"Two wrongs may not make a right but a thousand wrongs make a writer.”

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Did I Tell You I Love You?

I see I've written nothing here since, well, since last December, but this is still my old faithful blog, waiting in the clouds for an update. I pulled it up (down?) once in a while to see if it still existed and to check on familiar blogs, but I didn't write. Now I have to write.

Dad died four weeks ago today. His life was a grand one of 96 years, full of many accomplishments and good works, so why do we cry? my mother asked as we waited for the hospice nurse to wash the body and the undertaker to come and wheel him out of the house on a gurney, wheeled him out from the room where he died, the same room in which he was born. We should be happy, said mother (as a good Catholic would say) but wherever he was, it wasn't with us. He was gone, still warm, but gone, and we missed him, so we cried.

We cancelled his "lifeline". We contacted Social Security and the Office of Personnel Management regarding his pension, sent out our thank-you cards and backstroked our way through the public grieving process. Now the private grieving has begun.

My father was a writer and his office was a vast library of agricultural yearbooks and farm journals and novels such as The Beast Of Muddy Brain, a novel about farming during the depression, and I wanted to write something memorializing him, but the how of doing that in a way he would approve is difficult.

On a morning such as the one a week ago, with the heat and humidity washed out of the air by a torrential downpour and straight line winds the night before, with puffy white clouds dotting the cerulean blue of Earth's atmosphere, with the corn tasseled out and standing motionless in the sun while the crickets sang and the geese flew overhead, while a pot of San Marzanos simmered on the stove readied for ladling into hot jars which now line the shelves in the cellar lined with fresh newspapers, as our mother taught us, I missed him.

On a morning like this with the eastern sky tinged with light by the sun at its back and an owl calling in a low throttle from the woods who-who-whowhowho, not singing but crying from the woods still dark, dad would be up; pushing himself out to the living room in his wheelchair in his fluffy white robe (sometimes getting it caught in the wheels) to sit at the picture window facing east where he could look out over the farm he loved that his grandfather started, looking out over the best place on earth and wait for the first person to come in the house and pour his morning coffee and give him a graham cracker. (The first cup is always the best.) Sometimes that was me. On a morning like this, I'd like to do that one more time.

Did I tell him I loved him? At the end of the night when he was tucked into bed, hearing aids on his bedside table, rosary where he could reach it, when I rubbed his foot under the blanket and said "good night dad", did I also say I love you? I love you I love you I love you?

On these fall nights, dewy and still, the chill of winter hovers in the air and the corn rustles on the slightest breath of a night bird, with the lights of his bedroom dark and bedside lamp off,  I miss him.

Today marks the Autumnal Equinox with fall arriving at 10:21 a.m. here in the Eastern Time Zone. The heat of summer has overstayed its welcome but soon harvest will begin. But dad won't be here to watch them bringing in the corn. He won't be here to check the yield per acre, dust flying out of the back of the combine as the beans are harvested, grasshoppers jumping and the smell of chaff in the air. Even when he could no longer be actively involved, he would be at that window, watching.

On this first day of fall when the grass is still green and the roses thrive, with the coffee growing cold in my cup, I miss him.





Robert Raymond. Linck
8/07/20 to 8/25/16
A farmer, an environmentalist, a progressive, a writer, a father.




13 comments:

Chris said...

Beautifully written Yvonne. Dad would smile and tell you that this tribute was very fitting, he would be proud of you. Did I tell him I loved him? I know that I did, every day I said goodbye, but I was not ready for him to die, not then or now. You are a writer as dad and grandma Linck, that is a talent you will use and have forever Yvonne, your gift from dad.

Yvonne Osborne said...

Chris,
Thank you! I was so elated to have a comment, my first in several months. I never thought of it as a gift from dad, but you are right. Thank you for taking the time to tell me this. It helps.
Yvonne

Liza said...

Oh Yvonne, how hard it is to miss the ones we love. I know your beautiful words bled right from your heart. Your dad was a writer and that part of him carries on in you, in the way you sculpt images on a page and record the beauty surrounding you. Your dad knew how much you loved him, and somewhere, somehow, he sees this now. Once again your love is affirmed.

Frances Garrood said...

A poignant and beautiful tribute, Yvonne. And if someone is there to rub my foot and hold my hand when I'm dying, I shall know that they love me.

Yvonne Osborne said...

Liza,
Thanks so much. I haven't lost someone so close since my grandma died almost 40 years ago but that was so different. Thank you for your kind words.

Frances,
Thank you. That's a wonderful way of putting it. I know he knew it but I just wish I would have said it more often. Thank you again.

Anne Gallagher said...

What a lovely, moving tribute. You've made me miss him too.

Yvonne Osborne said...

Anne,
Thank you so much. You would have liked my dad. He was a writer and well-read. he would pull you into the living room, sit you down, offer you a drink and start talking!

