Thursday, July 6. Dad died this afternoon.
I drove all day from Cedar Rapids, arriving at the VA Hospital in Wichita about 5:00 p.m. After several fruitless searches through the VA corridors, I found Mom in a waiting room. She had just been told to leave the ICU ten minutes earlier. I picked up the phone and called the unit. A female doctor told me that Dad had no heartbeat, they were trying to revive him. My voice broke as I told Mom, “He has no heart beat.”
When the doctor entered the room, I was surprised to see how young she looked. With CNN news as an accompaniment, we listened to the doctor tell us that this man, whom she had never known, was dead and that she was very sorry. She was obviously shaken and distressed, admitting that they were puzzled why he had taken such a quick turn for the worse after his hemoglobin levels had stabilized. He had come to the hospital because of internal bleeding. Although unsure what had caused the bleeding, they believed the problem had been handled. But something had gone mortally wrong. She asked if it would be okay to do an autopsy. Mom told me to decide.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure you would like to know.”
The doctor put her arm around me, giving me a small hug. “Yes. Thank you.”
Fifteen minutes later they took us, accompanied by the chaplain, into Dad’s room. Only his head was showing, with tubes still attached and a white cloth stretched tight across the mouth. The head already resembled cold wax. As I had suspected, it was a corpse, not my father. I glanced at the ceiling, perhaps looking for his spirit, but it had already fled the room, seeking pastures more like home.
It’s now about 11:30 p.m., on the farm. I’m sitting in the living room. As I look around I’m struck by how few possessions Dad had. The pair of overalls on the back of the kitchen chair; overalls and shirts behind the kitchen door, the Bible and an old rocking chair, a few papers and calendars on the kitchen cupboard, his false teeth by the sink, his penny jar where he saved loose change. In the bedroom are a few more clothes, nearly all Sunday go-to-church clothes, nothing really him. No, except for the Bible and the overalls and the work boots and the penny jar, everything else in the house belongs to Mom. How unexpected, for someone to live in the same house for over 84 years and yet so few possessions. I feel like in his death he took everything with him.
Of course there is the constant evidence of his presence in the house. Everywhere I see his handiwork. He built the kitchen cabinets, he re-paneled or painted all the rooms, he put up the ceiling fans, he installed the shower–everything done with his hands and a few tools, a hammer, a handsaw, an old red level, a T-square with all the measurements long since erased by wear, a couple of lumber yard “yard sticks.” And it is immediately obvious, now that he is gone, how quickly this will all disappear. Mom told me tonight, what I’ve always known, that she would never stay on the farm if he should die first. This will be one of the last nights she will ever sleep in this house.
One knew rationally, intellectually that it could not last forever. But we revealed no desire to prepare for this transition. When the time came, we would just do it. Perhaps there is salvation in the busy-ness of the doing. I do wish, however, that I could have read the Bible to Dad, perhaps from the Psalms. Driving to Wichita, today, that was one image that helped me prepare for this loss. I think he would have liked those words present in the room with him. But I was 20 minutes late.
He was a good man, hard to love but worthy of the highest respect. He was my primary personal hero. Despite our mutual flaws, we were bound together in an uneasy, tense, and often distant relationship. But he will be missed every day for the rest of my life, his loss beyond my grasp and comprehension. And so much greater for Mom.
Friday, July 7, 1995
Tonight for supper we ate the rest of Dad’s watermelon. Tuesday morning, the 4th, while waiting for the ambulance, Dad asked Mom to feed him some watermelon. She did. He told her, “It tastes good.” His last meal in this house–perhaps the last food he ate before he died. Did he have any suspicion that he would never enter this house again? When did he know, this is the end?
This morning, when I came into the living room, Mom was sitting on the couch, her face drenched in sunshine streaming in from the east through the open door. I hugged her but could think of nothing to say. Neither of us felt like fixing any food, so we ate breakfast in Howard’s café. Many came over to pay their respects. Waldo Gray, the local barber, assured us, “No one was better prepared for death than Bob. He really knew the Bible.”
We then went to the Funeral Home. Lloyd, the funeral director, handled everything with grace and efficiency. He has this habit of responding to suggestions or comments with an “okay,” accompanied by making a circle with the thumb and forefinger. Perhaps a conscious technique, a gimmick, but oddly comforting.
Making all the arrangements helps–a controlled way of talking about the deceased with the focus on facts, not feelings, on decisions that must be made. When selecting hymns for the service, I suggest “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”–apparently this Lutheran hymn not a common choice, but I sense one appropriate to Dad’s faith. We choose the casket, vault, flowers–all expensive but as Mom notes, “I don’t begrudge him this. He never spent anything on himself.”
In the afternoon we drive to the cemetery. It’s hot, easily 1000, but there’s a breeze and convenient shade. We talk for a few minutes with the grounds keeper until the secretary of the cemetery association arrives. I recall her husband’s premature death, perhaps 25 years ago, when he attempted to drive through a flooded creek and lost control of his pickup. A man 20 years younger than Dad, already dead these many years. A brisk, efficient woman, she lifts from the back seat of her car an enormous, ancient-looking ledger book, naming who is buried where.
