Dream in a Suitcase by Domnica Radulescu

Author:Domnica Radulescu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2021-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Farewells and New Beginnings

The new millennium started with the death of my father, only two days after I had said, “Goodbye, Dad, I’m waiting for you to come visit me at my new home in Virginia, remember? You came there a few months ago, now I have a big new house.”

He said, “Yes, sure I’ll come, tell your mother. I’m not going to last much longer, you know…You and your mother, the two loves of my life.” He was sitting at the edge of his bed. He had gotten smaller, and his legs were dangling and didn’t reach the floor, like a child’s. I held him tightly for a few seconds. He was frail and thin.

I drove to Virginia with my husband and the two children to start my new semester. On the first day of classes, my mother called shrieking into the receiver that my father had died. That very morning. She found him dead in the morning. He had died in his sleep. Or as us Romanian say sometimes in our macabre humor, “he woke up dead.”

We drove back to Chicago the next day and were welcomed by the frigid winds blowing over the city from the lake and my mother’s tired face devastated by tears. The apartment sounded hollow, and my father’s absence was heavy laden. Everything felt foreign. Even my father’s special objects left on the night table just as he had left them the night before his death seemed foreign and out of place in an out of place apartment, in an out of place country.

I noticed a hand-crafted pipe, a golden cigarette lighter that he kept on his night table just because they were beautiful, as he had quit smoking long ago, his Mont Blanc gold-plated pen that he still used when writing articles about Romanian poets and his own poems of desperation about living in a foreign country.

All dressed up in his best navy-blue suit and carefully embalmed by the funeral home, my father looked like a waxen statue replica of himself. We were burying our first dead in American earth. I had traveled the full circle of existence, from the births of my children to burying my father, having taken a couple of crooked deviated paths in between. I owned a house with a big oak tree sprawling its roots far out into the American southern confederate earth and was now looking deep into the frozen earth of my father’s grave in the cemetery of the Romanian monastery in Michigan, another simulacrum of my native country reality.

The monastery offered a bilingual English Romanian service. In America, you could die and be buried bilingually. The frigid January Michigan wind made it feel raw and real.

We had arrived on the coldest Chicago winter of the past century; my father had been hopeful and excited by our formidable adventure for a couple of months until he hit the ruthless reality of his irreparable foreignness in a city and country which felt to him like a huge mistake until the day he died.

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