Five Years Later...

Five years ago, a ringing cell phone woke me at about 5 in the morning. The phone was in the kitchen in our little town home, and I stumbled out of bed to try to catch the call. I didn't bother turning on any lights, but in my mind that scene is lighter than it probably could have been at 5 am mid-January in San Diego. 

I wasn't quick enough and missed the call, which was apparently from my sister Sarah. I think I tried calling her back (with no answer), and then Alisha's call cut through.  In my memory, she was in tears. Dad had died. 

Michelle heard the exclamation point in my voice and raced out of bed. I was still on the phone, but she could discern that my immediate reaction could only mean what it actually meant, and she broke down before I told her anything. The kids heard me, too, and all left their beds. They were also in tears.

The details of the rest of that brief phone call are fuzzy. I think I asked Alisha a bewildered "How?" Just the month before, doctors had given him an 18-24 month life expectancy (and, of course, we'd hoped that was a conservative estimate). He had also just started chemotherapy. But Dad had apparently gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and somehow fainted and hit his head. He was gone. 

I had just emailed Dad the day before to check in – at least with me, he was always his most candid via email. In his response, Dad mentioned his few hours of sleep the night before, then practically boasted of scouring his interview notes that morning and drafting 8 different stories. He had five more interviews planned for the next week, and he claimed he'd had five stories on page one (three over the fold!) of the Ogden Standard Examiner the previous week. 

He also noted he hadn't had any fainting or dizzy spells so far that day. So far.

We had just been with him a little over two weeks before, spending Christmas and New Year's with my parents. We'd made it there in time to witness the Layton mayor and city council surprise him with a fire truck in front of the house, and an "illegal" city council meeting with an endearing parody of The Night Before Christmas. Then a declaration that December 22, 2014, would be known as "Antone Clark Day" in Layton. There were also lots and lots of well wishes. They knew he faced an uphill battle against an illness he could now at least put a name to: amyloidosis. They teased him for steadfastly refusing to accept any gifts from them — nothing that might be seen as compromising his journalistic integrity.

During those last days and evenings with Dad, we had several conversations about his illness, his faith, starting chemotherapy, concerns for various family members, end of life planning, and the comfort he took in our renewed efforts to find a way back to Utah…to look after Mom...after he was gone. 

But I apparently never got my head around the idea of him ever truly leaving. Not for a ways off yet. We had only just started to brace ourselves for a drawn-out process (that we unwittingly were already years into), a process that no one had said would end well. But we had a time frame that offered months, if not years. And in the meantime, I could still rib him about the drafts of his obituary and funeral program plans he'd sent me over the years.

Dad didn't even say goodbye to me the day we left. In a frustrating bit of foreshadowing (that was so Dad), he left early for chemotherapy with Uncle Steven, not waiting for me to get out the shower to say any kind of goodbye. I shook my head and chuckled about it at the time. We'd see him again soon enough, but really Dad?

Now he’d left early again, and I again wasn't ready. 

Within a few hours, my little family piled into our van and started back for Utah, so much sadder than we'd ever been to make that drive. 

Life went on hold for the next week plus as we huddled with family. I remember waking the next morning in Layton to the sound of my sister in Mom’s bedroom, crying. Soon there were lots of us on Mom’s bed. Our shared grief took the form of laughing, crying, eating, and lots of visiting. Stories, memories became the currency of those moments, and we traded freely and eagerly. 

The week culminated with Dad's funeral and burial, the attendance at which put into relief Dad's lasting impact: not any particular professional success, per se, but, apparently, just taking an outsized interest in people.  

At the time, I felt sharp pain in missing him and the thought of growing old without him, but I knew I would see him again.

....

It has been five years now since he died. I took the Utah bar a little over a month after Dad's funeral, feeling an especially strong pull to be close to family. Heaven and earth then moved a few months later, and I *finally* secured the position in Salt Lake City that I'd not so secretly been hoping for since law school. Not long after, we traded in our San Diego town home for a full-on house in Kaysville, UT — only a few miles from Mom. Muhammad Ali died. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series. All without Dad around. Last year, Mom remarried (and we are very happy for her). Most of us Clark siblings now live relatively close to each other, something I’d pined away for most of my adult life.  We’ve generally all tried to move forward and stay connected in our own ways.

And yet, I hate that the world has moved on without Dad. I hate that it had to. In many ways, I hate that I have managed life without him — that my children have managed life without their Grandpa Clark. 

Dad is still never far from any family gathering. We still readily share familiar stories of him — deliberately running over snowbanks with his car to "help the melting process" (and once mistaking Alisha's white car for a snowbank), cooking failures, milkshake contest scandals, the healing properties of dog saliva (which, no), faux press releases on family hijinx, and hundreds of other vexing foibles and moments now made loveable with time. We laugh as though we haven't already traded these stories a thousand times, and we sit in the glow of the laughter and memories. 

