TASK #24 PULL UP A FISH
“In the long run we are all dead”. John Maynard Keynes
I remember when my dad died. He had Alzheimer’s disease and he had slipped into a muddled state of mind. He was living with my sister but after he ran away from her house a few times–once wearing only a pajama top, in December, in Ohio–and after he left on a gas oven for a few hours, and other equally dangerous and appallingly bizarre misbehaviors, they put him in an assisted living home where he wilted away and finally passed…
I visited him a few times at the home. I walked in one time and he looked at me and said, “pull up a fish”…sad, but when I told my brother and sister, and later my friends, we all laughed. ‘Cause it was funny–painful, but funny–and somehow cathartic.
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I visited him a few times at the home. I walked in one time and he looked at me and said, “pull up a fish”…sad, but when I told my brother and sister, and later my friends, we all laughed. ‘Cause it was funny–painful, but funny–and somehow cathartic.
I was in my early 30s when he died, and though it wasn’t sudden it did give me a jolt and it made me think about death in general, especially as it relates to men.
No man believes that he’s going to die. We rarely think about it. It doesn’t cross our mind until we see the runaway truck careening towards us or an alarmed doctor pulling his finger out of our ass. If we had a lick of sense we’d treat death with the respect it deserves and take every precaution against it, but we don’t…
Because we’re men. Like soldiers who are about to go to battle, we don’t think we’re going to buy it–“not me. The guy next to me, maybe, but not me.”
I think that men have some sort of innate override system–after all, why do we do the stupid things we do?
But, like I said, my dad’s death got me to thinking…so I went and visited his grave. He’s buried next to my mom in a Catholic cemetery. In front of my dad’s grave was a small, empty glass vase and an American flag, symbolic of his short stint in the U.S. Army. There was a gravestone, but other than his name and his date of death, nothing was written on it. I stared at his grave for a while. I tried to conjour up his voice, but it was gone.
No man believes that he’s going to die. We rarely think about it. It doesn’t cross our mind until we see the runaway truck careening towards us or an alarmed doctor pulling his finger out of our ass.
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Worse, the only image of my dad still stored in my memory was an old man, ravaged by Alzheimer’s.
After a bit I wandered away from the grave. I looked at the tombstones. I stopped in front of one that had a baseball sculpted into the headstone. It marked the grave of a 10 year old boy. The inscription read: “To Our Beloved Aaron. He loved baseball and his family”.
That stone–not my dad’s–made me cry. I cried hard. I cried for Aaron’s lost youth and the fate that befell him. And after a while I found myself crying for my father as well. And suddenly a clear vision of him came back to me. He was probably mid-40s, tall and jaunty. He wore a white shirt with rolled up sleeves and a pair of brown slacks. He was grinning at my mother. He was in a good mood. After a while I stopped crying, and I felt better.
I thought about what what I’d read on Aaron’s stone. His epitaph. Someone had put some thought into it. So I pulled out my notebook and wrote one for my dad: PULL UP A FISH.
Not very eloquent, or evocative, but it was sure as hell funny.
TASK:
Walk around. Read the inscriptions on the headstones, and try to picture them in your mind’s eye.
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This week you’re taking a road trip. To a cemetery. Walk around. Read the inscriptions on the headstones, and try to picture them in your mind’s eye. Then go home and open your notebook and think up an epitaph for your headstone. Actually it doesn’t have to be original. It can be a poem, or a phrase, or a line from the movie “Scarface”.
And my epitaph? I like “The Buckeye Stops Here”, or my favorite poem, by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night,
But ahh, my foes,
And oh, my friends,
It gives a lovely light…
Send me your epitaph. [email protected]
Photo by Madison Gostkowski