This has proven
true in real life for me during the last month. Many of you have been following the journey my family took this
Christmas. My children’s father died last Tuesday, January 20th.
While he’d lived a good life and was ready, it was still difficult to let him
go.
My daughter asked
me to find a photo of the first time her father had held her. She wanted to put
it beside the last time she’d held him. I knew how important it was to her and
I knew the photo existed. I went through twenty years of albums, but didn’t
find it. I eventually discovered the photo in a scrapbook where I’d placed cards and
letters from friends and family welcoming Bonnie into the world. Next to the
photo, printed in her dad’s very neat script, was the following journal. He’d written it around midnight on the day she
was born.
Within the hour May 5th 1973 will
recede into history along with all of its predecessors. To some it must have
been an ordinary day that won’t be missed in the mélange of life. To me
however, it was the day on which something unforgettable happened to me: Let it be herewith recorded for history and
posterity that on this day I, John Wesley Clayton Jr., saw Bonnie Elizabeth
Clayton, my daughter born. I actually stood by the side of my wife and saw
Bonnie emerge from her body.
To describe this
event is to attempt to describe the indescribable. I don’t mean that the
functional or anatomic components of the birth of my daughter could not easily
be described as indeed these events have been in the medical texts on
obstetrics. I intend something far different from the biological event. I’m
referring to that overwhelming unity that I had with my wife. Something unique
in the universe happened to us when Bonnie was born. It was as if I felt a part
of her as I never before felt. We held each other’s hands during those final
contractions. When I saw that God had given us a baby girl and then told this
to my wife, a sensation of warmth and joy poured through me. We both shed tears
of joy and in so doing experienced the ultimate in sharing. We were truly one
in this act of love. When Bonnie was
born, the love we shared was reborn. The nurses and physician present realized
something new had occurred because they were happy too. But they will never,
never comprehend what transpired between the two of us. It was truly a renewal.
Tonight, in the
hospital we reviewed the sequence of events that had occurred on this
historical day. We recalled the details of labor and delivery—stopwatch in
hand! After Bonnie was born (officially 12:23 a.m.) and her mother was taken to
the recovery room, I followed. We embraced, and she said that I had now given
her everything. I had known that she had wanted a daughter because she wanted
to know that special kind of relationship that exists between mothers and their
daughters. Neither of us spoke of this wish because we would have welcomed a
second son into our family. But this baby—this Bonnie Elizabeth
Clayton—received a welcome into our hearts as no other child before born of
woman ever received.
Thank you God for
this new life and the love that gave it birth.
As beautiful as
those moments and others in our life together were, our family didn’t stay
together. John and I separated when David was 14 and Bonnie 12. They were sad
and difficult days, but somehow we managed to get through them and actually
became friends—good friends.
This Christmas I
saw John for the last time. Many of you know this because of my blogs and my
entries on Facebook. I thought I’d said it all. But there was something that
happened in the hospital I didn’t mention in my previous entries. My son,
David, had taken a break to get some fresh air. Bonnie and I remained in the
hospital room with their father. She on one side of his bed, I on the
other. I was holding his hand while she
talked to him, smiled her radiant smile, and later read from I Corinthians that
amazing passage about love.
I had a feeling of overwhelming love for this other human being. I did not see the
skeletal old man with a missing tooth, I saw the man who’d held my hand through
my contractions during the birth of our incredible daughter. I saw the man
who’d “given me everything” when he gave me Bonnie. We already had a son that
we loved with all our hearts. I wanted, really wanted, a girl. I had a great
relationship with my own mother after whom I named my daughter. My mother died
three years after Bonnie was born. I often think of them as the bookends that held up the story of my life.
And so, when I
found the journal John had written all those years ago, I thought about what Jim Frey
said about beginnings and endings. As I held John’s old and withered hand, it
was hard to know where I ended and he became. We were one again. The three of
us in another hospital room more than two thousand miles away from that first
one. Bonnie was no longer an infant—she was a bright star in the dark sky of
that dying room. She radiated with love for the man who’d fathered her. She
ushered him out of this life with the same intense love with which he had
ushered her in.
Susan Clayton-Goldner was born in New Castle, Delaware and grew up with
four brothers along the banks of the Delaware River. She is a graduate of the
University of Arizona's Creative Writing Program. Susan has been writing most
of her life. Her novels have been finalists for The Hemingway Award, the Heeken
Foundation Fellowship, the Writers Foundation and the Publishing On-line
Contest where she received a thousand dollar prize. Susan won the National
Writers' Association Novel Award twice for unpublished novels and her poetry
was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies
including Animals as Teachers and Healers, published by Ballantine
Books, Our Mothers/Ourselves, by the Greenwood Publishing Group, The
Hawaii Pacific Review-Best of a Decade, and New Millennium Writings.
A collection of her poems, A Question of
Mortality was released last summer by Wellstone Press. Prior to moving to
Oregon and writing full time, Susan worked as the Director of Corporate
Relations for University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona.
Susan shares a life in Grants Pass, Oregon with her husband, Andreas, a
blue-eyed feline named Topaz, her fictional characters, and more books than one
person could count.
4 comments :
Love seeing the old pictures, CP! What a beautiful tribute to a great man/father. Shared widely.
That was a really moving post, Susan. Thanks for sharing it. peter
Wow. That was really beautiful and heartfelt. And I love how you framed the whole story. I'm so glad you have these wonderful memories.
Beautifully written, Susan. I am grateful for your introspection and transparency in sharing the story of John's life and passing. Thank you.
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