Descansos

I passed twenty-eight of them along the interstate on my way to the airport. Descansos. Resting places. Engraved metal crosses pressed into harsh red clay. Plastic flowers covered in brown highway spit. A bright blue teddy bear, damp and withered. A carved wooden shadow box filled with photographs I couldn't identify at seventy-five miles per hour. A balanced rock cairn next to an empty porcelain vase.

I passed them four weeks ago on my way to my father's house. He died that morning, died clutching a spiral-wired phone to his chest. He dialed 9-1-1, couldn't speak. The last thing he heard was an operator named Christine telling him to wait, to breathe, to wait, to wait. Help was on the way. Please breathe.

Christine is my middle name.

My dad liked to tell the story of the day I was born. I slid outside my mom's body, a corporal treasure of blood and transfered pain. He held my mom's hand, one of the first men to stand beside his wife in his generation. He forgot to tell my mom to inhale. He watched the doctor grab my head, turn me right, left, twist my shoulders free, let my body fade from perfect darkness to chaotic light. I breathed.

"It's a boy! It's a boy!"

The doctor raised one eyebrow above a woven baby blue mask.

"Uh, Mr. Jaworski, that's the umbilical cord."

My dad never got that boy. He birthed four more girls. He birthed a pink quintet, a collection too petite for football, a basketball team without space for injury, recovery. He treated us like sons, like his Catholic saints, like fallen angels. As the oldest, I was crucified, I was misunderstood, left to suffer the eternal punishment of the five, left to echo the unfinished business he couldn't clamp. I never made him smile.

He died clutching a phone. He died of cardiac arrest. He died eleven months, eight days after my mom. He died a few weeks after open heart surgery. He died not knowing I wrote, not knowing I unloaded that birth pain on paper, ignorant of my calling, of the one thing that bound us together.

My father wrote. He wrote. He spent his blood on story, on charred paper. He told one book, then another. He wanted to make it big, make it Oprah, best seller, New York Times' worthy. He didn't. The words he spilled in his field took root, found home, echoed in paid print. But the words he tended, the ones he wanted to leave his nest never took flight. They sit on my computer now, six Mafia thrillers, six adventure stories with heroes so much like my dad I can't read them without seeing his head of spiked grey hair, his chiseled chin.

I drove to the airport, passed twenty-eight descansos. Twenty-eight locations of death, of automobile failure, crash, burn, failure. Twenty-eight. When I returned, the number was thirty-three. Thirty-three crosses, bears, flowers, shadow boxes, balanced cairns, roadside memorials.

My sisters couldn't deal with my dad's body. They wanted it reduced to ash, captured in an urn, sanitary, removed. They didn't gaze upon his face one last time, didn't wipe his stray hair off his forehead. I did. I followed the white hearse to the crematorium, the lone mourner, the eldest, the most forgotten, most unloved, most mixed-up, most black in a sheep field of gray. I drove my dad's car, let it follow its master on roads so Kansas straight it seemed silly to follow.

An echo. That's what I am. An echo.

The hearse turned right, then left, passed through a hedge so narrow, lush, I knew I birthed again, felt the pain of loss and chaotic light as we dove into a clearing, a patch of dried cold Wichita prairie surrounding the house of fire. I parked my dad's car. It sputtered as I pocketed the key. It knew. It said goodbye.

I met the Fire Man in his chambers. Two funeral home men lifted a long cardboard box onto a slick black table. They left, left me alone with fire, with death, with a man who tended the gateway to heaven, to hades. Fire Man didn't meet my eyes. He lifted the lid of the cardboard box, dropped it on the ground at our feet, let me peer inside, identify my dad.

"Yes. It's him. Thank you."

I let the tears fall. I couldn't stop them. They filled my cheeks, the scalloped edge of my cotton blouse. I wiped a shock of hair from my dad's forehead. He wore the clothes I chose - hiking shorts, hiking boots, a hemp shirt I gave him one birthday. His face looked odd, looked skewed, uneven, as if he were contemplating a great truth, contemplating yet another punishment for me.

"Thank you."

