My Father Is A Deer

Father’s Day, 2022

My father should still be here. He should still be here, and screaming “Careful you might live forever” to all the joggers wheezing by our house. He should still be here, and saying “I just stepped on a barking spider” whenever he farted (which was all the time). He should still be here, and telling me “It’s hopeless but it’s not serious” whenever I got bent out of shape as a kid, even though I had no idea what he was talking about until I was an adult and older than he was when he died. He should still be here, and making his nightly pilgrimage to the attic to prostrate himself to Buddha, even though it sounded more like self-flagellation than prostration to us heathen children - what with all his huffing and puffing and banging around on his boney knees. He should still be here, and pontificating at the dinner table to his empire of knee-high knuckleheads, sloshing his martini over his head like some mad king with a scepter. He should still be here, and asking my baby brother “Do you even KNOW what ‘scatology’ means?,” and my baby brother just turning around and farting in his face. (The perfect definition I’d say.)

My father should still be here so we could laugh together at his litany of lunacies, including that time he almost killed himself when he came THAT close to cascading over a hundred-foot waterfall backward and upside-down in his kayak. (What an idiot.) He should still be here so I could ask him the questions I never asked him when he was alive. Like “Why don’t you ever say you love me when I know you do?” And “Why did you say the only reason you were a good neurosurgeon was because you had good hands?” And “Why the hell did you have that Andrew Wyeth painting of a dead deer hanging in your office?” Was that your Buddhist way of reminding your patients of our inevitable disappearing, regardless of the healing you could give them today? Or was it something more gentle than that, an invocation maybe to shape a life as beautiful and as startling as that painting was, no matter how ephemeral our breath?

Yes, my father should still be here, and not dead at fifty-five; not Icarus ash in an empty can of kidney beans (a tin epitaph to his flatulence, I guess); not lost and gone under rock and grimpen in the middle of some dark wood somewhere in Vermont. But perhaps my father IS still here, given his Buddhist belief in reincarnation. Perhaps he’s alive and transfigured into a deer. But not just any deer. No, if my father is deer now, he’s the Great Prince of the Forest of Bambi, or the luminous Deer God of Rilke; joyously breaking wind as he runs like the wind through endless mist at the end of landscapes.

(Photographs from a project on deer processing, inspired by the paintings of Andrew Wyeth.)

“Donald Wilson. 1927 - 1980. Patience is armor.” - epitaph on my father’s grave rock