Saying I Love You in the Church of Sunday

My dad usually goes to church on Sunday. Last night, over the phone, I tried to help him sign up for Zoom so he could at least watch the service, but we got stuck on the logistics of this doesn’t work.

I thought about my dad at home, alone, on Sunday as I drove to get espresso this morning and the thought made me sad. Many people get energy from other people, and my dad’s one of those people. I imagined him like a battery without a charger sitting on the sofa with the Times in his lap, the length of a country between us.

My dad had polio as a young man and he has respiratory issues. Last time we spoke he asked me why he needs to keep washing his hands so much, and I said that maybe he didn’t if he was home alone. These times are confusing. It’s hard to tell what’s okay and what’s potentially deadly.

When we talk on the phone, we always close the call with I love you. This started, I think, some time after my mom died. For some reason, I brace myself to say it. I close my eyes and scrunch of my face like I’m about to get hit with a pie.

So when it occurred to me that the right thing to do would be to call my dad during this time when normally he would be in church and give him what he would go there for, connection and love, my face did its thing just thinking about it. I felt both excited and scared.

Talk about love for him? Sit in it? With my dad?

It’s not that we don’t talk about our feelings for each other. I’m not sure what it is. We sort of don’t talk about it. I think we are both distance lovers. We love with one hand out.

Not too close.

Caffeine makes me long to connect. It’s one of my favorite things about espresso. For about an hour after I drink it I love. Everything. Often it’s hard for me to fall asleep at night because I think about how good I’m going to feel after that one shot.

I had my espresso on the short drive home and then I went inside, made a short list of reasons I loved him, and then I called my dad.

He answered and when I heard his voice I knew I had done the right thing. Being locked up is not normal and the body does not generally respond well to not normal. I told him I knew he couldn’t go to church and so was calling to give him some love. My dad sounded surprised and happy and depressed.

I started reading my list, and I felt like the things on it weren’t good enough. You know when you lick a popsicle and it’s still too frozen to have any taste? I felt like my things were tasting like that to my dad. Like, Thanks, but none of this sounds all that amazing.

I was a mentor for a girl in juvenile hall years ago, and once, when we weren’t doing that well, I asked her if we could both write a list of the things we appreciated about the other person. I wrote a list and she spent the time writing about the time I had brought her family a chocolate cake. I had put so much effort into other things, and so I was surprised and also, I don’t know, maybe annoyed. That’s all she’d noticed? That’s all it took? A cake? Why had I tried so hard? Why had I gone to her court hearing? Why did I drive to juvie every week? Why was I sitting across from her now? Those things merited no mention.

What I wanted to tell my dad was You were always there—that’s what mattered, but when I said it in the form of various stories, they fell flat. “I’m a superhero,” he said when I said one of the things I loved was that he let us have sugar cereal when Mom wasn’t around.

I get it. I want my daughter to talk about me as the most important person in her life, the most inspirational, the strongest, the most loving, but the fact is I’m her mom, the person who let her have all the candy she wanted when the doctor told my daughter and me it was time to stop sucking her thumb.

Chocolate cake.

Sugar cereal.

Juvenile hall.

Coronavirus.

My dad was clearly touched that I called: his voice was shaky and he had laughed a few times, but the earth didn’t move. I hadn’t been able to fix the situation with love. He was still sad. He was still a man who needs people alone in an apartment.

How do we best support each other during this strange time that really isn’t all that different from real life only now so many of our life circumstances are magnified to a bizarre size: health crises, economic crises, social distancing, fear of contact, fear of loss, fear of the unknown?

Can I express my love for my father without bracing myself?

I don’t think so.

I might let it all come flooding in.

But wait. I don’t brace when my father says I love you. I brace when I say it.

Admitting love wholeheartedly, without holding on to something is so frightening!

There’s a video going around about apartment-bound people in Italy singing as a response to being in lock-down. The video shows the street empty except for a few parked cars. We hear the voices, first a few, then more, then more, all singing the same song in the dim of the coming night.

It’s so beautiful. I’m here, the people are saying. We are not alone.

Perhaps what will save us is the sound of our own voices crying out, Thank you, thank you, thank you, and What do you most need?

I shook the softening chalk of my bones,Saying,Snail, snail, glister me forward,Bird, soft-sigh me home,Worm, be with me.This is my hard time.

Roethke