by Edie Meidav
In his non-home, attended to by those with skills, he had been lying in bed or in a wheelchair playing pioneer tunes on his harmonica in desultory fashion near the nurses’ station, positioned on an island which was a decommissioned naval base out in northern California. Could it have been more perfect that the name of his home, dedicated to liminal states, was Water’s Edge?
What I tried to understand that mapless last night of his life was that this time his dying was real. From our entropic New York aerie, this was the totality of what I could divine.
I sat in our tiny dining room next to my husband who was dialing the hospital and using his best Brooklyn-bred diplomacy to get through the telephone lines into the exact right artery that would lead into the ER and whatever last bit of listening might be left in my father’s ear.
I should say that I sat like a penitent schoolgirl, fists clenched between tight knees, waiting in a room that had just lost its circulation. I chilled, for once the phrase right, since the temperature of the world had just dropped. While we tried getting through, it seemed everyone else in my family also tried the lines, this being a family not known for its lack of words. Of course at this second the lines would be getting clogged, heart to head, family flocking to its cerebral patriarch, and in seconds I would lose the chance to—to do what? Use words to sustain a last moment? Did the urgency of needing to talk to him have to do with affirming our connection? To say life and all its recent indignities had mattered? To show that despite being geographically challenged I would care and then care always, memory conjugated out over the rest of my lifetime? I cared, I care, I will care, those who don’t know you will care, you have a legacy.
Before those crucial seven ounces of consciousness left his body, I had to tell him he mattered, that all of the suffering and aspiration of his life had been worthwhile, that we mattered, that he would continue to matter within the context of the living.
Since the dawn of the answering machine, I have been a phone-phobe, voice seeming such a poor substitute for presence. This unfortunate sensibility makes me lack the grace of friends who sound ready and delighted to answer a ring, those with the talent of making time expand accordionlike in their affinity with Bell’s invention. Instead, and this serves as no apologia, I seem always to hang up first, caveman-like, unrefined and coarse: there should be a twelve-step program for those like me. Hi, I’m Edie and I do bad phone. If email redeemed most of my social life, which it did, my aversion to the phone stood as one of many traits which my father, with his open attitude but his unfamiliarity with computerized letters, accepted as a quirk.
Simply, therefore, in that pendulous minute before I could talk with my father, my job was, once again, to try to make the phone a friend. It was all I had.
My husband handed me the receiver and Bob the nurse came on to say: You want to say your goodbyes.
Right, I thought in that nanosecond, brilliant, that’s the name for it, I’m going to say my goodbyes.
The plural fit for a man of my father’s complexity, suspended in a metaphysical state of so many parts, within a state of so many pluralities.
And until that moment I had not realized that every person has, stored within, some finite amount of goodbyes for each person who matters and that right now, despite all brink moments and prior goodbyes, I was about to use up the last goodbye, tagged for him alone. This time the goodbye reverted to a greater status. I was about to spend my last goodbye as if some maximum leader had just declared the currency of goodbye not debased by all its manifold apparitions. This time the currency would count.
For five years, all my father’s near deaths had summoned me from New York back to California. Each death seemed realer than the one that came before. Each time my father’s Egyptian lady doctor said to me, If it were my dad I’d come now. Westward I flew, often with a baby on my lap, and the babies grew. The youngest especially became a fan of fire trucks, given the coincidence of their hectic arrival, coming to oxygenate her grandfather every second day after we arrived for a visit to California.
There he would be, in his medically outfitted room off the kitchen on the lower level of my parents’ house, his heart exalted by the nearness of family but his lungs drowning in the fluid that kept wanting to fill that aqueous spirit, and once again we would be summoning empirical data and conventional logic in order to persuade the scientist, the traveler who now wanted to stay home, that this was something of an emergency. There I would be, fingers robotic in dialing 911 for the firemen to come again—I got to know them—up the fifty-one stairs to the house in order to put yet another oxygen mask on him and spirit him away and me into the plethora of questions that came in his wake, all from the young truck-lover (who now every night, her choice, her subliminal Yahrzeit, sleeps in a plastic replica of all those fire trucks):
Where do the firemen take him? Why does Saba wear that mask? Will they fix Saba so he can walk again?
