrated with my mom because my heart is filled with nothing but empathy for her. If my father was the air I breathed, he was the blood in her veins.

Neither of us could live without him. Yet, here we both are. Deadly alive.

Even though I’d always been a Daddy’s Girl, we were all as close as a family can be. I love my mother, even if I often don’t understand her, and I know she feels the same about me. Without my dad to be the bridge between our two different approaches to life, and translate the words we do and don’t say to the other, I’m afraid we’ll have one breakdown in communication too many.

My mom gives a heavy sigh, letting go of a wriggling Oscar who is wearing the premade bow tie as a hairband. Mom is famous for her ‘speaking sighs’ as Dad called them; sighs that say it all without words. This one explains that on the second worst day of her life, the last thing she needs is me making it more difficult.

A tremendous amount of guilt hits me at that sigh. She needs me to be strong for her, and for Oscar. She needs us to be together as a family today, what’s left of it anyway.

At four, Oscar is still too young to understand the implications or importance of today. He knows in theory that Daddy is no longer with us and has become an angel in the sky, but I wonder if in practice he still thinks Dad is just away on some kind of extended business trip and will be bringing him back a souvenir. In many ways, I’m jealous of his youthful ignorance and trouble-free approach to life. He is the ultimate example of going with the flow and moving with the tide.

Letting my stubborn scowl soften in apology, I calm my frustration and prepare to explain my choice of funeral outfit to my straight-laced, untied mother. She, of course, looks impeccable in a knee-length, form-fitting, black dress, sensible kitten heels, and a black headband. Outwardly, not a strand of sleek blonde hair is out of place, but I know internally is a different story.

She won’t want anyone else to know this though. No, she’ll do her grieving in private.

In the lonely midnight hours, lying on his side of the bed they’d shared for over twenty years, which is starting to lose his scent, she lets the tears fall in silence as she mourns the loss of her life and love. Something about the nighttime invites soliloquies of the soul. Midnight confessions spoken into the silent darkness, free of judgment and the observations which come with light.

She thinks I can’t hear her nightly cries and prayers. At the mercy of paper-thin walls, I’m an unwelcome intruder in her most private moments. She doesn’t know I also lost the ability to sleep at exactly the same time my father lost his life.

Or maybe she does. How sad that we both lie awake at night, each cascading silent tears and whispering our pointless pleas in isolation. I don’t go to her and she doesn’t come to me. Instead, we lay separated by brick and plaster, drowning in our own grief until the dawning of another day without him.

I know I can go to her, but her tears will dry in an instant. She’ll need to be strong for me, instead of allowing us to be weak together. My father taught me that you need to be able to be weak so that you can continue being strong. Everyone needs something or someone they can reveal their weaknesses to. For my mother, it was always and only ever him.

It’s a poor substitute, but now she can only be weak and vulnerable when the lights are off and she’s alone. I know she needs it in order to keep breathing and moving for my sake and my brother’s. So I let her have midnight. And solitude.

The daytime, however, belongs to everyone else.
Today
belongs to everyone else. My mom knows it, and so do I.

Clearing my throat, I give my own brief eulogy to an audience of one and a half. “Dad taught me to be an individual. He told me happiness lay in finding yourself, expressing yourself, and always trusting and staying true to the person you discovered.

“I know you don’t always appreciate my style, but this is who I am, Mom. The boots, the braids, the flowers. Daddy helped me find and express this person, and now I have to do the final part and stay true to it. It’s what he would want. To do otherwise and pretend to be someone else, even just for a day, would go against his wishes. In being me, I’m honoring him.”

Something that looks a lot like comprehension and sadness lights up her dim jade eyes for a brief second before fading out just as fast. “I understand, he’d be proud.”

Before she excuses herself for a final appearance check in the bathroom that I know is just a reason to collect herself, she asks me to try to wrestle a defiant Oscar into the bow tie one last time.

And I wonder if she understood at all.

SITTING ON THE beach my father loved so much, with a fidgeting, bow tie-less Oscar in my lap and my stoic mother next to me clutching the urn to her chest, I draw my gaze away from the magnificent ocean to look around at the people who are gathered here to say goodbye.

I’ve never even said ‘hello’ to most of these people.

I think a funeral is the ultimate testament to how you lived your life. Although I was only little, I remember that when my great aunt Mara died, the people who had come to mourn had to stand on the steps and street as the church was at full capacity.

Can you imagine filling out a church? That’s a sign of a life well lived, when there’s no sitting room at your funeral.

No spare seats are available today either.

I wonder how many seats would fill at my funeral if I were to die tomorrow. My family would come, but who else?

Would some of the many people who’d made it their job to ignore me in high school show up out of guilt, or the need to keep up appearances? Would they talk to people about how wonderful I was, even though they never talked to
me
when I was alive?

I hate that, don’t you? When people die, those who never knew them at all are always the ones who seem to take it the hardest. Something strange happens to people when their acquaintances die, infusing their brains with a misplaced sense of nostalgia and closeness which never existed.

They’re the ones who can be found bawling graveside, while the family is sitting dry-eyed and unimpressed, or who come up with the most poetic words and falsified memories about the character of a virtual stranger.