Coming Face To Face With Tragedy
Nigel Fox tells a story on tape of his and Elizabeth’s journey home
As we all sat down at our table for our first formal meal together, my father and mother at opposite ends of the table and my brother Reginald and Martha across from us, I could sense the unspoken tension in the room.
My mother was unusually nervous, as demonstrated by her persistent straightening of a napkin on her lap. We sat quietly for a few minutes, and then my father rose to his feet as had been the custom of the house for many years and said a short blessing. “For what we are about to eat, may we be truly thankful, though Jesus Christ, Amen.” My mother responded, “Amen,” and then he returned to his seat. Then we began to pass the food in silence.
I could remember hundreds of such meals. Our dinner conversation usually concerned some recent event or some tasks to be completed. Never had there been silence like this.
“I see you have new milking machines,” I commented, hoping to break the silence.
“We’ve had them about a year now,” Reginald responded. Then my father, still chewing a piece of chicken, began,
“Have you decided to help me with the harvest?” he asked.
“I don’t think we can stay five or six weeks. I can’t leave the store unattended for so long.”
“You’ve been away for eight years. You can certainly spare a few weeks.”
“I have a life back in New York.”
“Selling picture boxes to the rich and idle. What kind of a profession is that? Here, we work the land and produce something for our labors.”
“You’re not going to demean what I do,” I responded. “I’ve worked hard for what we have.”
“And what will you accomplish once you’ve placed one of these picture boxes in every house? People will be sitting there, mesmerized by the pictures, and will the world be a better place for it? I don’t think so.”
I was becoming agitated, yet I fought to control my tongue. “I have to live my own life.”
“By rejecting all the values, you were taught to believe in?”
“John,” my mother jumped in. “Let’s talk about something else.”
I was so excited that I slid the chair backward and escaped from the table. I went outside to calm myself down. My mother, with some hesitation, followed me.
“He has no right to talk to me that way,” I told her as she closed the door behind us. “I’m not some child anymore.” I was pacing back and forth.
“He wants the best for you, Nigel.”
“He wants to run my life. From the time I was this high, he has told me what to think and how to feel.”
“You don’t know your father then,” she responded.
“You seem to know him so well. Explain to me why he won’t let me live my own life.”
“Because he’s convinced you’re making a mistake.” I could see the anguish on her face.
“I promised him not to tell you this.” She continued. “He’s dying.”
My eyes welled with tears.
“Dying?”
“He’s been sicker than you can even know. For three days he was in bed, and he forced himself to get up so you wouldn’t see him sick.”
“That stubborn fool,” I responded.
“He doesn’t want you to take pity on him.”
There were so many powerful emotions rushing through me at one time that I felt explosive. I did not know how to respond. I felt angry, because even in his death, he pushed me away, and I felt the greatest sadness I had ever known, as though my heart had burst into pieces and my lifeblood spilled out on the ground.
“So, what am I supposed to do?” I asked her. “Pretend he isn’t sick?”
“Help him finish his harvest. Make his last days happy ones.”
“But that could be weeks,” I told her.
Then she told me something that tore me apart.
“Your father wanted to leave the farm, but times were tough, and grandpa wouldn’t let him go. They had bitter fights about it, and when grandpa laid up sick in bed, your father wouldn’t even go into the room to talk to him. The two of them, stubborn to the end, wouldn’t even share one kind word with each other. When grandpa died, your father felt the deepest regret, and it still gnaws at him all these years later. Don’t make the same mistake, Nigel.”
She paused. “Let’s go back inside and finish our meal.”
I nodded in agreement, and we went back inside the house.
Inside, the others were eating quietly as though nothing had happened. My mother and I reclaimed our seats. Then, curling her lips into a half smile, she told my father, “It’s all right, John.” A few minutes passed without a remark from anyone, and in a more pleasant tone my father began to speak, “There’s a get-together at the Griffin place after church on Sunday.”
I remember the huge gatherings they had given when, as children, we would play chase through their grove of apple trees while our parents, sitting on huge tables spread out across the lawn, would engage in idle conversation, or would play dominoes. The food was usually wonderful, with a wide assortment of cakes and pies, and various vegetables that we hated eating, of course. There were chickens roasted on spindles over an open fire.
“That sounds nice,” I responded to him, and Elizabeth acknowledged, “It will be good to go.”
Then the table became silent as before.
“I’m sorry that I flew off the handle like that,” I said. “I’ve had a chance to think about what you’ve said. I’ll be happy to help you finish the harvest.”
