Returning the Call

Everyone knows the feeling, even if they’ve not had to experience it yet. The 3am phone call, the opening the door to police on your doorstep feeling. The cold dread. The stomach-dropping, time-stopping feeling you get the second you realise bad news is imminent, but before the unfortunate messenger confirms it. 

That’s how I felt when I saw my aunts name on my caller ID one bright winters afternoon as I sat at my desk in lower Manhattan. Looking out of the window on the 27^th floor, I took a deep breath to steel myself to hear the news of my Grandfathers death. He’d been ill for the last several years. In truth, we’d all been forced to say our goodbyes to him long ago, when it became clear the Alzheimers would keep taking him ever further from our family. He’d been living in a care hospice back home in Ohio for the last 3 years, and we’d all known the call could have come at any time. I answered the ringing phone.

I remember she asked if I had friends around me, and if I was sitting down. I’d worked at the bank for 8 years by then, since I’d first moved out of state, and my colleagues had become some of the closest friends I had. I remember she told me he was dead, that I needed to go home straight away, but what she actually said hadn’t made any sense. Asking her to repeat it hadn’t made it any better, and I screamed. I screamed so loud office doors opened on the other side of my floor. I had been sitting down, but I remember I fell from my chair onto the ground anyway. 

You can almost prepare yourself to hear some types of bad news, especially when it involves the relief of a loved ones suffering, but I was thoroughly, unequivocally, unprepared to hear that it was my father who had died that afternoon. He was - had been - just 52 years old. He’d gone to work that morning, collapsed on the shop floor, and couldn’t be revived by his colleagues who'd worked on him until their arms ached and the paramedics pulled them away. 

It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any sense to me. This giant of a man regularly competed in triathlons, he played sport every weekend, he took care of himself as well as any 50-something year old man could. It wasn’t enough. Cerebral aneurysm they said, he wouldn’t have been conscious long enough to know what was happening they said. I hope with everything I have they were telling the truth. 

I recall the drive home in only the vaguest of ways, even at the time I remember thinking how I really shouldn’t be driving, wondering if you could be arrested for being upset in charge of a vehicle. Glimpses of scenery flashed by in a watery blur. I couldn’t tell you the route I took, I imagine it was my usual route since I drove entirely on auto pilot. I can tell you the 8 hours passed by in barely a minute, in what felt like no time at all I pulled into the drive of my parents house and for a spilt second wondered what I was doing there and how I’d managed to get there at all. 

I spoke at his funeral, though to this day I couldn’t tell you what I said. He had more friends wanting to pay respects than could comfortably fit inside the church. They lined the pews, the aisles, and the hallways to join in the send off. People said it was a beautiful service, I’m grateful that I can’t really remember it.

I shook all of the hands at the wake, all three-hundred plus of them. We talked about him for hours, we laughed, we cried, oh god did we cry. We had some of his belongings with us for his friends to take away as a memento, books mainly, some trinkets he'd picked up on his many travels, his sports gear for the friends he played golf or hockey with. He was an avid reader of anything he could get his hands on. Not a birthday passed where I didn’t get him a book or a Barnes & Noble voucher, and he’d spend it all and more besides. 

He’d also self-published a few books of his own, each one was hand signed and dedicated to a friend or family member on the inside jacket. He’d been writing the third when he’d passed, you’d often see him sitting in the garden with his notebook and glass of wine as he took his characters through the final stages of their journey. Near everyone at the funeral had received copies of the first two books, and many expressed their regret at the loss of the story ending he had been planning. 

I’d written short stories and poetry at college, even had some small success with publishing in collaborative anthologies, but helping with the editing of his books was as close as I’d been to writing full story fiction in a long time. Blame the heightened emotions of the day, I know I do, but I heard myself telling people I’d write out his notes and finish the story for him.

The next day arrived with a hangover and a notepad, though the familiar scrawl brought fresh tears making it hard to make sense of the words as the danced across the page. I packed the notepad and his laptop, and, after spending what time I could with my family, I headed back to New York where I could almost forget what had happened. At least until the next time I would go home and find his car was no longer in the driveway.

I tried so many times that year to finish what he’d started, I tried so hard and failed even harder. At first it was just too soon I told myself, then I blamed the relentless misery of winter making me feel incapable of writing joyfully. Summer arrived and the mental images of him sitting under the tree with a pen in one hand and a wine glass in the other, left me feeling blind to the words I knew I had to make sense of if I was to do him and his characters justice. Then it was fall, and the dread of the upcoming anniversary meant I couldn’t face opening the book, opening the wounds again before I knew I absolutely had to.

Time passed, as it tends to do. Slowly, grief ebbing and flowing in waves. Violent storms can leave you feeling capsized at first, clinging to anything that might keep you afloat while the waves crash over your head. As time goes on and the storms start to clear, you find yourself floating along in the currents, mostly steady, with only occasional waves to knock you off balance, but even these get further between and easier to predict. A birthday, the anniversaries, major family events. You can see the storm brewing and choose to head it off or ride it out.

It was three years since that day I got that phonecall when I opened the notebook for more than a few minutes and the tears stayed at bay. A bright spring day with all its yellow sunshine, clear birdsong and fresh scented air, brought promise of new beginnings and fresh starts, and I finally felt capable of beginning to end his story. 

So I wrote, from what he had written, and we argued as much then as we had over the original editing in the first two books. He may have had a plan but I had ideas, it took some time for me to pull our stories apart so his could be told without hearing my voice. It was important to me that his friends, our family, could hear from him again. One last time. 

I spent many an evening that summer sat on my balcony, notepad in one hand a wine glass in the other. I had it finished by that autumn, the final chapter taking at least as long to write as the whole of the rest of the story. Something about saying our final goodbyes and cutting the remaining bond we shared was sometimes too much to process, so I wrote and rewrote, and rewrote some more until there wasn’t a word left that hadn’t been replaced or moved in some way. I could have kept it going forever not to have to say goodbye. 

I published it that winter, sending copies to all the friends and family who had asked for updates over the years. I hope it stands proud next to the two author dedicated copies they already have.

It was on the anniversary that I finally sat down to read it through end to end, from book one right through to book three. I could almost hear him reading it with me, telling me the story in his own words. 

I haven’t read them again since then, I’ve already said my goodbyes too many times.