Monday morning, the day after the vernal equinox, my father died. In the afternoon I went for a bike ride to search for some clarity and maybe a couple metaphors. Despite my many failures as a son, and in my lifelong search for inappropriate metaphors, I think I did as well as I could have hoped.
My father was a great man. Your life is measurably better for the fact that he both lived and did the best he could in many things. When I was a few weeks old he moved me to Washington DC and got to work on LBJ’s Great Society. This was not the neofascist “great” that the MAGA folks mean when they want to make “Great Again” or the militaristic great of the "Greatest Nation on Earth" folks. No, this was an actual set of ideas about how to do something new to actually make things better for Americans, and you are, despite the many failures and shortcomings associated with any attempt to turn lofty goals into reality, enjoying some of what was actually accomplished.
In his final months my father moved through a period of rapidly declining health and cognizance to leave behind a medium-sized patchwork family questioning what they knew about him. Of course that’s the subjective viewpoint of me, and I'm a single member of the family. There’s a spectrum of viewpoints; from his children who were fully estranged to those who were regularly enjoying my father’s circle of light. Those closest to him have written glowing Facebook posts, and my estranged sister reminded everyone on the eve of his death that she would remember him as “A F%^!k*!g As$#!@e”, but without the liberal use of alternative characters. Despite being the oldest child I’m in the middle someplace on this spectrum.
And, so, without vitriol or glowing rainbows of fond remembrance, I sought to find some wild metaphors to help describe what I was thinking. Metaphors are well hunted from the saddle of a well-tuned bicycle, and Richmond Virginia USA is a great hunting ground for the wild metaphor.
I thought about starting my ride at the capitol of the confederacy. This is a metaphor unique to Richmond, and it would work well with the divided family aspect of the cold stew of images my father’s death was already becoming. Unfortunately there are always parking issues and traffic in downtown Richmond. I was going to need to do an out-and-back ride and wasn’t up for introducing the chaos of the American Civil War twice into the way I was going to assimilate the death of my father. Also, the “white house of the confederacy” was too easy a metaphor; like shooting fish in a barrel.
I knew I wanted the James River someplace in my ride, and the Capitol Bike Trail is a paved car-free trail that winds along close by the James from near the house of Edgar Allen Poe to historic Williamsburg.
Of course I couldn’t start near Poe’s house as that was also too easy. His stories and the stories about him would define my ride in his terms. This was not his story. This was my bicycle ride.
Poe was mysteriously discovered lying delirious in a Baltimore gutter after having rather thoroughly lost his mind. My father was catatonic towards the end, very mundanely losing his mind to the swarms of TIA’s which had stolen his ability to walk around months earlier.
I had taken complete advantage of my father’s compromised state by spending hours mopping his fevered brow with a damp cloth, by swabbing his parched lips and mouth with a sponge on a stick called a toothette, by stroking his now bald head slowly and calmly, by holding his limp hand. He could not object to the amends of a prodigal son as I made them. The hospice aids would see a son comforting his vegetative father and offer up to me the wisdom that “hearing is the last sensation to go” and that I should tell him that I love him. My father’s been mostly deaf for decades and I felt too much like I would be acting the part of a performing ape to just do those things on command. Of course, I am technically an ape, and everything I was doing for him was a performance in a way, so, when I was alone in the room, I would bend down and whisper in his ear; I told him that I loved him and he continued to stare, unmoving, with dilated filmy eyes, at something off in the distance. I guess that if I am going to be a performing ape I will choose my stage; always the rather ineffectual rebel.
Poe’s stories set a standard for the horror genre, but the stories I remember being told as my father lay dying were just horribly bizarre. One notable one began “we met a man in Florida who ran a small shop and his mother had been a cook at a German Nudist colony”. It turns out the nudist colonies were in 1930’s Germany and the fellow became a gun carrying actual Nazi. I think the moral was supposed to be something like “Nudist Nazis can be good people in Florida so maybe, just maybe, you aren’t so bad”, but I got hung up on just the idea of Nudist Nazis and the sound of my father feverously wheezing away 40 shallow breaths a minute. Maybe if I just showed up and accepted my life a little more maturely I would be a better person... but... really? Actual Nazis but nudists for some reason? Maybe we could start my lessons in adult empathy with something a little easier?
Poe’s house was not going to work as a starting place for my ride.
Farther out I drove, past the edge of Richmond itself, past houses decorated with a “you can never have enough Trump flags” theme, out into the land where historic plantations celebrate a time when the idea of wages at all –let alone a minimum wage- was alien. By the time I turned into a parking area decorated with a huge statue of a bicycle I had eaten up so much daylight I was not going to have enough time to do what I wanted. This was perfect, and I had my first metaphor in the bag before I even started pedaling.
The big bike park has a lot of metaphor bait in it. There’s a large automated steel gate that closes it off if you stay too far past dark. The big bike itself has wheels much taller than most people stand, but it is so flimsy that most people would be too big to even safely climb up onto the seat; a couple weeks ago it was bent over probably by someone who tried to climb it. Today the big bike had been repaired, and was ready for someone to break it again. The day was 65 degrees (18.3C) with luscious day-after-equinox (Apris-nox?) afternoon sunlight. I would be riding home in twilight and tomorrow would be even longer, but the difference in the length of the day would not be as long as today was longer than yesterday. These were all great bits of metaphor that collectively could swell simple sentences to the edge of running-on. I stuffed them into my jersey pocket, and rode off east.
