Indeterminate Color

When the ambulance took away my dad, I hid on my parents’ bed and turned the channel to Turner Classic Movies.

This was the best room in the house for watching TV on hot summer afternoons. It was the only TV in the house that had a remote control. The basement stayed cool. The room was quiet. No one bothered me. The black and white Hollywood films with soft focus and film noir shadows were an odd choice for a third grader. 

But my whole life felt like an odd choice.

Above the bed, a tiny window near the ceiling was the only source of natural light. If I climbed onto the headboard, I could just about peek into the rose beds lining the southern exposure of the house.

But I didn’t want to look out that window.

So I stared instead at the TV. 

The plots of those old movies required full attention. Without special effects or plausible green screens, the movies depended on witty banter, meaningful looks, and conflicts that usually went over my head. Still, I tuned in. Perhaps it was just the thrill of being able to watch a movie in the afternoon without renting a VHS from Video USA.

This movie was especially hard to follow. I’d come into the middle of it. A woman sat at a round table in a jazz club while a gentleman begged her to hear him out. She had no interest in what he had to say. She was there to enjoy the music performance. Or maybe she just wanted the performance to take her away from whatever reality she was facing. At any rate, the man grew angry. There was an impolite fuss. The woman, with her gown of indeterminate color, finally had enough and followed him out of the room.

How long had I been down here? Had it been fifteen minutes or an hour since my dad collapsed into those rose bushes?

People often assumed I was a mistake.

It was fair, if unkind. But you better believe the town raised its eyebrows when I came into the world. Because how many men would choose to become a dad for the first time at age 70? I wouldn’t hear half of the rumors until high school. 

That day, I was just a kid sitting in the basement contemplating death for the first time. 

I decided it wasn’t for me. 

Sometimes the people in those old movies died, and that was fine for them. I could cry and grieve as they suffered their losses. The amount of tears I wept over Old Yeller and Black Beauty could have flooded the City Dams. 

But somehow I couldn’t allow myself to cry over tragedies on this side of the screen—at least, not if they belonged to me. 

My dad didn’t die that day. It was a simple case of heat exhaustion and dehydration. He enjoyed working, and three digits on the thermometer couldn’t tell him to stop. A day or two later he was back on the side of the house, this time with a glass of water within reach.

The only casualty of that day went unnoticed. But how much innocence does a third grader need?

I’d been married almost six months when the call came. The news was as expected and shocking as midnight calls usually are. I listened, with my ear against the receiver, and said something I can’t remember. Then I turned over in my bed and buried those feelings under three layers of blankets.

The next morning I clocked into work at 8 a.m. 

Ninety-one-year-old people die. Their longevity is celebrated. 

Most don’t have twenty-one-year-old daughters.

Other twenty-one-year-olds could grieve their fathers. I had to accept all the platitudes about “a life well lived” and be grateful at the “miracle of my existence.”

So I kept working, not letting the death of a parent tell me to stop. 

I’ve faced a lot of death since then, maybe more than most people my age. These days, I don’t watch black and white films. My phone screen usually does the trick. Stories and lives scroll by with the swipe of my thumb. Sometimes tragedies play out. There are cancer diagnoses, deaths, accidents, and fires. 

My heart goes out to every single one of them. 

But my own grief? That’s not for me.