To Thank Thee for the Things I Miss

by Joseph M. Torsella

NOVEMBER 24, 2008 TAGS: LOSS, LIFE, FAMILY, GRIEF COMMENTS (1)

Being left-brained and literal - male, in other words - I have always had trouble with subtlety in general, and poetry in particular. I'm uncomfortable with ambiguity. If I'm not "getting" what someone else is "getting," is anybody "getting" anything?

So when I came across a frustrating fragment of verse in a dictionary of quotations some years ago, I was, typically, put off. I was collecting material for an anthology of graces, in the words-of-thanksgiving sense. Searching for unique expressions of gratitude, I found the following lines by a now-forgotten 19th-century poet named Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

   An easy thing, O Power Divine,
   To thank Thee for these gifts of Thine,
   For summer's sunshine, winter's snow,
   For hearts that kindle, thoughts that glow;
   But when shall I attain to this -
   To thank Thee for the things I miss?

Those last two lines baffled me. What "things"? "Miss," how? And "attain," for Pete's sake. A mildewed word used for meter, not for meaning, I was certain.

Although the poem was ideal in many respects, I rejected it anyway. Unclear. Obscure. And I never thought about it again. Until my father died, on Thanksgiving Day 1995.

Dad was a 68-year-old cigarette smoker, so the prospect of an eventual illness had crossed our family mind. Still, when it came, its swift and relentless course was astonishing, coinciding precisely with nature's own. In July, Dad was tanned and lively on a Hilton Head family vacation, looking like the former Penn State center he was. He was diagnosed with lung cancer just as summer turned to fall. By the height of that glorious autumn, he was a thing in a chair, unable to speak, his world circumscribed by the length of the oxygen cord and our ability to lift him.

On Thanksgiving Day, my father's favorite holiday in his favorite season, my mother, sister and I listlessly pushed takeout yams around our plates, listening to his rhythmic death rattle. Seeing a final goodbye in his eyes, we asked visitors to leave at dusk. An hour later he died in our arms.

The next days were a blur of endless guests to be greeted, arrangements to be made, rites to be endured. In the anesthetizing bustle something surprising happened. Those lines - When shall I attain to this: to thank Thee for the things I miss? - stormed my consciousness. Forgotten for months, they now wouldn't leave me alone, wearing at my weary mind like a pebble in my shoe.

Their meaning unfolded, so obvious that I felt like a fool for missing it before. The answer had been in the next room, lying on a hospital bed. "When," I translated, "shall I have the wisdom to appreciate what I have been spared?" My life has had no grinding poverty, no devastating abuse, no disheartening failure, and - despite my own lifelong nicotine addiction - no serious sickness. Instead of begrudging the universe my minor disappointments, I was supposed to say thank you for these "things I miss." Of course.

Within a few weeks we celebrated our first Christmas as a family of three instead of four. My first interpretation of the poem gave way to another, as my numbness gave way to bitterness. I am supposed to say thank you? For spending sleepless nights hearing my father cough up his own life? For seeing his childlike hope crushed, as each new treatment proved utterly useless? For watching him die, worrying about work until his last hour, believing himself a professional failure, unable to have even a day of leisurely retirement? For the cosmic irony of watching Dad drag himself to the last Penn State game this lifetime season ticket-holder would ever attend, only to see his beloved Nittany Lions lose on a rainy, ugly October day? For hearing my mother say the words, "I'm a widow"?

red leaves

The lines of verse had a new meaning for me now. "When, O God," I thought, "will I have the pleasure of thanking you for this pain, of hearing you explain what mighty purpose justifies such human woe?" My inscrutable poem became a sarcastic taunt to heaven, and I was a smart-... Job. "Where was I when you made the world?" I'll tell you where, God: I was changing my father's soiled underpants, both of us knowing that he would never dance at my wedding. Will you talk your way out of this one at Judgment Day? Good. "When shall I attain to this?" - because I can't wait to hear you try.

