December 7, 1971, My Father Dies
12/08/07 09:16
This is a story about my father: his death, his
life. Thirty-six years ago, on December 7, 1971,
my father died.
This is a story about my father: his death, his
life. Thirty-six years ago, on December 7, 1971,
my father died.
It was Pearl Harbor Day. I remember this day with a pungent taste in my mouth, as I think of my father, the sailor too young to sail out to sea in a boat that might have been lost forever to WWII, had the war not ended just before he would have been called to serve.
The last time I saw my father, it was my 20th birthday: October 22, 1971.
I had just moved away from home to my apartment, a 5-bedroom co-operative in Montreal's student ghetto. It was Parc Avenue just below Pine, directly below a run down Pizzeria. Marco from Brazil was a 24-year-old grad student too rich and good-looking for his own good, and he ran the co-op with his artistic little dictatorial fingers. I didn't much care for his conceited ways and was glad to leave the co-op because of him.
My room was small and plain, but full of books and LPs. This room made me feel proud, because it was my first apartment, my first badge of adulthood.
This was the Granola age and my friends cared about being real, student activism and literature. Some of my friends cared about going to the pub until 3 a.m., then going to Ben’s for smoked meat sandwiches. It was a brief but happy moment in the life of any 19-year-old college student with few worries in the real world.
That carefree life would soon change. On our last meeting, my father told me: "Kathy, I am proud of you and understand why you had to leave home."
My father was going to scientific meetings in Denver, then to the Yucatan and Acapulco for a vacation with my stepmother. This was his first real vacation in seven years; his other trips were scientific meetings, with required attendance.
That morning, the sun streamed in through my small bedroom window, and my father kissed me gently on the forehead. That morning marked my first day as an adult, both in my perception of myself and in my relationship with my father. That moment was emblazoned on my psyche from the moment it happened.
My father smiled at me: he was not angry that I had left home. I beamed with pride.
That was the last time I saw him alive. He died in his sleep in Acapulco of a myocardial infarction (heart attack), after hiking in the high altitudes.
My interests at the time ran toward my boyfriend who was studying at McGill, where I was also a student. I looked forward to Christmas when I would see my father again, this time as a newly minted adult, living away from home.
I waited through the fall and looked forward to seeing him after his return from vacation. The weeks passed in a blur. I studied, partied, smoked Camel and Gitanes. I read Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and lived in a fantasy world of my own making and of the shared fantasy of my literarily pretentious friends.
The evening of December 7, 1971, I spent some time with my boyfriend. It was a Saturday night.
I returned to my apartment at about 11 p.m. The phone rang. It was a colleague of my parents, a professor in the medical school. He asked if I knew where my stepbrother was. I replied that I didn't. I asked him what was wrong; he didn't say.
I went to bed, but couldn't sleep. I tossed, vaguely aware that something was wrong, but I didn't know what.
At 9 a.m., someone knocked loudly on my door. It was my stepbrother.
“Don is gone. Don is gone,” he said.
“Gone? Where?” My sleepiness was greater than my ability to grasp his meaning.
“Gone. Don is dead.”
With my stepbrother’s words, “Don is dead,” hell thundered toward my brain at 150 million miles per second.
I screamed. I ran down the hall screaming, passing a roommate. She said:
“It’s OK. I know how you feel.”
I screamed bloody hell at her. "No, you don’t. You DON’T know how I feel. You CAN’T.”
I continued running down the hall, screaming, as reality hit.
I looked back at her, and saw her grimace in pain at the recognition of her faux pas. I felt guilty at having screamed at her, but I couldn't lie about what was true and what wasn't.
That morning, I returned with my stepbrother to our parents home, a few miles from the apartment where I had been living. I called my boyfriend. His sister answered the phone. I spoke. ”Is L…there? Nothing is wrong, Sue, but is L…there?”
“Kira, what is wrong?”
I replied, nothing is wrong, Sue; really, nothing; nothing, nothing, nothing is wrong but I need to speak to L....
“Kira, what is wrong? Something is wrong, what is it?”
“Just tell L…..that my father died last night.”
L….picked up the phone.
At that moment, I felt farther from L… and closer to my father. The difference between a father’s love and the passing infatuation of a boyfriend became crystal clear that moment.
L...and I agreed to meet at his apartment downtown.
The three-mile bus ride from my parent’s home to downtown was longer than any ride I remembered then or since.
That afternoon, minutes oozed into hours, like Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. I sat in front of the TV, as friends and I watched a movie. I was numb, grieving but unable to feel.
I remember nothing about the movie. At the end, I announced to the group that my father had died the night before.
