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Fifteen years floated by somehow, and I was now living back in Los Angeles. One Saturday night, my father was sitting at his dining room table, eating dinner with Helen when she touched her temple, stood up, walked over to the couch, laid down, and never woke up, having suffered a massive aneurysm. I had been visiting them that Saturday morning and I distinctly recall Helen sitting on the edge of a small bench in their backyard, crushing blossoms between her fingers, closing her eyes as she smelled them and then raising her face to the winter sun. And I remember thinking in the moment, that I had never seen her do that before.
My father, all of my cousin brothers, my sister cousin, Sheila and I were all crammed into a little hospital room for two days, hoping Helen would somehow come out of it. When it was clear she was declining, my father stepped out into the hallway and walked up to a red-faced chaplain who had been stationed outside the room, and he asked him to perform last rites for Helen. If I remember correctly, I believe the chaplain was eating either a bear-claw or some sort of sugar frosted flaked pastry, much of which had spilled down the front of his clergy shirt and wiping his full mouth he said: “Oh, Mr. Kearin, I can't do that. I’m no holier than you. You need a priest” and I watched as my father squared off and the corner of his lip curled up and he snarled, “Get one.”
A short time later, everyone at the bedside stopped talking at the same time and looked in the doorway. A slight, pale, white haired Father Paul had arrived and things suddenly got very real, because Father Paul seemed to be the kind of dude who brought a whole lot of “real” to whatever room he was in, and this was certainly no exception. He crossed over to Helen without acknowledging anyone and performed last rites. I remember it feeling incredibly intimate and uncomfortable. When he was through, he took a seat and sat facing my father. At one point he said: “Eugene, we must never try to carry this burden on our own.” He said “When we do…it hurts us” and he had my father put his hands on his own knees, and turn his palms upwards to the sky. A moment passed in holy silence, then, as we watched in horror, Dad fished out a wad of bills, and attempted to tip Father Paul, presumably to split with St. Peter and maybe “grease those gates a little,” but the gesture was met with a cold alabaster stare. He did not attempt to tip the Chaplain, but we’re pretty sure he would have taken a golden handshake and would have accepted at least a twenty…and some Pop Tarts.
Helen died that evening, on Dad’s 85th birthday.
A couple of days later, my sister-cousin Diane and I took Dad to The San Fernando Mission Catholic Cemetery to make arrangements for Helen’s funeral. I remember Dad wasn’t moving too well that day, so we accepted the receptionist’s kind offer of a wheelchair for him. This gracious gesture was met with the crack of a crooked smile and a look that spoke: “I’ll get you for this.” We’d heard from Dad for years that anyone in a wheelchair was most likely faking it to some degree and would probably benefit more from “…gettin’ a God damned job.”
We sat in a small room around a table with a kind, soft spoken man named Mario, who laid out some beautiful brochures with some pricing plans and said something to the effect of: “San Fernando Mission Catholic Cemetery offers a wide choice of burial options that accommodate the longstanding traditions of the Catholic faith and cater to all family and cultural customs.” My father waited patiently until he finished, leaned forward in his wheelchair, tapped twice on the pricing sheet and said: “You fuck us on this deal, Mario…and I’ll kill ya.”
I thought it was a good time to roll Dad out of the room until the color came back into Mario’s face and his hands stopped shaking. “Be right back” I said, as I pushed him out the heavy wooden door and started bumping down the beautiful California mission tiles. I returned the nods of a couple of passing nuns as I backed Dad’s chair into a little prayer alcove underneath a statue of The Blessed Virgin. I crouched down to eye level and in a loud whisper I said: “You CANNOT threaten to kill someone in a funeral home!” and he said, loud enough to echo off the adobe bricks: “He was trying to FUCK us!” He stared back at me, looking like a cornered street dog and I reached back for the only weapon I had. “Look, Dad…” I said “…when we’re done here, we’re gonna stop at In N’ Out Burger”…and like the Frankenstein monster when he first heard the strains of the blind man’s fiddle, he growled a long, low growl at me, and an improbable peace passed over his face as he slowly sat back in his wheelchair. “We’re gonna get a little tray of those French fries” he said, and I just nodded yes…HELL yes, we will.
After Helen died, dealing with my father was like trying to put a pantsuit on a porcupine.
The day of Helen’s burial, when everyone started to walk back to their cars, I stayed with Dad, as they front loaded the very last of the dirt over the filled grave. My civil engineer father wanted to be extra sure they weren’t “fuckin’ us” on the soil gradation and that they used the back side of that tractor bucket to tamp down a nice level base. He was sitting in a little folding chair that was half sunk in the mud on one side, with tears staining his cheeks, his hands resting on his knees with his palms facing upwards to the sky. “Like that, right?” he asked me.
Dad tried to tough it out alone at the house, like nothing had changed. He still drove down to his office every morning at 5:30, but we eventually had to pry his keys away from him when his car began to exhibit troubling traces of untold horrors on the highway between home and work. We had to close his office eventually, but he refused to stop working, so we brought in all his drawings and spread them out on the dining room table. I think he thought he could stanch his grief somehow by continuing to pound away like a steel driving hammer.
I got off stage one Sunday night and I saw that Dad was calling me on his cell phone. I answered it and an LAPD officer told me to please come up to the house as quickly as I could. When I got there, I found my father holding court with a circle of 10 cops on his driveway. I also noticed that the bottom right quarter panel of his front door was missing. The lead cop took me aside and told me “We got a call earlier this evening from your father saying he was being held hostage in his den by men wearing white jumpsuits and face masks, and they were all throughout the house, and that there was even one sitting next to him right now.” So they sent out about a dozen LAPD and they surrounded the house with weapons drawn, and then knocked his door in with a battering ram, got in there and found my father sitting alone, in his den, in the dark. There was no evidence of forced entry, other than theirs. The cop told me that something similar had just happened to his mother-in-law and that she imagined something that didn't actually happen. “Has he been under a lot of stress lately?” he asked.
I walked back to the police barbecue on the driveway and when the time seemed right, gently as I could, I said, “Dad, just so you know, this didn't happen tonight, OK? No one was in the house with you. It didn’t happen.” And I remember Dad looked at me, and he looked at the cops, and he wryly smiled and nodded, as if to say: “Got it…just between us, this didn't happen tonight. Mums the word boys, right?” And I thought…good enough.
The police left, I duct taped some cardboard over that quarter panel on the front door and I put Dad to bed. I shut out the light, left the bedroom door half open and stood in the dark hallway. Then, I heard a small voice say “Stephen?” “Yeah, Dad?” “Those guys in the jumpsuits…” he said “…do you think they're coming back?” and I said, “No, Dad...they're not coming back. Just go to sleep” There was a short pause and then a very different voice said “I hope they do come back…let’s lay a little trap for those sons of bitches.” “No, no, Dad…we're not going to lay a little trap for anyone. Let’s just go to sleep. I’ll be down the hall in the living room on the couch if you need me.” So, I walked down the hallway, and crawled into a sleeping bag, and as your lying there, in the dark, with the moonlight shining across the couch, and the big picture of Helen from the funeral home, which Dad refused to take down, is still there on the easel, watching you, there's a little part of your mind that wonders: “Did that happen? Are they coming back?”
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