And my own questions, all mainly circulating around one: Did he not once get me to promise that his life’s coda would have the dignity of freedom he had found in his adopted state? But who was not to say that in his travels, bedbound, he was not fulfilling the imaginative promise of California?
Consider the name. Unlike other states drawn from Spanish—Colorado (“red”), Florida (“flowered”), Nevada (“snowy”)—the name California itself is drawn from a fantasy land mentioned in Don Quixote, and before that a different land imagined in a chivalric romance by Rodríguez de Montalvo. Which suggests how readily you, too, can project on a land made up of such shifting plates. It is a shock to encounter, say, a tenth-generation Californian—though they do exist, great-grandchildren of dusty legacy and agricultural ingenuity, often the great-grandsons of early ranchers with some Mexican or Spanish romance thrown in.
Consider that whenever America encountered problems with coexistence, which sounds better in Spanish, convivencia, it expanded its territories westward, so that a slow seep of individualism spread from the tight eastern harbors out toward the hyperindividualism of the west, which may go a long way toward explaining why people from the middle states tend to be so other-directed and polite, a legacy of making do enough to declare, as in the license plates of Oklahoma, hey, this state is okay.
Whereas, in order to feel their own state is okay, citizens of California must perform elaborate tricks, yogic, Buddhist or from some other polyverse. To California they come to go beyond the quais of okayness, to find their big dreams, seeing it as Don Quixote might: the state will be a kindly queen, allowing them to realize, in acreage and billboards, their fantasies.
This was how my father, a resourceful, adaptable person, well suited in psyche and profession to the state, used it. An ambitious restless geophysicist, he was dedicated to, as one of his company’s business cards had it, the evaluation and exploration of natural resources.
Part of the liberty of the state, of course, has to do with the weather: it rarely constrains you, and when it does, the constraint has the dimensions of a Greek tragedy, as only the biggest ecological disasters set foot here: earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides, fires, geological capstones fitting the dimensions of the state, the heroic flaws and grand destinies of those drawn to it. If every state has a psychological age appropriate to it, California is forever an adolescent, dreaming in bright colors and assuming suicidal proportions at its misfortunes.
Which may be one of the reasons, right before we moved into its take-all-comers embrace, the state assumed leadership in that youngest of decades, the sixties: the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the rollicking music, and the rocking hills of Haight-Ashbury all fit the national demographic bulge of youth. Accordingly, the majority of my friends’ parents came from the following range, one drawn from the disappointed dreams of youth: drifters, horse-race gamblers, Vietnam vets, café chess players, social agitators, drug users, therapists, famous musicians, polyamorists or ex–psych ward types.
Many were divorced or separated or lived in
alternative arrangements. By contrast my family seemed solid and well endowed, conventional, with two working parents, their indiscretions unknown. California and the times may not have made much of a dent in my parents’ Old World creamed herring and Mediterranean tomato-cucumber-lemon-onion diet, but it did allow them to wear peasant shirts from my father’s many travels at all the many parties they hosted, parties in which my mother, an engineer at the public transit system, would invariably at some point don her green jeweled belly-dance outfit to shimmy before the guests, ululating as she had taught many of them to do, often accompanied by the happy jiggling students she also taught in a swirl of cloths on Sunday mornings, all before she invited my father up to do a sort of loose-hipped sheikh imitation with her before all of them: California at its multiethnic apotheosis.
Come to the party and we’ll dance for you!
The one common social denominator in any setting was this: the body, its hopes, its staving off of decay.
