I wrote  ‘The Frozen Man’ after listening to this song from James Taylor.
The song subject is a bit different than that of my poem but I credit JT with
the creative kick and ultimate catalyst I needed to write those words for my father.
My daughter Hannah, read ‘The Frozen Man’ in the pouring rain last Monday morning at North Cemetery.
Amidst the silence, there was nary a dry eye under the tent, especially me.
I listened to this song on my Nano tonight and got a bit misty.
I remember the day it inspired me to write the original poem for my Dad.
My deepest thanks to Yvonne for making my words
look so damn beautiful in calligraphy
(they were on display at his wake, btw)
Remembering my Dad today, who is no longer the Frozen Man.
He is finally free and I am slowly moving on . . .

Got this from a close friend of Sarah’s.
It is, in a literary sense, quite haunting and spoke to me in ways unimaginable.
It was supposedly written by a 15-year-old girl.
Pretty amazing and apropos for this particular time in my life.
Thank you, Katherine.
You are, in many ways, an angel,
although you would never admit it . . .

“The soul and the body exist separately.
While the soul uses the body as a vessel to express itself,
they never truly become one.
For this reason, when one’s body passes on,
the soul does not follow.
Instead it remains living; free to wander where it pleases.
Visiting its favorite places, or doing its favorite things.
And if, while on Earth, the soul found someone so special that it wants never to leave them,
it will enter that person and continue to live.
It chooses to stay in that person.
Forever watching over them,
Protecting them,
Loving them.
Forever being with them.
Realize this, remember this, keep this with you.
Because the bodies of the ones we love will pass on,
But their souls will never die.”

*thinking about Dad and angels

In the beginning,
[find]
the path of least resistance
[because]
God can forget too . . .

4~p

It’s like watching the slow and dying embers in the
backyard firepit on a sultry summer’s night.
In some ways I understand it, some I don’t.
Maybe it’s meant to be that way.
It’s hard enough to watch someone you love die but it’s the
‘dying marathon’ of Alzheimer’s that really hurts inside.
I had a deeply emotional visit with my father this past Sunday.
I felt this impending sense of detachment from him that I’ve never seen or felt before.
My sister says it’s that way with most patients in the final stretch of the endgame.
I am trying to make myself understand that.
Not doing too well with it either.
The past 5 years have been a sad and long goodbye and although I’ve said it before,
I want to believe in my heart that he is ready.
My father did not cry yesterday which had me scratching my freshly shaved noggin.
It was almost as if he was trying to be strong just for me,
but maybe I’ll never know.
I sat and held his thin and badly shaking hands and really looked at him,
into my father‘s eyes.
My heart was instantly shattered as a lifetime of tender and lost moments came crashing into my mind.
I want many things for my father and not one of them was in this room that has held him prisoner for the past 5+ years.
I want him to walk and feel the rays of the sun on his face again,
love and be loved in return, find the missing piece of the puzzle he’s been searching for since he got sick.
Find my mother.
I want him to find enough strength to finally fade away and find his corner of the sky,
his cerulean peace.
It’s time for my beautiful father to go home.
Because of all the places I roam, I miss having him there the most . . .

He stares blindly out the window of another night
down on Bleeker Street, where nothing seem to change except a world gone mad.
He exists.
I exist.
I go to him, touch his shoulder feeling the quivering bone underneath my hand
but he doesn’t move, nobody is home it seems.
As I bend to kiss his forehead,
I think back to my childhood remembering the smell of him;
a rich elixir of leather, spice and a fatherly scent I could never quite put my finger on.
It was a smell of  total comfort and one of extreme familiarity.
His scent is different tonight; he smells clinical, preserved and abandoned.
He smells like a familiar stranger, an ancient decade of melancholy memories,
echoes of voices lost in an obsidian mist . . .

I sit there with him as we both blindly stare out the window, watching a world gone by
and we sigh,
we cry,
we say goodbye to the too many words left unspoken,
the things we once took for granted,
and the once welcome spaces where we no longer belong.
I take his frail and shaking hand and wonder (as I have thousands of times before)
how many more nights will he sit here all alone and stare?
And simply exist.
There is little left to say but with my father, somehow that’s okay.
Somehow, I know he understands.
He has taught me well.
He was never big on words anyway.
It will be very hard to forget the nights down on Bleeker Street and even harder to forget
the little man just sitting staring out the window . . .

