Much to think about

By the end of August my thoughts were full of four pressing and painful issues:

1. What to do about the neighbor Nancy.
2. The meaning of my father's passing.
3. Whether to try for another baby and risk more sorrow.
4. Money.

Money was the constant theme. How to survive, really. The economy was a mess: inflation was upwards toward 20% a year, more in some spheres. Taxes were up and up, as were groceries and gas. Everything but our income, which was not tied into the cost of living. We were slowly slipping into financial doom.

As for Nancy, I held a lot of affection for her in my heart. I thought she could be a neat friend. The strange things she had said and done were mysteries to me, and didn't stick well to her in my mind. I thought maybe it was all due to her husband, who was a strange character we seldom saw. He had set up a leather-working shop in the old carriage house, but when the kids were over there playing, they never saw him do anything but lie on the couch he'd moved in there. So as thoughts of Nancy went round and round in my mind, I alternated between feeling mystifed and loving. Very confusing. As for what I might do to ensure the better outcome, I had no idea.

My father's death caused me primarily to think more of my mother's welfare. She seemed happy enough, and in one way we were all relieved: she had much more freedom to come and go and visited us much more frequently, sleeping in our family room off the kitchen, where the kids loved to visit her. Of course she was not confined there but she carved out a little niche in that spare room and often had her knitting out and a cookie for the kids. So his loss was not ours, not in any immediate way.

But then there was the loss of my little ones. The tiny body I had held after my body ejected it caused a constant underlying ripple in my awareness still, after nearly a year, and that was just the first. I had wanted a large family, and somehow I was failing to fulfill that dream. I had failed to provide 9 months of nurture for these two eagerly awaited new members of our family while they built their little earthly homes deep inside of me, and it all seemed so wrong. The emptiness was filled with the doctor's ringing voice: you will never bear another child.

But I didn't feel that way. I really felt I could bring a new baby into the world, as I had 3 times before.

I was still in the 6 months of rest that doctor's partner had recommended before I should try again, that tumultuous late August, so I didn't need to make any decisions. But it weighed on me like poverty and loneliness and death.

So my mind was filled with much to think about, and my heart stood on the precipice of deep pain. There was nothing to do but keep doing, and loving those whose care I had successfully found myself entrusted with. Time would do something with all this...

1977.

Adjustments and renewals

For years my mother had kept the peace, and the past year had been stressful, but from the time my father had stopped drinking 6 or 7 months before his death, her days with him had become sweet and companionable.

Such was the irony of the peace and loneliness she felt in his absence.

I called her often just to keep her company. And she came for prolonged visits, which we all enjoyed. And she enjoyed her grandchildren and singing with John at night while they did the dishes together.

We watched August evaporate and looked forward to the first days of school, then the first fall colors.

And all the while I thought about my sister, whose baby was due in 6 months, then 5. And I began to believe again that I could have a baby, too. No matter how discouraging the doctor had been.

The thought brought a bright smile to my inner person. It felt right and good, and I was willing to give it a try.

I felt renewed. The experience of my father's death might be the beginnings of a new life.

Funeral days

My father's body was cremated. My mother was annoyed by the call she received to bring his perfectly good suit that someone else might be able to wear to the funeral parlor for the cremation. She resented that it would go to waste. But they insisted that he had to be cremated in a suit.

So that was the end of the old wool suit and the body it had housed for years and years.

The ashes were placed in an urn, which had somehow arrived at the cemetery. A tiny hole had been dug and we stood around the urn and the hole and shared a few thoughts. Then in the sterile way of modern burials we left. Later the urn with its spent ashes magically found its way into the hole and was covered, but we were saved having all that disturbing sort of memory.

As if we could think of anything else.

Later that day we had the memorial service. My brother had come, and his wife, and my sister was there still. And the five of us were there. We shook hands with old friends and acquaintances after a routine service in the bright sanctuary of the Presbyterian church I had grown up in. And later that my parents had joined and served in.

And then we went to the home of the friends who had picked me up at the train the week before. Everyone sat around talking about my father, and how alcohol had killed him. Their grieving was made tolerable by a round or two of drinks...