I returned to my parent’s home for a few weeks. My younger sisters did not know of our father's death. My stepmother was returning home from the Yucatan and wanted to tell my sisters herself.
It was agreed we would keep my father’s death a secret from my sisters until my stepmother’s return. This was my stepmother's wish.
Two days later, my youngest sister came in from school and asked me:
“Is it true?” Instantly, I grasped her meaning.
I hugged her and said, Yes. We cried. We sat together for what seemed like a long time, silently, before we got up and resumed our own lives and did not speak of this, for years.
The son of my parent’s colleague had overheard the news and had told my sister at school.
We kept the news from our other sister. A few days later, my stepmother returned, sickened by the flu. She brought with her the urn, cremation having already taken place between December 7th and December 12th, the day of her arrival in Montreal.
We were in grief; we were in tears; we were beyond tears, we were numb.
As we prepared for Christmas, we felt confusion, pain, grief, hell. We knew that the routines of planning Christmas kept us from feeling the depths of our grief - that going through his clothes and boxing them up kept us closer to him.
And we knew that after all this was done, we would be left: empty, cold and barren - left to deal with our grief, our silent grief, alone.
I loved to feel his old denim jacket, to run my fingers up and down the jacket, to know its creases, wrinkles, stains and rips; I had worn this jacket the year he died. I held it near my face and wore it for several more years after he died. I have it still in the attic, hung in the closet.
We had no words to describe how we felt. We did not talk about it, did not talk about him, did not mention his name.
In my mind, I said: “my father died,” as if “died” in the past tense could bring about an undoing of what had been done. Past tense means it no longer happens, right?
I wanted to believe that 'died' could be undone, that he could become undead. I never said the word "dead" because that word carried a finality with which I could not come to grips.
We cling to our denial and disbelief more than we would like to believe. In the beginning, it's the only way we can survive: to understand something that really, we cannot grasp.
It was December, and Montreal was bitterly raw, and the sidewalk was covered under several feet of snow. Those years brought temperatures of about minus 20 Fahrenheit with a severe wind chill.
My stepmother decided the winter was too extreme for a funeral and that we would have the funeral in the summer, when Mom Esplin (my father's mother) and Aunt Laurel, (my father's sister) could come, too.
It was decided the funeral would be in June, six months away. In the interim, we couldn't sleep, we couldn't eat, we couldn't laugh, we couldn't cry.
We were living through an emotional ice storm, as cold, bitter and sterile as the weather outside.
We went through the motions, helped by Phenobarbital and Valium, from our family doctor.
This was the short-term solution to the overwhelm of emotions; the long-term solution was simply to cope, in our silent and bumbling way.
Christmas was a blur. We had a Christmas ham, presents, guests. But our faces wore the mask of depression - the mask that would take five years before it slowly slowly slid off our faces.
We felt like a part of ourselves had died. Indeed, it had. This was true for each and every one of us. No one suffered greater or lesser than the other: My stepmother, my stepbrother, myself, or my two younger sisters. We each had our own suffering, which was unbearable to each of us.
During the first few weeks after his death, I ‘saw’ my father everywhere on the street, as I was walking.
I walked down Ste. Catherine street, and nearly ran lickety-split to greet a slightly stooped, middle-aged man with wavy, gray hair.
This happened many times during the first weeks after his death.
I thought: "It's him, it's Daddy. He's here. He is not dead."
As soon as the words, 'not dead' appeared in my mind, I realized that the man I thought might be my father, was actually someone else - a stranger - who - in my grief and denial - only appeared to look like my father. I desperately wanted to see my father and to believe he was alive.
My subconscious knew this, of course, and relayed tricks to appease my grief, only for my conscious mind to lash back just as viciously at my subconscious with cold, hard reality. My conscious mind would not let my subconscious win.
As soon as I realized the stranger was not Daddy, my heart skipped, my stomach lept to my throat and I felt ill.
At night, I awakened and sat upright, feeling that I had to speak to my father, only to realize moments later that I had been dreaming of "Daddy," and feeling him near me, before I was faced with the slap in the face that he was dead.
After years of pressing down the denial, screaming out and feeling grief's hot tears rack our souls with sobs, could we finally begin to live.
This took at least five years. Likely, it took ten. The years after that brought sad reminiscences, scenes when I was newly married and sad that my in-laws were together as a family, unlike my family, which had been ruptured at the core, years before.
Now, I celebrate Christmas knowing my loved ones live within me, peace at last.
That is the true persistence of memory.
June 22, 1972 was the day of the funeral: It was sunny and warm.
My aunt Glenna had and sent a beautiful orange tree, which we kept in the living room. It lived for a long time.
