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Greek to Me
A TREE HAS FALLEN
A EULOGY IN THREE ACTS
by Michael Raysses
Growing up in the sixties, freedom was a national obsession, the province of the young. My initial vision of it was to be liberated from the constraints imposed by family and society, to be free to be me, whoever that was. Like all things, though, freedom has its price, and I found myself asking what it would mean to gain my freedom if something had to die.
My father has been a constant source of friction in my life. That isn’t nearly as negative as it sounds. You see, I need friction. I’ve understood this concept ever since I discovered that caribou need trees to rub against their budding antlers. It strips them of the fuzzy felt in which they are coated—a vital step in the animal’s development. Unconsciously, my father was my tree of choice, the one I most often scraped my antlers against, long past the time the fuzz had been knocked off.
Act 1
A year ago I returned to northwest Indiana. My mom was having surgery, and her health captured everyone’s attention. My mission was to ferry my father into Chicago every day to see my mother. Those trips became sprawling episodes where we interacted like renegade bumper cars trapped in a joyless carnival.
Through it all hung a Damoclesian sword, never referred to, always at play. With each passing day, the thread that held the sword frayed. Then one day, Dad lit on a topic whose familiarity was outstripped only by its volatility—our relationship. He recounted a phone conversation we’d had years earlier, one in which I confessed to a loneliness that was so deep I literally ached. In that conversation, I cried. As I drove, Dad asked me whether I knew how it felt for him to hear me in that state—a grown man, educated and strong, reduced to blubbering to his dutiful father about being lonely. Perplexed, I admitted I’d never considered it. That’s when my father told me that for all the work and sacrifice he’d made in order to guarantee my success, I was an abject failure. The sword fell, impaling me in time.
Act 2
A year passed. I didn’t return home. When I did get my dad on the phone, our issues were never mentioned. Now I was dangling by a thread, turning with no direction, waiting to fall. Until last month when I spoke with him on the phone—he was dying—and I landed with a thud.
Act 3
A red-eye flight got me home in time to see the morning sun open its veins and stain the sky crimson. Blood was in the air. That which binds one man to another drenched me. All I prayed for was to be love; to embody it in whatever form it took because I had been bled dry and it was all I had left.
Seeing my father, the redwood had been reduced to a desiccated trunk. There was no light in his eyes, only resignation. I wanted to cry but I remembered his words of a year ago, and I dammed the brine that rushed my eyes. All I wanted was to be love, and love showed up dressed as faith.
I knelt down in front of him, extending my arms. He rested his head on my chest. We began a week-long dance. I became his bulwark. Because he was so weak, I cleaned him, I fed him. At night when he tried to sleep, he rang a bell to let me know he needed something. Love showed up as the strength to go without sleep, while performing tasks of previously unthinkable intimacy.
Then love showed itself in its grandest expression: surrender.
As I stooped to raise him, Dad put his hands on my shoulders, assessing me. He told me I had kept in shape, something he respected. Then he told me I was a beautiful man. I responded that whatever I was, I owed to him. He repeated the words, and all I could say was that I was not a fuck up. I was not the man he accused me of being a year ago. He told me he was wrong. As his head rested on my shoulder, our tears cleansed our wounds, creating an opportunity to do something unprecedented—love each other unconditionally.
Dad confessed he had no fight left in him to live. It reminded me of my admission made years prior. But that was incidental to the real problem—he didn’t know how to let go. I just opened my mouth and I heard words that I had no cognitive awareness of, but that were being spoken through me. I heard my voice tell him that it was all right to let go, that he was loved, and that we would all be okay.
He looked away, pondering the unthinkable. The man who spent his entire life holding on didn’t know how to release. Then he asked when I was leaving town. When I told him, he requested I stay a couple of extra days. When I arranged for the extra time, he was grateful. He asked specifically when I was leaving. When I told him, he said, “When you go, I am going, too.”
Epilogue
Dad died sixteen days after I left. When he told me that he was going to leave when I did, I clutched for a moment. “Don’t leave on my account,” I said, only to be met by a look that reminded me of our recent understanding, something from which we both unknowingly derived a great deal.
What freed me to leave him when I did was that I gained an authority I didn’t previously have: to live my life knowing that the man who raised me had endorsed me in a way he couldn’t before. And Pop acquired the power to ultimately let go of this life.
Dad was the preeminent tree in the forest of my life. I was privileged to grow up in his loving shade. Like every tree when it falls, his memory feeds the ground where it landed, enriching the soil for generations to come.
I have learned the immutable lessons a tree imparts: the value of roots, the benefit in extending out to others, and the bliss to be had merely by taking a moment to feel the wind blowing through the branches.
Lastly, I have come to understand that we are all trees, capable of giving off benevolent shade or casting dark shadows. The choice is ours.
When a tree falls, it doesn’t matter if there is no one there to hear the sound. What matters is that we acknowledge the loss, going forward with what it has taught us, even when all we can see and feel is the unavoidable fact that a tree has fallen.
George Michael Raysses July 31, 1927—June 6, 2008
Michael Raysses is a writer/actor/National Public Radio commentator who lives in Los Angeles. His e-mail address is michaelraysses@hotmail.com