Off in a not too distant somewhere, I hear the shimmering sound of church bells.
Melancholy yet beautiful, their dissonance fills the night air with a longing, a void filled, 
an endless possibility.
Dark grey clouds move low across the sky saturated with change; change of the heart and mind,
soul and body, a chasm of repeating continuation.
The church bells chime on, sounding more and more like a movie soundtrack that once defined your life
as it echoes the pain,
loss of cerebral photographs, and confusion of all the simple things that mattered.
And yet, the sound is oddly comforting, a musical pall of earth tones beckoning pure white light.
I am suddenly aware of the clip-clop of my blackened dirty shoes on the pavement below,
an urban heartbeat, the intrinsic essence of time and space; of a time that
I listened for the sound of your footsteps, of a space holding everything you once were.
You.
My dear, drifting and lonely Father.
If you could only know what I want for you in the most loving of ways.
If you could only hear the beautiful church bells.
But the world will continue to hurt you until you find a way to finally listen.

Maybe it’s a sign of survival, of anguish,
of the frightening realization that mortality does exist in the deepest recesses of the mind.
Maybe it’s a sign that everything is still changing,
still in that near frozen state of flux . . .
For him, for me, for the four walls that still imprison him,
for a world that looks to him as confusing today as it did several hundred yesterdays ago.

Maybe it’s not a sign at all but a palpable gesture that while he sleeps,
this ravenous disease does not; it always wants more.
It replaces what it takes with something barely recognizable, something dark and foggy,
something you never want to talk about around the coffee table but remains forever.
Sometimes this thing just takes.
And takes . . .

Maybe it’s a sign that he is tired, fed up with playing the host,
sick of food that looks like pureed shit put through a strainer that he has to try and swallow.
Banana Crème Pie should never look like soup.
But it does.
And that’s a crying goddamn shame.
His mother was a pastry chef, Christ in a sidecar.

Maybe someday I will look back at this point in time and have a moment of revelation
but I’m not betting on it.
If this disease has taught me anything it’s not to get caught up in any kind of emotional gambit.
It’s a losing proposition at best.
So maybe it is a sign.

For my father maybe it’s a sign that simply says ‘stop’ . . .

The tree is up and dressed with soft, white lights, ornaments and icicles.
The cats are already stripping them off and methodically leaving them on the floor where my unsuspecting feet find them at 3:02am.
The other morning I found a ceramic reindeer the sole of my left foot was violently impaled
with the antlers of an unsympathetic and ceramic reindeer.
*%&^$&(#)@!!!!
Bastards.
Yeah, it’s Christmastime.
Although I’ve yet to hear much in the way of holiday music,
I’ve no doubt that within two weeks time I’ll be deep in the complicated state of Yuletide Dismay
wanting to slit my wrists at the mere sound of the introduction to ‘Carol of the Bells’.
It is at this festive time of the year that I unleash my innermost Mister Nasty, the stygian beast within, the curmudgeon of melancholy, my dark saint.
Part of me still harbours (more like imprisons) that little boy that used to love the snow
and the Christmas lights and yes, even the ’Carol of the Bells’.
These days Mister Nasty can’t come out and play.
Actually, I don’t want to come outside.
I play the dark saint of sorts and find my own personal way to somehow make it to December 26th
(Sarah’s birthday for those of you who will find out anyway on her Twitter).
I think that some of my snowy disdain is rooted in the overabundance of past holiday social fatalities.
Dealing with Alzheimer’s Disease ironically (and sadly) made me forget my ‘Santa’ mentality replacing it with this almost diabolical Grinch-like quality – an issue currently Under Construction.
Humor me for the next month or so as I deal with the bleak canvas of winter as my thoughts turn deeply inwards.
This holiday season has quite a different feel to it though and I think I know why.
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the reason.
So indulge me, won’t you?
And who knows?
Maybe this Grinch will once and for all find his Christmas heart . . .

