Maverick Douglas

Our son will be baptized today on the altar at the church where my father’s walnut-colored casket rested during his funeral mass so long ago.

Maverick Douglas carries the middle name of his grandfather who has been gone for nearly seventeen years now.

My father has never met any of his grandchildren.

He was not present to hear any of his daughters announce any of their pregnancies.

He was not alive for my college graduation, my wedding, the births of my children or anything in my life that has happened in the last seventeen years.

He was never able to set foot in a classroom which had my name on the door.

He has never met Mark.

I did not walk down the aisle with him at my wedding and the last time I held his hand, he was in a hospital bed, his skin paper-thin, his cheeks sunken and hollow.

I was a child then. I am a mother now.

I said goodbye to him for the last times in a hospital bed and on an altar.

I said hello to my son for the first time in a hospital bed and today, will baptize him on that same altar.

The beauty of these moments is something Heaven-sent.

It is a feeling so pure, so primal.

It is the answer to a prayer I have prayed for the last seventeen years.

“God? Make this all feel better. Please? Please let air pass through my lungs again in the same way it used to. Let my brows stop furrowing and my voice stop quivering and my eyes stop resting so heavily.”

Saying Goodbye

In the early morning hours of February 25, 2003, I stood next to my sweet dad’s bedside, wearing the pajamas and glasses I had haphazardly thrown on when my mom called suddenly to tell me it was time.

“The doctors said it’s time, Sarah. He won’t make it through the night,” she told me. “Go get Audrey and come home.”

“I’m a kid,” I thought to myself. “It’s a Monday. I’m not supposed to be in a hospital on a Monday. I have to student teach tomorrow. He has to go to work tomorrow. This wasn’t the plan. He has kids. He can’t go now.” My hands shook and my voice quivered as I called Audrey to tell her to pack a bag so we could go home.

Once I finally arrived at his bedside, I entered the room, knelt down next to his bed, and began to softly sob.

“Dad?” I cried. He lay there unconscious, a shadow of my familiar father. He couldn’t draw me near or console me in any way.

Cancer had ravaged him. It had stolen his breath and his hair and his spirit. It was the only thing which had ever noticeably scared Doug Zwirner.

Cancer made him slower and more unsure and more unsettled.

Machines were the only thing keeping him alive until all of his daughters could get to him. He couldn’t open his eyes or respond, but I began talking.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I assured him, switching parent-child roles with him. “You can go now. It’ll be okay. Don’t be scared, Dad. You’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay, too. And don’t worry about us,” I told him. I didn’t want him to feel badly about leaving us. And I didn’t want him to be scared about going to Heaven.

Now that I am a mother, I realize that the guilt of leaving his young family must have wildly spiraled throughout his mind, constantly consuming his thoughts at the same time cancer consumed his lungs.

Naming Our Son

Mark wanted to name our first baby Douglas Dale before we discovered, on the day after Christmas, that our first baby would, in fact, be a girl.

Mark’s father is Dale. He died six months after I met his son. I watched cancer come after another father and I watched it happen to the man I love.

So, two years later, when we learned, on Christmas Eve, that God had given us a son to love, Mark’s eyes glistened. I knew what he was thinking.

We would soon have our Douglas Dale.

It would be perfect, he told me. We would honor our fathers with our little boy.

But I couldn’t. I knew there was no way. I usually never am at a loss for words but I willed myself to stay quiet because I knew if I tried to say no, nothing would come out but pools of messy tears.

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t say his name every day.

Seventeen years later, my voice will still softly quiver when I say his name aloud.

There will always only be one Douglas.

He was ours. He loved fishing on Saturdays, bologna sandwiches, and polka music.

He smelled like Marlboro Reds and motor oil and he got pissed when he arrived home from work and the neighborhood kids had their bikes parked where his car was supposed to be.

He mowed the lawn with one hand and washed his car in the driveway on hot summer days. He made my sisters and I keep a garden one year to teach us the beauty of growing our own food. He used to wake up first and read the newspaper each morning while he drank coffee and smoked cigarettes.

It’s hard for me to remember things about him now. I have to recycle old memories because we haven’t made new ones with him in so long.

And I have spent nearly half of my life learning to live without him.

I couldn’t give all of that to my little boy to carry.

I couldn’t put the weight of being fatherless on Father’s Day on my newborn son.

I couldn’t write that name on lunchboxes and backpacks and yell it down the stairs at bathtime.

That name had already been taken.

And, Doug? In 2019?

Doug had a mustache, wore briefs when everyone else wore boxers, and bought his jeans at Sears.

It just couldn’t be Doug. I couldn’t share that name with anyone else.

So Maverick will carry Douglas as his middle name, but he will move throughout his own life with a name of his own, one not at all connected to loss and heartache.

And I will keep the memory of my father near to me still, as near as I keep my newborn son.