Furnishing Eternity by David Giffels

Author:David Giffels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

15: ONWARD

* * *

On the morning my father was to leave for Frankfurt to begin a ten-day trip through Germany and France, a big cherry tree fell in his yard. He sent an email to inform me: “Can’t do anything about it right now. It won’t leave the place while I’m gone. Give me something to do when I get back.”

His departure on this more or less spontaneous adventure at the invitation of two of his nieces seems now timed as a sort of juxtaposition—maybe even an affront—to my fixation with the mathematics of death. The day his party landed in Frankfurt was fourteen days before the first anniversary of my mom’s death and seventeen days before John died. When they disembarked from the plane, a message was waiting. My dad’s brother Jim, the father of the two nieces who were with him, had suffered a massive stroke. He would die nine days later.

My aunt’s message from Ohio was to her daughters, no-nonsense and emphatic: my dad was under no circumstances allowed to change his plans. Her girls could decide on their own what to do. The daughters made hasty arrangements to fly back home. My dad continued on. If the roles were reversed, he said later, he’d have wanted Jim to have the time of his life.

And so he did. He’d prepared almost boyishly for this trip, buying a new pair of shoes and a walking-around bag which he called his “murse,” claiming he was there to find a “Fifi,” and if he did he might not come back. In truth, he had two specific destinations. The first was the Troyes Cathedral, the second oldest cathedral in France, a spiky edifice with stonework as busy as needlepoint and astounding stained glass dating as far back as the twelfth century, which was being restored by a cloister of nuns who reside in the monastery there, and whom he had been helping with a small fund-raising campaign back home. The second was his old army base, Anderson Barracks in Dexheim, which he hadn’t seen in half a century.

He’d left his cell phone at home, intending to live fully in the moment. For the next ten days, his guides were a young grand-nephew and his wife, a military couple stationed in Frankfurt. Together, the group hiked tirelessly through cobblestone streets and hillsides across Germany and into France, eating and drinking, touring castles and cathedrals, visiting sidewalk cafés and beer gardens, through days sunny and pleasant. Each evening, my father returned to his hotel, a short walk from his hosts’ house. He was the only guest in the place. Before turning in for the night, he made handwritten entries on notecards—a simple engineer-like record of what he’d seen and done that day, the meals he’d eaten, small observations.

Fri. To Karl & Nicole’s

Checked in Hotel St. Paulishof

Went to Neuleiningen

Visited old guys in man cave

Drank wine & told lies

Dinner @ Eubelius Schnitzel

In the mornings, he chatted with the housekeeper, whom he’d befriended even though she spoke virtually no English and he spoke limited German.

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