by Nancy Wayson Dinan

My father died on February 6, 2020. I was working in Costa Rica, and he was in Austin, and we had all suspected that this might happen, but he had been almost dying for more than a decade. I don’t mean to make light of it—I only mean to convey to you my sense that he would never die. He had come so close so many times, and he had never once been successful.

Two months and one day after my father’s death, the singer John Prine died of COVID-19. When my father died, the virus was a specter, some distant thing that had the power to scare us but would never truly come close enough to harm us. Two months and one day later, the world was a different place. We were housebound, stuck in an apartment in Escazú, a neighborhood of San José. Costa Rica had locked down hard; we were allowed to drive two days per week, and the only places that were open were pharmacies, grocery stores, and doctors’ offices. When we walked in our neighborhood, there were handmade signs placed in windows: ‘Quédate en casa. No más muertes.’ We agreed with these signs. We hunkered down in our three rooms, avoided neighbors in the elevator, suddenly alone, suddenly terrified of other people.

When Prine died, I sat in my bedroom and played his music, sick to my stomach, crying. People could hear me—I could certainly hear them through the open windows, hear the ways they went on with their own lives in this new isolation. I was embarrassed to cry so hard, but I did it anyway. I hadn’t yet really processed my father’s death, and to tell you the truth, I’m still having trouble with that.

—

In the last eighteen months of his life, my father suddenly lost sixty-five pounds, going down to 110, and in my late-night Google searches, I learned that this weight loss was end-stage COPD, the very last bit of Stage 4, the end of everything. The patient, unable to breathe and eat well at the same time, chooses breathing, and eating for pleasure falls off. In addition, breathing requires so much work that the body spends most of its calories drawing in enough oxygen, trying to get enough in the blood to keep the organs going. Though he was still happy and alert, he had entered his last days.

But COPD is a weird animal, I learned, a terminal illness with no clearly defined time expectations. Stage 4 COPD can last for weeks or it can last for years. He had, in fact, already been in Stage 4 COPD for a long time, only I had not known. When I looked up the symptoms, I realized with a shock that he had entered Stage 3 more than a decade before, after a bout with pneumonia made him unable to walk short distances. I remember the sick feeling I had when I looked back on the scope of his illness, how he had changed so slowly, almost imperceptibly, and how he had marched himself up to the edge without any of us really knowing what was at the end of it. He’d smoked for years, from the age of eight until seventy-three, six years before his death, so we thought that we were looking at emphysema, at chest congestion. I don’t know that he knew he was locked into the course of a terminal illness. If he did know, he didn’t tell us, at least not until the very end, when nobody could miss it.

—

John Prine was not part of the music of my childhood, a soundtrack composed of Warren Zevon, Willie Nelson, and Jerry Jeff Walker, but he should have been. With his slow and melancholic waltzes, the humor of his lyrics, he sounded like the Austin I had always loved, the Austin which was slowly disappearing. I am not sure when I heard my first John Prine song, but I remember in college thinking that he spoke to me, especially songs like “Spanish Pipe Dream.” His voice belonged to an older Austin, one that was, even in the early 2000s, all but gone. This was part of his appeal.

But there was more to it than that. John Prine’s lyrics somehow spoke to my connection to the world where my father was at home, a world that was just as gone as the Austin of Whole Earth Provisions and Les Amis and Armadillo World Headquarters and everything else that had disappeared in the decades since my childhood. In his song “Paradise,” Prine sings about a place in his own father’s stories—Paradise, Kentucky—a place to which he asks his father to take him. His father tells Prine that it’s too late, that Paradise is gone, carted away by coal trains. In the song, Prine describes a wild life in a world that smells like snakes, the Muhlenberg County of Prine’s own memories. When Prine sings of asking his father to take him there, he is closer to my own father’s age than to mine. And yet this is the longing I feel, this sense that my father was privy to a world I will never see, a bucolic paradise, erased, if not by coal trucks then by the rise of Walmarts and gas stations and drug stores. They make this whole country look the same. Underneath all of it, buried, lies the memory of whatever was there in the past. For Prine, in that song, his father holds some way to transport him.

I always imagined that my father held a similar secret, that if I could ask him just right, he would show me a secret passage to the places of his youth—not far from Prine’s Muhlenberg County—to Reelfoot Lake and the fish fries of an extended family I will never know, to the sharecropper’s house where he learned to hoe cotton, to the garden where his mom grew vegetables, and thorny vines she used for switches. Until his very last days, he could tell me the stories. But he never did take me there. The only time I went to Tennessee with my father was once in the late nineties for a family reunion. I did not know then that it would be the last. He didn’t show me any of the places of his stories.

