Spring Onion is the recording project of Philadelphia based musician Catherine Dwyer. Dwyer has played in numerous projects over a decade-long music career, including Remember Sports, 2nd Grade, and 22 Degree Halo. Her debut LP, Seated Figure, is out March 14 via Anything Bagel Records.
I think we got breakfast that horrible morning, or some other time that horrible month. My father had died, or it was clear that he was going to. It’s unbelievable to me now that any detail could be even slightly out of focus. My dad’s brother John and I were walking up the ramp of my parents’ apartment building, drinking juices from one of the two recently opened bodegas on 187th street.
This particular corner of Washington Heights had been without a deli for years; those in need of a sandwich, or a coffee, or a plate of eggs had previously gone to Vicky’s, a Greek diner located at the midway point of the 45 degree angle 187th street forms between Fort Washington and Pinehurst Avenues. In the years since my egress (first to college in Ohio, then to an underemployed musician’s existence in West Philadelphia), two bodegas have opened, owned by embittered, competing brothers. One, across the street from Vicky’s, occupying a former stationary store, the other behind the bank on Cabrini Boulevard. Over the weeks of my father’s illness (lung cancer, stage 3b, and complications from the treatment of), during which I uprooted my rootless life to return to my childhood bedroom on 190th street, the Cabrini Boulevard joint became my preferred establishment. A half-masked teen runs both the register and the $10,000 juicing machine with efficiency and ease.
This is all to say, we were walking up the ramp of my parents’ building, John and I. John, the youngest of the four Dwyer brothers, had spent much of the last few weeks just as I had: weeping uncontrollably at my father’s bedside, doing what he could to help my mom and sister, who was four months into a tumultuous pregnancy with her first child. John shared with me the joy in the (ultimately meaningless) small victories, like when my dad started to make his own (deep brown, minimal) urine after a week in a coma. When my dad opened his eyes, when he squeezed my hand and blinked when I told him to, John was the one I called.
Apparently, there is a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, also known as the “death surge,” in which patients, heretofore comatose, experience an abrupt change in demeanor, a return to a certain lucidity and responsiveness. Suddenly, my dad, Jim, James, pop, seemed to remember that “Dad” was a sound he had once responded to, that “squeeze my hand” was a command he could easily execute. When I talked to him about the president’s recent COVID diagnosis, he rolled his eyes. He did not wish to spend his death surge discussing Donald Trump. When a palliative care nurse, checking my father’s vitals, remarked that she had seen my modestly successful indie rock band play at Baby’s All Right, in a time and a place very far from October 2020 in the Memorial Sloan-Kettering ICU, I swear he flashed me a shit-eating grin.
I called him James in those moments. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. I didn’t feel like I was his child anymore. I was just his blood and he was mine. Probably I assumed that whatever lingering consciousness he had cast him back to his childhood on East 95th street. He was James then, playing sock football with his brothers. The ICU nurses kept saying he could probably hear us. Play him music, talk to him, they told us. Sounds of the ventilator, of the playlist I made for him, mixing in his mind with the July nights of his childhood. Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.
It was high COVID then, October 2020. No one on planet earth had been vaccinated. Hospital policy limited our visits to one person per day. Occasionally we were granted an exception, based on how dire my father’s condition seemed on that particular day (the more dire, the more people were allowed to visit). Typically, it was either my mom, my sister Maura, or myself at his bedside. As the death surge waned, we arranged for the brothers to visit. Philip, the most troubled of my father’s brothers, spent his limited visiting time cracking jokes, not looking at my dad. John and Pat, the eldest, my godfather, held each other and wept.
It was sometimes hard for me to see what my father had in common with his brothers, beyond the things that siblings often share; a childhood home, some school friends, certain physical mannerisms. His brothers all raised their children in the suburbs, maintained an active relationship with the Catholic Church, and preferred the lightly seasoned food of their Irish-born parents.
Jim, my father, raised his children in Upper Manhattan, five miles as-the-crow-flies from his birthplace on the Upper East Side. My mother, a Long Islander by birth, would occasionally beg to make for Glen Ridge, Westchester, Port Washington, anywhere, please! But in Washington Heights we remained. Despite 16 years of Jesuit education (nearly all of his education, save for one year at the godless Columbia School of Journalism) my father’s ties to the Church were loose. Unlike his brothers, he held no leadership role in our local congregation. The St. Frances Cabrini shrine on Fort Washington Avenue — where the incorrupt body of Mother Cabrini, first American saint, lays in state on the altar — was more on the fire/brimstone end of things. My father allowed his subscription to the one true Catholic and Apostolic Church to lapse. He maintained a healthy skepticism of certain exotic foods like rice, or pasta, but paddled out bravely on the foodie wave of the late aughts. He ordered chicken hearts for the table in Chelsea, and crunched happily on pigs’ ears in San Sebastián.
To the naked eye, he shared very few organizing principles with those suburban-living, god-fearing, picky-eating brothers. One thing they did have in common, without question, was a deep abiding love of Costco Wholesale. No family gathering was complete without a tire-size clamshell of shrimp cocktail, no Kirkland brand polo shirt too shiny for a smart evening out on the town. A three-pack of Prilosec OTC made for a perfect stocking stuffer. Julia Child bought her meat at Costco, Dad would say to me, carving a $200 Christmas prime rib, wearing medical grade latex gloves from (where else?) the big C.
“You know, Catarina, they have caskets at Costco,” John said to me, that horrible morning, or some other time that horrible month. He sucked at his orange juice, not exactly looking at me.
