Woops--many spelling errors! I"ll have to correct them later.
This afternoon, a woman I know, Kelley Steed, posted on Facebook that she had made ham, black eyed peas, and greens for New Year's Day. Of course. It's the South, that's what Southern people do. It reminded me of New Year's Days when I was growing up. I didn't quite get the whole Southern food thing when I was a kid, though I understood why that's what my mother made. I was born in Arkansas, but our parents took us up to northern Illinois the summer before I started first grade. I still call Illinois "home," though I've been back in Arkansas since January of 1990. And I love it here. What used to appall me when I was a kid--pots of greens and pinto beans, cornbread, my mother's firm adherence to her status as a "hick"--now make sense to me, and I own it.
So this afternoon when Kelley posted that she and her family will probably end up weighing 500 pounds by the time winter is over because all you do is stay inside and cook, it reminded me of those New Year's Days at home when my mother made the peas and the greens for Daddy. I wish I had known how delicious those greens and peas were. I quit eating meat when I was 10, so I wouldn't even have been eligible to eat peas or greens cooked with a ham hock until after I was 18 and had returned home from my year in France. But even then I didn't really eat that stuff. What a shame--because now I am back to not eating meat, and I would LOVE to have some of those beans and greens and cornbread. But thinking about New Year's Day at home with my parents reminded me of my dad. It made me think of football. The only time we had a football game on at our house was if Texas was playing Arkansas and it was being broadcast in northern Illinois--AND if Daddy was off work. Holidays like New Year's were kind of his money-makers, as an ER physician, so in other words, football on TV at home only ever happened a few times in my life! But those New Year's Days were such good memories. I felt closer to my Southern roots on those days than any other day of the year, maybe because it was during Christmas break and it felt more private, out of the prying eyes of Midwestern classmates who might make fun of me--and since my father was hardly ever at home because he worked so much, the games brought the added bonus of REALLY feeling like I had a DAD. It was one day for sure when we really felt like a family.
And then it hits me. Daddy died early on the morning of January 2, 1999. The memory of his death and everything that surrounded it is mitigated, at first, by the fond New Year's Day memories.
After a while, though, it all comes flooding back.
I woke up at 6:50 that Saturday morning, thinking, "Why on Earth am I awake at 10 to 7 on a Saturday morning??" I went back to sleep, only to be awakened by a call from my sister, Amanda, at 10:00.
She said, "Daddy is missing." Then she must have told me that Daddy had flown to El Dorado, Arkansas from their home in Arkadelphia, AR to work in the El Dorado ER. He was supposed to be at work at 7 am, but never got there. The only other thing I remember is her saying "It's what we were always afraid would happen." Those may not have been her exact words, but it WAS what we had always been afraid of--that Daddy would get in a plane to go somewhere and crash and die. We grew up with that fear hanging over us.
The first thing I did was call my boss, Richard Davenport, to tell him I wasn't coming in to work Monday, probably for a week. I'll never forget what he said: "I'm so sorry" --in a very serious, somber tone. I was APPALLED that he would jump to the conclusion that my father had died! My dad was *missing*. He was missing...
I don't remember what time it was when Amanda came to get me, but we assumed by the time we got to Arkadelphia, where our parents lived, that we would know more. That we would know how and where Daddy had died, and that we would be making funeral plans once we got there. But when we got there, and Daddy was still technically missing.
I remember us all sitting around the table in the informal dining room that day. Maybe you'd call it the breakfast table, I don't know, but it's where we always congregated. I remember the sheriff of Union County, where Daddy had disappeared off radar, calling and telling us that he still didn't know anything. How was that possible? Surely you could see a plane crash! But Union County, Arkansas is very heavily wooded. It's all forest down there, which ironically is why Daddy liked to fly there. He had hit several deer on previous trips down there to work. He had a conversion van he liked to drive, and my mother joked that he needed "'roo bars" so his vehicle wouldn't get so messed up when he hit one. Apparently what we might call "cow catchers" in the US are called "'roo bars" in Australia, which my mother thought was funny. I do too.
That was a long day, that Saturday in January 1999. People converged on the house as they heard about what had happened. It was so comforting to know how many people were thinking about us, that they were worried, too. My mother told me later that she joined the Catholic church down there because she had a premonition that she would need a community around her for a funeral, never knowing exactly what would happen.
We all went to bed that night assuming but not knowing what had happened. It was the coldest night of the year. The idea that Daddy had crashed and been injured but was out in the freezing cold was too much for my mother to bear. Sunday morning when we got up, she burst into tears. "It's so cold, and what if he's lying somewhere hurt!" Sorry. That part always makes me cry. My mother does not cry very often, and when she does, it's a big deal.
So Amanda, Ian, and I decided to go down to the airport in El Dorado to see what they were doing. I think it took 2 1/2 hours to drive there. Our cousin Dennis had gone down there Saturday and slept on the floor of the airport, working with local officials in the search for my father's crash site. Denny is ex-Marine, ex-cop, and law enforcement there appreciated his help. We were so grateful. None of us were equipped to do what he did. And dude... He slept on the floor of the airport two nights in a row. Family means a lot in our family! And Denny is the shining jewel in our family...
So we waited there all day. We spent some time in a sort of pilots' lounge room, next to the radio room. We could hear them. There was nothing for us to do. We worried and held onto each other. When a plane goes down in the United States, the Civil Air Patrol, basically a bunch of retired pilots in jumpsuits, flies a grid over the airspace where the plane is thought to have crashed. They close the airspace when that happens. When the pilots of the State Police helicopter came through the doors at the end of that day after searching the grid, I rushed them and said, "You have to find my dad!" I know it was uncomfortable for them, but I just had to say it! Ironically, I could so totally see Daddy taking part in that kind of effort. He would have LOVED to do that. LOVED it. He wore jumpsuits anyway. (Oh my god--such memories...)