The sun would be in my eyes on the way back to the car. Even if I did not bag the mighty metaphor I was stalking I would have an excuse for any tears. I often tear up with the sun in my eyes. I don’t know why I thought that was a better excuse than that my father had just died, but I remember thinking that as I rode away from where the sun would set.
I started out too fast, with a smidge of a tailwind, and realized too late that the going would be harder, and I would be much more fatigued, as I returned home. My ride would be measured in how far I made it away from my starting point, but the hard work would be getting back there.
I have an overwhelming sense of gratitude surrounding my father’s last days. I could not have taken for granted that I would have been allowed in to observe, let alone take part in, the vigil that was the last few weeks of my father’s life. I was keenly aware through the unspoken special ways a family communicates that I was an embarrassment to the family name, though the fact that I had been repeatedly told exactly that using plain common language made it even more real. I had uncles that lived close-ish to me in the wide open of the American West, but I had never visited them because my participation in family things was “confusing”. I lived for a while with my father's newly born first grandchild almost within walking distance of my father's beloved Unitarian-Universalist (aka "Atheists with children") church, but I was asked to drive halfway across the county in the opposite direction to attend a UU church if I wanted; again I was "confusing". My siblings on the rainbows and puppies end of the remembering my father spectrum had posted smiling pictures of family vacations; pictures I was not in because I was not invited, or wanted, on those trips. I remember learning about one a few weeks after they had returned and being told that “of course they kept it a secret form me in case I would do something while they were gone”.
The pain in my legs felt good as I pedaled too hard. I wanted to pedal faster and harder, but when I put too much pressure on the pedals the bike frame would flex and the chain would rub against my front derailleur. I was going too fast and I wanted to go faster. I was pushing too hard and I wanted it to hurt more.
There are Civil War battlefields sprinkled amongst historic plantations east of Richmond. The woods between the plantation fields are, in places, almost as thick and wild as they were in the middle of the 1800s when the Civil War was fought. When the angled afternoon sunlight cuts through the still leafless trees to cast confused shadows on soft early-spring emerald hills this is one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
I passed historical markers to “the battle of deep bottom” where Grant feigned an attack to pull troops away from the siege of Petersburg, and “Malvern Hill” where Lee ordered his troops to attack up a muddied hill where they were slaughtered (later he would do the same thing at Gettysburg with Pickett’s charge). The land I biked through was fertilized by the deaths of thousands of boys in some of the deadliest and least important battles of the Civil war.
Futility and pain. I was biking out so I could bike back the way I came, and I was trying to do it fast so it would hurt more. To cyclists this makes sense. To people who have lost a father it might also make sense.
A fellow cyclist pulled out onto the path in front of me, and I passed him. Over the next quarter hour he valiantly caught up to me and passed me in return. I pulled onto his wheel and could tell he had more draft than strength. After a few minutes drafting him I pulled around him and never saw him again. There were other people on the trail, but they were either going in the opposite direction or much slower than I was. I had my little temporal slice of that day’s trail all to myself.
And all to myself is the way I had my mind. That wild jungle of emotions and thoughts, light and shadow, death and life. That field fertilized by my imagination where I am as ephemeral as a metaphor hunted by my own broken dreams.
I have often called my relationship with my father “complex”. By this I usually meant “absolute s#it” in the gentle colloquial way most people use that term when talking about relationships with their parents. However, there was a different complexity as well. My father was a great thinker with great complex thoughts he eagerly shared. Perhaps “sharing” is the wrong verb as he brandished them as if not unlike a fencer offering a duel. It felt like an honor at times to simply take to field in “conversation” with this man.
“What is the value of money?” he would sometimes ask. It was important to not get tripped up on the money issue as the concept of value was the trap. What is value? What can you value, and how do you value it? Is a penny for your thoughts too high an asking price? I sometimes felt like I should pay other people for the affront of just believing I had valuable thoughts, but when I stumbled in “conversation” with my father I felt there was some sort of value just waiting to be plucked from those moments.
My father was an economist, and when I discovered that economics was known as “The Dismal Science” I reveled in repeating that fact to him as if he didn’t know it. Never mind that I would become a biologist of sorts, and biology has been called “just stamp collecting,” with emphasis on the “just”.
The turnaround time of an out-and-back ride is as good a place as any for maudlin thoughts, and I had a few to spare. What I didn’t have was time to get back to the car before dark, or so I thought.
Dark polarized sunglasses accelerate the onset of twilight. As the sun dipped towards a partly cloudy horizon the push back to the car was tinged an orange and pink more vibrant due to the polarization. I was afraid of the automatic gate capturing my car and me. I imagined telling a faceless voice that I was out contemplating the death of my father that had occurred earlier that morning, and that I had lost track of space and time. The thought of using my father’s death as an excuse for something felt cheap. I wanted to value this time thinking about him. I wanted to show myself that I valued it, and cheapening it might produce something tangible, but value from the moments I was carrying back to the car would be spent in making it so.
Needless to say it was the darkness of my sunglasses more than the lateness of the afternoon that caused much of my fear. When I took them off with my helmet I was suddenly at the car with time to spare.
The future's so dark because I had to wear shades.
My world had not changed at all, but a change in my perspective had changed my whole world.
I bagged a pretty good one after all, and it was sleeping right beside the parking spot I had started in. Of course I had to chase it dozens of miles through space and time to catch it there.