I considered this, sucking at my own juice (California Sunset: carrot, beets, red apple, ginger). I thought of Dad disappearing to Costco for hours. I thought of the many emails he had sent me in praise of their optometry department. I thought of high quality extra virgin olive oil, of sweat wicking t-shirts. I thought of making sandwiches for us when he got home, rotisserie chicken and KerryGold cheddar cheese cut from a two pound block, on ciabatta rolls still warm from the bakery department.
Though he may not have followed his brothers to the suburbs, he brought a proclivity for excess into our house, to a degree not usually spatially possible in New York City. We had two refrigerators, one in the kitchen, and one in a closet near the front door. Even after my sister and I moved out. After he died, leaving my mom alone in the apartment, two fridges.
I do not know which came first, my father’s love for Costco, or the second fridge. Certainly, one does not exist without the other. My memories of the time before two fridges are limited, and certainly not detailed enough to shed any light on the family’s grocery shopping habits. In the second fridge, he kept cans of Coke Zero, 20 pound bags of potatoes, gallon jugs of the diet chocolate caramel chews he liked to snack on. He defrosted salmon, brined the Christmas rib roast, grew tall green sprouts from dozens of onions.
Then there was the “Dwyer Car Thing,” that took hold of my grandfather and his four sons. Three cars did they have parked on the streets of Yorkville, and three cars did they move each week, come hell or street sweeper. They all drove everywhere, back and forth to school in the Bronx, to nights out on the town and the Riverdale Diner in the wee hours after. That was this transit reporter’s dirty little secret; he didn’t actually take the subway much. His first book, Subway Lives, is based on his New York Newsday column of the same name. Promotional images for the book and the column place the intrepid, gumshoe reporter brooding on the steps of the 77th Street 6 train exit. But my memories of traveling through the city with my father all take place in the back of his black Toyota Camry, New York Press plate number 879.
Native New Yorkers have a way of making the city comfortable for themselves that transplants sometimes do not. We develop special skills to mediate the inhumane, nay, the anti-human forces that govern New York City. If you give the building’s porter a tenner each week, he’ll move your car (and the neighbor’s too!) when the street sweeper comes by. If you make a buddy at the DMV, or the NYPD press office, he’ll approve your press plates even if technically you don’t really meet the requirements any more. Of course, it helps to be a good old fashioned, nosy, schmoozy reporter with gossip to share and a favor to exchange. The impossible becomes possible. You too could drive your car to the Costco in Yonkers and fill the second fridge in your Manhattan apartment with your winnings.
Upstairs, in the apartment, on that horrible morning, I called the 24 hour 1-800 number of Costco’s casket subsidiary and placed the order. If we couldn’t bury him in the parking spot on Cabrini Boulevard that was good for four entire weeks, (due to a once-in-a-hundred-year calendar confluence of Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Three Kings Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and subsequent suspensions of alternate side parking regulations) the Oxford Casket from Costco ($1,149.99, shipping included) would do quite nicely.
What he had wanted, had dreamed of, since his first life-threatening stint in the hospital in 2003, was simply not possible given the current limits of virological science. His wishes were classically New York, like him. A wake at Frank E. Campbell’s, followed by a standing room only service at St. Ignatius of Loyola, and interment at Gate of Heaven cemetery (accessible by MetroNorth!) in Hawthorne, New York. COVID made all of it, save for the interment at Gate of Heaven, out of reach.
Even without a wake or church service to plan, there were still arrangements to make. John, bless him, took it upon himself to organize certain logistics as my father’s death grew more and more imminent. He purchased the burial plot and found a funeral home near him to receive and prepare my father’s body for interment. All the while, the seed John had planted, of a Kirkland Brand coffin, would not be uprooted.
My insistence on the Costco casket caused friction with the funeral home in Connecticut. Please, Miss, we offer the exact same casket, we have it in the home already. It caused delays; pandemic-related supply chain issues had, of course, not left the death industry unscathed, and the casket didn’t ship on time. The date of the service was pushed back to accommodate the casket’s late arrival. In the absence of traditional funeral rites, the Costco casket became the single most meaningful mark I could make on my father’s transition, as sacred to me as any shroud or pyre. We were waiting for the fucking casket.
There was very little about the actual ceremony that even resembled a funeral, much less the funeral for a great man with an enormous network of family, friends, coworkers, sources and bullshitters. His beloved Irish cousins, his friends of 50 years, his colleagues of 30 years, his war buddies, none could attend. I had to pee, desperately, the entire time. The offices of the cemetery (and thereby, its restrooms) were closed to mourners, due to the pandemic. The port-a-potty outside was soiled beyond use.
The president of Fordham University (alma mater of my parents, as well as several family members and close friends in attendance) delivered the graveside service, and stunned the small crowd when he, unprompted, tossed a Fordham University baseball cap into my father’s grave. Certainly, my father’s time at Fordham had been impactful. There, he met his wife, his best friend, and cut his teeth editing the school’s newspaper. But this man was an interloper. He was supposed to be there as Christ’s representative on earth, not to place promotional materials in a freshly dug grave. At the conclusion of the service, after a quick schmooze with some of the Fordham Rams among the bereaved, thanking them for their continued support, the priest pressed several more Fordham caps into my hands. Wordlessly, I handed them to my mom’s sister, Eileen, to dispose of.
At home, at the end of that horrible day, it was a relief to have something to be angry at, to feel something other than terrible loss. Desecration! we laughed, He desecrated the grave! It’s too bad you can’t tell a dead person a story. I think my dad would have liked this one.
