My Dad Died In The Dining Room With A Smile On His Face

By Bill Coolidge

Wandering waters poke along the black banks, sketchy currents appear on the backside of darkened clay oyster piles. Slowly a brushed bronze cloud cover overcomes a pencil thin gap of blue, the shadow of sun’s remnant rays. I feel the heaviness.

And the gratitude. Here at land’s end, exposed to the next incoming storm due tomorrow night; the silent tidal current comes and retreats, every six hours. A breathing, tilted by the orbiting earth and the sway of the ocean, in and out, in and out. I am not able to pray anymore, I exhale with the outgoing tide, inhale with the switching, an icon I can count on. Stunned into silence on September 11, I watched the ocean and her tides, at 6 and 12, 6 and then at midnight, I crawled into my bed. Held, suspended, ready in the morning to look out my window, turn on the radio. Maintain the vigil. Witnessing is how I pray now.

Joan von Mechow lived in this apartment where I now sit and write. For twenty years she sat where I sit, facing Carrot Island, Shackleford Banks and the Atlantic Ocean. In 1980 she told her daughter: “I want to die here.”

A hospital bed was placed next to the three south facing windows. With her bed cranked up abit, she could watch the vibrancy of sailboats, her friends walking to town, and the surprising fluency of dolphins. All the while, the sun’s heat radiated through her windows. Day by day, Joan von Mechow watched this progression of tides, moon and sun. Breath by breath she took in all that God’s creation gives. Breathing out she released what was given to her: sight, love, passion.

She died where I sit, in Beaufort’s first apartment building constructed in the mid-1930’s. People said: “What? Two stories high, it’ll never go here!”

Up it went, brick facing, thick walled. “Hurricane proof!” declared the builder, A Mr. Piner, whose daughter Lucy still lives in Beaufort and bursts out with a laugh whenever she talks about the town and her dad’s apartment house.

Seventy years later, plenty of hurricanes have come ashore and this old square brick building withstood all the winds, waves and rain that came her way. I’ve only lived here a few months but I’ve seen high winds. Sailboats dragging their anchor, the street out in front flooded, my kayaks tied down, flipped and nearly dragged away.

At night, I can get bearings by searching out the greens and reds, the buoys leading freighters through Beaufort’s inlet; the white blinking of the range marker, to my west and far to my left the tantalizing blinking of Cape Lookout, blink then a twenty second pause. Blink. As darkness enfolds, a few sailboats in the harbor switch on their anchor lights, little stars close to the water. All is well, I turn in.

I want to die where Joan died, I want to die how she died. Slowly. Watching the dynamic of wind and sea, fish and bird, sitting next to my beloved on a hospital bed built for two. Beneath the doorbell to my apartment is a taped piece of white paper: Joan von Mechow, 1105 C Front Street. And the ringer still works.

My dad died on a hospital bed in the dining room of the house he built for his new family a half century ago. When I was growing up in Marshall, Michigan, we lived a block from where the sidewalks ended yielding to farms, fields, and an occasional house. But then in the 1980’s a consolidation took place and a huge county-wide high school was built one mile away. First came new streets then the subdivisions and now the cars. My dad would sit, angled in his bed, watch the traffic, out and back, school buses, kids hotrodding, parents in stationwagons. And he would listen to country music on WCHL, the local AM radio station. My dad who loved Guy Lombardo, Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters began listening to Waylon Jennings, Garth Brooks and Dolly Parton. I’d sit in one of the dining room chairs next to his bed and watch the traffic, listen to the forlorn love songs while he closed his eyes and napped. I could hardly hear or feel his breathing. And one day I couldn’t. There he lay, just the smallest hint of a smile, a memory revisiting him, taking him away back to his own childhood of farms and fields.

How do you want to cross over? On a sailboat? A second floor water view apartment, in the house you lived and loved for fifty years?

My mother-in-law will be moving this summer to be close to us. She has her eye on a little cottage near the Tar River. I’ve canoed the Tar and watched the Blue Herons, the Kingfishers and a covey of black ducks. But it’s the scent I remember. River fecundity. Sunken mud, gasping, percolating upwards, the riveted holes releasing brackish water. Down stream the Tar merges with Green Mill Run and in “little” Washington becomes Pamlico Sound, a pathway to the Atlantic. She will probably die there amidst the cypress, the pine and the rising and falling of the black river.

My tears are private. That outgoing ship, navigating the channel at night, bound for Wilmington; that solitary pelican flying east toward Middle Sound, both heralding the downfall of night’s curtain. I am alone, here, tonight. Surely I can say what I desire? How my passions curb, bank then flow over the oysterbeds, curdling around the piers, honing in, honing in, asking me “Is it now? If not now, when? Are you ready?”