When my father died last September, he left very few things behind. He lived in a small apartment and he wasn’t the kind of person who was attached to objects in a sentimental way (or to people, to a certain extent, but that’s another story). Still, when we went through his possessions in order to free his apartment for the next renter, we did find a few things we weren’t too sure what to do with.
There were a few music scores of religious songs which seemed to date back from the late forties. They were contained in a heavy blue binder and the pages were yellowed and smelt strongly of cigarette, like everything else from his apartment. My father did not like his job, or his life, for that matter, but one thing he did enjoy was his music. He had a beautiful base-baritone voice and sang (for pay) at funerals and weddings, until he decided that weddings were too sad and boring and he stuck with the funerals.
I saved a small book of popular songs from the fifties, a tiny binder which he would get out to make us sing every time the family gathered for the holidays. Still, getting rid of his old music scores made me feel somewhat sad and guilty. But there’s no musician in the family (though my sister inherited his beautiful voice) and nobody plays this kind of music anymore.
Then there was the hair piece. You see, my father turned bald around his mid-twenties, when a shaved head was not fashionable at all, especially not for a man who sang love songs in a swing band on the weekends. He was very proud of his appearance and he ended up buying a toupee which he wore until the end of his life.
As a little kid, I wasn’t very conscious of how artificial the thing looked. There was the father without hair, the serious man I would see at the breakfast table, and I knew I was not allowed to let a friend in the house before he put his hair on. And then there was the father with hair, the silly man who liked to make everybody laugh. It made sense that my dad should have hair in his mid-forties. But when all the other men turned bald because of age, my dad still clung to his dark and thick hair piece, no matter how much the whole family protested. Dad just ignored the jokes and comments behind his back, preferring to believe that the damn thing looked real. We did manage at some point to get him to change the cut of the toupee and to lighten it a little, but that was as far a concession as he would make.
After my mom died and he lived alone, dad kept putting on his hair every morning, even if he didn’t get out of the house and had no visitor. Then he had stomach cancer and when he came back home from the operation, he slowly stopped wearing the hair piece around the house. We knew then that he really wasn’t feeling well and that things were serious. He died a year later, after a week in the hospital, and for the first time the toupee had stayed home without him, on its foam head in the closet, which is where we found it when we were cleaning his place.
We worked for 3 days at emptying the apartment and the toupee stood on its base a few feet away from us, in the same way my father always kept away from our activities, a silent observer of our lives. No matter how much my brother, my two sisters and I hated the damn thing, we couldn’t deny that it had been an integral part of my father. We had a hard time taking that final gesture with it, and do what we had to do. It stood there on its foam head, staring blankly and looking ridiculous. Talking about it made us laugh and cry at the same time, in that crazy mixed up mental state that always follows the death of a dear one. It was an unreal object, yet so real and organic at the same time, we just didn’t know what to do with it. In the surprise that followed dad’s quick death, no one thought of asking the funeral director to put the hair piece on my father for the cremation.
In the end of course, it had to go. I will not tell you how it ended and who took care of the tough job because I would have to reveal some details of my family history which involve one of my siblings, and that story is not for me to tell. (Yes, that hair piece had a heavy emotional load attached to it for some members of our clan!) Let’s just say that the toupee went away spectacularly, in a scene that had to be the funniest yet saddest thing I’ve ever witnessed in my whole life.
Man, what dramas we live, I tell you…