I didn't drink. I had, until I had wised up, but that was well in the past. So I was jarred and unsettled, and was glad when we had to leave for the three-hour drive home.

The goats needed to be milked, and we needed to regroup as a family in our own way, with soberness and also sobriety.

Turning points

The next days were full of turmoil and turning points.

We took care of the neighbors' goats while they were away. I went over and got my instructions, and then for the next three days I followed those instructions. But when Nancy got back she accused me of stealing half a bag of their feed. And no thank yous.

I got a call from my mother. My father wasn't doing well. As soon as they gave him a treatment - draining his belly of excess fluid - he deteriorated again. And each treatment left him without energy. Back in the winter the doctor had said that if he had one more drink it would kill him and he never had another, though he continued to smoke. It looked like it might already be too late.

The last days of July sweated themselves away with mosquito-y milkings at night and fly-hazed chores in the morning. Milk filled the fridge and the freezer, and on the counter the new wheels of cheese tended to mold in the unrelenting 90-degree temperatures and over-abundant humidities.

Then the call came. My father was in the hospital. The last treatment had been too rough on him. I needed to go home.

I left by train that night, and prayed the peculiar prayer that he would die before I got there: I was too afraid to see him weakened and dying. Lifelong friends were to pick me up at the Stamford station and take me straight to the hospital. When I got there he was alive, and I did see him. He was comatose.

His arms were bruised. Propped up, he half-lay under the white sheets. Mercifully he had no tubes: he hadn't wanted them back a few years before when he made those kinds of decisions, calmly, unconcernedly, in happier days. He had wanted nothing extraordinary and he had nothing extraordinary now.

I drove home my mother and my sister, who had come, and talked about this and that. I slept fitfully in the heat with the big old window fan blowing on me, the same as had kept me sane in the miserable summer days of my childhood. I consumed quantities of cold water and thought of my father with no tubes. How thirsty he must be! When morning came, we drove back to the hospital.

My sister had come in some days before, and together we visited and held vigil. My sister was a few months pregnant. Her enthusiasm about having a third child was under control. Her bump made me envious, and also hopeful that someday we too might have another child.

But we were there to be with my father, and I was not content to turn my back on him. I went to his bedside and talked to the unconscious familiar and unfamiliar face.

He responded with a grunt.

So I talked some more. And I asked him if he wanted some water.

He nodded vigorously, so I used a straw to dribble an inch or two of water at a time into his dry mouth. He scared me by choking on it, so I asked if he wanted more. He nodded earnestly.

So all afternoon I dribbled the life-giving water into his eager mounth and talked to him. He didn't say anything, but expressed his interest with small nods, all the while receiving the next inch of water eagerly.

He knew I was there, and I wondered if that worried him. We had a deep communion during those hours. I was able to give him that life-sustaining potion, water. Or love.

The next day I needed to hurry back to take care of family and farm. I was there a day when the call came: he had died. My mother and sister had opted not to go early to the hospital the morning after I left, and a few hours into the day they received the dreaded call. It was August 19, 1977. My father was dead at age 68 of liver disease. And kidney failure due to dehydration.

I ran next door and asked Nancy if she could take care of the goats while we went home for the funeral. She refused.

I got on the phone and could find no one home. All were on vacation. I begged Nancy.

Finally she relented. I thanked her and we piled in the car for the three-hour drive to Connecticut and the intense days ahead.

A death...

The inevitable part about animals is that they die.

We were still sorrowing for VJ's puppy Charlie, when another loss struck.

Fritz was milking, VJ was feeding. It was dark in the barn. Erica didn't come to the feed trough. VJ went to find her, and tripped over her body.

She was lying in the middle of the barn, cold, with her tongue hanging out and foam in her mouth.

We never knew why she died. It could have been a poisonous plant in the new hay a neighbor had given us. Or it could just have been the change in hay.

It mattered so we could prevent the same thing happening to another goat. There she was, one of our milkers, VJ's goat, bred for spring babies, and she was dead.

John dug another hole in the ground and buried her.

Her death made us feel more vulnerable in this undertaking of ours.