Alexandria, Virginia
Congratulations, Joanne!
Joanne’s Bio:
Joanne Lozar Glenn is a freelance writer and editor, teaches writing in adult education programs, and leads destination writing retreats. Her books include Memoir Your Way: Tell Your Story Through Writing, Recipes, Quilts, Graphic Novels, and More (co-author, Skyhorse Publishing, 2016); No One Path: Perspectives on Leadership from a Decade of Women in Technology Award Winners (editor-in-chief, Women in Technology, 2009); Applying Evidence-Based Laboratory Medicine: A Step-by-Step Guide (coauthor, AACC Press, 2009); 25 + 1: Communication Strategies for Business Education (co-author, NBEA, 2003); and Mentor Me: A Guide to Being Your Own Best Advocate in the Workplace (NBEA, 2003). Her poems and memoir essays have been published in Ayris, Brevity, Beautiful Things (River Teeth), Peregrine, Under the Gum Tree, and other print and online journals. She is currently working on a book-length memoir.
Apologies
When his brother Bones dies from a car accident, my father is already sick, his chest coppery from the radiation, his once-thick hair white wisps on a too-pale scalp. All he can say is Why? Sometimes that means “Why Bones?” and sometimes it means “Why me?”
At the wake, a woman hugged him. “God’s will, Bern,” she said. “Everything happens for a reason.”
He sighed, shook his head, turned away.
He retires early from his factory job. His garden lies fallow. His fishing rods collect dust on the pegboard in the basement, where he once got so drunk, so despairing as to throw eggs at the cinderblock walls and a hammer across the room and then end up lying in the bathtub with a clothesline around his neck, threatening to leave it all, my mother, us, everything. Even though he always said he had the best damn wife, the best damn kids in the world.
We are in the kitchen, the hammer incident long past, everyone grown and gone. This time when he stands at the table, leans his hands on the captain’s chair, and asks “Why me?” I, too, have an answer for him, oh yes I do. The words fly out of my mouth faster than I can think them.
What did you expect, smoking all those years?
The sag of his jaw. The droop of his unblinking eyes.
If this were a movie we’d be in flashback: my aunts, gossiping around this same table about my mother’s nervous breakdowns while I chop vegetables and my father delivers my mother to the hospital. Tini gets sick for attention, they said. Their husbands didn’t cook, grocery-shop, diaper-change like their sister’s did. Bern spoils her.
Did they understand their anger? Do I understand mine?
Only this: Sorry isn’t something I know how to say.
Instinct and a vague hope of sitting, maybe talking, with my father, just the two of us, push me to drive, again, the eight hours of highway between us. But it’s a holiday, the official start to summer. Brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins fill the kitchen, claim every lawn chair in the back yard. No time alone, no words to ask for some. Instead I kneel on the floor, pin and hem his new pants. He’s lost so much weight the old ones slide right off his frame.
A dry rage thrums, thrums, thrums inside me. I blame everyone for not getting what I want, for not seeing that I want it, that I should have it. But I must know better, because when I get home, I book a plane ticket for a trip three weeks away, right after grades are due. I vow to find the words I need, the time I want.
I never guess he will pass in his sleep the night before I arrive.
That afternoon I walk endless loops around the block with the sister who dodged the hammer, until my feet swell and blister. In the evening I heat meals for the siblings I could not wrap my arms around that awful night, the mother I always thought of as broken. I stay awake long after everyone goes to bed, use my words in a eulogy I didn’t know I would write, one I doubt will be delivered. Eulogies were for Protestants. I’d never seen them in any Catholic funeral. But somehow we get it into the service.
The west-facing stained glass windows brood in the mid-morning shadow. There behind the pulpit, avoiding the mourners’ eyes, I unfold my notepaper and breathe deep. For myself, for my father, for all the air his lungs can no longer hold. The dimness makes it hard to see. I feel hot, then cold, the paper so shaky that I place it on the lectern and track each word, each line, with my finger until finally, blessedly, my voice steadies, I reach the end, and return to my pew.
Many years and many deaths later, I will come to think of summer as our family’s funeral season instead of the months when, after Sunday Mass, we’d pack up the Buick—cooler, grill, charcoal, lighter fluid, the old green Army blanket—and head to the lake. And I will think about how easily pious or jealous or smart-ass words arise when what we crave is small comfort in a time of great fear.
On my bookshelf I keep a photo of my father taken maybe after my smart-aleck remark, maybe before, when sorry wasn’t something he knew how to say either. He is watering the garden, arcing the hose so the spray falls gently on furrows just beginning to sprout. I remember readying the camera, walking toward him quietly, shutter cocked. I managed to press it down at the exact moment he sensed my presence and in spite of everything turned toward me, smiled. And I remember my mother, so much stronger than we knew. Nursing Bern the whole time he was dying. Never once breaking down.
Maybe there lives in each of us a grace that, if we allow it, upends who we’ve shown ourselves to be. Maybe instead of apologizing or forgiving, we just nod to the people we’ve been, the memories we carry. Some that sparkle like sun on a lake, some as heavy and scratchy as that old green Army blanket we hauled to every summer outing. Over and over again being astonished at its heft and coarseness, and then, now, the relief of finally being able to lay it all down.
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