Jaki Jean & July 2nd & Missing Jack

Thirty years ago, I was living in the second story of a duplex on Harold Street in Montrose, preparing a recipe from The Silver Palette, a cookbook given to me by my friend Stephen Sachnik. 

Raspberry Chicken.  With wild rice & a side of braised carrots.  I don’t remember if I planned a salad.  But dessert was boysenberry sherbet nestled in champagne.  With some shavings of dark chocolate as a garnish.

My guest, a man who had been in & out of my life & my bed & my heart for several years arrived.  He opened a bottle of wine, perused my then new apartment & joined me in the kitchen.

I don’t remember what we discussed.  I just remember the phone ringing.

Thirty years ago, one chose to answer the phone or ignore it.  No caller ID, no voice mail.

I answered it & heard my youngest brother’s voice, broken, scared, frantic.

“Jaki, Dad had a heart attack.  They are taking him to Southwest Memorial.”

Henri, my guest, took me to the hospital.  He offered to stay & I said no.  I don’t know how to explain my response to this man, whose paintings still hang in my bedroom.

In the waiting room of the emergency ward were our neighbors, Israel & Nora, Juta & Dietmar, my brother Jason & his friend Leslie.  More people I don’t remember

.

Leslie who was in band with Jason in high school & like Jason, a lifeguard.  Leslie who administered CPR & brought Jack back for the paramedics.

But it is a long drive from Dorrance Lane to Southwest Memorial Hospital.  

By the time I arrived at the hospital, Jack was gone.  The doctors took my mother & me into a room & told her that they lost him & then I went with her into another room.

And watched, helpless, as she threw herself across Jack’s body & begged him not to leave her so soon.

Someone took her from the room & left me there.  I touched him, I kissed his forehead & he was so cold.  I remember touching his eyes, eyes so like mine.

My sister was out of town with her boyfriend for a christening.  My brother John was at a lake with friends.

Calls were made, arrangements were made.  People travelled for the funeral.  Life went on.

But thirty years does not take way the loss of Jack’s early exit.  Sometimes I am so pissed at him for leaving early.  Sometimes, I just wonder.

I wonder what he would have been like with my sons, with Janet’s sons & daughter, with John’s daughter & son, with Jason’s daughter.

I wonder what he would have felt when Sam gave the opening address at the 35^th Anniversary of PDAP or how he would have felt when Nick & the Lady Jane got married.

I wonder what he would have said if he was still alive & I was still voting to the Left as he was voting to the Right.  If we could finally agree to disagree & discuss issues without him throwing a plate of pasta across the room.

I wonder what he would have thought about me returning to school for my forties crisis, about my concentration in Feminist studies & Feminist Theory & vagina women.  Or my intense belief that the fear of the Other binds us in repression.

I wonder what it would be like to watch him grow old with Jean.  How different her life would have been with his presence.

So, thirty years does not lessen the loss.  Nor will forty or fifty or sixty years.  I miss him.  I will miss him until I see him again.

When I next encounter Jack, I am going to ask him:  What the fuck were you thinking, leaving so soon?

Until then, Daddy, rest in peace.  I love you.  We have a lot to discuss . . .