My response to this awareness of social disparity—all that we seemed to have in relation to all others seemed to lack—was to try to bring people in to what seemed the potluck bounty of our house, and even without my intervention, an uncountable many came and lived with us. A friend and her confused mother; the daughter of a pot-smoking vet who later became something of a celebrity murderer; a German exchange student; a polarity therapist; a secretary; a massage therapist; a lost philosopher; a friend with stepmother troubles; a friend with stepfather troubles. The list goes on. Beyond the guests, a succession of people lived in the dank basement apartment, and one had an ex-boyfriend who came by, parking his red-painted former milk truck on our cul-de-sac for a week. I would bring him treats until I finally asked my parents if he too could not live in the house, one that had been bought for $25,000 back when that area of South Berkeley, not far from the invisible but real border with Oakland, was considered too close to racial troubles. In our basement kitchen, this latest of our inhabitants penned for his dented guitar a song that ricochets around my head sometimes, a Californian anthem with one of those strident melodies of childhood:
I’m a drifter and I drift this world around
And I know who I want to be and just where I’ve been
To be free to flow with the wind.
And despite or because of all its disappointed dreaming drifters, the town seemed to function, believing itself a microcosm of the world, the best of the best to be found there, believing itself potent on the world stage. Alice Waters was starting Chez Panisse, the gourmet ghetto mentality of the town was radiating out, the town was claiming its position as the only American city to have its own foreign policy and my father’s grandiosity linked with the town’s.
Just as, after being a shepherd studying sheep husbandry, my father abandoned pastoral charms to go bigger, mastering geothermal energy as a means, in his view, to save the world, every family trip we ever took abandoned pleasure and instead involved long pilgrimages to sulfurous, spitting sections of the earth where the grandeur of nature dwarfed us. In relaxation, my father, and hence our family, never proved lazy.
Even after the fog of dementia started to pour in, even as he started his long slow dying, I would, as ever, try to make the phone a friend and call him. If I asked how he was doing, he might say: Well, some medieval colleagues and I were trying to figure out all the names of God and the colleagues were really quite congenial. Or: Someone handed me a capsule containing a worm that could destroy humanity and I was just figuring out the best way to save everyone.
Like the small liberal town he had chosen, he’d had a long-term utopian mission to save the world. He had started an Israeli cultural circle and would invite prominent Bedouins, Palestinians, and Arabs to come speak to a volatile group of talkers. He supported causes, soup kitchens, candidates. The Department of Energy named him, with great ceremony and a placard, an energy pioneer. He did what he could in his way, writing a poem that appeared in a millennial anthology, Prayers for a Thousand Years, that had a last line that went something like this: May I in my small way do the best I can, knowing that for my time I did the best I could for others.
And for all his love of trafficking with high and mighty causes, people, places, he remained a socialist, a person who wore the same holey plaid shirts, who would say, if a vase broke: It’s just a thing. He never went out without a roll of quarters in one of his threadbare pockets, ready to dispense change to people in need. He was unafraid of homeless people found sleeping in his car and would give them a ride wherever they needed. When at age fourteen I was caught stealing sunglasses for my brother’s birthday, from a drugstore on Telegraph Avenue, the open-air post-hippie emporium street that hosted so many lost denizens, under the influence of all those friends the products of those broken post-sixties Californian homes, my father did not scold me. Instead he merely shook his head, hours after my release from a scary graffitied cell, and said: Look, Edie, it’s never the thing that counts when you give a gift, it is the thought. Thought is everything.
In later life, accordingly, he inhabited his body as if thought were everything, the body an uneasy, stolen perch, an afterthought, a car in which his homeless self happened to find itself. Once, on a business trip while I was living on the Upper West Side, he visited me and said goodbye to me on Broadway. I watched him walk away, his back disappearing into the sidewalk masses. A father barely skimming the earth, he carried not even a briefcase, a stick-skinny man whose movement radiated out from a loose central axis, wrists flopping out a bit as if the wind could spirit him and his untailored suit away.
