Thumbs up, Dad

 7:34 AM on a Monday

It hits me that my dad has been dead for over a year. 

Suddenly, the air around me will ache with an absence. 

A few pulse beats 

Phantom limb syndrome.

For 15 years I was a visitor to my dad's prison, 

where his mind did time inside a decaying facility.

Life sentence. No parole. 

His mind paced around the cracked and damaged cells,

watched the walls close in,

Saw the exits jammed with broken furniture of betrayals,

As a visitor I would bring snacks, talk about the weather,

see if he needed anything 'inside there.' 

He would look at me like a stupid child.

 I was here but I wasn't really here. 

At the end of my visitation 

I could leave and therefore missed the entire terror of prison. 

In some ways visitors make you lonelier. They remind you that life 

still races outside, the bustle you used to be apart of,

now makes you feel all the lonelier. 

In some ways it's better to have no visitors in prison, which

is what my dad did toward the end.

No visitors accepted. He would stare out from the crumbling cell

and refuse any requests for chit chat and sweets.

No more fucking conversations about a weather which did not impact him.

No more talk about aunts and uncles who were serving time at different prisons.

No more pitying looks. Please go away. The prisoner is seeing no visitors.

The slow wind down of 15 years.

As the walls caved in and the prison consumed him,

he turned his head to his right and vanished,

leaving behind the rubble.

***

I blame the holidays.

Mother's Day makes me think of Father.

Father's Day makes me think of lawn mowers.

4th of July makes me think of St. Patrick's Day.

It was always that way. 

Emotions and memories mismatched

with the public mood. 

On mother's day I looked for pictures of her 

and kept running into pictures of us with my Dad

for the last 15 years pretty much all her pictures are 

with my Dad in his wheelchair or hospital bed, or death bed.

always smiling like 'this is great. We're having a good time,'

those smiles you see at children's hospital. 

The desperate parental teeth baring grin, 

clinging to the pretend happiness of living.

All those hundreds of pictures of my mom 

standing next to my prisoner dad trapped inside his body,

giving a 'thumbs up.' A stupefying 'thumbs up' like Neil Armstrong

popping his head out of the Apollo. A 'thumbs up' I've since copied

for all the unsettling moments in my life. 

Hey, I'm just a visitor to this misery...thumbs up, looks good, 

I see what you've done with this place, with this disaster,

quite lovely how the misery smells this morning, thumbs up. 

I could write a book on 'thumbs up' in my family. 

Shocked expression, glazed over, zombie eyes and the 

hand gesture which says 'I know what you think you're seeing looks like hell, 

but it's actually Tahiti. And this IV bag is my pina colada, 

and this hospital bed

is white sand beaches.

This life sentence is a meditation retreat

to realign my chakras (Buddha would actually agree but for different reasons.)

Please don't ruin the fantasy, play along.

Give me a thumbs up back from Pompeii

as toxic ash embalms a city.

Thumbs up from the last helicopter out of Saigon 

as you cling to the rope.

Thumbs up, Titanic. 

Thumbs up across America. 

***

I was in Amsterdam waiting to have breakfast with a friend

she approached me with horror 'what's wrong?'

I had been thinking about something. 

The elephant in the room. 

The elephant in every room.

Death.

It's just that some times I grab the tail and you grab the horns,

and we both stand there like blind men trying to describe the same beast.

I laughed it off. 

Thumbs up. Two thumbs up. Uh-oh. Double barrel joy joy.

Then I spun a long dizzying allegorical

philosophical tale with anecdotes, 

running as quickly as I could 

from my face.