My father lived life ferociously and fully. He was an intense man with deep-set blue eyes; many remarked on the passion with which he went about life.
For the funeral service, we met at the Unitarian Universalist church, where the minister spoke of this loss - not only for family, friends and loved ones, but also for science, that Don Wynn Esplin, Ph.D., was cut down in the middle of his life at age 44.
The minister spoke for what seemed like a very long time. I fainted briefly and my stepmother took me into the kitchen.
* * *
The drive from downtown Montreal to Mount Royal Cemetery was not far, but it seemed long. My sisters, stepbrother, stepmother and I were in the lead car behind the hearse.
I bought a black dress and shoes for the occasion, knowing, that for the first time, I would become Kathryn, a grown woman of 20, nearly 21 - not the Kathy of childhood, nor the name of Kira that I had taken for a few years.
In the car, no one spoke, we barely made eye contact, so locked were we in our own numbness. We weren't able to comfort ourselves or each other. The windows were closed; we couldn't smell the fragrance of the flowers nor hear the birds that sang.
We were closed to our inner drumbeats. My aunt Laurel was there and so was Mom Esplin. They wore dark dresses; they looked sad but did not speak. The cemetery on Mount Royal had recently been redone, complete with street signs and grassy knolls. Birds chirped and a gentle fragrance hung in the air.
Through all this, I never shed a tear. I was numb to the death of the man from whom I had learned everything.
For the next two decades, I went through the motions, resolved to carry on my father's work in science. Not as a scientist - but as someone who knew how important he was, and what a loss for society his death was.
I finished college and grad school, settled down and married. I had been raised an Atheist, yet I always felt a pull toward Catholicism. I decided to become a Catholic at Boston's Paulist Center.
It was during the religious conversion process when we read Scripture and related the passages to our lives; it was during this time that the floodgates of grief finally opened: the tears flowed and would not stop.
In front of a dozen people, for weeks at a time, the tears rolled down my cheeks. I had learned so much from my father - how he had died so that I could learn from his mistakes, his successes, his life. It was as if he gave me the gift of life, twice.
It was then that I finally let go of grief, to rejoice at being alive.
And now, 36 years later, I weep, I smile, I love, I laugh. But most of all, I remember. I remember who and what he was. And what he could have been.
But it is in bringing his message to people that I consider my most important mission in life: through science he lived and spread his message; through words, I spread mine.
Copyright © 2007, Kathryn Esplin-Oleski
It was Pearl Harbor Day. I remember this day with a pungent taste in my mouth, as I think of my father, the sailor too young to sail out to sea in a boat that might have been lost forever to WWII, had the war not ended just before he would have been called to serve.
The last time I saw my father, it was my 20th birthday: October 22, 1971.
I had just moved away from home to my apartment, a 5-bedroom co-operative in Montreal's student ghetto. It was Parc Avenue just below Pine, directly below a run down Pizzeria. Marco from Brazil was a 24-year-old grad student too rich and good-looking for his own good, and he ran the co-op with his artistic little dictatorial fingers. I didn't much care for his conceited ways and was glad to leave the co-op because of him.
My room was small and plain, but full of books and LPs. This room made me feel proud, because it was my first apartment, my first badge of adulthood.
This was the Granola age and my friends cared about being real, student activism and literature. Some of my friends cared about going to the pub until 3 a.m., then going to Ben’s for smoked meat sandwiches. It was a brief but happy moment in the life of any 19-year-old college student with few worries in the real world.
That carefree life would soon change. On our last meeting, my father told me: "Kathy, I am proud of you and understand why you had to leave home."
My father was going to scientific meetings in Denver, then to the Yucatan and Acapulco for a vacation with my stepmother. This was his first real vacation in seven years; his other trips were scientific meetings, with required attendance.
That morning, the sun streamed in through my small bedroom window, and my father kissed me gently on the forehead. That morning marked my first day as an adult, both in my perception of myself and in my relationship with my father. That moment was emblazoned on my psyche from the moment it happened.
My father smiled at me: he was not angry that I had left home. I beamed with pride.
That was the last time I saw him alive. He died in his sleep in Acapulco of a myocardial infarction (heart attack), after hiking in the high altitudes.
My interests at the time ran toward my boyfriend who was studying at McGill, where I was also a student. I looked forward to Christmas when I would see my father again, this time as a newly minted adult, living away from home.
I waited through the fall and looked forward to seeing him after his return from vacation. The weeks passed in a blur. I studied, partied, smoked Camel and Gitanes. I read Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and lived in a fantasy world of my own making and of the shared fantasy of my literarily pretentious friends.
