When my father died at age sixty-two, my young son was asked to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Land of Counterpane at his memorial service. It starts like this:
When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay,
To keep me happy all the day.
He made it through the first verse before dissolving into tears. I later told him, “Well done,” because he had given the best eulogy of all simply by crying honest tears for his grandfather. I gave no such eulogy, in words or tears.
My father left no monetary estate, but I did inherit something. In clearing out his final hospital room, I filled a cardboard box with the items from his bedside table. They were things one might discard or donate to a thrift shop. They did not inspire sentimentality, but an odd impulse made me put the box in my closet, and in the intervening twenty-five years it has accompanied me on several moves. Now I am glad I have it. The items perfectly encapsulate that child who was sick and lay a-bed.
Yes, I did write “child” and not “man,” for my father’s life began much as it ended, with chronic illness requiring long hospital stays. At age six, an infection nearly destroyed his kidneys. In those days before penicillin and dialysis, kidney failure meant death. I do not know what treatment he received to leave him just enough kidney function to survive. He was in a hospital bed during the two years that most children spend attending first and second grade.
What toys beside him lay, to keep him happy all those childhood days? I don’t know. But as he matured, he had a marked interest in the gear and equipment—the toys—involved in hobbies that intrigued him. He became a serial toy-buyer. He was not one to master the hobbies, though he did master the art of collecting aspirations. Our home was forever haphazardly furnished but our closets were stuffed with the shiny accoutrements of his near-pursuits: slot cars, comic books, art supplies, sailing paraphernalia that never saw lake or ocean, obscure board games whose rules we could not fathom, running shoes that never touched the road, and hand tools.
Did his long stays in hospitals and his lifelong weakness inspire his habit of dreaming of a new pursuit, acquiring all the requisite toys, then shoving those toys aside in favor of the next activity that caught his attention, but which his body would not allow him to really pursue? It is unknowable. All I know is that he had all of those objects that, if you didn’t know him, would lead you to think he was a man of wide accomplishment.
You might imagine that the box of items I took from his final hospital stay would be an eclectic collection, one choice item from each of a dozen disparate hobbies—a sort of curated museum display of This Man’s Many Interests. Not so. He chose a different set of toys when the circumstances turned most dire.
I have his bottle of Tums antacids, circa 1997. The price sticker tells me that it cost $5.29 at the Drug Emporium. Dad had myriad conditions and few sources of physical comfort. His constant crunching of Tums was, at that time, a mildly annoying habit. I now feel a tightness in my jaw—what for me qualifies as an urge to cry, swiftly suppressed—and an absurd feeling of love toward this two-thirds-empty bottle of tablets. It is now my own personal Veil of Veronica, a simple item that provided the comfort that my father craved, which comfort was denied him in every aspect of his physiology except for, occasionally, his stomach. Bless you, Tums from batch 3J11, expiration 10/99.
I have his October 1997 issue of Road & Track magazine, featuring “All the New Cars ’98”. A man who was unlikely to see December 1997 wanted to know what new models were hitting the road in 1998. He couldn’t afford a great car, but he devoured every issue of Car and Driver and Road & Track. He was, naturally, also a huge fan of auto racing. In fact, we spoke of cars and racing in one of our last meaningful conversations.
I was visiting one evening during his final week. We were sitting quietly as his declining vital statistics scrolled across a screen, when he said, “I failed you.”
Was this to be our moment of reckoning? A time for tender reconciliation? I held his hand and said, “No you didn’t, Dad.”
He said, “But I didn’t make you a racing fan.”
I dropped his hand. My disdain for automobile racing had been a source of mildly derisive comments from him for years. I was not going to have it now, not even disguised as maudlin self-criticism. Yes, he was on his deathbed. But you can only play that card up to a point.
I have his paperback books by Dick Francis. I did share Dad’s interest in Dick Francis and, by extension, in British steeplechase horse racing and the apparently endless series of murders that happen in that world. We spoke in bad English accents when discussing the books.
I have his eyeglasses, old-fashioned trifocals. You might think “Swell. Next item.” But you see: These eyeglasses hugged his face. These eyeglasses rested on the bridge of his nose. His eyelashes brushed the insides of these lenses. These eyeglass stems rested on his ears. Photons passed through these eyeglass lenses and into his eyes and thence onto his retinas and the impulses were converted to vision in his brain. Visions of the walls of his room. Visions of the words on the pages of his books. Visions of the roof of the adjoining building that was all he could see out his window. Visions of us, his family, looking down at him. I love these eyeglasses with a desperate, tight-jawed, nearly Tums-batch-3J11-worthy level of feeling.
I have his hope. Hope existed in Dad. He had been badly ill and a-bed many times before. I think he thought that the reason for his long survival against bad odds was that he kept pursuing the next thing, and didn’t take time to think about dying. He made time only for nearly pursuing new hobbies. Hope is in that box in the form of two 2.5-pound dumbbells. Dad’s body was wasting away, and so he had lost muscle. No problem. He had the equipment to remedy that. He planned—always with the planning—to lift weights.
This was a man who, in those final two weeks, could not sit up at all. Every day he sank deeper into the mattress and pillow. This man, who had resisted the summons to the grave for so many years, who had against all odds risen from one sickbed after another, was clearly losing the fight.
That is, it was clear to me that the fight was lost; it was never clear to him, or even conceivable. You see, he had the solution, and it was the right toy—a toy that he might never use, but that to him meant he knew what he wanted to do, if he could just work up the energy to do it.
So. Dumbbells it is, Dad, you got it. Tools for living. Just in case.
I told you at the start that my son only made it through the first verse of Stevenson’s poem. This is the final verse:
I was the giant, great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill
And sees before him dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.
A counterpane is a bedspread. That was the pleasant land that was all that my father could see for many months—years—of his life. He was not happy all the day for many of his days, but it was not for lack of trying. His mind and his hopes took him to where his body could not go, right up until his body finally denied him even the Land of Counterpane. No more of that for you, boy. Man? No, let’s let him be the boy he started out as, and perhaps remained throughout his often grim, toy-seeking life. Can we just imagine him at ages six and seven, trying to figure out how to get along in this counterpane world? And somehow finding a way?
What strength. What stubbornness.
Thanks, kid: I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t figured it out.
I did receive an inheritance after all, of infinite value. This year, as I turn sixty-two myself, I make my twenty-fifth annual inventory of my father’s accidental reliquary, my jaw tight but my eyes characteristically dry, and I love every dusty, stupid, utterly ordinary item in it, and I always will.
And, okay, I lied about my dry eyes. I have finally delivered my father’s eulogy, in words and tears.