“Where would you like for Bob to be buried?”
We had parked close to Dad’s parents. I point to their headstones: “Any chance there might be two spots close to where his folks are?” After some discussion with the sexton about the plot number, she interprets the cemetery records to indicate that the family owns five vacant spaces, comprising an unsuspected family plot. Mom is pleased. An ideal location.
Sunday morning, July 9, 1995
I’ve been sitting on the porch for the last hour, reading Barbara Scot’s journal describing the year she taught in Nepal, listening to bob whites, occasionally noting the crowing roosters from the small farm across the road. Yesterday was spent cleaning the yard, mowing, trimming branches from trees (how I hate those Osage oranges). Dad was constantly planting things. He had given up farming to become a cattle trader (according to Mom a legalized form of gambling), but he never lost his desire to stick different things into the dirt and see what would grow. Most things didn’t. The dirt on this hill is tan and dusty, little more than a thin veneer over solid rock. To the west lie the beautiful pasture lands of the Flint Hills, but this farm is deceptive terrain, always delivering less than it promised.
Most successful in the yard are the phlox and hollyhocks and on the porch a series of spider plants, hung by remnants of baling wire that Dad was always saving on fence posts and in his makeshift sheds. When I mowed east of the house, I discovered a series of tiny evergreen bushes, hidden among the grass and miscellaneous weeds. Planted every 18" they betray a dream for a row of greenery marching across a patch of yard that had always resisted civilizing–though we had once constructed a duck sanctuary for my favorite 4-H project, including a small pond that I dug for the ducks. When it came to flowers, Dad was always seeking tenacious perennials, flowers that would survive the summers with minimal care or watering. I suppose Dad wanted plants to be like the people he admired: uncomplaining, not asking for special factors. He wanted beauty but never complained when he got less.
It is already hot, but a good breeze from the south and it feels comfortable sitting here on this small wooden deck. Yesterday afternoon we went to the Funeral Home to see Dad. He was in his gray casket, wearing his gray suit. It somehow didn’t feel right that he lay there in his stocking feet. When I asked Lloyd about having Dad wear his good cowboy boots, he said it was no problem. But when I asked Mom, I could tell she didn’t like the idea. Looking at him for the last time at the Funeral Home, I was relieved to see that the body still didn’t look like Dad. The face was too broad, the lips protruding and frozen in a straight line.
Monday, July 10, ‘95
Endless ironies. Dad’s funeral, yet a day of unexpected joys. Mom was anxious about moving off the farm, so the first thing we did after breakfast was go to the HUD Office and start filling out the application forms for federal housing. Later in the afternoon, after the funeral, we received a phone call that a one-bedroom was available and Mom could move in Wednesday morning. I give Mom her first high five.
At the church, just as we are beginning to eat dinner, Dad’s nephew Billy and his wife Faye arrive. What immediately impresses everyone is how much Billy looks like his uncle: similar frame, muscular forearms with short fingers, the “Marrs hairline” (as Billy calls it), the prominent Indian-head nose, and also something of Dad’s personality, certainly the wit and word play that Dad would bring out in social situations, times when he felt pressure to be the one talking. It had been close to 45 years since I had seen Billy, so we spend the next hour learning about unknown cousins and the fifty horses on Billy’s ranch and an adopted son who is really Billy’s brother (Billy’s father went through several marriages before his alcoholism finally cornered him). Mom is obviously pleased that Billy and Faye have come. With my wife and son, we represent all the relatives at the funeral. Only six of us, but two more than we expected.
During the funeral itself I never felt much emotion, as if my emotional centers had been anesthetized. The pastor is just finishing his first month in this rural church, so he finds it difficult to eulogize someone whom he had only met one or two times. I regret that we did not ask someone to speak who had known Dad and could have said a few words about this unusual man. Later, driving to the cemetery, we pass the swimming pool, full of young tan bodies jumping off the diving boards, reminding me of a stanza from Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”–the lines about watching the children, at recess in the ring, as the chariot makes its way to eternity.
Friday, midnight, July 14, ‘95
Just finished a shower and putting on my chigger medicine. As a kid I was impervious to the chiggers, but now the little fleas are having great sport with me, over 200 chigger bites encircling my ankles and calves. Supposedly the swelling and itching is cased by an allergic reaction when the chigger attaches itself to the skin; I will be glad when my body decides to ignore these annoying guests.
Tonight is the last night a Marrs will sleep in this house. Not sure of when William and Evelyn Marrs first moved here, but it must have been in the early 1890s. In 1911, Dad was born in this room. But tonight I am alone. My Grandfather William died in 1916, perhaps 50 yards from where I now sit. His wife and children–Ed, Cora, Harriet, Bill, Bill’s twin brother who died at birth, Bob–now all dead, except for Aunt Harriet, over 90, trapped in a badly crippled body, last in this house 30 years ago. After tonight it’s over.
I learned today what I expected: the insurance on the house will end shortly after it’s abandoned. Dad had the house valued at $20,000 plus $10,000 for the belongings. Both figures inflated if one does not factor in the values of the heart.
