I’m squirming in my seat tonight. This rehearsal is painful. We’re getting closer to performance, so we’re into the details. Repeating passages again and again, trying to get the rhythm right, and the words. Nothing inspires me about being here right now. I’m not here because of Dad or Kathy, or because of beauty, or because of music or prayer. It is only the requirement of attendance that got me in my seat, on time, attentive.
More work with the men of the choir tonight, and I think of all the office work I still have to do when I get home before bed, things I need to have done before I go in to work in the morning. I don’t have time to be here. And why do things I choose always have an element of discomfort? Who designed these chairs to be so uncomfortable? I take some solace in memories, which seems to be my new modus operandi on the other side of an event showing me life is a blend of not only present and future but the past too.
I’d spent hours in these folding chairs accompanying my dad to his opera choir rehearsals when I was a child.
Dad sang with the Anchorage Opera Chorus when I was young, occasionally singing short solo parts like the gatekeeper in Rigoletto. I remember the conductor as a woman of extreme talent and beauty. Her name was Elvira Voth. Pitying my attendance at Dad’s rehearsals, perhaps, she gave me the task of writing down measures she wanted to revisit over the course of a rehearsal. I took my responsibility seriously, sitting on a hard metal seat just behind her, as single-mindedly intent as her choristers were. She spoke the measures to me over her shoulder as she continued conducting: measure 36, measure 141. I wrote them down dutifully.
We attended the free opera dress rehearsals as a family. I remember just before the storm scene in Rigoletto someone yelling up from the orchestra pit, “The bass drum! Can anyone find the bass drum?”
Dad’s resonant voice supported melodies of praise at church for most of my growing-up. More than these formal performances, though, I remember him singing songs from Fiddler on the Roof in the car on the way to and from a small cabin north of Anchorage, singing arias and spirituals walking through the house, waking us up singing the military call “You’ve got to get up …” or the old folk song “Lazy bones, sleeping in the sun …” He sang into his deep laughter, and even if we were annoyed as kids, we always ended up laughing too.
Dad’s laugh started deep and slow, suddenly erupting into prolonged musical interlude, his whole body convulsing, eyes crinkled shut, head back. It was the kind of laugh that came on like a tidal wave, a swell that swallowed the room in its exuberance. I remember him sitting at the head of the table one night after dinner, dishes cleared, and reading to us “The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry. He laughed so hard tears ran down his cheeks and he had to steady himself against the table to keep from falling over. I didn’t have to understand what was so funny; his laugh was its own entity.
When I was still in high school and starting to understand that a parent is someone you know only a part of, I went to coffee with my dad. Coffee shops were new then, and Café del Mundo on Northern Lights was our first haunt before Kaladi Brothers opened. It was a cold clear day in Anchorage, and a sheer covering of ice climbed up the windows of the coffee shop, sun glinting off of the ice crystals and spattering on the walls inside.
I asked Dad the awkward questions of someone becoming an adult talking to an adult, trying on this new relationship, not knowing how to make it work but wanting it to, trying to know myself through knowing him better. What would he do if he could do anything at all, and what would he change about his life if he could?
He was too tired to answer fully, and we were too new to this kind of adult conversation. “I think I might have pursued music more seriously,” he said, and his soft brown eyes looked off into that ice-diffused sunlight somewhere I couldn’t reach, and the music was there too, my dad and the music, hanging in that light.
I remember looking at him differently, this dad I idolized in many ways, seeing him as a person with dreams that sometimes got tangled up in life, seeing him with longings that went unfulfilled.
The same voice that laughed and sang also erupted in anger and frustration, with a volume and intensity matched to his physical size. His quick temper had been legendary in his younger days, both at home and at work. When I worked at his law firm as a receptionist one summer, a colleague of his, after a staff meeting, stomped through the lobby where I sat at the desk. He hesitated briefly, his eyes darting as though chased by his frustration, and blurted, “Your father … is very … passionate!” and continued on to his office. I wanted to laugh, because I knew it was true. I wanted to say, “Oh, you have no idea.”
It wasn’t Dad’s temper that was hardest to deal with. That tended to be a flash in the pan, a momentary raising of the roof. It was directed. It was not unkind. Then it was over. He would come upstairs while I was still fuming and ask how things were going—which would, of course, make me even more furious. But what was hardest about Dad was his ceaseless judgment of himself and, by extension, us. “He always thought of himself as that Kansas farm-boy,” one of his office colleagues said, referring to Dad’s wrestling with the various elements of his nature. Within the span of one conversation, Dad would marvel at the daring of a paraglider, and then say, “Those guys wouldn’t have the guts to start their own business.” It was a proclivity that said more about his own father than himself, a feeling of never quite measuring up, one of those pieces of self that sticks to each following generation like gum to a shoe. When that trait appeared in my own life, I thought that it said more about him than it did me—until I grew up and had to accept that regardless of its origin, it was mine to work through.
