On September 28, 1981, my father went to take his morning walk in Valley Green, a nature reserve in Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Park, where cars were prohibited. The area was a favorite among walkers and runners, and my father, who was 76, was known to the regulars there. The walk in Valley Green had become a staple of his health regimen since his recovery from surgery for an abdominal aortic aneurysm five years earlier. He had traveled to Kansas City for this surgery, because one of the surgeons there was renowned.
The only motor vehicles permitted in the area were the city’s Department of Sanitation trucks. On that beautiful September day, the driver of one of those trucks had pulled up to a shed to get some trash bags. He left the truck idling. Two other workers were with him in the front seat. The driver got the bags, stepped back into the truck and put it in reverse. He hit my father, who was dragged under the truck’s rear wheels. A witness heard him gasping. We don’t know if he died instantly, there were conflicting reports. Records indicate that he died later at a nearby hospital, where he was taken. I choose not to belabor the particulars, because the scenario is simply too painful for me to dwell upon. The months that I spent poring over documents, talking to police officers at the city’s AID, talking to lawyers: they’re a blur to me now, but the events of my father’s death changed, irreversibly, my relationship with life.
I was 29 when my Dad was killed, and I moved to New York eight difficult years later. I was writing about music then, and I spent many late nights in jazz clubs. On occasion, my friends and I would migrate afterwards to a small, inexpensive Middle Eastern eatery and take-out shop on Greenwich Place that stayed open from lunchtime until the wee hours. It was frequented by musicians, students, neighbors, club-goers, doctors from what was then St. Vincent’s Hospital, and friends of the shop’s hard working Syrian proprietor, Mustafa, who was outgoing, generous and engaging.
One night as I sat eating a falafel, I watched a man turn over his empty Turkish coffee cup, rotate it in the saucer, and a little while later, pick it up and ‘read’ the grounds. When I had my coffee, I asked Mustafa if he would read my cup. He explained that it was, technically, haram in Islam for him to read my fortune, although many in his homeland did it. I told him that I was not interested in predictions (being at odds with the notion of ‘the future’ since my Dad’s sudden death): I just wanted to know what there was to see in an espresso cup. So he obliged within my parameters, pointing out certain patterns and silhouettes in the sediment, suggesting what they might represent. After peering into the cup for awhile, I could actually appreciate some of the interpretations. “This,” Mustafa said, indicating a particular configuration, “could be an older man, a father or an uncle, who is watching over you and wishes only good for you.” “My Father is dead,” I said in response. “The dead don’t have wishes?” Mustafa countered.
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On the day in September 2001 that would become infamous, and in the months that followed, I felt my personal tragedy re-inhabit me. The shock, devastation, anguish of knowing that one’s loved one died alone in unfathomable circumstances. The haunting photos that people taped to phone booths, trees, subway walls, stop signs — they made me recall the Donald Justice poem, ‘Presences’: “Everyone, everyone went away today. They left without a word…” And there they were, their images defining the city. There they were, having gone.
On March 11, 2002, I went up to the roof of my building after sundown to view for the first time the Tribute in Light, which initially ran for a full month. Two neighbors came up shortly after. We greeted each other and our talk immediately turned to that day, six months earlier. Then we fell silent in the damp evening, gazing at the beams that filtered into the sky. I felt as if those souls, having ascended beyond the suffering that we can inflict upon one another, were reflected there. They had attained grace, and I wished fervently that they had attained peace. Every night that month I went to my window or to the roof deck, to look at the beams of light, and though I mourned, I also felt a sense of reunion. I was disappointed when the commemoration ended.
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My father planned to come early on the day he died to take my Mom to pick up her car which was being serviced. When I eventually picked up the car, I saw that a Monarch butterfly was crushed in its grillwork. I extricated the pieces, and set them in a cabinet. Ten years later to the day (and acutely aware of the anniversary), I was cooking dinner in the tiny kitchen of my apartment on the seventh floor of a Manhattan high rise, when a monarch butterfly flew in the open window, flitted through the apartment, and out again. It seemed remarkable to me.
In the decades since, closure has become part of the vocabulary of suffering. It signifies a resolution of sorts, an ending that enables a beginning. It seems to be something the living strive or wish for. But Mustafa’s pronouncement made me ponder what the dead might ‘wish’ for. Perhaps they wish for our enlightenment regarding the life that we’re living. Perhaps they wish to be remembered in a way that mutes the concept of closure, a way that transcends the divide between them and us.
I moved out of New York ten years ago, and back to my hometown of Philadelphia, but I recall the last time I went up to my New York roofdeck to contemplate the Beams of Light. They absorbed and diffused the pain of the day. They reminded me of the souls who are still with us in spirit. How might it change us, as a city, as a people, I’d wondered, if (budget be damned) the beams might become permanent and we were reminded nightly that they are no conclusions to be drawn.
©️Karen Bennett, 2011, 2023
All Rights Reserved
So, intensely thoughtful.