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My father's ghost: A Father's Day Remembrance
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June 18, 2009 | 10:44 AM
Some things that cannot be explained are better left as mystery — like the other-worldly events since my dear father's death five years ago, that have convinced me, even though I am not religious, that the spirit transcends the physical. Although these experiences could never be explained scientifically, neither can they be denied.
My late father, Eddie Mont, was a no-nonsense, unneurotic, rational thinker, to whom I listened with open ears and gratitude. He was a lovable, sweet, funny, bright, unpretentious man. He knew who he was, and he had one of the healthiest self-images of anyone I have ever known. He was neither humble nor boastful — except, perhaps, about his more than nine lives.
I always loved his "adventure" tales about beating the odds: a fall off a fire escape and broken leg as a young boy (the only time he was ever in a hospital in his 90 years!); a motorcycle accident; an explosion and electrical shocks from high-voltage wires while ankle deep in water working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where he was a welder in the bilge of the battleships during the World War II. This last escape did not stop him from fooling around with live wires in back of his TV sets and nearly electrocuting himself. He was almost drowned at Crescent Beach in Huntington in his 70s, when a man who was swimming near him became panicky and started hanging onto Dad, pulling him under. Then there was the poisonous root he ate, thinking it was horse-radish; and falling asleep at the wheel of his car driving to Huntington from Rhode Island to see us. I once asked my father to enumerate his list of near-death experiences, which he gladly did — like some sort of a badge of pride. I have that list in my purse.
He knew how to tell a story. My favorite was his cross-country trip to California, during the Great Depression, riding on the tops of freight trains, dodging armed railroad guards, hobos, and surviving the desert's extremely freezing nights and scorching days. From those days of uncertainty about his future, he worked many different jobs and somehow, miraculously, by wit and diligence, he managed to put away a respectable nest egg.
My father was my best "customer" when it came to listening to me play the piano, eyes closed with a smile on his face.
When he was only 80, my father noticed an art book about the sculptor Alexander Calder on the table. "This crazy stuff is in museums? Who couldn't make this?" he asked.
The fact is that Calder and my father (a retired hardware salesman) had a lot in common — good wit and humor, the ability to draw well, a pair of pliers in their pockets and the ability to fix anything. Among the nuts and bolts that surrounded him in his downtown store, were reels of wire.
Calder once said "I think in wire." So I called my father's bluff, and for the next couple of hours, my father didn't come up for air. He produced several wire animals, naïve, elemental, graceful, and very amusing, that we still enjoy. His work could probably have been successfully marketed in a gallery, but my father went on strike after a couple of weeks of filling requests.
At almost 90, Dad began to get sad and depressed at some new limitations. The last great gift he gave to me was to come back to Huntington where, alas, he died only four days later; I could have my dear friends around me at the service, and his ashes in our own backyard.
My father died, but it is somewhat ironic how irrepressible he still is! I have several wonderful proofs of the presence in our lives of this man who flaunted his ability to cheat death so many times. I never believed in ghosts. I wouldn't even say "ghost" is as good a word as "spirit" for what is happening around my house.
When my father died, my gardening friend, Joan, helped us choose a beautiful coral-barked Japanese maple tree, which we planted in the backyard near the chestnut trees which he and I used to love to harvest every Fall. His ashes are nourishing the roots, and the tree is thriving.
One day after a difficult visit to my mother, I was crying to my husband and then called out to my dad's tree in the back, "Dad, I know you want me to take care of Mom, and I am doing my best …"
Suddenly the telephone rang, and there on the phone was Dad's sister Martha, his female doppelgänger, in her upper 80s, singing a tune he used to sing to me: "Just a song, just to say, I love you." My cousin took the phone and said, "I am sitting beside my mother in the hospital, and she suddenly says to me out of nowhere, 'Quickly, call Carol!'" We hadn't spoken for months, and there was Aunt Martha, with a message from my father. This I knew and felt clearly.
About 20 years ago my father made me a wooden whirligig which he kept repairing as it got increasingly weatherbeaten. It was a woodcutter who bent his head and sawed more furiously the harder the wind blew. I placed it right outside the kitchen window. The woodcutter came to symbolize my father, who always had a work ethic I admired, who drove himself like a horse, an industrious man with his back to the wind, a survivor bent to his work, but still able to look up for a spell to look into the woods, to smile at the earth which bore the wood he cut.
The woodcutter eventually fell apart beyond salvaging. But a year after Dad's death, at a garage sale I saw a whirligig with almost exactly the same design as my father's. I grabbed it for $20, brought it home, mounting it on the same post as my father's had been. With the first gust of wind, it was obvious that the new one was not functioning properly, and no matter how I tinkered with it, I couldn't get the windmill to rotate. My father always loved to troubleshoot and fix things for me whenever he came. One night my father visited me in a dream. The very next day the whirligig starting to spin around!
The coral-barked branches of the maple tree against the snow appear to be like capillaries sprung to life after his fatal aneurysm. I have lived in this wonderful house with its lovely wooded acres for almost 40 years. I know every growing thing on the property. The most exquisite sign of my father's abiding presence is something that grew without my planting — a path of delicate wild crocuses that appear as though by magic every spring since he died — leading from the house to his tree in the back.
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