I feel like there’s an epidemic of friends losing parents, siblings, friends. Some are sudden deaths, some coming after long illness. Doesn’t matter. The pain is the same and I feel so sad for what my friends are going through. Of course it also brings up all the old feelings of grief that I’ve experienced. Here’s an old column from Life Magazine that I often pull out to read because because it makes me feel better for some reason. I would have thought that old Life’s were all digitized and available on line, or that someone had put together a volume of Loudon Wainwright’s columns, but I guess not. I scanned my old copy but it was too hard to read. Then I tried to download it and create a readable version — but the Life format was so large, it’s hard to get into a readable size. I’m sure if I worked really hard, I could figure it out. Finally, I transcribed it. The link below will take you to the Google Books page with this column.
The Sum of Recollection
The word has come that an old friend has died suddenly, and bits of recall about him keep breaking past the frail guard of work I set against them. As I look out the window he pushes his glasses up over his forehead, his voice is on the other side of the phone’s ring. Stared at upside down, a piece of handwriting on the desk could be his. Fragments of him play back like short bursts of mnemonic film and I cannot look away.
Nothing in the tumble of images surprises me about him and they show me how little I knew. It’s hard to get to know friend better. A lot of long relationships develop almost formal rhythms, and we learn to know each other’s margins and bruising places. Conversations often ply between unsaid limits and we respond to proffered cues with grooved fidelity. Exploring stops. New ground is left untouched while we glide comfortably along, turning over old stones, safe with rediscoveries.
Obviously we present clear variations of ourselves to different people. Our friend, another man recalled, had known a lot about the romantic poets and like to talk about them. Not to me he didn’t and I had an absurd flash of wounded feelings, like a child who’s been left out of a secret. But who can claim to know anyone? Indeed we are all simply the sum of others’ recollections about us. The gathering of them goes on for a long time.
My father died 30 years ago last month, and I continue to think of him very often. There is no grieving in it. Rather, a sort of memory print of him lights up in my consciousness and nudges me for a moment. Any number of things can trigger it—something my daughter says, the sight of a boat, another man’s walk. Most often, the view is familiar, but now and then a new piece is added. Still, the feeling remains that my construction of him is far from complete.
I was told of my father’s death while at school and instructed to travel to my grandmother’s where the family would gather. My mother had not yet arrived when I got there, and I recall being taken first to see my grandmother and then into another room. Here were two or three of my father’s brothers and my great uncle who, as the senior relative was presiding. A gentle and thoughtful old man with a delicate mix of modesty and strong family pride, he had been working for years on a genealogy. When I arrived, he had just finished writing my father’s obituary for the paper.
With real solicitude he sat me down and offered me whiskey — a courtesy in which he overlooked my age (17) in order to acknowledge my sudden rise to manhood. He asked me to read the obituary and give him an opinion of it. I told him I liked it, but I didn’t. I still recall how it felt to be reading those spare, longhand paragraphs whose facts, particularly the raw facts of my father’s name and death, seems so utterly unconnected to the powerful, demanding, volatile person who had been such a huge part of my life. The list of dates, of schools, the military service, the job, my mother’s name and mine told no more about him than directions describe the place they point to. Caught short with my father’s lack of newsworthy accomplishment in so relatively short a life, my uncle had revived a couple of our presentable ancestors to give the obituary some distinctive padding. Wrapped thus in dead relations, my father was given a suitable, but brief, public farewell.
One might think that almost any life would produce material for a really good send-off. In his foreword to The Obituary Book, Alden Whitman, chief obituary writer for the New York Times, says the form should be “written with grace, capturing, ideally, its subject’s unique flavor.” Surely the unique flavor of some of the departed is best interred with their bones. And Whitman, of course, is speaking of those accomplished or powerful enough to have made the world notice them before they died. Yet most of the rest of us have qualities which can enrich the living and are well work the looking for.
A few years ago I saw a collection of old home movies that my father had made in the mid-1930s. Since he had held the camera, he never appeared in the films, although his long afternoon shadow occasionally fell across the scenes he shot. But his presence, the way he thought about some things and how he felt were extraordinarily evident.
To make his movie during one bitter winter, he had walked out on the frozen bay near our house and shot a long piece of film looking back toward the land. What obviously interested him were the shapes the camera lingered on—great heaves of broken ice and pilings of docks wrenched into jagged angles against the sky. Watching, I was astonished at his selections. I had always thought of him as a completely direct man with no interest in abstractions of any kind. But here he was on film, working hard with the camera to find the right framing for the stark forms he saw. As it had been with my friend’s love of poetry, this was a large insight into my father’s being that I had missed completely.
The film showed me more than that about him. In another section he was photographing me as I skated near him. First I watched the movie with the fascination one usually feels when he looks at pictures of himself, especially pictures of a self in child’s packaging. Delighted with my own gay awkwardness on ice, I suddenly had the sense that the camera was projecting a clear quality of love. The child fell, the camera lurched as its holder moved in to help, then steadied when the boy rose smiling. The camera moved in for a close-up, then drew back and held as the child bent-ankled in one crude circle after another. Decades later, the photographer’s tenderness quite overwhelmed his subject.
Even if we’re late, we can still reach out for fathers and old friends and find good moments for ourselves in what they left behind.
From Life Magazine, The View from Here, by Loudon Wainwright. February 18, 1972
