by Jeff McMahon
My father's old brass ship's clock hung on the wall, silent and unticking. I sat at his desk below it, my fingers on his computer keyboard, silent and unticking.
I had been there more than an hour, trying to figure out how to get inside. Being a writer, I'm a Macintosh man; being an engineer, he was IBM compatible. Nor had he any use for frivolous interfaces like Windows.
I faced a black screen with a letter and a carrot. "C:>," it blinked. Just "C:>"
I had to retrieve his financial records for my mother, and I had to leave to catch a plane in about an hour. I hadn't slept the previous night. My eyes burned, my hands shook, and IBM's Disk Operating System gave me a thumping headache. I called out to him, hushed but frustratedó"Come on, Pop!"óand that's when he chimed in, in that voice that tugs my deepest tether.
"Menu," he said.
I was surprised to hear from him, because he had died at sunset the day before.
I realize this may sound strange. The first thing my dead father says to me in his new state of being is a DOS command. Believe me, I would have preferred something more profound. He might have told me what it's like being dead, whether there's an afterlife, which religion got it right?
None of that seemed to concern him, though. He wanted to help me with the computer. He was like that, practical. He worked at Argonne National Laboratory when they developed the first nuclear reactors. He invented a radiation analyzer that went to the moon on Apollo 11.
And technology never outran him. Give him some kaput electronic contraption born 60 years after he was, and he'd have it running clocklike.
A DOS command made its own sense.
Right after he died, he stuck with me all the time. He hovered behind me, above my head and to the left. That's how it seemed. I couldn't turn and look at him, but I could feel him there, and I could hear his voice.
I was driving down a seaside boulevard a few days later, swinging through the curves the ocean had carved in the shore, trying to remember the poems my dad recited from heart in my childhood. He had memorized whole works from Robert Frost and Robert W. Service and soliloquys from Shakespeare.
Engineer or not, he loved poetry. Writer or not, I couldn't remember them all. Especially oneósomething about a bird.
"Oh, the north wind shall blow," he suddenly said, "and we shall have snow, and what will poor robin do then?"
"She'll fly to the barn," I replied as it came to me, "to keep herself warm, and tuck her head under her wing, poor thing. She'll tuck her head under her wing."
In that way my father and I spoke across the barrier of death. His words popped into my head like Roman candles, audible, but coming from within. It's not so odd. It happened to Hamlet. He followed a ghost with his father's face away from Castle Elsinore, and the spectre spoke:
"Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold... I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night."
My father's certain term ended at his memorial service. He faded from the spot slightly behind, above me, and to the left. Death became impermeable to speech.
He continued to return in dreams, thoughóevery night for 18 months. I might dream about something unrelated to him, some drama in which he had no role, but he'd be there, sitting in a chair in the corner of a room or standing alone at the dream's edge.
I walked an oak-lined street in Chicago, I dreamt. Ahead of me I saw my father, flanked by my brothers and sister, walking toward me. Since he's dead, I was surprised and happy to see him. I ran toward him, and as I ran, the years left me. I was 3 years old when I reached him, and three feet high. He lifted me to the sky.
My father has lost much of his form in the years since he died. He's become more of a feeling, though he zooms back into his stern face when he has something important to say. Regardless of form, his essence is unchangedóthe hell-forged, Irish, stubborn, brilliant, belt-harsh, loving, thundering himness I know as well as I know myself.
His dream visits seem natural, perhaps because they began while he was alive. Seven years ago, a dream foretold his death:
My family was holding a reunion, I dreamt, in a lake house. I was late, the last to arrive, just as I had been in birth. I found everyone there but my father.
"Where's dad?" I asked my sister.
"He's gone across the lake."
I looked over the water and saw his rowboat heading into the distance.
I didn't need to consult any dream interpretation books. The next day I began an effort to get closer to my father, just knowing that I must, not knowing that cancer was growing within his body. None of us would know about that for two years.
He kept the cancer to himself until he could hide it no longer, and three months after he told us, it took him. We had become better friends by the time I watched his last breath expire as the sun slipped behind Arizona mountains. Fast friends we've remained.
I sat at my desk last Thanksgiving, on the 33rd anniversary of my birth, my fingers poised on the keyboard of my computer, silent and unticking. I knew I had something to write, but I knew not what. The old brass ship's clock I had taken from my father's den hung on the wall beside me, still as still as the day he died.
It began to tick.
When my father died, he took with him my immature notions of death. He taught me that death is a changing, not an ending.
Once, I was a boy, and he was a man. My hand fit small within his hand. My eyes beheld the mystery of his eyes. Now, I am a man and he is a collection of disembodied voices, prophetic dreams, and haunted clocks. The hands and eyes are gone, and all that remains is the mystery.
Is your father alive? You still have a few hours to hold his hand.
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"I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night."
This column won a first place from the California Newspaper Publishers Association and a Golden Dozen award from the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors
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