I Hear You

Everyone likes to hear a good listener–Ron Stavoe

Tending to Endings (six)

One summer afternoon, my dad returned home to get ready for his summer job at the Pepsi-cola company. He was between his junior and senior year in high school. His sister Jeannine met him at the door and told him their mom died. The news caught him completely off guard.

My dad knew his mom was sick. She had been going to doctors since he was in the eighth grade. But no one had told him the illness was cancer, and always, always she was going to get better.

“I was a teenager and should’ve been smart enough to figure it out,” dad says, “My mom kept losing weight. She was sleeping in a cot in the living room because she was too weak to make it up the stairs”

I would describe my relationship with my dad as very close. And yet, it is December 2019 when my dad tells me about that day in 1956 that changed his life. I knew the fact of his mom’s death before that, but not the story. From the way my father reaches for details—”I came home from school…no, it was summer…I must’ve been out with friends.”—I don’t think he has told it often.

The degree of silence in my dad’s home was in part due to an era. But, even today there are not many places where it feels natural to launch into a conversation about someone who is about to die or someone who has. Counseling sessions and Death Cafes are two. Most celebrations of life, some funerals.

I was with a group of friends a few weeks after my mom died. I had just returned to Boise. It was a potluck for some occasion, a sunny spring afternoon. It felt good to be home and among friends after five months away. But I also felt that strange distance that trauma and loss can carve. I had been through something that was hard to explain even to myself. On any given day, I felt many things: grief, gratitude, relief, hurt, rawness, love, peace, exhaustion, numb.

My friend Kathy came up to me holding her cup of ginger tea, her blue eyes smiling and said, “Would you have time to meet for coffee sometime soon? I would love to hear more about your mom.”

What I felt then was a wave of relief.  Pretty much all I could think about was my mom and all we’d been through over the past five months. I had been meting out small pieces of story to friends and anyone who would listen in order to not overwhelm any one person.

Often our reticence about death is good intentioned. We don’t tell because we don’t want to burden others with loss that feels heavy and disorganized and raw. We don’t ask because we don’t want to overstep or to awaken pain. I didn’t ask my father about his mother because I knew it would make him sad.

But how much else do we leave unsaid when we sidestep the whole story. As I’ve begun to make room for more of these stories in my own life–both the telling and the listening–I’m realizing quite a lot. Stories of death are, after all, actually stories about life. It’s the only part of death we actually know anything about.

Now, Kathy’s question seems perfect to me. Do you have time for coffee? I would love to hear the story. It did not feel intrusive, it felt like an invitation. We met the next week and I sat in my sunny living room and told her about my mom. It was a gift to be able to walk through that time again with someone listening.

In January I attended something called a Story Circle that was held downtown Boise in the Linen building and hosted by Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence. The topic of the circle was about heritage and we shared stories about the origin of our names and stories of our people.

One of the biggest gifts of the evening was feeling connected to people in my community who I had never met, and this happened for me, not so much through telling my story as through listening. Regardless of our ethnic or geographic background, as each person shared, I found those soft familiar places, those points of connection.

Last Christmas I finally asked my dad to tell me the story of my grandmother. And he did get teary, though mostly when explaining to me things about his mom that made him proud. She was active in local politics and president of the PTA and the leader of a kitchen band. “She was never angry, but she was always involved,” he says. “As soon as my dad came home, she would hand off responsibility of all of us to him and head out to some gathering or public meeting.”

“She influenced people,”he adds, “She would get my dad involved with things, saying, Art, why don’t you go talk to the kids at school about what you do at Crane Company. And he would.”

And I realize now that in this way, grandma was a lot like my mom. And dad and I talk about that rare quality some people have of being able to draw people to them, not with promises or persuasion or anything other than their own way of being in the world.

My mom would collect quotes she loved whenever she read–Henry David Thoreau and Marian Wright Edelman and Anna Quindlen and Wendell Berry. But one of her favorite quotes of all time was something my father said back when I was still in grade school, Everyone likes to hear a good listener.

And this seems ironic now, and like it has taken me a very long time to hear my father. When he finishes telling me about my grandmother I ask him to tell me about his father and I listen and I listen and I listen.

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