The evening of December 7, 1971, I spent some time with my boyfriend. It was a Saturday night.
I returned to my apartment at about 11 p.m. The phone rang. It was a colleague of my parents, a professor in the medical school. He asked if I knew where my stepbrother was. I replied that I didn't. I asked him what was wrong; he didn't say.
I went to bed, but couldn't sleep. I tossed, vaguely aware that something was wrong, but I didn't know what.
At 9 a.m., someone knocked loudly on my door. It was my stepbrother.
“Don is gone. Don is gone,” he said.
“Gone? Where?” My sleepiness was greater than my ability to grasp his meaning.
“Gone. Don is dead.”
With my stepbrother’s words, “Don is dead,” hell thundered toward my brain at 150 million miles per second.
I screamed. I ran down the hall screaming, passing a roommate. She said:
“It’s OK. I know how you feel.”
I screamed bloody hell at her. "No, you don’t. You DON’T know how I feel. You CAN’T.”
I continued running down the hall, screaming, as reality hit.
I looked back at her, and saw her grimace in pain at the recognition of her faux pas. I felt guilty at having screamed at her, but I couldn't lie about what was true and what wasn't.
That morning, I returned with my stepbrother to our parents home, a few miles from the apartment where I had been living. I called my boyfriend. His sister answered the phone. I spoke. ”Is L…there? Nothing is wrong, Sue, but is L…there?”
“Kira, what is wrong?”
I replied, nothing is wrong, Sue; really, nothing; nothing, nothing, nothing is wrong but I need to speak to L....
“Kira, what is wrong? Something is wrong, what is it?”
“Just tell L…..that my father died last night.”
L….picked up the phone.
At that moment, I felt farther from L… and closer to my father. The difference between a father’s love and the passing infatuation of a boyfriend became crystal clear that moment.
L...and I agreed to meet at his apartment downtown.
The three-mile bus ride from my parent’s home to downtown was longer than any ride I remembered then or since.
That afternoon, minutes oozed into hours, like Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. I sat in front of the TV, as friends and I watched a movie. I was numb, grieving but unable to feel.
I remember nothing about the movie. At the end, I announced to the group that my father had died the night before.
I returned to my parent’s home for a few weeks. My younger sisters did not know of our father's death. My stepmother was returning home from the Yucatan and wanted to tell my sisters herself.
It was agreed we would keep my father’s death a secret from my sisters until my stepmother’s return. This was my stepmother's wish.
Two days later, my youngest sister came in from school and asked me:
“Is it true?” Instantly, I grasped her meaning.
I hugged her and said, Yes. We cried. We sat together for what seemed like a long time, silently, before we got up and resumed our own lives and did not speak of this, for years.
The son of my parent’s colleague had overheard the news and had told my sister at school.
We kept the news from our other sister. A few days later, my stepmother returned, sickened by the flu. She brought with her the urn, cremation having already taken place between December 7th and December 12th, the day of her arrival in Montreal.
We were in grief; we were in tears; we were beyond tears, we were numb.
As we prepared for Christmas, we felt confusion, pain, grief, hell. We knew that the routines of planning Christmas kept us from feeling the depths of our grief - that going through his clothes and boxing them up kept us closer to him.
And we knew that after all this was done, we would be left: empty, cold and barren - left to deal with our grief, our silent grief, alone.
I loved to feel his old denim jacket, to run my fingers up and down the jacket, to know its creases, wrinkles, stains and rips; I had worn this jacket the year he died. I held it near my face and wore it for several more years after he died. I have it still in the attic, hung in the closet.
We had no words to describe how we felt. We did not talk about it, did not talk about him, did not mention his name.
In my mind, I said: “my father died,” as if “died” in the past tense could bring about an undoing of what had been done. Past tense means it no longer happens, right?
I wanted to believe that 'died' could be undone, that he could become undead. I never said the word "dead" because that word carried a finality with which I could not come to grips.
We cling to our denial and disbelief more than we would like to believe. In the beginning, it's the only way we can survive: to understand something that really, we cannot grasp.
It was December, and Montreal was bitterly raw, and the sidewalk was covered under several feet of snow. Those years brought temperatures of about minus 20 Fahrenheit with a severe wind chill.
My stepmother decided the winter was too extreme for a funeral and that we would have the funeral in the summer, when Mom Esplin (my father's mother) and Aunt Laurel, (my father's sister) could come, too.
It was decided the funeral would be in June, six months away. In the interim, we couldn't sleep, we couldn't eat, we couldn't laugh, we couldn't cry.
We were living through an emotional ice storm, as cold, bitter and sterile as the weather outside.