We ended up going back up to Arkadelphia that night, and returned to El Dorado the next morning with our mother. It was a bright, sunshiny, COLD day in southern Arkansas. We'd been there a while when Denny said, hey, look, the airport has emptied out: They had gone to a potential crash site, he hypothesized. So he said he knew where they probably were--he'd been searching the maps with them the whole time. We piled into his Ford Explorer, and after a false start, ended up at what was the crash site.
There was a Red Cross trailer there--several fat, smiling women wanted to know if we wanted hot cider. Here's what was going through my head when they asked that: "Are you fucking KIDDING ME??? These assholes KNEW they had found the crash site, but YOU were called FIRST???" The only reason WE knew where to go was because Denny had been working with law enforcement. It was a really low blow. And it got worse. We saw the sheriff pull up in a truck, headed toward the muddy, forested crash site with his girlfriend in the passenger seat. We were being held behind yellow crime scene tape by a stout deputy with a nine millimeter gun strapped to his leg. He insisted that we were not allowed to go to the site, threatening bodily harm if we tried. My mother said that the sheriff's girlfriend better not be allowed back there... And I mean, REALLY?? How does the girlfriend of a law enforcement officer rank access to my father's crime scene, but his family does not?? It was an awful feeling. Maybe it was the lack of control. No, it was because my father was dead and we felt we were excluded. We had waited 2 days to know what had happened to him--and some woman who had no business being there knew more than we did??? No. No.
The next thing of note was when the coroner came riding out of the woods on a four-wheeler. With no formal confirmation that my father had actually died, this man began telling us which body part was found in which position in the trees. I had to step away at first. I remember Amanda taking it it, saying "uh huh" but knowing how far her stomach had dropped. She is a doctor, but it's different when you are hearing which pieces your own father has been dismemberment into. She was so brave, but you just can't hide that kind of horror. Later I answered the phone at my mother's when an old friend of my dad's called from Illinois. He told me that "when that aluminum hull breaks up, it's like knives. It just rips through people, and it is normal for people to be dismembered like that."
So the coroner asked my mother which funeral home she wanted him to be taken to after the state crime lab had his way with him. Of course all they did at the crime lab was check for drugs and alcohol, which of course they did not find. I WISH I had pushed for an autopsy of his brain. There is a strong history of stroke in his family--his younger sister had a debilitating stroke the next year--and it would have been nice to know if that was the reason he crashed. What I remember is Amanda saying that an autopsy would not find a heart attack because it takes a little while for the enzymes that indicate a heart attack to accumulate in the body, and he apparently died right away, no matter the cause. Jesus.... this is so sad....
I had gone back to Little Rock to be at work the next Monday, but I couldn't stay home by myself, so I went back that same day, I think. Everyone there got sick that week--it was a horrible virus, worse than any of us has been sick since or before. My mother set the funeral for 2 weeks after he died so family could be there, and as she had him remains cremated, that was not a problem.
After the remains got back to the funeral home, we were notified and when we went there, we went in the front door to meet the guy. He took us past several visitations--it was very busy in there--then we followed him out the back door, across the parking lot, and into a small building that houses the embalming rooms. We entered a small room with a stainless steel embalming table in it, upon which lay a black body bag, my father's hands bound up by a white sheets. The funeral home director told us it was all he could prepare for us to see, though we were welcome to view the rest of the body. It was the final, awful confirmation that it was indeed my father who had died: Those were his hands! It made it real in a way that had not been there before.
Of course the whole thing was worse than horrible. But at the same time, that church family that my mother had sought because she felt there would be a funeral she needed strength to endure sustained us in so many ways. My parents' next door neighbors were from Zimbabwe and Isaac taught Philosophy and Religion at a local college, so they were a great comfort, too. Isaac did one of the readings and my cousin Emma Kate Starling sang La Pieta. People were very impressed. Amanda and I had requested "When the Golden Bells Ring" because it was on the Natalie Merchant CD we'd been listening to around then. Martha and Jerry performed it. The house was packed. In front of the alter was a pillar upon which the cremains rested, along with a picture of my dad taken on a recent cruise -which is amazing, because we barely had any photos of him.
Several months after Daddy died, my mother took a job giving care to an old Russian man and his wife. She felt she should work. lol It was not good, and she did end up quitting and finally finished her bachelor's degree in sociology. Daddy had not wanted her to return to school--they met at the medical school here in Little Rock, but she dropped out to support him and have children. It's what you did in 1961. But while she was helping those people, I was there one day while she was sorting through Daddy's clothes. She figured that man could use some of his pants. All I could think was "Noooooooooooooo!!" Daddy would need those pants when he came back together. Isn't that weird??
That whole time was harrowing. My mother had no idea how much life insurance there was--at one point she told us there was only $100,000--which would have to support her and my two little brothers. There would be no money to help the rest of us who needed it, who had depended on Daddy to take care of us. Fortunately, my mother later found out that she was to get $500,000, which apparently annuitized is enough for her and my brother Adam, who has autism. They both received Social Security benefits now.
And it turns out that Daddy fell off the radar down there at 6:50 am. My mother had awakened with a jolt at that exact moment, as had I. We are pretty sure that's when Daddy died. We are all connected.
