Hover
by Andy Flaherty
I arrive just in time to be taunted by the sun’s disappearance. A flight of kestrels playfully chitter above the entrance. The building itself, set back into a copse of trees, reminds me of a child’s pinwheel. I enter the nucleus where the nurses gather and from there four wings extend out to provide space for ten large rooms; five on each side of the hallway and spaced for privacy.
Dad was moved here from a hideous rehabilitation center. We are relieved, despite the truth that this hospice decision reveals. Each wing has a private garden ready to burst with golden daffodils and green vines heavy with yet to be identified progeny. His room is a reluctant yellow khaki and filled with uninspired paintings. There is a sitting area to the right framed by large windows opening onto a hillside of slowly awakening flowers where I make my temporary home.
The ambient noises abate with the sun. A cardiac machine commands the space just as the brass Fanfare of German marches in the corner of our living room. This monotonous sound references the potential absence of the lub-dub, the vital first movement of a heart’s contraction. And now, in the corner not twenty feet from his mechanical bed, I sit listening to the retreating pulse of my old man as I fall asleep.
“Hey, little roo. When did you get here?” he mumbles.
“Last night about seven,” I mumble back through the fog of awakening.
“Sorry to bring you all the way up here from Chicago for this. Where’s your mom?”
“I told her to go home to get some sleep, that I would be okay with you.”
“Nice. Glad you did that. She blames herself you know. Since you found me on top of her when I fell off the toilet, she blames herself for not being able to take care of me on her own.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say in a growing storm of anxiety.
The short walk across the room takes 40 years. Each footstep a weight lifted. Finally, I grab his arm. He makes no fist to hit, nor does he turn in silence.
My mind races, my breathing—like a pilot light on a stove that will not ignite—is full of fits. I think back to six months earlier, how his femur snapped, and I knew. We have not yet reached his end, but we are circling the runway.
Our faces meet.
“Hey Dad, would you like a shave?”
“I guess so,” he says, folding the newspaper he holds despite the fact he can no longer concentrate.
“Let me check the bathroom for supplies and I’ll be right back.”
The bathroom has a sterile shine. Like antibiotics that eradicate without discrimination the good and bad, the disinfected is stripped of personality. I feel so alone, so empty, so absorbed that I begin to smell vinegar in the morphine drip, then crave its numbing effects to relieve my sadness. The mirror startles me, but I reach for the razor and shave cream anyway. I muster a false face, grab a towel, and return to Dad’s bedside.
“Here we go. Let’s get you sitting up in bed,” I instruct while pushing the button to raise the headboard.
“You are going to have to pull me up on the bed,” he begs, as I notice his head now slumped over his chest. The words “Got it, Dad,” leave my mouth, but I am relieved when the attending nurse comes in and shifts my father’s head for comfort.
The room darkens from the obstruction of clouds. I reach for the side table light, but it is loose and there is a delay. When it alights, the boyish handsomeness of my father, the air force major, my family’s navigator, has disappeared. His hands are his mom’s, mangled with arthritis, his head is his father’s, bald with scaly patches of lichen-like spots, and his face is disappearing in the forest of gray stubble. His eyes are partly cloudy.
His breath is sour as I rub my hands to make peace with the menthol before applying it to his fragile face. He jumps despite my efforts but then relaxes into a smile. I slowly scrape; with each scrape, a painful memory falls. His hollow cheeks make me afraid I will rip him apart.
To be speechless after years of having too much to say is unnerving. Talking had been a way to soundproof my brain from his judgment. Now, I want to hear him again. Hear him maybe for the first time. Want him to open up the pages of his life: they matter. I sputter, but manage to say, “Dad, can you tell me that story again about you and John going up in your Cessna from Truax to Superior?”
“You don’t want to hear that old story again.”
“Yes, yes I do, please!” I blurt out.
I continue his shave, wiping the blade between each swipe. After clearing his voice, Dad begins, and we lift off together in the single-engine Cessna I have always refused to ride in.
“We were cleared for take-off at 6:55am, just before sunrise. John and I had made this trip to Superior about a hundred times. The take-off was good, I applied the right amount of pressure to raise the nose and the pitch of the plane. Since the air traffic was going to be at a minimum, I decided not to ascend immediately to thirty-six thousand feet. With the wings expanded, the lift force set us in motion, and we broke from the pull of the earth.”
His tale has barely taken off before it stalls. A long pause ensues as I move the razor up the left side of his cheek. In his silence, the blade glides. As I wipe the clippings, Dad leans toward me with a whisper.
“I can’t really remember.”
“It’s okay Dad, I can try and help. You always say next that you decided to try to replicate… ”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he proceeds cautiously. “…It was an old maneuver I learned when goof balling around on Okinawa in 1945. I used the engine forward thrust and the wings’ lift to hover like the hawks and kestrels. That is when the miracle occurred. As the Cessna settled into a hover, from out of nowhere a kettle of hawks appeared and flew with us in tandem for what seemed like miles moving up and through the cumulus and stratus as we flew into the violet sunrise. For a brief moment, we were free…”
“Yes, you were free!” I interrupt with relief and quiet tears.
