I spent a few hours with my dad last night. He was in bed, lying on his side. He wasn't able to talk but he did hold my hand with a grip as strong as his silence was loud. His hand, his fingers were so thin - but I remembered what they felt like when I was seven, when I held his too-large hand on the keyboard to try and teach him my first piano piece. His thumbs were wider than the keys and he didn't learn it but he laughed.
I don't know if he really recognized me last night, but I want to think he did, or at least I think he knew me as someone who loves him. I stuck a hearing aid in his available ear and we listened to music that I hoped he could hear, favorites of his that I remember from childhood: Vera Lynn, Phil Harris, Harry Lauder. (Oh, how my mother despised the Harry Lauder CD that we always brought out and blasted on my dad's birthday. For 100+ year old Scottish vaudeville music, it's not bad. And it still amuses me that we can tease my mom from beyond the grave - or ashes urn, whatever.)
I finished with Kenneth McKellar's "Songs of Ireland," which is what we used to listen to on tape in the GMC Jimmy on our way up to ski at Eaglecrest. My father had a beautiful baritone voice but couldn't carry a tune to save his life. I remember him singing to this album even though I know he probably never actually did, but there is a trueness to this false memory I will polish until it shines: the warbling of the tape, wet Juneau alpine snow, my father, the consummate gentleman skier cutting a dashing figure in his woolen ski sweater. I have saved all his ski sweaters.
When I left his bedside, his eyes were closed and his grip relaxed. He was sleeping, or slipping away. I was called back just a couple hours later. He died early this morning.
I think of the obituary that I will write, and how much of my father's narrative remains mythic in its grandiosity and mystery. Butcher, soldier, adventurer, laborer, scholar, drinker, geologist, skier, catskinner, union man, tennis player, reader - these are just some of his occupations and identities. When I was a kid, he seemed to know everyone in the state. He had built every road. He could walk into a restaurant and know ten tables full of politicians, academics, construction stiffs, miners, and artists. He was a part of the old pre-Pipeline Alaska that I'll never be able to describe. And now he's gone and I can never ask him about the abandoned Tamarack Inn, the DEW Line, how to get to Üllerhaven, or skiing in races with a wine skin strapped to his back. Or the time he foolishly risked his life by saving a shelf full of liquor bottles at some construction camp during the big earthquake (probably with a twinkling smile on his face because he was always smiling).
There was a fire at the Mendeltna Roadhouse near Glennallen a few days ago. It burned to the ground. I think of these historic roadhouses and my father - these pieces of old Alaska that are disappearing - by fire, by progress, by neglect, or old age. The old Alaska is slipping away one fire, one old man at a time. It's hard to remember the heyday when I'm looking at a picture of roadside charred timber. It's hard to remember the father and the man when my most recent memories of him are all skin, bone, and milky-eyed stare. But that hand, almost claw-like, was holding on so tightly. I think I'll remember his hands.
