Dad’s life spanned many chapters: athlete, football coach, high school teacher, father, reader, house painter, musician/singer/songwriter, playwright, hunter, fisherman, carpenter, traveler; lover of dogs, cats, and all things wild, and the lakes and woods of Michigan. Even the final chapter wasn’t too terrible: yes, he needed hearing aids. He fell a couple of times, brushing it off with his usual harrumph and dismissal, but at last reluctantly accepted a stout Ukrainian-carved walking stick with the polished brass head of a Labrador Retriever for the handle. His wife took over the household cooking and maintenance and the driving. And the “bossing” (as he called it) about taking his pills and doing his physical therapy. He kept making music, settled at a tavern table with half a glass of red wine among friends, but mostly let them sing his songs. A year before, he stood in the balconies of Michigan theatres to accept the cheers and ovations of audiences applauding the revival tour of his musical play, North Country Opera — with my now-middle-aged brother in the cast.

The mechanism was starting to wear and grind. A more serious fall and hospitalization. Some cardiac irregularities. A probable mini-stroke. Sudden painful flares from an inflamed gallbladder; a blocked bile duct. You don’t want to do surgery on a ninety-year-old guy, no matter how stoic or tough he is…or has been… unless you have to.

They had to. And damned if he didn’t come right on through it: “Heart, lungs, blood pressure, vital signs all stable throughout,” said the surgeon. I drove a thousand miles to Michigan for the aftermath, feeling sick and frightened. My grandparents died when I was just a kid; my mother is an ornery nonagenarian living a thousand miles in the other direction. I didn’t know how to do this.

Dad was pale, frail, weak. He needed help to get in or out of a chair or bed. He disliked the walker, but needed it now, as one of us clutched the gait belt under his armpits. It’s amazing how quickly you can come to take a urinary catheter bag in stride, and start saying, “Here, wait, let me move The Accessory over here.” He said he had no pain. He sat at the kitchen table and ate dinner; he grinned and waved at his new baby great-grandson on a video call. He read the newspaper by the woodstove and stroked the lynx-eared tabby cat curled up beside him. He napped often. He was cheerful. 

Then, a fall getting into bed. We got him up. The next day the physical therapy exercises were not doable. That night, the paramedics were called. He lay in his bed, yellow-pale, unconsciously gripping the bedsheet, breath rasping through a slack and gaping mouth. At that moment, at four in the morning, I thought I was going to watch my father die before my eyes. But he didn’t. Not then.

They stabilized him. His heart was a wreck. He was in diapers. His speech was a thick, slurred croak we could barely understand. I was there for the hospice conversation. I had been wondering if the time was coming for that, though his wife had not. But we agreed: he’s 90. His heart cannot repair itself. He hated the hospital; he wanted to go home. So, he did. And so did I.

Where I live, the sandhill cranes start arriving on their northward migration in late February. We get flashes of spring: blue skies, south winds, balmy afternoons when you drag out the lawn chairs and sit with your sleeves rolled up and your face turned up to the sun. And the cranes come. In the last week of the month, there was a day where they soared and sailed and called from early morning till nightfall. They’re often so high you can’t see them unless they tilt just right and their wings shine silver, but you can hear them. The great purring trumpets cried down to us, hour after hour. A friend said she stopped counting at ten thousand that day. I spoke to Dad and told him about them; I told him about the two bobcats who were chasing rabbits in the pasture, and about the visitation of seventy wild turkeys in our front yard. (“Do you have a shotgun?” he asked, and I could hear the smile.) Afterward, I leaned back in my chair and watched and listened as the cranes streamed north. And I wondered if they were carrying parts of him, if their lofty passage was delivering a message about another passage looming.

He died on March 1, at 5:30 in the evening. Quietly, peacefully, with his devoted, indomitable wife stretched next to him on the cot alongside his hospital bed in the living room.

Dad was not a man of faith. He did not believe in an immortal soul. He has siblings who believe in their hearts that their brother — their tough, kind, thoughtful, creative oldest brother — is scorching in eternal hellfires. He said he didn’t care what we did with his body; it wasn’t going to matter to him. His wrapped ashes are sitting in his favorite old leather and wicker fishing creel for now. Perhaps there is a mortal soul: whatever life essence we have, that unique and nebulous skein of energy and memory and love and pain and history, just has to have this husk to live in, and when the husk turns to dust, it simply disperses.

I was driving through Cheyenne Bottoms not long after. I had occasionally hoped that maybe one day Dad could make a trip down here to Kansas, so I could show him this glorious expanse of prairie and sky, peopled with its birds, animals, shimmering grasses, and wildflowers. So different from the deep, chilly forests of Michigan, but still teeming with life and light. It didn’t happen. But as he loved Michigan, I love Kansas, and we understood what that meant to each other. A flight of pintail ducks lifted from the dyke’s edge and winged alongside my car. The sun broke out of a cloud-piled sky and their white necks glowed. And I suffered the ache that Dad was gone, nowhere, simply vanished from the earth. That he could no longer fish the cold brown rivers, watch the sun pour golden on the trees, hear the cranes call, watch a hummingbird, hear a great song be sung, call his dog, embrace his wife: could no longer cherish anything beautiful in this world. The radio station began to play a sonorous, mournful piece of choral music: slow, deep in sound and color. A requiem mass. As the pintails veered away over the water, I thought no! He is not nowhere. Dad is everywhere now. He’s in the ducks, he’s in the water, the sky, the wind, he’s in the coyotes’ cries, he’s in the music. Of course, he’s in our memories (feeble and time-limited as they are). His molecules are scattered, absorbed, strewn across the world with everything that lives in it.

Next week we will gather with every friend and relative who wants to come to celebrate his life. There will be laughter (“Note: in honor of Jay, formal dress is discouraged.”), reminiscence, and hugs. There will be a lot of great music. Dad used to joke about attending his own wake. “Prop me up at a table with a beer in my hand, everyone can come and sit and have a drink with me.” After ninety years, many of Dad’s old friends have gone on before him. I like to imagine them sitting around a big round table with pitchers and glasses to hand, listening in.

I’ve heard it said that grief is love with nowhere to go. Next week, a high school auditorium will throw its doors open for it. The love will pour through every person there, and others who are not. There will be tears — in the right place, for the right reasons. And we will sing.