So alone...

It is July’s swan song today — or, more to the point, here in Iowa, July’s cicada song — the bugs, those buggers, take your pick, in their way, their accustomed way, claxoning mid-summer and providing point to this summer’s counterpoint of unexampled heat.

Two days earlier, on the 29th, and sixteen years before, my father was his own cicada, his own last summer, his life, that day, that very dawn, at an end, his song — his song, all but ignored, as it rep-ratcheted, trilled, rep-rubbed to an end…an early end.

A date, sure, on a calendar, of course, on my calendar.

And, in my case, my mind, the morning I could never again say, “Hi, Dad!”

“And did I tell you, Dad? I love you.”

"That I loved you then. "

"That I loved you always. "

"Always, Dad. "

And, sixteen years later, who could have imagined this.

That, this, that dead man’s oldest son, then a writer, would now be a physician, a physician teaching, each day, other physicians. That that same man’s youngest son would also now himself be a physician. The two of us carrying forward all we learned before.

The hurt then.

The love mostly now.

And, sixteen years now to the day, I am in Kansas City.

At this, the annual medical student conference.

Me, a physician.

Thinking of my father, my father, my dead father these sixteen years later.

And me laughing.

Me laughing with students.

“Yes, this is a great program,” I say, my eyes hiding my life, my pain, this day. “Yes, the residents are terrific. Yes, the faculty are all you could ever hope for. And, yes, you, you, belong here.”

And, yes, me laughing.

Even as I try to hide what I cannot hide.

Me, again, laughing.

“Yes,” I’d tell then, if they’d asked, reading my eyes.

“My father died sixteen years ago, this day, this very day, this very morning. A phone call. A phone call at four-thirty. Yeah, Eastern Time. Me in Vermont. A phone call from two brothers at a phone in Seattle. ‘He’s gone,’ one brother tells me. 'Dad’s gone. Few minutes ago. Gone. Maybe it’s for the best.’”

For the best, maybe.

But my father, my father, is dead and lost to me and anyone near me.

And, yes, yes, I still hurt, yes…I still hurt.

And you don’t know that. It’s not your fault, I know.

But still, I hurt, I hurt…

And no one in Kansas City knows to care. And I’m now in Kansas City.

And, yes, in this sea of med students, residents, most young, most so very young, all with lives to live, with lives so much to live, I’m alone.

So alone.

My son, our son…

My son, our son, Brendan, who for almost three years had been in New Orleans, doing what he, by himself, could do to help those he can to recover from Katrina, is now in Haiti.

Keep in mind that when he went to New Orleans, this parent’s advice was pretty much limited to, “Watch your ass.”

“Yeah, Pops,” I think he, hardly convincingly, told me then.

And then there was that bullet.

That bullet.

Shattering the drywall, only inches above my son’s head in the shower, while my son, my loved son, himself showered.

And, then, more bullets.

In rooms below.

In the very same apartment. From somewhere in the street. From somewhere in the street that might have, could have, killed my son.

My good, my loved, my second son.

And now Haiti.

“Watch your ass,” I tell him again on the phone.

“Ten days, Pops. Ten days, I’m off to Haiti,” he tells me.

This, the reckless son.

He, as a boy, given to barreling full-speed down a Vermont dirt-road hill on a bike, his mother holding her breath behind him, his father never knowing until years later.

He, who, as a kid, saw an electrified fence and saw an opportunity for a charge, even if it meant putting his stream of pee in the line of fire.

He, who showed up for his college graduation road-rashed—chin, legs, arms—after doing a handlebar-sault racing, pre-grad, post-alcohol, to a bar.

And now Haiti…