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MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
MARCH | APRIL 2017
the
Barbecue
issue
by
Crescent Dragonwagon
T
he Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan
was telling us about a dinner she had
hosted at which my father had been
present, four days before his unexpected
death. “Well, you know how he was,” she
said. “I served a chocolate cake, and he
loved it. ‘Well, then, Maurice,’ I said, ‘Why
don’t you just take the rest of it with you?’
‘Oh, Fionnula, no! I couldn’t! Really? The
whole thing?’ ‘Of course the whole thing,’
I said. You’d think I’d given him diamonds.”
My husband and I exchanged looks. Across
the surreality of it all, at least one minor
mystery was solved: that empty wooden
cake box, the name of its high-end bakery
painted in gold leaf atop it — what, we’d
wondered, was it doing sitting near the front
door of my father’s Los Angeles apartment?
Larger mysteries remained, as they always
do with an unexpected death. We had tried
to unravel them, though we’d not yet fully
comprehended the basics: My 77-year-old
father’s heart had abruptly stopped beating.
His sudden death upended normality. Ned
and I flew in from the middle of the country,
arranging his memorial and clearing out
his apartment. The week we did that we
somehow ended up (I have no memory of
how) as houseguests of kind Fionnula, whom
we’d never met before this turn of events.
Emerald
Smiles