What Remains

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
—W. S. Merwin, “For the Anniversary of My Death”

My father died on September 18, a day he had walked through 85 times before. He crossed it at the age of three, living in Hershey, Nebraska, cornfields to match the sky in both richness and reach, a stack of white bread on the dinner table every single night; and then again at 21, driving with my mother in a large-fendered car with the radio on and the windows open to a chorus of late-summer frogs; and then again at 36, a man who appeared at home in his body, bore children on his shoulders, dangled them from his arms; and then again at 65, his own children grown and one of them with children of her own, the grass now cut and the leaky roof fixed and the shed in the back yard built, the not-yet-turned leaves still on the trees but the rake standing at attention in the garage. Until the last September 18.

My mother held his hand.

I was not there.

Even though I had been home a week before and would arrive the following afternoon, when my father left this world in a body he no longer recognized as his own, I was not at his bedside holding his other hand, a fact I am still trying to forgive myself for.

Because my dad was there for me. Always. Except when he wasn’t. At my birth, the obstetrician gave him the choice of saving either his daughter or his wife. A botched delivery meant that one would likely have to be sacrificed. My father chose his wife. I do not blame him; anyone would have made the same decision. Or maybe I do. Or did. I once wrote a memoir suggesting that this initial abandonment led to a lifelong feeling of lack. But the longer I live, the more I realize that lack rides beneath the skin of every human; we have a fundamental belief that we are not enough. That’s the thing about growing older: The arc of your past elongates, such that what was once tragedy flattens and mercy becomes the line you discern.

Feather came into this world in late summer, on a neighbor’s farm about a mile from my house. Another foal had lived in Feather’s corral from spring to early summer. I had named him Feather, too. But First Feather left, was sold, I imagine, and a new Feather arrived in July as if fallen from the sky. Feather was the color of bone, with a darker mane that was but an inch or so long. The first day I saw him, his legs trembled when he stood. Just born, he reminded me of myself as an adolescent, knees and elbows unable to find ease, unsure of my place. He stayed close to his mother, his sweet nose nuzzling her belly, always trying to nurse.

I would see them on my runs in the early morning, dawn making promises from behind the nearby mountains. Feather and his mother were corralled in a pen next to the road. Each day I would call to Feather, and within a few days of being born, he made his gangly way to me. I would have to fall to my haunches because he was so small. Through the metal fencing, I would offer my fingers, and he would suck them one by one, seeking milk. His lips were soft like velvet, warm, but he pulled with determination.

The bodies are laid out on tables; black plastic covers them from head to foot. The plastic is not heavy enough to conceal the fact that humans rest beneath. I would know the form anywhere. Six bodies stretch on six stainless steel gurneys in a white-walled room labeled “veterinary lab” on the door. The anatomy labs on campus are being remodeled, so the cadavers have been moved to the vet science building. Everything is temporary.

At one end of the room, two skeletons dangle from an unseen thread attached to the crowns of their heads, and the skeleton of a large animal of some sort skulks behind them—a family out for a walk. Chemicals charge the air, though beneath that smell is the brood of decay, the funk of a cluttered room closed to sunlight and air.

We are handed white lab coats and blue latex gloves. Some of the coats have ribs Sharpied on their backs in an attempt at whimsy. I don’t laugh, though the nine others in my group giggle and point. Most of them are 20-year-old women training to be yoga instructors. I am closer in age to many of the dead than to the young women wearing leggings and holding notebooks. Though I have been teaching yoga for years at this point, my understanding of anatomy remains limited. This is why I am here: to become a better teacher. I have trouble visualizing the inner landscape of the body, get lost between ligament and tendon, concentric and eccentric, have trouble navigating the medial, the distal, and the proximal. As forced air blows from air-conditioning vents in the ceiling and goosebumps populate my arms, I wonder whether the dead can clarify the living.

Above each cadaver, a white board records the name of the individual, the age, the sex, the occupation, the cause of death. All in erasable marker.

“Get into groups of four,” the head of the anatomy lab says. “That way you will get to see everything.”