My father said nothing in response. Two small streams of tears began to drip down from the corners of my mother’s eyes. Then, I thought of what an imposition it was on Elizabeth to take her away from the church and New York for so long. I knew she would silently endure whatever I asked of her.
The next morning, she arose early as always, and from the corner of my eye, I could see her making prostrations while my father, standing just outside the window, was watching. From the expression on his face, I knew he was confused, but he would never mention anything about what he saw. After she finished her prayers, she went to the barn with him, and there they milked cows. This would become her routine for the rest of our stay.
On Sunday morning after the others had left early to walk to the small brick church where Brother Woodrow conducted services, Elizabeth and I remained at the house. At nine o’clock, she began a prayer service in our room. She prayed in Greek while I read silently from the small English prayer book she had given me. I kept thinking about my father. It seemed impossible that he was dying. The vigor, the stamina, the incessant hard work which had characterized him for as long as I could remember were being sucked from him as one might suck soda through a straw. I did not know if I could endure witnessing this debilitation and decay.
When everyone returned around noon, we began to prepare for the gathering. My mother made two apple pies and my father prepared two chickens for the roasters, though I could see from the strain on his face that it was difficult for him to complete the task.
The gathering went pretty much as I expected. The children were playing games in the apple orchard, and the men were playing dominoes on tables on the lawn. Elizabeth sat quietly among a group of young women, all engaged in the superfluous conversation which characterized much of the discourse in our county. I knew she felt out of place, that she would rather be engaged in a discussion of religious virtue or theological insight, but she endured it all for my sake.
At one point during the afternoon, Mary Parker approached me as I stood watching the men playing dominoes.
“Nigel,” she began. “You’re looking well.”
“I’ve been all right,” I awkwardly answered.
“We missed you at church this morning.”
“Elizabeth and I prayed at home.”
“They say you’ve joined her strange religion.”
“Yes, I was baptized,” I answered.
“And you bow down before pieces of wood and do other strange things.”
The way she described it made us seem like witch doctors.
“It’s different, Mary. But it’s still a Christian church.”
I lacked the theological expertise to give a defense of what I had done, and I felt disinclined to explain myself or to justify my decisions.
“You’ve changed so much, Nigel,” she observed, and I could see she wanted to say more, but she restrained herself.
It had been an awkward situation from the beginning, and I felt as if more should be said to all parties, but I could not find the right words.
I spent most of the afternoon darting from place to place, like a hummingbird hovering from flower to flower. I could not engage myself in any activity, and I found the conversations trivial and uninteresting. I wanted to talk about my father’s illness, about the mystery of death, but it was one subject strictly forbidden.
I found my father talking to two men about farm equipment, and I attempted for a short time to participate in the discussion, though my mind was too distracted to focus on ploughs and milking machines. Finally, I found myself standing by Elizabeth and listening to the young women discussing quilt making.
“You should put the stitches one-sixteenth of an inch apart,” one girl explained.
“No. That’s too close together,” another disagreed.
“But you shouldn’t penetrate the padding,” a third contributed.
Elizabeth quietly listened, trying to fit in. But I never felt more out of place. There was a distinct incongruity between my interior reflections and the reality of my exterior circumstances. But that had always been the case even before I left the farm/
While the women were discussing how one could sew a cloth so that it appeared seamless, it struck me that this was an apt metaphor for the philosophy of the whole community. They centered everything on the proper appearance. For Elizabeth, it was a different matter altogether. As she had told me many times, the most important concern was inner life, those things which the naked eye could not see which were hidden in the human heart. The virtues of compassion and patience and mercy do not manifest themselves in the outward trappings of custom and social convention but express themselves in ways often impenetrable to the human eye. And she once explained that we fool ourselves in thinking how much control we have over our external circumstances when we only have control over our inner life, over our growth into vice or virtue. It is a lesson that has taken me nearly fifty years to learn.
At three o’clock, as we all sat down to dine on all the delectable foods, I could see my cousin, Mathias, talking with two young women, both having designs on him, but he deflected their advances with the skill and charm of a diplomat. Then, he approached the table where Elizabeth and I were sitting.
“I know it must be difficult,” he began to tell her, “to be so far from home, to be among people whose attitudes and beliefs are often hostile to your own. It takes rare courage. I just thought that I should tell you that.” Then he turned and walked away. I did not know how to take what he said, and Elizabeth seemed equally confused. Yet, I like to remember this Mathias, before the media managers and power brokers would mold him into what he was to become.
