Journey to Healing: Loving Embrace, Saving Grace

As I sit in the stiff and ironically uncomforting wooden pew of the Charlie Marshall Funeral Home, I start to sob. The hurt and pain are now physical. My breath quickens, and I feel myself quickly going over the edge. It is a despair like no other and just when I think that nothing can take this searing hurt from my heavy heart, my father wraps his strong arms around me and ushers me out the side door and into the night. My father has hugged me maybe three times in my life. He has never been an overly affectionate man. But I will remember this night vividly. Wrapped in my father's embrace, I have never felt so secure in all my fourteen years and little do I know, how much that simple hug will mean to me in the coming years.

As the door creaks open, a shock of February cold slaps my face and snakes down my spine and I gulp it down into my lungs. I realize we have both abandoned our coats. The crunching gravel beneath our feet is the only sound in the still night. The glow of the lone streetlight washes over us, as we stand alone in the deserted side parking lot of the funeral home, giving the evening an even more desolate feel. My father is a good six inches taller than me, and built strong. He looks down at me, his hat sitting too jauntily on his head, mocking us in our misery. Its brim is shadowing his face, hiding half of it from me. My lips quiver and then my father reaches out, and in an instant has pulled me close to him. The embrace is not too soft, like an acquaintance greeting me with a false hello, but neither was it too tight, like a drowning person pulling me under to save himself. I relish and drink in every detail, knowing full well that it could be years before he lets me get this close again.

His full grown and graying beard musses the hair from under my head band as he rests his chin atop my head. Its scratches and chafes me, as it always has, but for once I do not mind. I feel his tears spill down into my hair, and each one is a tiny salty reminder that I am not alone in this pain. He gently shushes me like I am a babe in arms, and I can feel his breath on my skin and hair, warm in the chill of the night. It smells of whiskey and menthol cigarettes. While the scent of such vices may be disgusting to the some, it is the simple, comforting, and steadfast smell of my father to me. His voice too is a salve to my heart's pain. His soft murmurs in my ear are gravelly. The pain claws its way into his throat with razor sharp talons, making his voice crack like a boy. He wraps his arms around me tighter, and the fresh bandages on his arms crinkle. I tense at the memory, still fresh, as it was only four days prior that my father attempted suicide. I'd been staring at them earlier, crisp white gauze, turned coward yellow from the ointment. I just know I will lose it if a crimson reminder of his attempt to leave us all behind pushes its way to the surface. The bandage catches on my sweater, and I brace myself for the feelings of betrayal, and disgust that these sickening pale bandages have been causing me lately. But I feel nothing like that. I simply feel ... not alone.

I relax into him, and we cry together for our shared loss. His sobs are almost inhuman. At first he cries with only silent tears streaking down his face, over his nose, and down into his beard. But then they get breathier, his chest rising and falling frantically, and suddenly he is full out weeping. His anguish physically vibrates through me. I have never heard my father cry before, and the desolation in his voice haunts me to this day. Soon our despair ebbs for the moment, and I focus on the physical presence of my father before me. I smell his cologne, Old Spice, just like my grandfather. It is the smell of tradition, and masculinity. I can even smell his shaving cream lingering in his beard. And the smell of the sea, tangy and salty, clings to him wherever he goes. Everything melds together. Every scent is another piece of his life. From the sawdust in his pockets from piecing together a toy chest in his woodshop to the smell of gulf breezes from a hard day's work as the harbor master. Mixed in there is the scent of motor oil from changing the oil in his sisters car and the constant smell of Old Spice because my mother loves it. . . but now there is a new scent. Now there is the stuffy and overly perfumed scent of a funeral home that clings and will not leave, tainting the scented memories I carry like a decomposing corpse among the roses.

I force my mind to veer from these thoughts, and again focus on my father's attempts to comfort me. His arms are strong like a father's should be, and they hold me tight, tethering me to reality, not letting this storm of emotion blow me away for good. With his sinewy muscles wrapped around me, the scent of the familiar on his skin, I am reminded of fond, happy memories. His ravaged voice can still soothe me. Instead of dwelling on terrifying thoughts of the finality of death for those I love and myself, my mind floats to happier times. Here in this moment; in the ultimate safety of my father's arms no boogeyman can get me.

Seven years later I find myself yearning to once again feel the utter and complete safety of his embrace. But it cannot be. My father has left this world and joined his own father, leaving me to figure it out on my own. At his funeral, and in the days and weeks that followed, I receive abundant hugs from anyone and everyone. But no one's embrace can come close to his. These well wishers surround me with an awkward jumble of arms and elbows, their unfamiliar scents attached to their own memories, and the heartfelt, yet inept condolences cannot fill the void. I now know what an embrace can entail. It is more than two arms wrapped around another. It can be a failing attempt to show empathy and understanding, or it can be the emotional lifeline that saves another's soul. I pray that I become the kind of person my father wanted me to be, and that I inherit as many of his beautiful qualities that God wills. He held me close on a cold day in a deserted parking lot. But in that simple gesture I found the comfort and solace I could seem to find nowhere else.