None of us moves.

“Should we count off?” he jests. But we remain huddled near the sinks. I am normally one to take action. Today, though, surrounded by dead people, I want to remain with the herd.

The first gift I remember my father bringing home from his travels was a thick red book titled Walt Disney’s Story Land. On the cover, Mickey, Donald, and Goofy rode an open book like a magic carpet. Inside, cream pages were filled with rich, colorful illustrations. Mickey was in there, Bambi and Dumbo, too, as well as a squirrel named Perri who lived with his family in a perfectly circled hollow of a tree. I was three, though I question whether the memory is real or not. I’m on the sidewalk, in front of our military bungalow that sits a hundred feet from Pearl Harbor. My father unlatches the gate to the yard, one hand holding a briefcase and the other a hardcover book, just for me. Because my father was a storyteller, it feels right to me that this first gift I can remember receiving would have been a book of 55 stories. But he would not be the one to read them to me. My mom would narrate the antics of the animals. Instead, my father would make up stories in which I was the main character, not some teapot that could sing. Later, my two younger brothers joined the tales. The stories lived inside me, not on a page. In my father’s words, I became an author of my own life. I am hard-pressed to remember any of the details from those bedtime tales, only the feeling of sitting in bed against my father’s side and waiting to see where his imagination might take us next.

The book remains, but just barely, its binding now mostly string. I picture it on the shelves of the spare bedroom of my parents’ home. It outlasted my father.

Feather and his mother lived alone in their narrow corral. Other horses whinnied sometimes from a nearby pasture, and the mare called back. In late summer, long grasses were harder to come by, so I would pull them from the roadside early on my run and carry them in my hands for a mile. I wanted Feather to taste more of the world than the hay left by his owner. A horsewoman I knew said that I wasn’t supposed to feed other people’s horses, but I never saw Feather’s owner, didn’t believe Feather was given much more than a pen. I took him grass every day. Soon he knew it was me and would run to greet me at the metal bars. Gambol really, half buck, half run, pure joy. The mare would push her way toward me, greedy for more grass, the blades squeaking in her teeth, but Feather mostly just wanted me to pet him. He liked me to rub his neck the most. When I knelt to the ground, Feather and I met face to face, and I saw myself reflected in his liquid eyes. In Feather’s gaze, I appeared larger than I was, appeared larger than I felt. In those moments, I would swim in his pupils. “I love you, Feather,” I told him every day. “I brought you this grass.” He would turn his body to my palm.

The first body belongs to Lenn, who died at 91. He had been a high school teacher and now rests belly-up on the gurney. His head remains covered by a sheet, while the remainder of his body lies exposed. The flesh on his thighs and arms is brownish orange, infused with formaldehyde, which preserves his innards long past the time that nature would reclaim them. His penis cowers in contrast to the rest of his skin, shrunken tight to his body. Gray pubic hair furs the lower pelvis; his toenails are white and pointed. We have been invited to touch the bodies with our gloved hands, but I don’t yet.

“How long has Lenn been here?” someone in our group asks.

“Ten months,” the lab tech answers as he peels the flesh away from Lenn’s thoracic cavity.

Lenn has turned 92 on this table.

His insides have been carefully arranged, a curio cabinet of flesh, each piece—appendix, small intestine, pancreas—labeled with a square white tile for hundreds of students to see. I realize that more people know Lenn intimately from the inside than those who knew him intimately from without. I have never met Lenn, but when offered, I take his liver in my palm. Cold, heavy, certain.

The lab tech unpleats the large intestine for us, a crenulated organ in a muddy golden brown that contracts into a space no bigger than a lunch box, the kind a high school teacher might keep in his desk. Lenn’s stomach has been slit and emptied, the evidence of his last meal removed. I peer at nothing when the lab tech opens the paste-colored organ. Somehow the emptiness is more haunting than the intestine itself. The inside of this body takes me outside, to an image of Lenn at his desk grading papers, the half-eaten sandwich packed by his wife close enough to reach as he grades his students’ essays. When Lenn takes a bite, he tastes summer in the tomato.

