Climbing Duke Chapel's Steps

My Dad's last Easter

On this day last year, March 31, my father climbed the steps to Duke Chapel for the last time.

He was married to my mother in Duke Chapel a long, long time ago. He became a member of their congregation when he and my step-mother moved to Chapel Hill after they retired. He graduated from Duke Divinity School, right next door, and spent his undergrad years at Duke, got his PhD there and a Masters in Theology too. He loved Duke basketball and Duke football. He loved all things Duke, but Duke Chapel was perhaps the thing he loved the most.

I visited for Easter weekend last year, and his goal was to get up the steps of Duke Chapel. It’s a long walk and there’s no easy way to get there. With his pulmonary fibrosis, walking any distance was very difficult for him by then. He could barely do it, but he did it.

Duke Chapel has always been a sacred place for me. I used to dream of getting married there. Or ordained there. I have done no such thing, and at this point probably won’t - at least not the ordination part. I’ve loved Easter services there, with the organ playing “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.” You have not heard organ music until you’ve heard Duke’s organ. They play the Widor Tocatta at the end of the Easter service and my Dad and I loved to stay and listen to it.

It was a happy day. We went to the Washington Duke Inn for lunch after church, then I went back to the airport. My father was still able to drive then. By Thanksgiving he could not leave the house.

I think I knew it was his last Easter.

I miss him. It’s flower season now and I’m texting flower pictures to my step-mother, but my Dad is not on the text chain. If only you could still text with someone in heaven.

He climbed those steps to Duke Chapel for the last time, in large part I think because it was important to me to go. I wanted to spend one more Easter there.

My father always kept up hope that I would get a PhD or become an ordained minister. I got half of a PhD and entertained the idea of seminary many times, but the liberal church has gotten way too wacko for me and the conservative church wouldn’t have me, plus I don’t really believe in the divinity of Christ which is not much of an issue - a lot of Protestants don’t - but it seems like one should not be a Christian minister if one is religiously Jewish and culturally a flower worshiper.

Still, I miss Duke Chapel. I was sad last year that the prayers included Gaza but not Israel, not the hostages. What did I expect from the liberal Protestant church, though? Always on the side of the so-called oppressed, even the terrorists. I was angry but said nothing because I didn’t want to upset anyone. As all Southern families know, not upsetting anyone is the highest value there is.

By Thanksgiving we could not go out to lunch anymore the way we used to so my step-mother made Thanksgiving at home. My aunt who had just lost her husband in September came over. She asked about how long my dad had left, and my step-mother said we just don’t know. Dad thought he would live to see his 80th birthday in January, but he died on December 21.

Two days before the anniversary of Marilyn’s death.

He was at peace. I don’t think the rest of us were. I am at peace with his death, though I miss him. It’s a funny kind of grief. I actually miss talking to him. One of my blog readers has offered to teach me Hebrew lessons, and I want to tell my dad. I want to send him articles and flower pictures. I want to ask his advice on cooking and I miss reading his nightly text with what he made for my step-mother for dinner. Toward the end of his life he was no longer able to do the simple things he loved: cooking, grocery shopping, taking my nephew to Duke football games. But it was a blessedly short time that he was unable to do these things.

I disappointed him in some ways, but I was very much there for him at the end. For the most part I was always a very involved daughter, visiting regularly and calling often, texting every day. Within the bounds of what was possible, I was pretty good.

He was so proud when I went to Yale. To him, that was my shining achievement. It made me sad because there’s so much more to me than that, but it made him happy. He was also very proud at my MPH graduation. Education was so important to him.

My Dad never really appreciated the things about me that are most important to me. He didn’t get my work as an organizer, didn’t understand my work in harm reduction and vaguely disapproved of it (though he came a long, long way) and liked the idea of the stability I might have as a teacher but didn’t get what was my passion for teaching urban kids. Still, at the end we were united in our love of Israel.

I hope I can find the Dead Sea sand he kept in a jar. It’s the only thing of his I want. I got his memory, his gift for history, and his parents’ genetics. I’m a lot more like his parents, especially his mother, who was an incredibly social networker. I take pictures of flowers, which his father the photographer would have appreciated. They would have liked my drive and success if they had known about it, but Dad was protecting me by never telling them that I was a union organizer. My grandfather was very politically to the right, and he hated unions. He probably would have cut me out of the family. He did that sort of thing, though I did not really know it at the time.

I had a dream the other night that I was in my grandparents’ old house. It was a nice condo in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. My grandmother was there, but as her young self. She was looking through the drawer where she kept old memories, trying to find something. I don’t know what she was looking for, but it was something financial, or the title to something. Eventually she disappeared.

My Dad has climbed the steps of Duke Chapel for the last time, but I have not. I’ll climb them again.