Alzheimer’s is a disease of loss, of missing the person who has been claimed by its piracy. I think I have missed my father the most since Sept. 11, or maybe I’ve just missed him differently. If not for this disease, he would be an elder statesman, taking up dignified space in the hushed and hallowed realm of our collective thoughts. We look to statesmen for wisdom, comfort, calm in the face of fear. Yet his voice is absent.
When I saw all the former presidents at the memorial service on Sept. 14, I etched in my mind an image of my father, standing amongst them, head bowed in prayer; I wasn’t willing to concede that he wasn’t there. Just after the 11th, I put my head against his chest so I could hear and feel his heartbeat and I whispered, “Something terrible has happened in the world. I wish I knew what you would say.”
Then I realized that a very long time ago, he taught me something important about grief. He taught me to look up. We had driven out to the Agoura ranch my family owned during my childhood. The ranch-hand met us at the car with tears streaming down his face. He told us that my father’s beloved horse, Nancy D, had died suddenly in the hours before dawn. She had been close to delivering a foal and, with no previous symptoms, had succumbed to a fatal disease. I burst into tears, but when I looked at my father, he had a sweet, faraway look on his face and his eyes were aimed up toward the sky.
“Why aren’t you crying?” I asked–a reasonable question for a nine-year-old.
“Because I’m thinking of all the wonderful memories I have with her, all the great years we had together.”
I’m sure he cried, and grieved deeply, but what I remember–what I have held within me all these years–is the looking up, his remembering to check in with God.
When I lived in New York, I used to love looking up–at roof gardens, at classic architecture, at the moon hanging between buildings. In the nights since the 11th, I have had dreams of walking those same Manhattan streets and looking up at a hole in the skyline. In the morning I have woken up and found I had been crying in my sleep. Sometimes it hurts so much to look up–sometimes the emptiness stretches so wide and aches so horribly.
But there is this about the sky: it always changes, and when we look up, it helps us heal. We remember, we dream, we tell God how much we hurt and how fragile our hopes seem.
My father has lived longer than any other president, and his voice can’t be heard now. But I tell you that it can. He would have said to look up. He told that to his young daughter a long time ago–and to many others over the years.
Last week, I turned a corner in Los Angeles and saw several people staring up into the sky. I followed their gaze to a cluster of balloons sailing up into the endless expanse. They were red, white and blue. We all stood and watched them until they were just tiny specks, and then we looked at each other and smiled. We were strangers, but we smiled like we weren’t. That’s the other thing about looking up–when you look down again, you see things differently.