I knew my father was dying. At least in general. After my younger brother’s unexpected death three years ago, my father’s lymphoma became aggressive. The cancer marshaled in his neck and threatened to choke a man who could hold his breath for minutes when retrieving a shell from the ocean’s floor. A year or so before his death, the doctor ordered chemo, not for cure but to prevent suffocation. The chemo attacked the cancer and my father. Every time I saw him, he was further diminished.

It was a Wednesday morning in mid-September when I understood his death was not distal but proximal. By then, we had 24-hour care to help my mother, give her some rest, move my father from bed to table to toilet. That Wednesday morning, over the phone, my aunt told me to fly home.

The following day, I entered the house, scanning the usual spaces my father occupied—his recliner, the kitchen table, the patio chair outside. Instead, my dad sat in a wheelchair in the living room, slumped over. He wore a white T-shirt, just like the hundreds of white T-shirts he wore when I was a child, beneath his naval uniform, a triangle of white at his throat like a handkerchief or a flag. I dropped my bags and ran to him, fell to my knees, and reached for his gnarled hands. When he saw it was me, he cried. Or maybe I was already crying, and he followed. “It was not supposed to end this way,” he kept saying. “It was not supposed to end this way.”

But how should it end? How should the man who made me, in large part, dissolve? Is there another ending where the hero rides off on his horse into the horizon to be gloriously met by the sun? He could not sit upright. My mother fed him the little that he ate, one spoonful at a time, wiping the corners of his lips. That image of the hero on horseback was wildly impossible.

Some days I would feel burdened by Feather, another being dependent on me, another being I needed to show up for, be present for, help. Between the classes I taught as a professor, the young colleagues I mentored, the yoga students I led, and my own family, my body felt stretched, my hide thinned and fragile. Sometimes I didn’t want to get out of bed. Yet I would, every morning, long before the sun arrived, to run from no one but myself. And here was Feather, a baby animal who I told myself was waiting for me, a manufactured need. One morning I decided I would just wave and call to Feather as I ran past, keep my body moving. To stop meant that my joints would thicken and resist the return to the run, that my knees would ache from bending down. Today, I would not stop.

But then I saw the long grass on the side of the road, bent under its own weight, cooled by the stars. I knew he would take such tiny bites, nibble my skin. I stopped to tear handfuls for Feather, marveled at how easily the grasses gave. Such a simple gift. In that moment, bringing grass to Feather felt light and joyful again, the giving not a loss but a gain, if only because the opportunity was so remarkable. No one else awake on the street, the stars still pouring over the mountains, and a tiny horse had run to meet me, his coat having grown thicker in a month, his limbs longer. And the two of us stood eye to eye, as we did every morning, a joining that had become the best part of my day partly because it was magical, partly because it was simple, and partly because the warmth of his small body affirmed the future.

Here are her hips, still dripping from the wetting agents that keep the parts from rotting. Here, the fat on her thighs, her ovaries, the tiny fallopian tubes. Here is her uterus that may or may not have held a baby. Natalie, 93, died of ovarian cancer. Hard to say what all she carried in her lifetime. The uterus, her uterus, is flat like a pancake.

“It would expand in this direction,” the lab tech indicates, motioning with his hands to show us how a fetus would fill her body.

The young women around me gasp.

My hope is that Natalie knew those first butterfly flutters of a baby growing in her womb. No one knows me more intimately than my two children. Though they have no memory of this, they once swam inside me. For nine months, I was inhabited by each of them. For years after, I carried them on my body, on my hip, in a sling or a baby backpack. Now my children have left the house. They wander the world outside my body, tethered by strings that only I can see.

Natalie’s brain rests on the table beside the trunk of her body, never to be reunited. The brain is smaller than I would have expected, cream-colored and soft.

“This is outstanding,” the head of the anatomy lab says, “the time it took someone to cut everything else away to leave only the brain and the nerves that run down to fingers and toes.”

Not as long as it takes to grow a baby within an organ the size of a pear, I think.