We went through the motions, helped by Phenobarbital and Valium, from our family doctor.
This was the short-term solution to the overwhelm of emotions; the long-term solution was simply to cope, in our silent and bumbling way.
Christmas was a blur. We had a Christmas ham, presents, guests. But our faces wore the mask of depression - the mask that would take five years before it slowly slowly slid off our faces.
We felt like a part of ourselves had died. Indeed, it had. This was true for each and every one of us. No one suffered greater or lesser than the other: My stepmother, my stepbrother, myself, or my two younger sisters. We each had our own suffering, which was unbearable to each of us.
During the first few weeks after his death, I ‘saw’ my father everywhere on the street, as I was walking.
I walked down Ste. Catherine street, and nearly ran lickety-split to greet a slightly stooped, middle-aged man with wavy, gray hair.
This happened many times during the first weeks after his death.
I thought: "It's him, it's Daddy. He's here. He is not dead."
As soon as the words, 'not dead' appeared in my mind, I realized that the man I thought might be my father, was actually someone else - a stranger - who - in my grief and denial - only appeared to look like my father. I desperately wanted to see my father and to believe he was alive.
My subconscious knew this, of course, and relayed tricks to appease my grief, only for my conscious mind to lash back just as viciously at my subconscious with cold, hard reality. My conscious mind would not let my subconscious win.
As soon as I realized the stranger was not Daddy, my heart skipped, my stomach lept to my throat and I felt ill.
At night, I awakened and sat upright, feeling that I had to speak to my father, only to realize moments later that I had been dreaming of "Daddy," and feeling him near me, before I was faced with the slap in the face that he was dead.
After years of pressing down the denial, screaming out and feeling grief's hot tears rack our souls with sobs, could we finally begin to live.
This took at least five years. Likely, it took ten. The years after that brought sad reminiscences, scenes when I was newly married and sad that my in-laws were together as a family, unlike my family, which had been ruptured at the core, years before.
Now, I celebrate Christmas knowing my loved ones live within me, peace at last.
That is the true persistence of memory.
June 22, 1972 was the day of the funeral: It was sunny and warm.
My aunt Glenna had and sent a beautiful orange tree, which we kept in the living room. It lived for a long time.
My father lived life ferociously and fully. He was an intense man with deep-set blue eyes; many remarked on the passion with which he went about life.
For the funeral service, we met at the Unitarian Universalist church, where the minister spoke of this loss - not only for family, friends and loved ones, but also for science, that Don Wynn Esplin, Ph.D., was cut down in the middle of his life at age 44.
The minister spoke for what seemed like a very long time. I fainted briefly and my stepmother took me into the kitchen.
* * *
The drive from downtown Montreal to Mount Royal Cemetery was not far, but it seemed long. My sisters, stepbrother, stepmother and I were in the lead car behind the hearse.
I bought a black dress and shoes for the occasion, knowing, that for the first time, I would become Kathryn, a grown woman of 20, nearly 21 - not the Kathy of childhood, nor the name of Kira that I had taken for a few years.
In the car, no one spoke, we barely made eye contact, so locked were we in our own numbness. We weren't able to comfort ourselves or each other. The windows were closed; we couldn't smell the fragrance of the flowers nor hear the birds that sang.
We were closed to our inner drumbeats. My aunt Laurel was there and so was Mom Esplin. They wore dark dresses; they looked sad but did not speak. The cemetery on Mount Royal had recently been redone, complete with street signs and grassy knolls. Birds chirped and a gentle fragrance hung in the air.
Through all this, I never shed a tear. I was numb to the death of the man from whom I had learned everything.
For the next two decades, I went through the motions, resolved to carry on my father's work in science. Not as a scientist - but as someone who knew how important he was, and what a loss for society his death was.
I finished college and grad school, settled down and married. I had been raised an Atheist, yet I always felt a pull toward Catholicism. I decided to become a Catholic at Boston's Paulist Center.
It was during the religious conversion process when we read Scripture and related the passages to our lives; it was during this time that the floodgates of grief finally opened: the tears flowed and would not stop.
In front of a dozen people, for weeks at a time, the tears rolled down my cheeks. I had learned so much from my father - how he had died so that I could learn from his mistakes, his successes, his life. It was as if he gave me the gift of life, twice.
It was then that I finally let go of grief, to rejoice at being alive.
And now, 36 years later, I weep, I smile, I love, I laugh. But most of all, I remember. I remember who and what he was. And what he could have been.
But it is in bringing his message to people that I consider my most important mission in life: through science he lived and spread his message; through words, I spread mine.
Copyright © 2007, Kathryn Esplin-Oleski