After a few more weeks, most of my rage burned itself away, and I had only a broken heart, not a fiery one. I read one book after another about near-death experiences, trying to argue myself into a stronger faith than I felt, to definitively prove an afterlife. My fiancee and I married in January, but still grieving over my father's death, I absented myself from my own life, reading, thinking and desiring only death. Not the act of dying, mind you, but the promised place I hoped would follow. For the place where, as I read at my father's funeral, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away." I wanted, simply, to see my father again in that new world.

And, once again, my restless brain worked over the poem, and it manifested a new, third meaning. "When, O Lord," it now said, "shall the longed-for day come?" When shall we see again all the times, and places, and people we miss? When can we finally escape this vale of loss and tears, and attain the grace of eternal reunion?

In the spring, my wife and I learned that our first attempt at conception had been successful: Carolyn was pregnant. My grief continued to change, following the predictable course of some psychologist's model. In the hoped-for new life of our child, I found some acceptance of death.

My memories now are not of Dad's pain, but of the beauty of his ethereal last days. How he overcame a lifetime of emotional reserve with whispered "I love you's," tender touches to our cheeks, long, silent gazes filled with love. How his courage to reach out across his vulnerability inspired us - finding unembarrassed voices to sing him to sleep - to do the same. How when we cried, he told us of seeing an inviting, magnificent light that held no fear. How when he cried, he breathed - barely able to form the words - "Haven't you ever seen tears of joy?" How he constantly made us laugh. And how, even when he couldn't speak or smile or move, when an old friend came to see him on his last afternoon, Dad managed to raise his hand in a proper salute - a typical gesture of propriety for him, welcoming and gentlemanly to the end.

Living these moments, I managed to see my father as I had never seen him before. One by one, each human ability left him: to walk, to eat, to talk, and finally to draw breath. As each left, he was reduced to a more and more gorgeous essence, until he was at last not a fleshly person, but a concentrated perfume of intelligence, sweetness, courage. He was becoming what he had always been, and I was becoming able to see.

Reliving these moments, I hear a fourth meaning to the poem. In missing my father I have come to truly love him and he has become more alive for me than ever. I now respect traits of his that I once scorned - his gentleness, for example - and proudly claim them as my birthright.

These gifts - revelation, appreciation, understanding - were made possible only by loss. "When, O Lord," I now sometimes think, "shall I attain that state of wisdom in which I see that in each loss, however painful, there is some treasure to be found, and to be thankful for?"

On Oct. 25, 1996, my wife gave birth to our baby, our miracle, our son. When my father was sick, we told him that if we had a male child, we would name him Joseph Robert after my father and Carolyn's father, and so we have. He arrived, looking like his grandfather, just in time for Thanksgiving.

Recently, yet another meaning to the poem came to me. Perhaps "the things I miss" is deliberately mysterious. My dictionary says a "miss" is a failure to perceive, understand, or experience. We say, "You're missing the point!" when we see a meaning others do not. Perhaps these cryptic lines are a sort of Zen koan asking us to give thanks for ambiguity itself, for the ability of a thing to have many and conflicting meanings. Thank you, God, for missed points, for meanings between the lines, for silences among sounds. Thank you for the riddles, the mysteries, the contradictions that you have woven into the fabric of our days, for without them we would be unable to ponder the meaning of our lives. And if we were unable to ponder our meaning, would we have any?

Fall is here again. I had been dreading this season, because I thought it would remind me of my father's decline. It does, but the world's splendor brings me great joy, joy that is undiminished by knowing that nature's exquisite beauty, like my father's, comes from the fact that it is about to die.

I am a different person. I would like to say that all is clear to me now, that I have attained the perfect peace of Buddha. It isn't and I haven't. I am still an anxious, moody, type-A personality.

But I have attained a new tolerance for life's ambiguities. I have attained it through a death and a poem, an insistent poem that for a long while I never thought of and couldn't understand, and today cannot stop thinking of and understanding.

I am happy. I am sad. My father is dead. My son is born. And on this Thanksgiving Day, I will say a prayer of thanks for "things I miss," a prayer that will have for me six (and counting) different meanings, some of them contradictory. And I will mean every one.

Joseph M. Torsella is president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. A version of this article first appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer