YOU get over here!

The last time I saw my dad upright and walking was on Park Place just off the main drag in our town. He was keying a car.

Me: Dad!!!!  What the hell!

I shouted while jogging towards him.

Dad: This idiot parked over the line!

Dad shouted back waving the offending key at the victim’s tire, which was barely touching the white parking space line. Yes, I am my father’s daughter.

Me: That is the job of the meter maid, not yours!

I screamed trying to get the key out of his hand.

Dad: I’m in charge here!

My father, once the Master of the Universe, was now a confused, stammering, rogue teenager. His Saville Row bespoke suit replaced with an easy-on-easy-off track ensemble. His Brunello Cucinelli shoes replaced with Velcro trainers. I took him by the arm and walked him home.

For months before the key incident, I had been receiving reports of my dad accosting dog walkers for not picking up their pooches excrement.

“Get that shit out of my town” would be a common bark. Pre brain damage, Mr. Sophistication would never have used that language.

“It’s my town too!” the offender would snap back.

“Well, then that is even more disgusting!” Dad would sashay off.

Damage control was my job at the time. I felt like the mom who was constantly preaching “My son is really not that bad.  Just a few behavioral issues”.

Who knows how many of those incidents occurred while dad was on the loose?  Maybe this was payback for all my teenage escapades that literally gave my mother a bleeding ulcer.

Dad lost his privileges to wander around town solo when Isolene our beloved housekeeper spotted him walking down the double yellow line in the middle of the street on his way into town one day.

Isolene: Mr. Sorensen! Get off that line! Get over here!

Dad: I am NOT on a line, I am on the sidewalk, and you get over here!

It wasn’t long before Isolene retired back to her home state of South Carolina.

Isolene: It’s too painful to see Mr. S. this way.

Me: I don’t blame you.

Shortly after her departure, mom hired two live-in nurses to care for him.

Yesterday was the 23^rd anniversary of putting Fa’s (named by the grandchildren) ashes into the ground. It was a day that is hard to forget and a day not void of humor. My nephew Brian, eight years old at the time, got the ball rolling.

Brian: How did Fa get into that miniature coffin?

This asked while he shimmied along the edge of the Morgan family mausoleum.

We were a few yards from the fake green turf surrounding the hole my father would eventually end up in.  His wood-paneled urn, pedestalled, standing just to the right of his final resting place.

My brother had wanted him contained in an 18th-century Chinese ginger jar. “Not recommended” was the response he got from the funeral director, who by the way, held a long-standing resentment towards my brother who had been a star of the high school football team circa 1972. The funeral director had not.

Brian: How is he in there?

Me: It’s not him, technically (wincing) It’s his ashes.

Brian: Ashes???? What the heck!!!

It became rapidly clear his parents had yet to talk to him about what happens after death.

I spied Jeff Marks and waved him over. Jeff was the son-in-law of my father’s deceased tennis partner and the only non-denominational minister we could get on that cold January morning.  He also was the one who caught me burning down his sister-in-law’s Barbie house when I was ten.

Me: I need help explaining how my dad got into the urn.

Jeff: Brian, after someone dies either they go into the ground or they are turned into dust.  After Fa died he was taken into a room where he was turned into dust. It says in the Bible for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Uh oh, I am thinking.

Brian: What????? What kind of room turns you into dust?

His eyelids almost disappeared into his head. I am nervous the scarring has already been done.

Me: A crematorium. There is intense heat and…

I blurt out, but can’t finish.

Brian: Oh, you mean they burned him up? Is that what turned him into ash? Like burning a piece of wood?

I nod yes, mildly horrified.

Brian: Why didn’t you just say that? They burned him up in a fire! Big deal”

With that, he took off running and did a side vault off a headstone.

Jeff: Well. I guess we didn’t need to sugar coat that explanation. Let’s get started.

Fifteen of us gathered around the urn. It did look like a tiny coffin, I think to myself, just big enough for a squirrel corpse.  The minister started talking about some famous tennis shot of my fathers and how he is in heaven winning all his matches.  Clearly, a tough service to perform when the deceased is a former Lutheran turned agnostic.  Then I saw my younger sister pointing at my shoe from across the turf.

Me: What? (I mouth).

Kir: Your shoe! (She mouths back).

Is she really going to point out in the middle of the gravesite service that I have perhaps stepped in dog poop? That would be perfect. Thanks, Dad. Haha.

What was sitting on my shoe did not come out of a dog.  It was a small white spider, in below zero temperature, on the top of the black leather.  Others in the group began spotting it too. I saw my mother taking in the scene for a moment then she focused back on Jeff.

As he was booming “And now Paul is in the hands of the Lord” the spider jumped off my shoe and carried its tiny body across a stretch of turf then crawled down into the hole. My younger sister and I lock eyes. What the heck!

After the final prayer, I beelined it over to the hole and tossed in a couple of my dad’s favorite candy, Dutch Hopjes. I was also checking for the spider, of course, but I didn’t see him.  How was that little guy not frozen? Where was he?

In the car on route to my mother’s house where 200 people were waiting to celebrate my father’s wild and exciting life, my mother says:

Mom: Did anyone else see Dad?

Brian: What are you talking about Dee Dee?

Mom: The spider. My first-anniversary gift from Fa, 45 years ago, was a silver Georg Jensen spider web pin. The spider’s body was a piece of turquoise. He chose that particular pin because I was terrified of spiders and every time I saw one I would scream.  Fa thought it was hysterical.

Brian: Fa is now a spider! What the heck!

Much later that evening, after the caterers had finished cleaning up, and our friends went home to their lives absent of pressing grief, three of the four of us adult children lay on the bed with our mother.

David: How about that story dad’s cousin told? About dad jumping off the garage roof when he was nine with an open umbrella and cracking his head open. Maybe that’s what happened to his brain in the end. Some kind of delayed reaction. And who knew Earnest Hemmingway’s father was his doctor? Dad’s childhood medical bills probably put those Hemmingway kids through college.

Kir: OH MY GOD (screaming from the bathroom) it’s the white spider!! On the wall!!

I bolt upright and scream back:

Me: Don’t kill him!!!! It’s Dad! I can’t handle another death!

My dad was an esoteric snob and the funniest person I have ever known. If he had survived his horrific brain illness, he would have aged hysterically quite nicely. Right now I imagine he is flying around in his golf cart laughing his head off.

 

February 18 1925-January 6 1998