The expectations Dad expressed were meant to help us overcome these insecurities, to see that we were better than any doubts we had about ourselves. I found myself unwilling to admit my own shortcomings to him. I wanted him to see that I’d met his expectations. After I left for the army, I remember him asking several times, “How are things going? Do you need anything? You paying your bills okay? You’ll let me know if you need any help, won’t you?”
“Sure, Dad,” I’d say, but I was more likely to take a second job flipping burgers than ask him for anything. The couple of times I ran short on cash, I called my brother Sam for a loan. Dad would have been hurt by this, but when I held up my understanding of his expectations against my role as daughter, I paid more attention to his expectations.
If passion and music go hand in hand, maybe it makes sense that so many of my childhood memories had to do with music: sitting at the piano in countless recitals, braids hanging down my back; playing the cello at our dining room table; singing in a sixth-grade musical; going with Dad to sing with the children’s choir in the Anchorage Opera. I sang with the Chorale and Chamber Choir at Duke, rushing to rehearsals after my ROTC lab in the woods, one time arriving still wearing camouflage paint on my face in order to be there on time. Music was always a part of my life, and I never thought much about it until I was older. Listening to and performing music helped me express passions and yearnings within community in a way I would not have known how to otherwise. Music was portable too; after college, I sang with choirs in the different communities where I lived during eight years in the army. The first piece of furniture I bought was a piano. On moving to Seattle, my first action after finding an apartment was to find and audition for a local choral group. When I went back to Alaska for Christmas, I sometimes sang in the St. Mary’s choir with Dad and occasionally with Kathy. In a family in which talking about things that mattered was difficult, this musical connection between Dad and me bore a hieratic significance. Music was a steadfast friend in a turbulent life, resistant to passing time and changing circumstances. The tremor of a bow across a string, a chorus of voices, breath flowing across a reed—all echoed my own ache for connection through music and musicians, a need as deep as breathing.
So that’s how I made it here tonight. Even at times when I don’t feel it, I understand music’s work in me, know it with an
academic surety even when emotionally I am as dry as dust.
I suck down music as essence, as someone dying of thirst in the Sahara sucks down water. I gorge on it. Most of it runs off me like rains off parched soil. I can’t keep it down. The sick rarely understand what they really need, or how much they can handle. All I know is that I crave it like a drug. When I signed up to audition for the Requiem, it seemed perfectly natural to hope for respite in the opportunity to sing. But this isn’t respite. It is work, sometimes wonderful, sometimes wrenching.
Mozart’s Requiem, like all Masses written to honor the dead, has been a favorite of mine since a class on music and poetry at Duke. The possibility of singing Mozart’s Requiem with one of the greatest musicians of all time thrills me more than anything else I can imagine; it is the only thing inspiring imagination in a self that feels otherwise flat and dead. But somewhere inside of me I want it with everything I have, no matter how painful the rehearsal. Listening to the words again (and again!) as we work to get each sound and word right, I remember the liturgy I love. The Requiem combines the elements of this liturgy that supports, guides, and instructs me in worship I no longer understand with the music I crave. I need all the guidance I can get.
CHAPTER 10
A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY
When man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering, or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden.
—Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Certain winter mornings in Alaska, when the humidity is high and temperatures low, ice crystals cling to the trees in a brilliant coating and rest suspended in the air like a bright veil. Time is arrested until temperatures warm just enough for the crystals to dissolve. Suffering is like this. The rest of the world is postponed. Unlike the hanging crystals that inspire awe, however, suffering is a jealous and lonely state. It can’t abide the company of anything else. It is greedy; it demands all of one’s energies. It demands a focus on absence and loss, and cleverly tricks one into believing that there is no other possibility.
For two months in Alaska, I packed up and moved, donated, or sold everything in my childhood home. Practical considerations dictated efficiency: the difficulties of maintaining insurance on an empty house, completing tasks from long distances, the sagging housing market. I think we all knew that to leave this home required moving quickly, as is necessary any time one leaves a place where memories, hopes, and dreams are buried deep. Our home was a two-story, open-floor-plan Northwestern style that, at the time it was built, was considered quite contemporary. The loft was open upstairs, with Sam’s and my bedrooms on one side of the house, and Max and Ned’s shared bedroom and the bathroom on the other. In between, the balcony looked down to the living room and the front hallway, and windows looked out to the trees, and the mountains and ocean to the west. The four of us had two primary tasks: emptying the house, and finishing the deck Dad had started. Sam, Max, and Ned stayed for a couple of weeks, and then came and went from Alaska as their work allowed. My boss had given me a blank check. I knew I needed to be there until things were completed. I also knew we needed to move with intention.
Just before Dad and Kathy’s Hulahula trip, they had emailed photos of Dad in canvas work overalls driving a rented bulldozer, putting in concrete for the supports of a new deck off the dining room of our home. In the photo, Dad grins into the camera, happy to be doing work that allowed him to see and enjoy the results. He’d planned a large deck extending off the front of the house like the prow of a ship, out over the yard and toward the forest.
We had decided to finish the deck before selling the house. This wasn’t a practical decision; each of us wanted—needed—to finish Dad’s project, moving under separate but similar burdens of wanting somehow to make things right, not yet understanding that this was impossible, that there were some things that could not be made right in any of the ways we then understood.
