Goodbye Song

My father died last week.  Our relationship was complex, as was his story.  I knew him very little, yet I feel like I understood him well.  His own experience--as an immigrant, as someone from a distant place--surely plays a role in my own passion for the world.  I wrote this poem for him.

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When I hear that you are gone, a waterfall of memories and feelings flood the room. 

I see myself at four, standing barefoot in the kitchen

and bravely trying the curried rice you make,

while you laugh and offer milk to cool my throat.

I see us one warm Easter day, me turning dizzy-around in my floating yellow dress. 

I see us peering into the garden that fascinates me—

it seems to be carved from the center of your house, and it dances with the sky.

And later…I see you grumbling about the naughty kids

who cut holes in your hammock, so that when you laid down

to listen to birdsong and watch the sunset, you fell right through. 

I listen to you talk with my husband about those common things

you both treasure in your distant countries.  The easy slowness.  The endless dirt roads.

The rains that fall so hard they threaten to collapse the painted tin roofs,

and are so loud that people close enough to hold hands cannot hear one another speak.

 

 

I wonder what you were like as a boy, when everything in your life was just beginning. 

I close my eyes and see you with an eager smile and bright eyes that take in everything. 

I imagine you climbing gnarled trees and racing alongside your giggling friends. 

I see you proudly bundling wood in your arms to make the cooking fire,

and flinging yourself headlong into the wide, brown river.

 

I think of your first years as a doctor, so far from your country when the map shapeshifts in a fury of fire and rage, when the home you have always known becomes another place.  How scared you must have felt, and how confused about what would come next.  I think of the years since, when you have worked so hard to build out of the unknown a life filled with work and relationships and love.

 

How strange it is that just last week, my tiny neighbor

Arik taught me to say “goodbye Dad” in Bengali. 

Saying this made us both laugh.  The words bounced along just like Arik does. 

How could I know I would need to say them so soon?  “Bangli Tata, Baba.” 

I would rather not say this goodbye.  And I wish I could say it after years of knowing you better. 

 

When I was a child and someone died,

the grown-ups would say “well, he’s at peace now”

 in such a doleful tone that peace held no appeal for me.

But after years of learning my own way in the world,

I think of the good in this good-bye and it feels true. 

I imagine goodness opening for you now

in the world of spirit, like a magnificent flower. 

I imagine you there, bright-eyed, with your own father,

with my mother, with the patients you have worried over and fought for.

 

In the river beyond this world, I wish for you lazy hours along its bank, vibrant birdsong,

a woven blue hammock tied between palms, a fishing pole at your side,

and a smile on your face.  I wish you fullness and grace and every kind of flowering. 

May the good in this goodbye fill you like the sun and flow over onto the rest of us,

so that even when it’s raining, we will think of you and see rainbows.