The Whole World Sings Below

The Whole World Sings Below

This evening, the dog and I hiked the ridge. It could have been the moors in a 19th century novel - an evening when it might be thundering, but is simply grey with racing clouds. The cows let us pick daisies, red clover - Dad's favorite and I think of him. A kind soul who took loving care of the Japanese during the Occupation - a mere blink of an eye of time from when his brother, a fighter pilot, an architect, a father, was lost in the South Pacific.

I got to be with my dad when he took his last breath in the room he had shared with my mother as long as I had known him. I stood there with my knee on his bed, touching his back, merging with Greenbrier, K, Araceli, and Thom as we attempted to sing our father into heaven with the only thing we could muster in our numbness: “Oh, the West Virginia Hills, how majestic and how grand, with their summits bathed in glory…..”.

The last words my father spoke, just hours before he died as he struggled from the bath room were: “Beth, Beth, help me, dear.” How many times in his life did he hear similar words uttered to him as he made his rounds at the hospital, visited the sick and dying in their homes - or echoing in his head as he thought of his younger brother in the fighter plane, being shot down and drowned in the South Pacific? That generation didn’t talk about hauntings in their heads.

What is it about human nature that in the moments it takes the pen to scratch a President’s name, an Emperor’s signature, a Prime Minister’s scrawl, a soldier goes from battle to reconstruction? Even as the heart screams with grief for the kid brother who shared the attic room with the slanted ceilings in a little New Jersey town, a man is capable of walking into a hospital ward in that prior land called evil, and seeing a woman with pneumonia, a child with a broken leg, a young man with seizures, and he begins to administer care with every fiber of his knowledge and every inch of his soul. And then he writes home letters to his wife, extolling the gentleness of these people. That generation didn’t reveal how they discovered the secret of forgiveness, the ability to be humble and in that humbleness become the strongest generation yet.

As my father’s breaths became softer and slower, I wanted to whisper to him, “Go Daddy – reach on over for Mother’s hand and embrace your brother and all the collies who have gone before you and I know are waiting for you. Indulge in the gardens of your beloved sweetest berries.” Instead I softly began to sing with my siblings, “I want to wake up in the morning where the rhododendrons grow, where the Lord is so near me, when I breathe He can hear me, and the whole world sings below…”