The professor picks up the brain so that he can display the coral-like structure of the nervous system, which runs down the main channel along the spine and then branches to the arms and legs. He fans the nerves into a shape that mimics the human skeleton. When I touch them, I am surprised at their rigidity, given how they float above the table like a gossamer scarf.

Natalie’s eyeballs, though, are soft and so very light.

“Were her eyes blue?” I ask him, because they look gray now, or cloudy blue, marbled.

“Those are the chemicals,” he responds. “You can’t tell her eye color.”

Even in death, the body remains a cipher.

When I was 11, my father made a desk for me. This was when we lived near Pearl Harbor, in a house that had no garage. I do not know where he made it or when. How could he have built a desk without my knowing? And what hours would he have used? He was up with the dark and came home with the dark and worked Saturdays because Asia was still awake and my father was the lawyer for the Pacific Fleet. Some of my strongest memories are of my dad returning home at night, his uniform still sharp and white, carrying nothing in his hands that was not military issue, because to do so would have been against regulations. Some days he might pull the hat from his head and remove a paper for my mother—a letter or a receipt that had been riding atop his body all day. But from the outside he looked exactly the same as when he had left.

The desk had tiny compartments for letters I didn’t learn to write until I was an adult, letters I would send to him because he had trouble hearing and felt cut off. I kept secrets in the desk drawers, as well as my sticker collections and mix tapes. An angsty teenager, I would write vicious diary entries about how my father did not understand me, was unfair and cruel, never once considering that I wrote on a surface sanded by his own hands.

My children used the desk, stored their own secrets in the cubbyholes and drawers, and now it sits in my home. My father’s hands have touched every angle, every edge, every plane. It has moved across the Pacific Ocean three times, hardly a nick.

Feather inhabited my days, long past my runs. I worried about Feather on stormy nights. Told myself stories about how he spent his time. He had only a skinny tree for shelter, and his mother’s flank. I asked the horsewoman I knew whether her horse had a barn. “Yes,” she said. “Technically he doesn’t need one, but I want him to have a safe place.” Feather’s coat remained wet even a day after a storm, the rain sunk deep in his hair. I wanted him to be safe. I wanted to be safe. A barn for the world.

Once when I was running, I saw some walkers on the road ahead of me stop to pet Feather. I was both upset and comforted. He was mine. He was loved by all. Perhaps they called him by another name, Apple or Breeze or Cash.

“I have fed him from my fingers,” I wanted to say. “I have been inside his eye.”

Genevieve’s lungs rest on a table to the side. I have no idea where her body is. Like Natalie’s uterus, Genevieve’s lungs are slick with moisture. Like Natalie’s uterus, they are adrift from the whole. Liquid pools on the cloth under the organs. A nearby plastic box, empty except for the pervasive brownish-red liquid, reads “Genevieve” in black marker. How many times have her lungs been pulled from the waters to be exposed to the air once again?

I had always envisioned the lungs as light, like balloons inside the body that lift on inhalation. But lungs are heavy, meaty things, not unlike the liver of a chicken in terms of color but enormous and slabbed. The lobes are marked by edges that flap like gills, almost frilled, but dense. I push my finger into the meat of the lung, like I might a steak, and the tissue is thick and fleshy. There is nothing airy and light about lungs, nothing transparent or fragile or translucent, like eyes. When you breathe air into your body, you are taking the air through a sieve of thick tissue, the weight of a chihuahua.

No air remains in Genevieve’s lungs. We all end our life on the exhale. Empty like a pocket.

On the weekend before my father died, the same weekend when my father told me he wanted a different ending, my mother and I drove him to the VA hospital in Fort Worth. He needed to be seen by a doctor to be able to receive benefits, and my mom had been waiting for close to a year for this appointment. Most of the drive, he slept. Or he asked, “Is it morning?” It took an hour, but when we arrived, nurses helped us unload my father and wheel him to the office.

The intake involved a series of questions my father either could not answer—How do you learn best? Visually, orally, aurally?—or questions that he answered in ways that made my heart contract: Have you ever considered taking your own life? “I am the luckiest man alive,” he said, tears in his eyes.