This morning I went upstairs. Last time anyone had been in those rooms was probably in 1973 when Dad and I brought down an old buffet, a dining room table, and a library table for our new home in Texas. The stairs and rooms were a mess. When Dad re-roofed the house, the long nails had knocked most of the plaster off the ceiling. The stairs were covered with rubble. But I found an old trunk full of remnants from abandoned lives: a large photo of Mom’s Dad, posing with his rifle when he was sheriff of the county; several notebooks of Dad’s compositions, including short stories and the beginning of a novel written in the 1930s when he was living here on the farm with his mother. Dozens of photos. One shows Dad as a high school sophomore with the Howard football team. I recall a previous visit to Howard when, walking down Main Street, I was stopped by an elderly man who, without warning, announced, “Your father was the greatest football player this town ever saw.”
Sunday, July 16, 1995
Back in Cedar Rapids. Yesterday morning I finished what I could at the farm. Watered Dad’s tomatoes and cukes since the water will soon be turned off. Gave his cattle one last trough full of water, with some purposely running over for the tiny yellow frogs and water beetles who live in the mud hole, unaware the local landlord has died and they will soon be left without water on a dry hill in Kansas. Collected his tools from various sheds, loaded up the pickup with a few final items for Mom, and said goodbye to the old, old farmhouse.
It hurts to accept that this has happened. Why can’t I walk back into the house and find him in his rocking chair, reading the Bible? Is it possible we will never talk again on the phone, replaying our little joke about Bob Marrs calling Bob Marrs as I hold my receiver away from my ear, Dad’s loud baritone voice unaware how phones really work. But some resolute segment of the brain reminds me that it’s all over. We had our 50 years–ample opportunities, though never adequately appreciated. But it’s too late for guilt or regrets. What remains are images, an odd collage of incidents now remembered only by me, but ones that resonate so deeply that only death will ever remove them.
Two stories of my father as teacher and me as his student. The first occurred in the spring of 1958. I was in the 7th grade, preparing for my first grade school track meet with arch-rival Moline. Since I was one of the larger boys in the class, Mr. Unruh, the coach and grade school principal, asked if I would like to throw the discus. Suggesting that I might want to practice before the meet, he loaned me one of the school’s two discs so I could try it at home. As soon as I finished my paper route, I was on top of our hill, becoming quickly frustrated by the difficulties of throwing this heavy, flightless object. Mr. Unruh had proposed that for this first meet, I could just stand at the toe line and throw the discus. But I had seen enough film clips to know real discus throwers didn’t stand at a line. They crouched down, before spinning their bodies in a circle and then releasing this spinning disc. My few minutes of effort convinced me that if I was to have any success at the meet, I needed to learn about this spinning business. So I jogged down the hill to the milk barn and asked Dad, who milked his dozen cows every morning and night–only occasionally with my help–if he would be willing to show me how to throw the discus.
Dad told me to go back up the hill and keep practicing. “I’ll be there as soon as I finish milking this cow.” Within minutes he joined me. He was clothed as always in his overalls and work shoes. Quickly he measured off the front and back of an imaginary circle. Holding the discus behind his back while his body was tightened into a crouched position, he spun around once and the metal frisbee exploded out of his grip, sailing, sailing across the field.
“That’s how it’s done.” He then turned and walked down the hill, back to his milk cows.
I’ve never understood the moral of this memory; perhaps that is why I return to it so frequently. Certainly the tale is about my immaturity, my impatience. I never did learn the proper technique for throwing the discus: I always just stood at the front line, bent my knees, and threw as hard as I could. I never learned the spin, nor did I ever ask my Dad to help me again: there was simply too much distance between where he was and where I was.
The lessons of the other memory have eventually become easier for me to appreciate. For my eighth grade graduation I received two presents. From Mom I received my first good wrist watch, a Bulova I wore until I was in college. From my Dad I received a white note card, 3" x 5", on which he had written in pencil the location of a Bible verse: Proverbs 3:13-18.
For many years I valued Mom’s gift and disregarded Dad’s. The Bulova watch was something practical that I could use, physical evidence that my graduation was an important moment in time. Dad’s note card remained meaningless, incomprehensible. And so I forgot it, lost in a drawer full of odds and ends.
And yet, gifts have an odd habit of changing as we change. My beautiful Bulova watch became corroded and stopped working. Once it no longer told me the time, I threw it away. But the passage from Proverbs, as Ezra Pound would say, was news that stayed news.
Although my wife and I are not Jewish, in 1979 we began singing in a quartet at the local synagogue. During every Friday night’s prayer service, immediately following the return of the Torah to the Ark, the congregation reads responsively from the prayer book, reciting a passage from Proverbs, Chapter 3, verses 17-18, on the happiness of the person who finds wisdom: “It is a tree of life to those who hold it fast, and all who cling to it find happiness. Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.” How beautiful those words have become for me, rendered richer by that weekly reminder to honor wisdom, to honor those texts–such as the Torah–which help us discover that wisdom. How unexpected that in a Jewish synagogue I find the cornerstone of my father’s Methodism. How exquisite the curves of our lives. How satisfying this bountiful “tree of life.”
Thanks, Dad. You were always a much better teacher than I was a student. It was the perfect graduation present.