—

My father was born in Ridgely, Tennessee, at Water Tower #2, in the summer of 1940. He remembered his first time seeing a car, how he didn’t get indoor plumbing until the family moved to Michigan in the late fifties. He lived to see the internet but not to trust it; he took the daily newspaper until the day he died. A lifelong science fiction fan, he embraced change and technology, but he could not figure out how to use a computer.

He told stories, though. Some of them were told often: the summer he spent drunk on a boat in Michigan; the time he broke his arm in the Navy; the multi-day canoe trips he would take down the Colorado River whenever he tried to quit smoking. Others he told me just once, like the one about a letter he read at my mother’s house right when my parents had separated, or the one about his time in a Bolivian prison. Now I recognize that there are other stories, stories he could have told me that I will never now know.

The stories that seemed the most like him, and also the most inaccessible to me, were from his first fifteen years in Tennessee. He told me how he chopped cotton, how he tried to do gymnastics in the outhouse, how his brother drank turpentine and, to save him, the family left him outside in the snow for hours. And it occurs to me now that when John Prine asks his father to take him to this disappeared place, he’s asking his father to share with him something that can never be shared. There will never exist a time in this world when I can experience what my father experienced: all those years that went before. That time is gone, and not for me to know.

—

I find myself these days thinking that death is more of a passage than an ending. Still, I am forced to admit that the body is done, decomposing and needing disposal. I can either, then, look at death as a separation of body and spirit, or as a switch turning off, the power going out on the machine. But even in this metaphor, I am left thinking of what happens in machines when they lose that vital power, how it does not really disappear. It goes somewhere else.

A friend posted a tribute to Prine when he died, noting that he hopes Prine is back in Paradise, Kentucky with his father, back in the time before Mr. Peabody’s trains carried away the paradise. Part of me wants to believe in the notion of my father traipsing across the Tennessee woods again, young and curious and strong. Nothing I know in scientific nor spiritual writing supports such an idea. And yet it is one of two to which I return, this idea that heaven (such a fraught word) is made up of all the happiest parts of your life, shorn of grief or sorrow, hazy with old-fashioned pleasure, like a daguerreotype, sepia-toned.

The other idea to which I regularly return is that the dead stay with the living, that my dad is here with me still, and that he judges me for the way that I use my time. At the end of his life, I was so busy when what he wanted from me was just presence. I talk to him a lot now, telling him how I’m doing, what I am discovering about grief. One of the things I have discovered is that you mourn not only the dead but your own life, your own way of living, all the things that used to exist and no longer do. What will happen for me when I die? Will I be at my grandmother’s house on Lockhart Drive in Austin with everybody there? Will my husband and two children join this group at a house they’ve never been inside? Will we sit on that front porch, long lost to our family, as the thunderstorms come rolling down? And will my children at last get to know the family that lived there, their family too, but one that departed before my two sons arrived?

If they are there with me in my own heaven, what, then, is theirs? When I die, will I be pulled back to my father’s heaven, to his moments, to his countryside? I cannot tell you—I can only write from the perspective of someone who sees a thing coming. I cannot write as someone who knows what that thing is.

—

At the end of the song, Prine gives instructions for what he wants to happen to his body after he dies. He is to be cremated and placed in the Green River, so that his ashes will never be more than five miles from Paradise. A couple of years before he died, my father asked something similar of me. One of the times he was in the hospital, he made me promise to put his ashes in the Colorado River, just south of Longhorn Dam, the place where he used to take his canoe and put in, so many years ago, when he wanted to quit the habit that would eventually kill him. He told me he wanted his ashes there because he had always wanted to make it to the Gulf of Mexico, and he never had.

But the pandemic took even this from him, or at least for a long while. I was unable to fulfill his dying wish for almost two years. More than eighteen months after his death, his ashes still rested in a box in my aunt’s closet, waiting for the day when his family could be together again. In the meantime, the world had changed, altered beyond what he could have imagined. For years, I waited until the family could gather again, waited until we had a chance to remember, a collective memorial for everything our family has lost.

When the day came, it was only me and my husband, sliding down the cliff below Lady Bird Lake, clutching the box of ashes. I stood on the shore and imagined him finally reaching the ocean. I didn’t imagine that he would pass through today’s east Texas, nor through the east Texas that existed immediately before the pandemic. Instead, I imagined the slow backwards wind of the clock, the fall of development, the rise of the old pecan trees. The Texas of thirty years ago, the time that belonged to him, and that I am not allowed to enter. Wherever John Prine is, I hope his father is there too.

Nancy Wayson Dinan is a native Texan who lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Her work has appeared in The Texas Observer, LitHub, The Paris Review Daily, and more. She earned her MFA from the Ohio State University in 2013 and her PhD from Texas Tech University in 2020. Her first novel, Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here (Bloomsbury), was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. She currently directs the MFA program at Western Kentucky University.