I looked at Fire Man. He wore tortoise shell glasses with large frames. He wore a maroon Polo shirt. He wore three decades of fire silence. I knew his age, knew his long association with the transference of matter without his saying a word. He carried himself like a soldier, like a firefly, like someone who guards and lights and fusses just a bit, knows he has to shine his ass so that the living can see, can understand.

"I never visited a crematorium before. What happens next?"

I whispered my question, didn't want my dad to hear, even though his cheeks didn't rise and fall like mine.

"Here. Let me show you. Let me show you."

Fire Man repeated himself once, twice, three times. He kept saying the same words over and over as if it would seep into my dad's dead skin, into my own skin near dead with fatigue and fear. He pointed to a pine door and I followed him inside.

Fire Man showed me the oven, the place of transference, showed me the buckets of metal hip joints and skull plates and tiny screws that doctors use to extend our planet time.

"The recycle man takes them away every other week. They don't reduce to ash, Birdie. I don't know what else to do with them."

Fire Man treated me like his wife, like his daughter, like a treasured bit of protoplasm just born into his family, umbilical cord fresh and red and so much like the promise of new life. Fire Man knew me, knew my path, my desire to see my dad consumed, collected, cooled, encapsulated.

"Birdie, I have done this for twenty-eight years."

I flinched. Descansos filled my mind, the space of the unliving, the undecided.

"And in all these years I discovered something important. Maybe I shouldn't tell you. You're father hasn't gone through the change yet. I feel like I must tell you this, though. Whenever someone burns, I watch the smoke. It's like watching for the new Pope to be chosen. If someone's smoke is dark, I know that person didn't lead a clean life. You know what I mean? They weren't good. But white smoke, oh Birdie, that's someone who's done good."

I nodded. I expected my dad to exude the smoke of my family, the gray smoke of Maybe, of Kinda Good, Kinda Crappy. I expected gray or black or something altogether unidentifiable. I shook Fire Man's hand, thanked him for his kindness.

I sat in my dad's car outside the crematorium for an hour, two hours. I didn't know when Fire Man would pitch my dad's body into the oven. I waited. The sky stayed blue, stayed clear, knew my intention. I watched the chimney, watched with fear and trepidation, watched worried that my dad would burn black, burn evil. I remembered the bad times, the night times, the dad who couldn't grab my extended hand.

Smoke belched from the careful brick. Smoke. A hiccup of smoke, of white, clear smoke. The smoke of the just, of the beautified, of the sainted. I didn't smile, didn't feel anything but relief. I drove. A mile from the crematorium a small naked cross lay against the wind-swept ground. My hands moved in a motion I thought I forgot, the sign of the Catholic cross, the sign for rest, for peace, for resurrection.

Comments

[Mike]

Still perfect, and so are you.

[Rick]

Masterful.

[Cindy]

http://offtype.net/image_5821444918.gif.html

I love the new site!

[Cindy]

I posted that under the wrong comment section.

[Lloyd]

Damnit Birdie... I just read 'MY TRIBE'...

you've got to STOP making me cry..

L.

[JIM]

Hi Birdie! Nice home.

[Meg]

This is perfect, B. And so is this new place for you.

[Debbie]

Hi, baby.

[jenn]

beautiful. so beautiful. thank you birdie.

[Stephanie]

Oh Birdie.

I am going through my own heartbreak right now. My beloved Shauna only has a few weeks to live. The breast cancer got my best friend and I am bereft. She was supposed to leave the hospital today and go home to be with her family, surrounded by her daughters and her husband. As soon as I am done with finals this week, I will be spending every moment I can with her to help ease her into the next phase.

I so feel your pain and grieve with you.

[Phil]

That's a sweet send-off, Birdie.

[Gloria]

Thank you. Glad I found you.

