On my father’s death (and other natural miracles)
On the day my father died, it seemed that everything else was trying to be born. It was Cinco de Mayo, and the world outside the large windows behind his bed at the care center in St. Paul, Minnesota, was wild and wet and green. I spent that afternoon sitting with him and looking out those windows. His eyes were closed, his breathing unsteady, and he could barely swallow. Sometimes he’d startle awake for a minute out of his sleep and look at me with concern. I tried to comfort him but didn’t know how. What could he see?
I sat next to the gaunt shell of his body, listening for his last whispers of thought, and tried to pray. But I’m not good at prayer, so my mind began to wander. I thought of the memoir I’d just read, “The Presence of Absence.” At age 81, Doris Grumbach writes of an intense epiphany she had at 27 and her lifelong search to rediscover the presence of God.
But her search for proof didn’t interest me nearly as much as the paradoxical title. While “the presence of absence” may describe God for some, it better describes Alzheimer’s, a disease that leaves a person physically present but mentally absent. And we had all been watching
it take hold of Dad for several years. The growing absence: the widening gaps between thoughts and the nonsensical unfinished sentences. Then, finally, he could no longer dress or feed himself, and his mind began to seem as dark and cavernous as an empty church.
It was at that moment, just beyond Dad’s bed and outside his third-floor window, that the miracle occurred: A snow-white squirrel appeared at the tip of a long, twisted bur oak limb. It peered in at us for a second, then raced down the black
trunk, dashed across the yard and disappeared. Though I’m skeptical when others mention such stories, I wondered if the squirrel was some sort of sign — or some kind of angel or ghost — the kind of “proof ” that Grumbach had so longed for. But what then would the rodent-angel be proving?
I used to teach “Buckeye” in my writing classes, a popular essay by Scott Russell Sanders, in which he claims that a soaring hawk he saw one sunny afternoon was also his dead father. “It was a red-tailed hawk for sure; and it was also my father,” Sanders writes. “Not a symbol of my father, not a reminder, not a ghost, but the man himself, right there, circling in the air above me.” After reading the essay at a conference I attended, Sanders mentioned that many people had written him about similar experiences — about encountering a dead spouse or parent or sibling in a crow or fox or some other animal.
But my father was not dead. And soon my faith in the would-be miracle waned, and logic intruded. Unlike Sanders, I didn’t sense a spiritual presence in an animal. And I would later learn that though uncommon, there were many white squirrels in St. Paul, as it was a genetic mutation of the gray squirrel. Still, the apparition of the squirrel ghost had left me intensely focused on the natural world outside my father’s bedside window, a world that it seemed he was both leaving and returning to.
The rest of the afternoon, a cold rain blew through the trees, and I kept looking out Dad’s window and wishing that he could too
— at all that dripping green fecundity. Spring: the season of re-membering, when all the parts — the humus and detritus and water and sunlight and carbon dioxide — all come together again to make new life from decay and death. It was Dad, a smalltown Congregational minister, who first told me that the word “religion” means “to tie, or bind together again,” or re-ligare. And this went beyond holy books and holy wars and holy buildings; a religion included all living things. So maybe the white squirrel was a miracle, because it was bound to the cycle of creation, of re-membering. And so was Dad. Though it was not belonging I felt that day; it was the fear of separation.
Since Dad had been a pastor for almost 50 years, he’d spent a lot of time in care centers like this one — doing what I was doing — sitting with his parishioners in their last days and hours. But the longer I sat there, the more lost I felt, and the more I wondered what he would have done if he were me. Finally, I put one hand on the warm dome of his head and the other on his dry, stubbled face, and cried. Mainly from grief I think, but also from gratitude — for a life well-lived, and a man well-loved.