From Janelle Kihlstrom-Pomery, Daughter

It’s always hard to know how to begin something like this, although I know that when I get started it may go long, and I apologize for that.  Since we didn’t have a traditional funeral for Dad, I guess this is my way of saying goodbye.  My dad, Gustave R. Kihlstrom, Jr., known as Gus, lived to 90 years old, and yet that doesn’t feel like enough years to me.  I guess I wanted him to live forever, and at some level I believed he would.

My dad was a sort of Renaissance guy, really, good at all sorts of things but modest about it, so we never really knew about all of the things he had done or could do – like, for instance, I just learned a few weeks ago he’d been an X-ray technician in the Army.  He was dedicated, optimistic, persistent – stubborn, even – energetic, restless, but reliable, faithful, loyal, kind, gentle, a good husband, a good father, a good man.  It’s true he was sometimes impatient, and when I was younger, we would have little tiffs or mutual aggravations, often about me waking up too late in the morning or going to bed too late at night, but the aggravations were short-lived, and there were never any hard feelings.  I guess waking me up in the morning for the 6:30 a.m. school bus as a teenager was what Robert Hayden would call one of “love’s austere and lonely offices.”  

I was stubborn, too, and I didn’t always do everything I could to make Dad as proud as I would have liked, and yet despite that, he was proud of me, faithfully.  My high school and college records were pretty spotty, even with Dad’s help executing some ambitious but not-quite-thought-through science projects that won him – I mean me – some awards in junior high, but he was thrilled to see when I got my master’s degree, and I was so glad for that, at least.  He was also proud to be a grandfather, and even though he was an older father and I was older when my kids were born as well, my kids were fortunate to have met him and known him, in my daughter’s case, for the first decade of her life.  He was very proud of both his grandkids, and as with his own children, had unwavering faith in them and their future.  His grandson, Auguste, is called “Augie,” but he does have “Gus” in the middle of his name for a reason.

Some of my best memories are meals with my dad, the great meals my mom made for us all when Greg and I were kids and then on holidays when we’d visit as adults, the fun pancake breakfasts we had together on family vacations, and the daddy-daughter meals when we got to go to a nice restaurant just the two of us.  Then, when I was in college here in Maryland and Dad picked me up to drive back up to Pennsylvania for weekend visits, we would drive through Taco Bell and get some burritos, and we’d always share a couple of Mexican pizzas.  And we would have a chance to talk.  I came to treasure the memory of those drives back home.  

I remember Dad in the car a lot.  He loved to drive.  He taught me to drive, and eventually I learned.  I didn’t drive my parents’ cars too often, which was probably wise since I eventually totalled my first car turning left on a yellow light before getting the hang of it, but one time I needed to follow Dad back from picking up one of my parents’ cars at the shop, and I remember following behind his car as it got dark, even from a distance, following the tail lights, and what a feeling of comfort it was to see those tail lights, knowing that as long as I followed them, I wouldn’t be lost.  Even then, maybe just because I’m a poet, I sort of saw it as a metaphor.  

One poet, Khalil Gibran, said, “When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”

A little while after Dad died I started writing a poem called “Memento Vitae.”  I finished it but set it aside to polish later.  In medieval times people would often carry or place an item in their home called a memento mori, a reminder that some day everyone must die.  But I think I need to be reminded, as well, that some day everyone must live.  My dad would want me to remember that.  He loved life and he loved me.  And of course I loved him.

Dad liked poetry, and he enjoyed reading The New Yorker.  In his last few months, he still had a pile of New Yorker magazines on his table, and we brought him an LED-lit magnifying lens.  He could still read the title of the magazine, at least.  He loved the cartoons, too.  He liked to tell old-fashioned “dad” jokes, and little stories.  Some stories he told only once, and others he told many times.  I liked to hear them all, even the old standards.

Whenever I smell fresh-cut grass, I think of Dad.  He traveled for work often when I was younger, but the smell of fresh-cut grass always meant that he was home.  Mom told a story of how he was playing “Sheep May Safely Graze” on the church organ one Sabbath, and I suddenly bolted from our pew and tried to join daddy on the bench, I guess like I might have done when he was practicing at home.  She also told a story of how as a baby I would always stop crying when Dad lifted me up to touch the leaves on our red maple tree in the front yard. 

