“Remember you are but dust and to dust
you shall return.”
– Ash
Wednesday liturgy, Book of Common
Prayer
On this day Christians reflect on the finitude of every
living being including ourselves. Ash Wednesday begins the six weeks period
of Lent, a time for reflection and introspection. Sister Death is very near to
me these days having lost a sister-in-law, our beloved beagle and most recently
my father in the last year. I begin this Lenten period of reflection on my own mortality and the
quality of the life I have lived with this brief meditation.
I spent the day in Bushnell
last Friday. It’s the small town in which my Dad was born, spent most of his
life and recently died. Eleven years of my own life were spent there as well
from the middle of first grade through high school. In some ways, it’s still
the same small town I remember. In others, it has changed beyond recognition.
The small downtown that once housed
the only businesses in town is largely empty with antique stores and beauty
parlors replacing drug stores and barber shops, local restaurants now closed and
a number of those old structures now torn down completely. The IGA grocery
store, whose Boy's Contest I won as a middle schooler sending me to Los Angeles for a week, has
been replaced by a new CVS pharmacy. A Dollar Store stands in the place the
A&P once sold 8 O’Clock Coffee, fresh ground on site. I could swear a
little of that wonderful aroma still lingered in the air as I sat in its
parking lot Friday remembering the day the packing house fire across the street
was so intense it broke out the store’s windows.
The dirt road that ran from
the rental house in which we first lived to the downtown is now being
four-laned. It is the main access to the exit on nearby I-75, the de facto
business district today with its sprawling Walmart, hotels and chain
restaurants. The downtown that once had
a single blinking light where US 301 made a 90 degree turn before heading to
points south now sports a handful of full traffic lights and an increasing
number of traffic backups.
The idea of traffic jams in
Bushnell, whose population hovered around 800 the decade I lived there, was an
ongoing joke during my childhood. But today Bushnell is becoming an exurb, the last "undeveloped" (sic) area perched on the outer rings of urban sprawl one hour north of Tampa and one
hour west of Orlando, the stepchild of the Stepfordesque Villages which have consumed the
northern end of the county.
With the handling of my father’s
estate and the eventual sale of our family home, my remaining ties to that once
little town are slowly slipping away.
Little Heartaches that Blindside Us
The morning was taken up
meeting with my Dad’s financial advisor to see what investments I now need to
distribute as the personal representative (executor) of his estate. After all
those numbers, I needed a little ride around town to clear my head. Wave after
wave of childhood memories flooded my mind as I rode down tree lined streets
where family friends long gone once lived. I would spend the afternoon continuing
the process of cleaning out our family home.
There is no small amount of heartache
in dismantling a family home. My Dad and brother and I cleared our 11 acres on
which my best friend’s father built our house. We moved there in 1964 and for
most of my life, this has been the place I called home. Letting go of this
house, its wooded acres through which the setting sun glints and glitters each
afternoon, its hundreds of azaleas, camellias and a small grove of citrus trees
evidencing the success of hard won protection from killing frosts, will be
one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
It is a rather classic illustration
of my frequently voiced belief that “Life is a series of lessons on letting go.
The last thing we have to let go is our Self.”
There are so many unexpected
concerns with varying degrees of urgency that emerge without warning in dealing
with an estate. Have the property taxes been paid? What about the insurance? How
long are the power and telephone paid? How much are the housekeeper and grounds
keeper owed? What bills might be outstanding that need payment immediately?
But it is the little heartaches
that blindside the survivors of deceased parents now dealing with the loss of their
family home that often prove most difficult.
One of those moments of unanticipated
grief came from submitting the change of address form at the USPS website that
will forward all of Daddy’s mail to my Orlando address. I’ve needed to get into
that mail box to see what bills and notices might be there since he died a
month ago. But his key ring was thrown away along with his clothing the night
he went into the hospital. Among the keys that vanished that night was the key
to the mailbox.
Something as simple as closing
a mailbox is rarely the stuff of grieving. But P.O. Box 243 had been my
ultimate home address since we first moved to Bushnell in 1959. All of my
applications to colleges and most of my jobs bore that home address. I even
remembered the combination needed to open the box door right up until it was
replaced by the key a few years ago.
There was a finality about closing
that box that caused me to hesitate ever so slightly before hitting the submit
button at the online USPS site. A very subtle but foundational thread of my
life story died at that moment and I have to confess that I wept when I got the
confirmation email that the box was now closed.
A much more poignant moment came
when I cleared the voice mail from my Dad’s telephone. He had accrued 36
messages during his three weeks in the hospital before the message service
overflowed and would not allow any more to be left. Most of them were doctor
appointment reminders and calls from the local CVS to remind him that his
medication was ready.
But there were several
personal messages from my Dad’s friends, one of whom he had known for virtually
all of his 90 years of life. The messages bore the evidence of his friends’ increasing
anxiousness about his welfare as the reality began to dawn upon them that they
were losing him.