Soon after he passed, it became fashionable in the family to invoke Dad's name as the driving force behind any good thing that happened, or for inspiring any course of action that could be mildly controversial. He has become the family's guardian angel (though no one has used that term) in that all good things now seem to be the result of Dad's heavenly efforts, at least as much as God's. 

For awhile, Mom kept their shared email address, which had always come up in the header as "Antone Clark." Sometimes those headers caught me in just the right way, and it took a moment to realize that I had not actually gotten another email from Dad. 

Then there was the stash of birthday cards we found for the year ahead – each one already addressed to a child or grandchild, each with his famously muted inscription (“Dad”), and each stuffed with a few dollars. So the last time I actually heard from him was a few months after he died, when I opened his card on my birthday.

For most of the last five years, I've worn a pair of his old brown shoes at work (Dad left behind an inordinate number of shoes, several of which he'd never worn, and all of which happened to be my size). I've also got a tie he bought me as a Christmas gift, and just about every time I put it on, I replay the moment Dad told me in the store how "sharp" he thought it looked.

About two years after he died, a man approached me one early morning at the Layton Gold’s gym. He asked if I was Antone Clark’s son. It had been awhile since someone asked me that. When I told him I was, the man told me how much Dad meant to him. As I remember it, the man said he’d been a janitor at Northridge High School while my youngest brother, Peter, was there (at least four years before). Apparently Dad would stop and talk with him when he visited the school. 

I think about that encounter often, how Dad’s small gesture apparently meant enough to that man that he would seek me out at the gym years later to tell me.

Then I think about how introverted I am, and the seeming impossibility of my approaching someone I don't know, you know, just to chat.

I still have internal arguments with Dad about notions he’d held over the years. More than once Dad shared with me that “Great souls suffer in silence” (a quote apparently from Friedrich Schiller). I burn at the notion now, and I wonder why I never said something to him about it. I wish he hadn’t seen it as a courageous to not share his difficulties with someone (other than in his journal). It may have been reflective of his time, culture, and upbringing, but I’ve wondered how much lighter his troubles might have been if he’d figured out how to appropriately share them — if he hadn’t seen depression as a personal (if not spiritual) failing that he’d try to manage by keeping it to himself. 

Maybe it would have been slightly less traumatic being his son in those turbulent early years, when I could never seem to earn his approval.   

I’ve thought of Dad more frequently of late as I have consciously withdrawn myself from the faith he cherished and taught me to cling to — the faith that made me so certain five years ago that I would see him again. I have wondered how I would find the courage to tell him if he were here, and how he would respond. I like to imagine him at his most generous — that he would understand that I had come to this place because of my efforts to live up to his ideals of truth and integrity, not despite them. And while I'm in that space, I like to imagine this not putting distance between us but drawing us closer, with him consoling me as I grieve my loss of faith. All without him feeling the need to sermonize or try to "reclaim" his son from a fallen state.  

I guess we can at least make of the dead whatever we need them to be.

The reality, though, is that however I picture that imaginary conversation going, I feel relegated now to simply hoping that he continues somewhere — somewhere other than in memory. That I'll get to hear him laugh again, shamelessly name drop, fawn over Guaraná Antarctica, and loudly tell stories to someone else (with knowing looks and nods to me across the room that make me question who he’s really talking to).  

Hope in this context feels like the unsatisfying consolation prize. It's far too sunny a word to express what’s left in the wake of disillusioned uncertainty.

Which leaves me, now five years later, grieving his death anew, and in some ways, more profoundly. And at the same time, feeling the pull to make meager efforts (like this) to try to preserve my memories of him. To preserve that part of him that is in me.

Joan Didion once noted that fastidious notebook keepers (like me, like Dad) seem afflicted with a "presentiment of loss" that compels them to record things. I heard Greta Gerwig reference that quote in a recent interview promoting Little Women, as she offered the thought that film/art “saves people" — that we can “save” our loved ones (or our memories of them) by writing things down. In this way, Jo March "saved" her younger sister Beth in Little Women by writing down her story. 

That thought resonates deeply. But then I wonder if that’s all I’m left with — that and running over snowbanks in Dad’s name. I'm afraid it might be, but I sure hope not. I feel fortunate for the time I had with him, but I so wish he were still here. Or at least somewhere. Waiting for me, cheering me on, making intercession with God for all the good things that happen to me in life, or even just interviewing the power brokers in heaven and drafting stories. Whatever. All of this — all of it — seems prompted by little more than the fact that I miss my Dad. And in some ways, five years after I lost him, it hurts more than ever.