Four, Two, Now...

My father’s tumbling, trembling, hollering, whooping, whispering old life bleeds across years, across lifetimes even, and on his second death day, I fold my fingers around the memory of him

There’s a pinch of autumn in the mornings now, a thing I wonder if I’d felt four years ago when our caravan of life had pulled through a narrow drive in North Albany. Sometime after 10 pm, we’d spilled from the cars, from the U-Haul, and scrounged for a key left by the leasing agent. We’d used phone flashlights to dig in the lock, and then flung open the door of a new life, stepped right into it as if it had always been ours.

I suppose it had been.

I remember waking up the neighbors with our raucous desert voices, not used to whispering after 9 pm in a quiet neighborhood. We’d lived on busy streets prone to flooding in July, and in houses surrounded by people who didn’t know us, didn’t care as long as we stayed out of each other’s way. But in small-town Oregon, our arrival was a thunderclap, and the most curious of our new neighbors was already standing in his driveway, wrapped in a robe, telling us where we could and could not park.

We’d carried mattresses from the truck, tossed them on floors, and dug for sheets, pillows, or anything to mimic either. And then the long drive, the lament of our two cats loudly surviving the biggest adventure of their lives, the realization that we’d done it … all of it hit like the ground after a skydive. So we’d sprawled out over the slanted driveway on our backs. We’d looked up at a sky without light and dust blocking the galaxy. We’d swallowed the first gulp of a life we wanted. And then, before I fell asleep next to my daughter on a mattress in the loft, I’d watched a barely waning supermoon through the window. This town, I thought to myself, is going to heal my nervous system. In the morning, I knew it would. Four years after, I can tell you it did.

One year later, on the same day, my dad ordered DoorDash alone in the home he’d been moved into when he couldn’t fully care for himself anymore. He must’ve received it. We think he did. And then what? He ate alone? He wrote? He read? He watched TV? We don’t know. But then he did text a friend, someone he had no text history with, but whose name started with ‘St’. He must’ve reached for his phone in a moment he knew or suspected might be his last. His heart already giving way to the enormous pressure it had carried and held all his life.

Love, he’d written.
Restore.
Love.
Live a great Canaan.

We never found his phone. Someone working in the home must’ve slipped it into their pocket before my baby brother thought to search for it. It’s gone, but the text itself arrived days later in a screenshot from the friend who received it. I don’t think this was meant for me, he’d said.

I picture my dad dying alone, the clarity slipping through cracks in his dissolving armor. I close my eyes even now and sit on the edge of his deathbed, and I listen. I wait. I pick up the reverberation of his life and let it echo against the bones of my hands. I lift his last words, his last years, his life story that is so fucking human, aching, and still so alive, up to the light of a supermoon spilling through the window four years ago. I remember how it felt to know that this new life would heal something, steady something that the desert had never been able to. My father’s tumbling, trembling, hollering, whooping, whispering old life bleeds across years, across lifetimes even, and on his second death day, I fold my fingers around the memory of him. I hope that it’s true, that this new existence has healed his story.

I sprinkle salted water over my altar this morning, look directly into a photo of his five-year-old cowboy self perched on a beloved horse. I let it all in, the mess and joy and pain and unmatched longing of it. I let it all out, the softness and rigidity and poetry and loss of it. Take a deep breath when the last of the water drips from my fingertips. Lean close to the lingering soul of my dad and tell him I hope he’s begun to make peace with the life he lived and with the one he didn’t.

I tell him I haven’t stopped returning to his deathbed, his death moment, to do nothing but be the one holding vigil. Tell him the missing pieces of his final day haunt me in a way I can’t describe. Tell him I hope he’s learned to let go of those final shreds of armor, settle into the seat of a saddle, and ride again the way I saw him do only once. Whooping and trilling as his body became the body of the horse, the two of them moving like a prairie wave over and under endless hills. I think about handing him the first key I used to open that house in North Albany, giving him a talisman for all the thresholds he still has to cross. And, two years later now, I feel the undercurrent of autumn rippling below wildfire season, below summer winds, and I repeat my father’s own words back to him.

Love, I remind him.
Restore.
Love, again.
Live a good Canaan, Dad.

When we carried his ashes to freedom last year, we each wrote one of his names on the bags we carried. I chose the name of his little boy self, the one who lived on the back of his horse.

The first time my father put me on a horse with him

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I write and work from the fertile soil of Kalapuyan land near the Multnomah River (now widely known by a settler’s name). Almost every word has been written from my backyard with my bare feet in the grass or from my desk to the sound of rain. But every word is woven with reverence for the people who carry displacement in their bones and who will someday be the rightful stewards of this land again. I recognize them as the original storytellers of this place (something I have learned from Holly Ringland), and I hope the ground itself feels the offering of this work as it spreads.

My evolving lineage of thought is HERE, and it is a joy to share with you the people who have helped me form my worldview through their wisdom, surviving, brilliance, humility, thinking, living, shapeshifting, questioning, mess-making, repairing, and sharing of thought.