On the wall was a photograph of Marines being extracted from water by a twin-blade helicopter. One Marine was in midair while the others were treading water that looked gray and cold. My father could not stop staring at the photograph. “Look at that,” he said, shaking his head. I do not know if my father could have articulated what he was seeing, but he knew that what he saw was full of wonder.

Recently, I had the realization that I should love the whole world the way I love Feather. It was early autumn, and Feather had grown tall. I knew he would be leaving me soon, and I had begun to reassure him about his future owners. “They will take care of you, Feather.” Every day I saw Feather in his corral, I experienced relief. Every day I approached Feather in the autumn dark, I worried. Would he be gone? It was a question I did not ask of the people I met every day, the trees I passed, the cats who curled by my side. Feather was more impermanent, so every time I left him, I told myself it could be the last time I saw him. But that is true of everything; nothing remains. The book, the body, the desk.

I had the opportunity to say goodbye to my father, on the night before I flew back home, five days before he died. I sat on his bed and held his hand. I told him all the things I wanted him to hear, that soon he would be with my younger brother Bryan and his older brother Jerry, that he didn’t need to be afraid, that he had given us everything. My father cried. I cried.

He pointed to his chest. “It hurts,” he said.

“I know, Dad,” I replied. “It’s sadness.”

I promised him that I would take care of my mother, and my other brother, as well as my own two children, his only grandkids, whom he has always worried so much about. His hazel eyes seemed faded, his body so small. The hands that used to engulf mine now curled and purpled, unable to hold a cup. “You will always be with me,” I said.

One of the last things he told me was delivered in a whisper: “You have no idea how religious I am.”

Above the lungs rests Genevieve’s heart. The lab tech pulls the heart apart to show us the cavernous insides. “Here are the heartstrings,” he says, pointing to thin connective tissue that spindles into columns inside the chambers. “They aren’t really called that.” He laughs.

The heart is papery and slight when compared with the lungs, which stand solid like a wall behind it. In fact, all the organs and muscles have been dwarfed by the certainty of the lungs, their literal heft, our primal need for air.

“But does some kind of electrical impulse or something travel from the heartstrings to the brain when we are in emotional pain?” asks Carli, one of the young women. Unconsciously her hand goes to her chest. She knows how much the heart can hurt.

“No,” the lab tech scoffs. “I was just kidding! These are the chordae tendineae. They connect the papillary muscles to the tricuspid valve and the bicuspid valve.”

He moves on to the aorta and the other massive arteries that take oxygenated blood from the heart to the rest of the body.

I catch Carli’s eye. She stands next to me. “Not everything that is real can be touched,” I say.

The other day, I could not find Feather. I called to him in the dark, but he wasn’t there. I began crying, giant sobs, my forehead against the cold metal of the pen. Then Feather appeared from the shadows, like a beige-colored ghost. I knew then the feel of the future. I would be at those bars again, and I would be crying alone.

Lenn knows, as do Genevieve and Natalie. Phoebe, too, the homemaker who lies right now on her stomach so that I, and so many others, can touch the translucent tendon, shining gold that runs up the back of her calf.

In my head, they gave their bodies, though I know too well that some choose donation because they cannot afford anything else. Still, the story I tell standing above Phoebe’s corpse is that they offered their bodies knowing the body is precious but cannot be held forever. Without attachment to their material, to what happens next, knowing that they, that we, are all dying, that everything is temporary, they donated their calves, and their livers, and their lungs, and their empty uteruses into the hands of others.

Though I will always remember holding Genevieve’s lungs and Natalie’s eyes, I realize more and more as the days pass that I did not hold their organs but rather their surrender.

I was not there when my father died. I will not be there when Feather is taken to his new home. One day, the corral will be empty and winter will be upon us and nothing will move, frozen and cold.

My father knew I was coming the next day and did not wait for me. Maybe the manner of his leaving was his final gift to me. There he is, walking up the sidewalk, black shoes shining, laces done up just right. He carries nothing and builds furniture out of air.