[Melinda]

so what did your dad do that caused the smoke to be clear? He stood by your mom's side but then it seems he didn't stand by that which he created with your mom..Or was it that you did not understand that the critical mind held a gift and was part of maybe setting bounderies and doing something that that critical mind was necessary to do to create a hidden good.
YOur story is well communincated.. had to go to the end with compassion for you...would love an answer however wanted to know if you had found it in the white smoke. it is a great strange thing that fire man observed.. I had my dad cremated he too was mean a marine that was great in battle but had a hard time because of his intensity raising a child alone. He had a self demise to his own strength, but we reconciled although he was nut fully free of his own demon he asked God and others in the end in humility for prayer. MY husband was the same and it was the one most rejected who closed the eyes and did all that is to be done.. strong souls that come thru these people to do a highe work on earth. often they are purified by our love and that respect we can give becuase we chosse them as a way to coem down even if in some way we carried a gift greater then they did in compassion.. their negation and flaws have careved in us a greater good. in his difficulty and denial he made you carve out of yourself somethign greater than life and like aman transcend yourself in beauty and flyin spirit to produce even this now as your experience touches others.. that if nothing more was his great good. He helped you come to this world..he wounded you so that you could find your spirit, he wounded the cage of your body perhpas and made the door open so the bird in you could fly.. fly all the way tomy consciousnes.
Ihad a death experience at age 17 and came back and was my own parents mentor even togh they were brilliant they did not know how to transcend their reactive self. seems like you were able to do transcend the reactions..to something deeper that is always a gift.. a strange death before death..your dad tried to communicate and was blocked in books as well as in the end.. but you you can do it..what good in him was aborted went into you at the time of conception when he loved your mother and made a prayer..and in that prayer was you and so I am sure for that alone was the smoke smoke .. for you..for you ....a message for you..all my love and comapssion..

[melinda]

Oh beautiful lady
linda pajara de espiritu....i forgot to tell you that i was not able to see my dad's smoke nor my husband.. what a gift that fire man gave you .. that God gave you...blue sky white smoke..!!!
It was a message for you in spirit I hope you can go deep inside and still find there your fathers phone call to you .. where there is no breath there is a thought of intention and it is hidden deep beneath our core..I hope you have found it..and he knew you were doing what you did .. i know i was able to see it being done tome..however i was able to return on the third day..and scare everyone..and all converted..that were there. I had not expected it being 17 years old and i was not the same ever again..
I am offering you some thoughts only in love touched by your story..daring to this communication which i have never done on computer..
it is possible that he was faithful to something to provision to doing his work for all of you and that is all he could do..I however wish that in the future men will be raised to have more depth and breath .. breath to express their iner self an dlove so that women like you donot suffer this sense of non recognition ...
I send you my compassion for that.
I have a son and when he was 6 he said tome .. I cannot see my dad.. he washeaving as if he were to become suddenly asthmatic.. he was hoolding on to somuch spiritual pain it seemed and so muc indignant outrage and righteous anger and stillholding a peaceful exterior.. he said my dad my dad blurrs people and he waved his hand across my face as if to erase it .. and he saidlike this he does this to them and that is not correct.. no human must be blurred. he did not say a gender he always used human.or .person .
no one is to be blurred....and i said who told you this ..he said my inner self..I cannot blurr anyone there is too much pain when it is done..noone is to be blurred..it is not suposed to be ..it is not our truth.
and then i held him and said i know you wont go asthmatic over this grief you told me you were coming, you are in a small body but you are here and you knew this incoming you chose us and you knew his flaw.. donot fall down now and rise to the level fo truth in you and understand the pain has awakneed you now two weeks before your sixth birthday to the truthin your spirit .. and he took a big breath and looked at me and suddnely the pain was gone. andi said i see you and you make all people gather around you already and your energy goes to them all equally.. you are here .. even your father sees it but he cannot do it and so he hides in humiliation .. do not loose ti be strong you were his prayer you know this.. that which he was not able t do but inside wanted so much to do...

i hope you will find something in this. this is the first time that i post anything on computer .
you are welcome to email me back, much love to you and peace..sincerely
anterah-melinda
ps I am not an old person but i have seen the other side.

[aletta]

Thank you, wonderfully written and speaks to the fear inside me of being reduced to ashes, waste, in some anonymous forgotten receptacle.