I Am Crying Now...

Where the dead sleep, and where the living visit, a tree with purple flowers violently bloomed. Its trunk and roots burrowed through the brown of earth, its boughs parted the particulate brown of dust and smog, all while shielding death itself from the unyielding gaze of denuded brown mountains. My host mother and her daughter carried red flowers to the cubby hole bearing the remains of their recently departed husband and father.

My dad wasn't placed in a cemetery. He was burned and then collected into a box. Mom and I rationed him to friends and family so that each could say goodbye in his or her own way. We can no longer visit Dad. I don't remember precisely where I scattered him, though I know many places where I might have.

Dad died soon before turning 58. Since I must place him in terms I can more readily understand, he died when I was 24, nearly five years ago now. Mom was 53. Her hair was slightly less white than it is now. Dad wouldn't have minded.

Strangely, death doesn't stagnate the departed's influence on the living, but rather provokes it. For in place of definite reactions, uttered words, and recordable moments lives an imagined world. Certainly, I know my dad from childhood and adolescence--even as a semi-adult visitor. I know his guffaw and the scowl that his forehead wore so unnaturally for such a gentle-hearted man. I remember his interest in beginnings, be it our family or whatever town we happened to live in. I see his stuffed pockets and bulging backpacks and filled car-trunks, always prepared with first-aid kits, binoculars, compasses, flashlights, space blankets, hand warmers, and spare food. He always seemed to be rummaging. And, I hear both his frustrated words for a recalcitrant computer and his sweetly sung "Swing Lo."

However, my knowledge of myself outpaces my knowledge of my father. What would he think of my current trip? Would he laugh if he found out that I've come to love Gordon Lightfoot, the folk singer I so often teased him about? Would he have enjoyed the food I cooked, and, if not, could I at least rely on the non-finicky nature that so benefitted Mom to make me think he did? What would he have looked like after finally losing the hair that still allowed him a part on the left side, as I often wear my own? Would he have been as thrilled as I was during Obama's campaign? Could he still throw a baseball well? Could he have ever explained to me his unyielding joy in birdwatching?

I want to know more than the one thing I do--that he would have been loving and supportive and proud. I want to know details, not themes. Mostly, I invent them. Sometimes, though, through means I cannot control, I stumble upon Dad.

I did so on Saturday. While circling an unheated pool at a nearby restaurant/resort getaway in the comfortable air of a Cochabamba winter, I saw first his blindingly white legs, with their hair patterned more after a high-mountain meadow than his more forest-like chest. I saw his left hand and the gold band, perhaps a centimeter wide, that never came off a finger more man-like than my own. I saw his pacing gait, waiting to discern the right moment and place to make his leap from the side. And, when I most needed a bit of courage to take the swim I so wanted to take, I saw his goofy smile generating enough force to compel his unsculpted body forward into a splash bursting in firework form. I leapt after him and, finally rising from the jump, let out a scream of shock that he never did. We laughed together. I played. Getting out and drying my head with my old tattered towel featuring the logo of a football team I once fanatically cheered with his parents, I felt my dad's fingers rubbing my head in his so-happy-to-be-a-dad way.

The trickle of tears started soon thereafter, though the presence of relative strangers shut the water off at the faucet, if not at the main. I used to cry mostly when I imagined my mom dying; now I also cry when I realize Dad is dead.

Neither myself, nor my host mother, nor her daughter shed any tears at the cemetery today. Their relatively easy-going demeanor clashed with the air of solemnity I had adopted to display respect in this foreign situation. They simply changed the flowers (though the mother thought the daughter cut the stems too short), talked a little bit about other acquaintances residing there, and even chuckled some at statements I paid little attention to. On the way out, lagging just a bit behind my companions, I looked again at the purple-blossom tree and noticed that there were no birds in it. So, I placed some there--not paying much attention to their species or characteristics--hoping that Dad might spot them.