None of us were carpenters, even avocationally. Among us, we didn’t have the skills to do what Dad had begun or the energy to figure it out. So we found a carpenter who did most of the work, and he kindly obliged our desire to play a small part. The carpenter showed me how to force the boards into straight lines with one tool while nailing them down with another. Even lumber, made for straight clean lines, needed help to fulfill its purpose.
Along with the photos of Dad came pictures of two small dogs he and Kathy had taken home and considered adopting. He wrote the emails from the dogs’ point of view. “What do you think of these people we’re considering adopting?” I thought all concerned were great. Dad and Kathy decided at the last minute not to keep the dogs. They still liked to travel often enough that new pets would have been too difficult. I was glad for the dogs that Dad and Kathy had made the decision they did.
Someone suggested hiring someone to clean out the house. The idea nauseated me. No stranger would walk through the house to box up spices and toothpaste and books. Books, especially.
Books were things we had shared most next to music in our home, by reading and by way of gifts. Dad frequently gave as Christmas gifts books he had discovered the previous year: Neruda, Borges, a book on the nature of God. One distant family member went through the house and indicated piles of books he was interested in. I tried to disregard the intrusion and ignored the request. Dad’s books stayed with us.
The books on Dad’s bedside table were all books I had loaned him during his February visit or given him before: three books of Greek plays, a book on Tolkien, and Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. The last book was dog-eared a third of the way through. Knowing that our eyes had wandered the same pages, our minds had followed the same story, brought Dad back as though our minds could walk the same place together again if they chose. And it was an appropriate story too: a father in the Midwest and his children, smiling in the face of pain. A father who gave his life for his children. A father who crossed a river, and a child realizing it wasn’t yet time to join him.
Did you like these, Dad? What did you get out of them? We never talked about them.
Dad’s bedside-table books—into a box to come home with me.
We sorted clothes, filling boxes and carloads for Goodwill, starting other boxes for ourselves. Kathy and I wore the same size and had frequently shared clothes. Sometimes, at the urging of my dad, who worried that I didn’t spend enough money or time on my clothes, she bought me the same clothes she bought for herself.
I put two of Dad’s suits into a box to be sent to me. I’m not sure why. They hung in my closet for the next six years.
For goodness’ sake, he would have said. Give them to someone who needs them. I don’t need them now. He’s laughing, because he is now in a place filled with joy. You can’t imagine, Shan, it’s beautiful.
I need to keep these, Dad. I want them. I promise I’ll give them away when I’m ready.
We donated the ping-pong table in the garage and other sports equipment to Alaska Children’s Services, where Dad had done probono legal work for years. He had a soft place in his heart for kids who grew up without opportunity, and had schemed many times about starting a school, maybe on a farm—with ponies!—to help them. He’d talked about the pony farm for grandchildren too. I don’t know where the pony idea came from, or where he would have built it, but his plans abounded.
I packed up my room. Kathy had redecorated it when she and Dad overhauled the house ten years before. I’d spent the first night home from college at Christmas in tears. My room was no longer my room. Life had moved forward without me. Along with her sewing supplies, my varsity letter jacket from swimming and debate hung in the closet. I packed it into a box for Seattle. Kathy had framed and hung a couple of watercolors I’d painted when I was twelve. One was a doll leaning against a shelf of books. The other showed waves breaki
ng against rocks where a lighthouse stood. I packed those too.
Then there was the attic, a plywood, windowless room lit by bare bulbs and filled with boxes from thirty years of my family’s life. It was accessed by a hobbit-sized door off Sam’s room. I entered with trepidation—no, dread. It was a storage shed of memories, some long forgotten, ready to spring like a jack-in-the-box at any moment. It smelled of old cardboard, plywood, and dust. The bulbs shone like interrogation lights, exposing memories naked and cold.
The process was this: sort and pack in the attic, and then deliver to the garage. Sam had divided things up in the garage depending on where they were to be shipped. I tried not to get too involved in any particular box. It was impossible.
One box opened to a stack of soccer pictures. Me at ten: bobbed brown hair, an orange team T-shirt, and a broad gap-toothed smile. I remembered playing fullback and wilting from the charges downfield from one aggressive forward. Then she scored. Dad asked, Why don’t you just charge back at her? He asked it with a smile. The next game I did. How could I not? I wanted only to make my dad proud. Sprinting toward each other, she and I collided at full speed. We fell flat on the wet grassy field. The screaming parents on the sidelines hushed, stopped moving, before resuming their din. She never charged my side of the field again. I think of that story as defining the person I became.
Were you proud of me, Dad?
Boxes of files—to be read or shredded.
Underneath a pile of papers, I found a plaque with a brassy musical note on it, an eighth note with a flourished tail. I’d won it at a piano competition in junior high. I played Grieg and something else I don’t remember. I tied for first, and back at home after the competition, Dad said, “You didn’t deserve to win. You didn’t practice enough.” I was mad. I knew he was right.
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