Sometimes, during my father’s long dying, our upstate–New York family flew west to spend some summer month in one housesitting situation or another, caring for this canary or that dog, my daughters delighted to be in the ease of extended family and the weather that surrounded them. Their sociable grandfather, who had always had a bipolar way of saying goodbye—either expert in the gooey and endless Jewish art of goodbye, or Israeli in the way he could say, for example, to someone he was chauffeuring, I love you, now get out!—would be equally delighted by the multiplication of family.
His party never ended, the goodbyes never stopped, and meanwhile the meds worked their damage, fighting a war in his liver, the meds that said to his corporeal being, essentially, the opposite of I love you, now get out!
I destroy you; now you must stay in life!
A few months after my father’s death, the attending doctor described Bob, the last person in that last room, as a kind and dedicated representative of the art of nursing, a practice for which I only gain respect each passing year of my own life as a two-time mother and undifferentiated mortal.
There Bob was, on the phone in that expanse of time, his voice so dry and tight it almost sounded sarcastic, conveying over the unclotted line the atmosphere of the emergency room, thick with death, telling me: You want to say your goodbyes.
Yes? I said.
You can talk, he can hear you, he said.
He could hear but could he listen? Back to the character of this father of mine. In the same way that I was living in exile, out in New York, forever hankering for the calm skies of my northern Californian childhood, the freedom of being able to go outdoors with your children any time you darn well chose, my father had lived his whole life in exile. We grew up in a little Israel of the imagination, set, provisionally, in the liberal airs of Berkeley. My father’s Israel had begun in 1933, where he had moved when he was three. Prior to that, his family had lived in the small Polish town of Przmsl where his father, Joshua, had been a woodsman and a community leader. When anti-Semitism roved their town like some fanged beast, Joshua scented survival and took his family to Haifa. Soon after, all the family—the uncles and grandfathers and cousins who remained in Poland—were killed. Survival instinct, therefore, lived deep in the nature or nurture of the family.
Someone who married into the Meidavs traced our genealogy back point by diasporic point through the Maharal of Prague, the Baal S
hem Tov and Rashi, through Lucca, Italy, through the house of David and all the way back to some humble Palestinian second-century-BCE sandalmaker named Yohanan, and something about this millennial-long connection to the land paradoxically provided succor to my increasingly leftist father who loved the ideation of the Palestinian thinker Sari Nusseibeh. To his death, this American exile remained an exponent of the two-state solution, clearly a yored, a person who had “come down from” Israel, a distant survivor of an era and not, as our Israeli cousins liked to point out, a person on the ground, like his more rightist brother who had remained in Haifa.
Part of my father’s lofty idealism—so well suited to both California and his Israel of the 1950s, before a moral conscience started riddling certain sectors—meant that a favorite book among the many antique books in his collections was a set of lithographs done by David Roberts, Travels to the Holy Land, in which the Englishman had penned lovely romanticizing images of Bedouins hunkered down by a well, little aquarelle-like images of the land and its peoples coexisting, and for copies of books such as these, preserving the memory of a time before strife, my father would travel to book fairs seeking out unfoxed copies of the early Holy Land.
In this way and in so many others, my father was ideally suited to California. Because California seems to listen but insists on rose-colored landscapes. It has the compelling charisma of a narcissist, one which lures emigrants out to fulfill internal, narcissistic dictates. In its royal beneficence it makes lifestyle urges, ethical or sybaritic, holy, the body its temple.
Stay simple, a handwritten imperative on the cover of a notebook that one of our Berkeley house’s many inmates dictated. Stay simple, an idea perplexing my child’s mind. Was it better to stay simple so one could feel the world and all its categories better, anew, as if one were truly an innocent? Or was it better to gain in the intricacies of the world, cultural or natural, so that one could better understand its phenomena? Is it better to know the name of a leaf or does knowing the name mask appreciation of the leaf?