Elizabeth ate very little of the feast that was spread before her. Having grown accustomed to the austerity of her fasts and finding the seasonings unfamiliar to her palate, she nibbled at a variety of vegetables but found only the string beans to her liking.
“Is the food all right?” I asked her.
“It’s fine,” she humbly responded.
“You haven’t touched much of it.”
“I was thinking about your cousin.”
“He’s always been an enigma to me.”
“Was he trying to praise me?” she asked me.
“It seems that way.”
“He disturbs me,” she acknowledged.
I snickered a moment and replied, “Oh, he’s harmless.”
Yet I could see from the expression on her face that my words had not persuaded her.
“Mathias used to follow me around all the time and ask me questions. He is incredibly bright. I’m like a big brother to him.” She did not say anything further about him, and later that evening when I pressed her to share her thoughts; she declined, saying, “It’s not my place to sit in judgment of anyone.”
The days that followed, we filled with the most strenuous work of my life. We rose early and barely finished after sunset, and Elizabeth labored with a stamina surpassing any man and my father, for whatever reason unable to dismiss his pretense, insisted on working beside us, though it was obvious the work was taking its toll.
I never understood what possessed him to continue this charade, when its obvious cost was hastening his death. I could not bring myself to betray my mother’s confidence and tell him that I knew, until, of course, his illness became so obvious that he would have no choice but to admit it. I often pondered whether this pretense was his method of denial, of refusing to face his mortality.
I can’t remember how long it was before the strain of work became more than he could bear, maybe three or four weeks. The days blended like a watercolor splattered with raindrops. However, one day it came. When Elizabeth went out to the barn as she had done every morning with my father, she went alone, and I could hear my father coughing in his room.
“He has a cold,” my mother told me when I got up to see him, but I knew she lied. Then when the doctor came that morning and spent over an hour alone with him in his room, I knew it was far more serious than a cold.
“Is he OK, Doctor?” I asked him. He whispered something into my mother’s ear, and she nodded.
“I’d like to take him to the hospital in Green Bay,” Dr MacGregor proposed.
“He won’t go,” my mother responded. “He doesn’t want to die in the hospital.”
“Maybe, I can talk to him,” I proposed.
“No. He doesn’t want you to know,” she urged me.
“This is ridiculous. If he needs treatment, he should go to the hospital.”
“He’s a stubborn man,” the doctor interrupted. “I’ve spent almost an hour trying to convince him.”
“He’s a stupid man.” I felt terrible after I said it, but I could not believe he would refuse proper medical treatment.
I went into the room to talk to him.
“How do you feel?” I asked him.
“It’s a little cold. That’s all.”
“I know you’re dying,” I firmly told him.
He seemed angry at my acknowledgment. “Who told you?”
“That’s not important. I came to tell you that you should go to the hospital.”
“I don’t want to die at the hospital, all alone without my family around.”
“They’ll give you proper treatment there,” I asserted.
“It’s too late for that. There are some battles you cannot win, and a courageous man faces that.”
“But I don’t want you to die,” I told him.
The sadness seemed more than I could bear, and the tears swelled like ripened oranges and rolled down my cheeks.
“I wanted this to be a happy time for Elizabeth and you, not filled with sadness,” he affirmed.
Then I hugged him for the first time in years. It was an awkward moment. My father being unaccustomed to such an open display of affection was first inclined to push me away, but I held him so tightly that I don’t think he had the strength.
“Go to the hospital,” I told him. “We won’t let you die alone.” But not even I could persuade him.
“What possesses a man to deny himself medical treatment?” I remember asking the doctor after I left the room.
“I don’t know,” the doctor answered me. “But I’ve seen it many times before.”
I struggled with this problem the rest of the morning but came no closer to understanding it.
“Life is something to be struggled for,” I kept reiterating in my mind. With every muscle and sinew, I fought the thought of death.
When Elizabeth returned later that morning from the barn, my father was resting quietly in his bed. She immediately noticed how nervous I was and asked me, “Is something wrong, Neilos?”
“My father is sick, and he refuses to go to the hospital.” I began pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor.
“I’ll talk with him,” she told me.
“It won’t do any good.”
She smiled and then disappeared into the bedroom. When an hour passed without a sound, I wondered what they were talking about, and I grew more anxious as each minute passed. Then about one o’clock, she opened the door and came outside.
