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I remember when my Grandma Keillor lay dying in a little hospital in Onamia, tended by her daughters, and my father and his brothers came to bid farewell to her. They drew up their chairs to the foot of the bed where she lay unconscious, and they were very still and solemn for a while, but in due course they got to talking about cars. It struck me at the time as callous--I was 20 and a poet--to sit by your dying mother and discuss a particular low-mileage Ford station wagon you'd seen on a used-car lot in Anoka, and now it seems like the most natural thing in the world. Life goes on. Your mother is dying, but a man needs wheels.
The best gift I can give my father is to bring my daughter to visit him. She touches his foot, and he wriggles his toes. She throws a ball at him; he throws it back. She smiles a beatific smile. She kisses his hand and his cheek. She waves bye-bye. She has no words for this. It is pure love.
She is three, the age I was when he wrote a letter to me and my brother and sister in 1945 from New York, saying how much he missed us while he was in the Army, billeted in a hotel at Broadway and 29th. He thought about us every day, he said, and wished we could be with him but didn't think it wise for children to grow up in a city among so many people. It was signed, "Love, Daddy." I never saw the letter until a week ago. It never occurred to me that he loved me, but of course he did, and it was nice to hear about it at last.