One set of messages was particularly
hard to hear. They came from a buddy from his teaching days who visited him regularly often bringing him homemade soup. The plaintiff voice repeatedly
asked, “Sam, where are you? I’ve been trying to find you and no one seems to
know where you have gone. Please call me when you can.”
Truth be told, it’s hard for
me to even write those words. Hearing them was absolutely agonizing. Indeed, as
I sat at his computer listening to those messages, pen in hand to take down any
vital information, it occurred to me how well they expressed exactly what I was
feeling:
Daddy, where are you? I want to talk to you. God, I miss
you.
Glimpses of Lives Well Lived
My family didn’t have a lot of
valuable things, at least not in monetary terms. That wasn’t who either of my
parents were and the three of their children have largely inherited their
priorities. With the exception of a couple of family heirlooms, their
furnishings were pretty ordinary and those which none of us will take into our
own already crowded homes will likely end up at the Goodwill. Even so, it is
hard to see rooms emptying of ordinary objects that once made possible a very
rich life in that home.
Neither of my parents were
prone to throw away anything. I have smiled repeatedly as I’ve gone through my
mother’s things, still sitting on the same closet shelves where she left them
10 years ago, in boxes of orderly filed documents. The office manager for a
USDA agency for 25 years, she knew how to file and erred on the side of keeping
a paper trail of everything. Among those files were statements from the
Tropical State Bank in Sebring from 1956, newspaper clippings of Jimmy Carter’s
election and every Christmas and birthday card she’d received for the last several
decades of her life.
My Dad simply didn’t have the
heart to throw all those things out. Perhaps it was the last piece of her he still
had and he held onto it as long as he could.
I began working in what used
to be the bedroom my brother and I shared until I graduated from high school
and moved away from Bushnell the next day. It had become my Dad’s sorting room
the last couple of years. He would always say to me that he needed to get in
there and get some things sorted through but just hadn’t gotten around to it.
I decided to begin the
cleaning out process there. And I quickly saw why he never got around to that
project.
Drawers that used to hold cut
off teenaged boys’ shorts and tee-shirts now contained bushels of cards,
letters and photographs. Mother had kept every card from their 50th
wedding anniversary in 2000 and even some of the bows from their gifts. I found
myself smiling as I remembered what a wonderful day that had been. Many members
of my parents’ families of birth had travelled miles to be present and much of
the little town where they had spent the majority of their years together
turned out to celebrate as well.
On the bed was another pile of
cards and photos. As I began to look closely at them, I realized they were all
the sympathy cards my Dad had received when my Mother died 10 years ago. And
there in the middle of them were the last photos taken of my Mother, her
emaciated face staring into the camera, that spark of life that had always
glistened in her eyes already gone. And she would be, too, within four days of
the photos being taken.
Seeing her image in those
final moments of suffering ripped open wounds that I thought had long ago
healed. Even 10 years later, seeing her like that was agonizing. The intense conflict
I had felt – absolutely not wanting to let go of her but absolutely praying she’d
die to end her suffering – all came crashing back.
I could see why my Dad never got
around to going through those things. It was, no doubt, too painful for him. Indeed,
I almost felt like a traitor as I stuffed armfuls of cards and letters with
words of congratulations and sympathy into garbage bags to be recycled. There
is something quite odd about watching years of life events and stories going
into black plastic bags headed for a recycling bin. I found myself asking the
question Peggy Lee’s classic 1960s hit so pointedly posed: “So, is that all
there is?”
But perhaps this sorting
process is what is necessary to begin healing, to work through the dull
thudding pain of loss held at bay most of the time by urgent matters of the
estate needing my attention, pain that threatens to erupt without warning into
immediate, unbearable agony with the next photograph or handwritten note, its
author, too, now long dead. I suspect that the only way to get past that pain
is to go through it. Indeed, between moments of hysterical laughter and deep, uncontrollable
sobbing, I can feel my soul slowly relinquishing its grasp on these lives I have
so cherished for so long.
Truth be told, I don’t want to
let go. But it is clearly time to do so. And even as I somberly carry these
bags bulging with the last tangible reminders of lives well lived but now over
out to my car, now destined for recycling plants, I am aware of an immense gratitude
for the privilege of having shared those lives and the life lessons I bring
away with me.
Leaving the Woods Behind
We are a long way from having
the family home ready for sale. That we will need to sell it is
clear. Neither of my siblings are interested in moving back to Bushnell and
while I love being in what is left of those woods, I know I cannot live in that
small town again. There is a reason I moved away the day after graduating from
high school.
Between now and then, the
three of us will need to finish cleaning out the remaining items on shelves and
moving out the remaining furniture. I will no doubt scavenge the beautiful yard
my Dad and I spent so many years creating seeking any plants I can dig up to replant
in my jungle yard here in the city.
More than once as I have taken breaks from
the sorting process to walk our beautiful wooded property I have found myself
smiling as I realize that, like my home in the heart of Orlando, you can’t see
our house in Bushnell from the highway, either. Apparently, this nut didn’t
fall far from the tree.
I will have much to ponder this Lenten season.
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
frharry@cfl.rr.com
harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
© Harry Coverston 2017
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