“Neilos. Go get the truck. We’re taking your father to the hospital.”
I was flabbergasted!
“What did you tell him in there?”
She placed her finger to her lips and told me, “I’ll speak of it later. Help your father with his bag.”
Then I returned to the bedroom where my father was packing, and I stood there a moment watching him as he struggled to close his bag.
“Can I help you?” I asked him and he nodded in acknowledgment. Then after approaching from the opposite side of the bed, I snapped the bag shut and lifted it by its worn leather handle to my side. It was heavier than I expected. “What do you have in here? It feels like an anvil.”
“Just some personal things,” he responded.
“What did she tell you?” I asked him. I could see he was fighting back tears.
“I can’t talk about it,” he responded.
He was firm in his unwillingness to talk about it.
“You’ve made a complete about-face,” I acknowledged.
But as much as I pressed him, he would not reveal a word of what they talked about.
It was a two-hour trip by car from the farmhouse to Green Bay, and I drove with my mother sitting beside me and with my father beside her. We said hardly a word to each other for most of the trip, and I kept puzzling over what Elizabeth could have told him to make him change his mind. From my own experience, I knew she could be persuasive, but my father was accustomed to having his own way, and I had never seen him firmer in a decision.
I remember the irregular rhythm of the bag as it bounced against the metal bed of the truck. At first, the thumping annoyed me, but as it endured and grew monotonous, I began to concentrate on the thumping, as if trying to predict when the next one might come. It was a mental exercise, which took my mind away from the seriousness of the situation. My father was dying. A man who had intimidated me most of my life with the strength of his personality now seemed weak and frightened, as frightened as I felt most of the time.
When we arrived at the hospital, it was nearly dark. I could hear motorcars, a noise that I had taken for granted in New York, but which stirred in me all the memories of the past eight years and of my struggles to make a life for myself. It seemed ironic that as my father’s life was ending, mine was just beginning, and I felt a little guilty about it.
After filling out the necessary paperwork, we took my father to his room, where I chatted with them both for a short while. Then as my mother wished, I left them there and drove back to the farm alone.
It was nearly midnight when I arrived at the farm, and the house was almost completely dark except for a light in the kitchen where I hoped Elizabeth would be waiting for me. Instead of entering through the front door, which might have disturbed their sleep, I walked around the back and entered there. I could see Elizabeth sitting alone at the table and reading. Once she saw me, she opened the door for me.
“Did everything go well?” she asked me.
“As well as can be expected. Mom’s going to stay with him tonight.”
“How are you feeling?” she asked me.
“The truth?” I questioned.
“Yes, the truth.”
“I almost wish we never came,” I told her.
“You can’t mean that,” she responded.
“I know we never agreed on much, but he’s my father, for God’s sake. I can’t deal with this.”
“I made some soup for you,” she told me. “Would you like a bowl?”
“Sure,” I responded. Then it occurred to me that I had not eaten anything since breakfast.
She set a grey porcelain bowl in front of me, and then with a wooden ladle, emptied it three times into the bowl. “I also have some Greek tea.” Then she poured me a cup.
“What did you tell him?” I asked her. “To get him to leave that room?” Then she smiled in her disconcerting way.
“I listened to him,” she responded.
And I thought about all the customers, who, as though enchanted, would sit down across from her and then unwrap themselves while she listened earnestly to their deepest secrets.
“He’s a lovely man,” she told me. “In Greek, we call it ‘Atholos’, without guile.” She paused. “He thinks he’s failed you. That’s why you ran away from him.”
“I did not run away from him.” I could see she did not believe me.
“Alright, maybe a little.” I hesitated. “Maybe a lot.”
“I talked about my father and my brother Pavlos.”
“I don’t remember him.”
“The one that went to Athos,” she explained. “They fought, and when Pavlos left, my father would not see him off. My father never forgave himself.”
“And what am I supposed to do?” I asked her.
“Forgive him, Neilos, for whatever he may have done.”
Forgiveness had always been difficult for me. I was someone who kept detailed accounts of everything that had gone wrong in my life, always trying to find and catalogue initial causes and points of no return and then assign responsibility. It weighted down on me like a huge chain. After she spoke, I knew I needed to forgive him.
That night I had a succession of nightmares, each waking me in hour intervals throughout the night. At one point Elizabeth awakened and said that she would pray for me, and I vaguely remember her kneeling at the foot of the bed and praying, but I was too exhausted to acknowledge it. When morning came, I was more fatigued than when I went to sleep.
