“The lilacs are here,” my father said many times in the spring at their first bloom. He loved their light floral smell, almost but not quite like jasmine, how they seemed to appear on the bushes overnight. He loved their color, too — the lightest purple, the faintest lavender.
He wasn’t able to announce their return when they blossomed this spring because he passed away in November.
This is the first Father’s Day without him.
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Since November, I’ve dreaded the coming of spring, then summer and now Father’s Day. It’s a weird feeling. For those of us who live in Chicago, the longer days of spring and summer after a cold winter are always welcomed. The new leaves on the oak and elm trees; the red, orange and yellow tulips on the parkway; the burst of new green growth everywhere, it seems, after a winter of thick roots sleeping deep underneath the cold soil.
When my father got sick last year, I knew it would be his last autumn. It was fitting, yet painful, to watch his decline as the brown and red leaves fell from the trees and crunched beneath my feet while the days got shorter. When he was in the wheelchair and my family would take him outside, we rolled past the fall flowers, the orange mums and red asters in their last days, and he pointed at them with his index finger as though, despite his rapid deterioration, he still led the way as our father, making sure we didn’t miss their beauty.
We knew, without words, that it was all coming to an end. His demise fit with the fading of the rest of the natural world.
Which is why I dreaded this spring. The tight green closed hostas pointing out of the earth and opening toward the sky, the peonies and hydrangeas unfolding softly in the sun, which made me long for the fall. If it’s still fall, I told myself like a child, then he’s still alive.
I felt an incongruity with so much growth in his absence. How can there be so much life bursting around you when your loved one has died? How does a child at any age get used to the loss of a parent?
I know I was lucky. My father lived a long and full life until 83. It’s natural to lose a parent, terribly more devastating when a parent loses a child. People have suffered so much worse. This process is logical, yet it doesn’t help with the loss that hits me hard when I watch the young buds on the trees clinging to their branches like newborn babies clinging tightly to their parents.
Even the other day, like a kid, I wanted to rip the tulips from the ground, snap the light green buds off bushes. How dare they sprout and scream new life when even just one person is in grief.
It could not have been a better death. He was at home. Our family surrounded him. We knew he wanted us there. We played him music, told him stories, sang him prayers and, finally, told him he could go. It could not have been a more peaceful death, but it was his death.
He loved spring and summer. He once told my mother the reason he liked lilacs so much was, of course, their smell, but also because it reminded him of his own childhood.
The last time I visited his grave, I brought lilacs. I yanked several bunches from a bush near my home. I still felt like a child, wanting to rip them off in a temper tantrum.
At the cemetery, though, I took each bunch delicately out of the bag I brought, sniffing them carefully before laying them down next to the deep purple and bright yellow pansies planted there. They were fragrant, pungent, full of new life.
I know I have to try to embrace the contradiction of the summer flowers and full green trees in his absence. A Father’s Day with no father. In time, the grief will simply fold itself into the rhythms of all the seasons, others tell me who have been through it. Besides, with each year I get older, I’m grateful to be a witness to their coming and going.
He’d have told me to enjoy the spring and summer, I’m convinced. That it’s healthy to be surrounded by so much life. That it’s not incongruous at all.
“The lilacs are here,” I’m sure he’d say, pointing and leading the way.
I know, Dad. I know. They’re right here.
Liz Shulman teaches English at Evanston Township High School and in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. Her father, Dr. Stanford Shulman, served as division head of infectious diseases at Children’s Memorial Hospital and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago from 1979 to 2014.
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