Vanessa Victoria Kilmer said...

I'm so sorry for your loss. You've written a very beautiful tribute. Your love for him is quite clear and speaks volumes of a good man.

Yvonne Osborne said...

Dear Vanessa,
Thank you so much for reading and commenting. I want so much to spread the word of the sort of man my father was. This was a modest, meager start but I'm glad you liked it.

Deborah Lawrenson said...

Read with a growing lump in my throat. I am so sorry for your loss, Yvonne. Can identify too with the way you see your father gone but present in the scenes he loved, and in the everyday books and the coffee. Sending you a big hug.

Yvonne Osborne said...

Deborah,
Thank you so much. Grief is a funny thing. I go along for days and don't feel it. As much as we want to deny it, life goes on, as my mother says, you think you're important and than realize you aren't even the smallest cog in the wheel. Then I'm driving down the road and think about the beans and the corn drying in the sun and it hits hard.

Tricia J. O'Brien said...

What a beautiful portrait you painted with your words of your father and of your love. I felt it in my heart and saw the house and its land in my head through you.

Unknown said...

No, maam, you didn't
tell me you loved me...
yet, that's o-tay.
I know if Jesus loves me,
then He loves you
and we'll be together someday Uptown.

Dunno if you saw this before...
yet, here it is once moe, curly:

Greetings, earthling! Need summore new-fangled-thots N ideers? Look no firdr, brudda. Can't stay long. Done gotta git, Paw... yet, if Im a sower, we plant the Seed; if Im an artist, we RITE the Word:

Would U please help a plethora of King Size, wildchild, rawkuss poetry/wordz which are lookin 4 a home in thy novelty?? Thx. Whew. They're pretty insane. They're bereft of reason. Oi! Blimey! They're bloody PINK spiders!

Gotta gobba lotta shrewd, surreal, supersonic, sardonic satires, sassy N savvy elixers N electronic elegance (and palpable nuance) on our YOUTHwitheTRUTH blogs. Wannum? Have'm. N'joym. Gettm outta my hair!!!

How mucha wanna betcha our sugar-high-mojo, pleasure-beyond-measure, fuse-blowin-exploits R a copious madhouse of one lavish bookay D.O.A.? Our proFUSE NRGod who leads U.S. to explosive fairy-tales in the 'one-stop-shop' symphony Upstairs? God's the BigDude, the Owner of ElysianFields, the Grand Prize, the Austere Overdrive, NoPurchaseNecessary: our bombastic tenaCITY on a Hill which'll plant the Seeds 4u2 grow-up to new N greater heights!! Mama mia! Thatsa good pasta!!

CAUTION: our 22ish, avant-guard, accurately-atrocious, offa-the-reservation-like-Jimmy-Hoffa, metal breadcrumms R sooo out-of-order, toots, they're an intimate wealth of bottomless sophistication. And dats da lethal fak, Jak. Go ahead. Sue me. Yawn. But, yet, here's the perennial KOO D'TAH: who else has actually SEEN the Great Beyond in spirit & lived to tella youse bout the bionic, bloated, brevity-like-earth we're living on?? Yes, earthling, Im an NDE, almost salivating4salvation. So gain altitude, never attitude: death has no intrinsick favorites.

If Mr. abSUREditty's an ultra-great-reward, and not everyone enters, Q: why is it an excruciating deluge of epic-.357-caliber where the quality's a limitless bulldozer plowin, pushin-your-power-cord with eternal goodies? A: the Prize-A+-TheEnd just gives U.S. moe-curley-graphix 2 VitSee: an explosion-of-extravagance which few R asking 4 anymore! Grrr. They're too concerned withe grotesque sanity of ambivilant piss-ants which swiftly crawl like lemmings to their scorecard destruction. C'est la guerre.

THANK GAWWWD!!! the Don has the ebullient BAWLS!!! to do the Manifest Destiny!!! To lead U.S. forward to the White House Upstairs with his SQUARES!!!

So, break-free, earthling; be like a contraversial outgrowth of incredibly-intoxicating-effusiveness in your zeitgeist to give the ultimate, stunning, backknuckle potency: Wiseabove. Wanna join this useFULL idiot Upstairs 4 the most zany, kooky, X-acto-knife antidotes? Extremely exquisite, explicit endorphins in abundance? Puh-lenty of pulverizingly-tantalizing psychopathic psychosomatics with eXtras? i2i-kick-velocity's-ass-ultra-maximum-rocket-fuel-party-hardy at my pad ya ever encountered without d'New Joisey accent 4 an eternal slew of precarious, magnanimous & primeval absurdities indelibly etched in the granite corridors of eternity with a total-barrage-of-melt-in-thy-mouth 'depth-of-undenial'???

Make Your Choice  -SAW
...cuzz nobody gitts outta here alive, earthling.