January 31: Never to See My Father Again, Thomas Merton's Birthday, My Father

Merton almost loses his father:

All this time, Father was abroad.  He had gone first to the South of France, to the Roussillon, where I was born.  He was living first at Banyuls, then at Collioure, painting landscapes along the Mediterranean shore, and in the red mountains, all the way down to Port Vendres, and the borders of Catalonia.  Then, after a while, had and the people he was with crossed over into Africa and went inland in Algeria, to a place on the edge of the desert, and there he painted some more.

Letters came from Africa.  he sent me a package containing a small burnous, which I could wear, and a stuffed lizard of some sort.  At that time I had gathered a small natural history museum of pieces of junk that are to be found around Long Island, like arrowheads and funny-looking stones.

During those years, he was painting some of the best pictures he had ever painted in his life.  But then something happened, and we got a letter from one of his friends, telling us that he was seriously ill.  He was, in fact, dying.

When Bonnemaman told me this news, I was old enough to understand what it meant, and I was profoundly affected, filled with sorrow and with fear.  Was I never to see my father again?  This could not happen.  I don't know whether or not it occurred to me to pray, but I think by this time it must have, at least once or twice, although I certainly had very little of anything that could be called faith.  If I did pray for my father it was probably only one of those blind, semi-instinctive movements of nature that will come to anyone, even an atheist in a time of crisis, and which do not prove the existence of God, exactly, but which certainly show that the need to worship and acknowledge Him is something deeply ingrained in our dependent natures, and simply inseparable from our essence.

It seems that for days Father lay in delirium.  Nobody appeared to know what was the matter with him.  He was expected to die from moment to moment.  But he did not die.

Finally he got past the crisis of this strange sickness, and recovered his consciousness, and began to improve and get well.  And when he was on his feet again, he was able to finish some more pictures, and get his things together, and go to London, where he held his most successful exhibition, at the Leicester Galleries, early in 1925.

Merton has already lost his mother to cancer, and now his father, living and working in Africa, becomes gravely ill.  Merton is only nine years old, and he has little training in faith and prayer, which could have provided some source of comfort to him at this time in his life.  He tries to pray, instinctually--probably along the lines of "Help me, help me, helpmehelpme, helphelphelphelphelphelp."  I say this same prayer on an almost daily basis, several times.  In the morning.  On my way to work.  During work.  On my way home from work.  I ask for God's help all the time.  (Tonight, my son is having a sleepover with two of his closest friends.  They are screaming and laughing in my son's bedroom at the moment.  Helphelphelphelphelphelphelp.)

Today would have been Thomas Merton's 105th birthday.  I realized this fact because of my poet friend, Jillena, who posted a Merton quote on Facebook this morning.  For some reason, 105   doesn't seem like an impossible age to reach these days, although Merton didn't make it.  In my work in the medical field, I often encounter people of advanced years who seem eternally youthful.  I knew a lady who lived to be 102, and she didn't look a day over 70. 

This February will be the second anniversary of my father's death.  Her would have been 93 this year.  Unlike Owen Merton, my father didn't recover from his last illness.  I've been thinking about him a lot recently.  Yesterday morning, during my mythology class, I had my students do a journal entry about moments of transformation in their lives--when you fundamentally change because of some experience.  I found myself writing this about my dad:

My father was the god Vulcan to me, hunched over, working with his hands, the muscles under his tee-shirt like bands of sheet metal.  He could do remarkable things--tear a Detroit phone book in two with his hands, take the two pieces, stack them on top of each other, then tear them in two again.  I saw him do this with my own six-year-old eyes.

He was always there.  Mount McKinley.  Old Faithful.  The polar ice cap.  Haley's comet.  He was there at the beginning of time.  When God said let there be light, there was light.  And my father was standing in that light, taking care of business.

But, after almost 91 years, nine-plus decades, 1080 months, 32,850 days, my father's body was done with business.  It wanted to rest, take a nap, find a cave to hibernate.  Yet, my father wouldn't let his body fall asleep.  Kept trying to climb out of bed, kicking oxygen into his lungs.  He was a lunar space shuttle tethered by bed sheets to Earth.

When he finally took his last breath, it was more like a shark leaping out of the ocean to catch a passing seagull for lunch.  He leaped, bit down, fell back into the bed, and then sunk.  And kept sinking.

Nietzsche said, "God is dead."  That night, I believed Nietzsche was right.

On this anniversary of his birth, Merton seems very alive to me.  So does my father, as I listen to those three adolescent boys pretending to be men.  I have become my dad.  Old Faithful.  Mount Everest.  The tides.  Continents.  Oceans.

When his son goes to sleep tonight, Saint Marty will be his moon, guiding him toward morning.