Later, when I was in high school or college or visiting for a weekend as an adult, whenever I’d walk into his office, he’d look up and say, “Oh, hi, Janelle.”  He never seemed sorry to see me, or that my interruption of his work was an annoyance, although I’m sure at times it must have been. Even if I was coming in to ask him for help, to use his copy machine or his computer, he seemed glad to see me or to help.  I guess that in his later years when I said “Hi, Dad,” which he said was a cheerful sound to him, it was his cheerful voice I was borrowing, or trying to.  The last time I left our old house, when he was still alive, I looked over one last time at the door to his office and I almost literally heard him saying, “Oh, hi, Janelle.”  It goes with the house, I think.  I think his voice is still there in that room now, whoever owns it or whatever they’re doing.

I used to wish that my hands were more graceful.  I have disproportionately long arms, but I’ve always wished I had long, graceful fingers to match them.  It seemed only fair.  I had just realized shortly before Dad died that I’d inherited his hands (I knew I had his nose, which is a bit much for my face, but Dad said he grew into his and someday I’d grow into mine.)  Now I don’t mind that my hands look a bit robust, for my arms or the rest of me.  Maybe I’ll grow into them as well.

My last good phone conversation with Dad was in July.  During that call we had a few minutes to talk and he said at the end of it, in his somewhat formal, both warm and slightly awkward way, that he thought we had a good rapport.  I agreed.  We could have said more, but what more was there to say?  Sometimes saying more is saying less.  He said I was doing a great job with the kids.  In our very last phone conversation a little more than two weeks before he died, when he wasn’t quite as aware as before but it was still a fairly good day for that point, where his memory could be fairly easily jogged by certain things, he asked about the kids and I told him Anya was doing well in school, on the honor roll, and she was playing the violin.  He was excited at the mention of the violin and tried to think of the name of a composer – “Oh,” I said, “Vivaldi?”  Yes, Vivaldi, “The Four Seasons, Allegro.”  

Dad loved classical music and he also loved opera, but even though he embraced his Viking heritage for their spirit of travel and world navigation, he wasn’t a fan of operas where people wear horns on their heads; he liked comic operas like “The Barber of Seville,” because they were lively and fun.  

He did talk about going back to Sweden toward the end, though.  In one of our last visits, after returning to his room a bit disoriented, he said that he needed to talk to his father so he could ask him if he ever ended up going back to Sweden, or if he stayed here.  I told him his father loved this country and had definitely stayed in America.  I hoped that would convince Dad to stay a little longer, too.  

Before his 90th birthday celebration, I bought a pendant for a necklace that contained a piece of the Muonionalusta Meteorite that had fallen in Sweden about a million years ago.  I never managed to show the piece to Dad or explain what it was, even though it might have made a cute anecdote.  Things are always left unsaid between people who mean everything to each other.  There are so many things.  In the last few years, there was COVID, too.  

Dad started to say during COVID, “Someone is stealing the days.”  It did feel like that.  The first time we visited after COVID restrictions in his assisted living were eased to allow it, he held onto my hand a long time.  My heart broke, and I felt helpless in that moment, because we were on our way back to Maryland, two and a half hours away.  We would visit as often as we could, but it couldn’t be every week, or as often as I’d like, or that I’d imagined, when we had hoped he could live near us in his last days.  Because of a medical emergency, he’d had to move into a nearby assisted living right away, and our plan for Mom and Dad to live closer to us had to be postponed, and because of COVID, in Dad’s case that postponement became permanent.  We were lucky that Dad was vaccinated and survived COVID with a mild case, but still COVID stole some of our days with him as well.  

And yet I had been so fortunate, so lucky to have had him in my life for 49 years.  The world had him here for 90 years.  To me, he was a million-year event.  On his deathbed, at first I wanted to believe that maybe he would survive this last downturn after all, and appealed to his Viking spirit to fight.  But maybe I was thinking of the Welsh poet who implored his father to rage against the dying of the light.  Finally, I managed to say instead, “Everyone is here.”  He reacted when each new person came in the room and we could tell that he knew each of us were here.  His father had always said that holidays were when everyone was together.  I told him it was OK to rest.  It had been a long day, a good day, a good life.  

I wanted him to live forever, but he needed to go back to Sweden, and I needed to let him go.  When I left his room for the last time, I thought I’d be able to spend one more day with him before we all had to go back home.  It was December, and I’d brought a copy of “The Night Before Christmas” and was going to read it to him.  But that was the last day.  After we left his room that evening, we were all talking, and I turned back one time in the middle of a sentence and said, probably out of his earshot but because I needed to, “Bye, Dad.”  Not in a somber way, not in a poetic way, just a simple, casual “Bye.”  I hope that if he heard it, he knew there was love in that word, that there was always love.  Bye, Dad.