I hate wearing new shoes and I’m willing to bet that 99.999% of the male population does too.
They never feel right and by the end of the day you’re walking like Donald Duck after
sniffing glue and eating one too many Skittles.
Taste the rainbow of discomfort.
The only footwear that feels right to me the first time I wear them has been (and always will be) sneakers.
I didn’t wear sneakers today.
I wore shoes. New shoes.
Uncomfortable and unbroken-in shoes.
Evil, nasty monster shoes that should be thrown into the footwear abyss where all the bad shoes go.
Actually, they were a pair of Timberland casuals, a gift from my mother-in-law that can’t say no to anything 70% off, although sometimes I wish she would.
I love her anyway.
But my feet felt like two squishy blisters about to pop as I walked to the train.
Even the people driving on Boylston looked at me, concerned, as if to say,
“Hey, man, you look like you gotta take a crap or something!”
As I limped to South Station, I began thinking about walking in my father’s shoes,
not theoretically but realistically.
I would put on his oxblood wingtips that were 6 sizes too big
and waddle around the living room tripping on things while making believe I was him.
Everyone would get their chuckle and it would be bedtime for Mick.
I liked going into my father’s closet in the hallway.
It had all of his ‘stuff’ in it and I could get lost for hours.
In the back of my mind I can see the large glass pickle jar filled with change.
It was in the shape of an actual pickle barrel and it weighed about 200 lbs
(or 90.718474 kilos)
I wonder when he cashed those coins in?
It was probably after I’d lost interest in the closet and moved on to collecting
pollywogs in a rusty pail underneath the back deck.
There was all kinds of stuff in that closet: old army boots, belts that had fallen off their hooks that he forgot he even had, an empty ‘Tootsie Roll’ bank that served no purpose whatsoever and a shoebox filled with brushes, polish and stained rags.
If I could have bottled the smell of his closet, I would have.
The thing I liked best about my father’s closet was the feeling of comfort that it gave me as I sat there surrounded by his stuff. My world was safe as I sat there on the closet floor even when he wasn’t home.
These days I find myself missing the ‘safety’ that was him.
When my mother and father were well I always felt I had that net stretched out below me should ever I fall, not that I would ever use it.
I just liked knowing it was there.
The net disappeared many years ago and I really miss the feeling of calm that it gave to me.
For now, I’ll choose to cherish the memories of that special closet in the hallway that seems light years away.
Maybe it’s not that far away after all.
As I finish writing this post I can see snow falling outside the dark kitchen windows and it’s only October 15th.
Maybe it’s my mother and father’s way of telling me that I now have my own net to tend to.
They always had a way with words . . .

Dear Dad,

I know you’ll never read this but I wanted to take a few minutes
and tell the world how very much you mean to me and Maureen.
We miss so many things about you; your laugh, your smile, your once bright eyes,
the way you used to drive Mom nuts whenever you tried to sing,
how proud you were of your wonderful grandchildren,
even the way you used to wrap yourself up like a mummy whenever we went to the beach so you wouldn’t go all ‘lobster’ on us.
I’ll be visiting you this Sunday and will undoubtedly feed you lunch,
maybe give you a shave if you need one.
It’s really sad that there isn’t more I can do.
But at least I can do that.
I haven’t been keeping up with the Red Sox like I used to either.
That was something I did when you were better so we’d have something to talk about besides the weather.
These days the weather isn’t worth talking about anyway.
I saw an older man sitting on a bench on the Boston Common the other day that looked just like you.
I absentmindedly started walking faster towards you him before I caught myself.
He wasn’t you.
He could never be you.
Then again no one could ever be the man I call my father except for you.
On Sunday, Maureen and I pray a small part of you knows how special you have always been to us
and will continue to be.
Maureen says it best when she gently puts her hand on your cheek and says,
“You are the greatest Dad ever, you know that don’t you?”
And so I will say, “Happy Father’s Day, Dad,”
because in my heart I know you’re still in there somewhere.

Much love, Papa Wally
Much love . . .