My father passed away 186 hours ago. 162 hours ago I stood in front of the bench where he set his final cigar, on the cold cement floor where he lay down for the last time to cool his tired bones. Rowdy the Doberman, the only earthly witness, saw from his nearby cage what in the days that followed seemed more and more like an act of divine sympathy and humor.
On October 4th, 2009, my father finished mowing his lawn and lit a stogie in his sitting room before suffering a circulatory failure that gently closed his time with us on earth. A poetic coda for a man who took pleasure in few things more than those that punctuated his life. He loved to cut grass, loved cigars, loved to stretch out his overheated limbs on the cold ground as he caught his breath. And then it was over, cell phone untouched in his pocket and no signs of pain. Just shy of 62, that final Sunday moment came much too soon, but could not have come much more perfectly.
The events in the days that followed certainly would have given him a heart attack. On Thursday, his Missouri Football Tigers blew a 12-point lead in the second half against hated Nebraska. On Saturday, the St. Louis Cardinals ended their thunderous season with an embarrassing whimper of a 3 game sweep to the LA Dodgers. On the Friday in between, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace prize. With his children thriving and his work a success, a man like him needed things to be angry about, and no conceivable sequence of events could have possibly turned his face more red. All of it’s now a punch line to a dark joke his ghost won’t ever stop laughing at.
The day before my father’s mother died, she told someone nearby of her dream the night before. She dreamed that she was sitting on the porch in Memphis where she grew up, and saw her Grandmother walking slowly down the old street towards her.
On October 4th, 2009, my father told my mother on the phone about his dreams. They were strange dreams, he thought they meant something. He saw his own mother and father in the places of his past.
Then he cut the grass and lit a cigar.
Loretta Bell: How’d you sleep?
Ed Tom Bell: I don’t know. Had dreams.
Loretta Bell: Well you got time for ‘em now. Anythin’ interesting?
Ed Tom Bell: They always is to the party concerned.
Loretta Bell: Ed Tom, I’ll be polite.
Ed Tom Bell: Alright then. Two of ‘em. Both had my father in ‘em . It’s peculiar. I’m older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the younger man. Anyway, first one I don’t remember too well but it was about meeting him in town somewhere, he’s gonna give me some money. I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past… and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. ‘Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
October 27, 1947 – October 4, 2009