“You had a bad night,” she told me as I sat down at the kitchen table.
“The worst,” I responded.
“Sometimes the demons attack us when we sleep. You should pray the evening prayers with me, and you will have no more bad dreams.”
“I don’t believe in demons,” I asserted.
From her expression, I could see she thought me foolish, but it had taken a radical metamorphosis for me to believe in God. Believing in demons seemed inconceivable. “Oh, you must believe in demons,” she asserted.
I did not want to argue with her, so I responded, “Of course.”
But I didn’t believe in demons or angels or anything supernatural. Now after everything that has happened, I’ve reconsidered.
After sipping the soup quietly for a few minutes, I told her, “We should see my father,” and she nodded in agreement.
When we visited my father in the hospital, I found it difficult to look at him, his face transparent with his agony. The complexity of human suffering, of its inexplicable pervasiveness, had never touched me as personally or as profoundly. I had never lived very deeply, content to ride passively on the crest of life’s wave. I had not learned that compassion entailed co-suffering; that in each man’s life there is a cycle of crucifixion and resurrection, and that often it is only through suffering that we become fully human. All these lessons I had yet to learn and lacking the tools to deal constructively with his death, I rebelled against it.
Elizabeth was always nearby, encouraging him with her comforting voice, while I stood off at a distance, often looking out the window to the traffic beneath us. When he tried to make conversation with me, I was unconnected, for whatever perplexing reason unable to engage myself.
When he had a good day, Elizabeth would invariably tell him how well he looked, and on the bad days, she would quietly pray for him while counting out prayers on her prayer rope. Oftentimes when his face felt ablaze with fever, she would gently wash it with a small cloth and basin of water, all the while singing the same Greek hymn. She once tried to explain the words to me, but I was too agitated to listen.
All I could think about was his death and how angry it made me.
“Damn it.” I wanted to shout at him. “Don’t do this to me. Give me another chance to make this right,” as though he had some final control over it all. I remembered every argument we had shared and how pointless they had all become. “How can you be so calm?” I had once asked Elizabeth. “He’s dying for God’s sake.” She smiled in her often disconcerting way as though mildly amused by my question.
“You must pray for your father,” she told me. “We all have to be prepared for what comes next.”
This frightening uncertainty caused me my greatest trepidation. For her, the reassurance she needed to be rested firmly in her faith.
For my mother, the strain seemed more than she could bear, and though she heroically tried to mask her apprehensions, I could see it was too much for her. The only man she had ever loved was dying, withering like the winter corn after harvest. She sat nervously fidgeting with her fingers the whole time she was with him, and when my father would call for her, and she would respond, “Yes. John,” her voice would betray her anxiety. Not even her religion gave her comfort. It was difficult to learn what my mother was feeling about it all because she refused to talk about it. While at the hospital, she was always preoccupied with making my father more comfortable. When we were home, she would close herself off in the kitchen as though it were a private fortress and there she would spend hours cooking, as though the proper mixture of spices would enchant away his death.
Despite it all, each day brought his death ever closer, and we began to feel its palpable presence as though it were sitting in the room with us.
When my father died, I was not with him. Elizabeth and I were alone at the farm, waiting for a delivery of eggs from the Palmers at the northwest corner of our count. They were supposed to arrive about one o’clock. At about noon, I could see my uncle Peter running up the footpath between our properties, and I could hear him shouting something in the distance.
Elizabeth and I ran out of the house and met him on the way.
“Your mother called me from the hospital,” he began to explain. Having the only telephone for miles, he had often played county messenger. “Your father’s dead.”
The news hit me like a storm, and Elizabeth, falling to her knees, began to pray as fervently as she had the first night we met. I did not know how to react. I remember shouting in an almost childlike rage, and I too fell to my knees, but instead of praying, I kept hitting my fists on the ground and screaming, “No! No! No!”
I remembered the last words he had spoken to me the day before, not so much because they were particularly profound, but because they were his words. He had lifted his head from his pillow, with great effort, and in almost a whisper told me, “Live a good life, Nigel and have no regrets.”
Now, nearly fifty years later, I realize I heeded nothing of what he told me. I rushed headlong into a life that has destroyed nearly everything dear to me, and regret has become one of my most intimate companions! But I am determined that with whatever time I have left to reconcile it somehow!
The Tape Clicked off and Jim Jacobson stood up a moment after listening.