This telling has exhausted him, and Dad is out of gas. I stand watch. His labored breath is punctuated with small shaky eruptions. There is a combination of raspy efforts followed by long periods of silence. Here on death’s front line, I cannot reconcile Dad’s freedom flight with John and the story we never spoke of. The time Dad was shot down and had to parachute out of a C-47 with a silk map that floated until he was saved. He never spoke about the Distinguished Flying Cross. Stories find their way into our lives in so many different ways.
As Dad slips into sleep, our reflections mingle on the expansive windows. There is an urgency now in my desire to make sense of his passion for all things that fly. How his life had been informed by words of reason and beauty. A need to alphabetize the beloved books that reveal who he strove to be. Ways to capture the awe of the “roll and glide” and “wheel and spin” of his in-flight poetry. When I free him from time, Dad makes clear sense; past histories taught lessons and future explorations prophesied innovation. I sit silently and hope that he has read Marinetti’s Manifesto:
In an airplane, seated on a cylinder of gasoline, I felt the ridiculous absurdity of the old syntax inherited by Homer. A furious need to liberate words, liberating them from the prison of the Latin sentence… This is what the propeller told me as I flew at two hundred meters over the powerful smokestacks of Milan.
Dad was ordered to respect authority and he demanded it of me. When I didn’t, we collided. It was always a game of sinking the battleship with us, father and son. We were constantly fighting a war that could not be won. If only we had been freed from that struggle. But in those days, I was his Icarus, a boy ignoring the advice of his father. A child who did not pay attention to words because they felt too confining.
My resentments, like our reflections, fade. His books will be forgotten, but not the quotes. Those slips of paper he glued inside their covers write their own prescient stories. I think of one.
Anthology of William Shakespeare
February 13, 1968
Montgomery Alabama
High 65, clear skies
“The price of greatness is responsibility.” Winston Churchill
While I am staring at his increasingly vacant face, a flicker of feathers behind me leads me to turn as a hawk dives to desecrate a mouse; Dad was both the soldier protagonist charged with greatness and the Shakespearean antagonist whose ambitions could be ruthless. As much as he loved words, he knew that words were often a foil for the deceptive and sinister. His bi-cameral mind collapsed when he discovered that his beloved words were merely approximations; that ambition and responsibility were not always conscious of each other.
But that was then, and this is now. The unexpected challenges of our lives no longer provide sufficient force to feed my transgressions. Our torn relationship fuses like a hope muscle and only the essential remains.
I am awakened from midnight’s darkness. The room is without air. My bed, the gray couch where I attempt to sleep, is damp from thrashing. I hear the nurse’s feet pad the halls, a shuffling reminder of the palliative care to come. An occasional phone rings, an anonymous voice attempts to comfort some absent family members. I start to spin but my finger finds a tear in the fabric, a cord-like thread that I pull in the sky of silence. I listen to his sleep, for signs it is not death. What comes surprises me, and I muster the courage to parachute into his dream.
“What’s that hammering, Mom?” Dad blurts from the bed.
“I thought they might be building over on Briar. It must be a new house.”
“Hey Mom, I am in the backyard. Bud said he would come by and we are going to walk over to the river.”
“I already told Pop. He’s in the garage working on that shelf you wanted for the side door entrance.”
The room is extremely still. Dad and I are copiloting the plane and we begin to glide.
“Love you, Billy. You are a bright, beautiful boy. Be careful,” I add as if I was his mom.
Maybe it is true that dreams signify ambitions. It is infinitely clear that his papers have arrived. The next mission signified by his half-opened eyes and the matt gray of his skin. If only I could pour him a brandy just to hear the ice cubes clinking again in the glass; to toast a life well lived rather than his stubborn refusal to listen. I cross the room and pull the chair as close to his bed as possible. He is already floating in the sea of sheets tucked around his shrinking body. I am fully in the cockpit to help navigate the trip home. I do not try to discourage, or make comfortable, the unknown. His words sputter like an old movie on a continuous loop. There is no beginning or end. Characters just appear, telling stories that originated in the yellow house on Beverly Court, his childhood home. It is a celestial sphere where words and actions fall away and love hovers in a violet sky.
It is inconceivable that I would become my father, but then he hands me the controls. For five more days and nights, we negotiate the sharp edges and dark corners of our lives until Dad reaches the Karman Line, roughly 60 miles above the earth, where he circles for the last time.
“My relationship with my adoptive father is one marred by disappointment, impenetrable silence, and occasional injury. The path to forgiveness from him to me and me to him has been one of the most extraordinary and rewarding journeys of my life. Magically, the healing blossomed during his extended dying. I wrote this essay to honor his past, my past, and our present.” —Andy Flaherty
Andy Flaherty is a second career educator whose life has been enriched by immersion into poetry, writing, photography, and the minds of generations of students. “Hover” is his first published work. His current effort is a series of fictional stories about navigating the landscape of a midwestern city in the late 1970s.