The Mask of Life

Notes on a father dead for a decade.

My father, the late Edward Mason Anthony Jr., holding his face in his hands. Photo ©2003, Ted Anthony.

The latest in a series of essays inspired by the intersection of family photographs and memory.

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ONE SUMMER AFTERNOON IN 2003, I asked my father to take his face down from the wall and carry it outside.

It wasn’t his actual face, of course. At least, not anymore. His life, his journeys, his experiences had long since left that face behind.

“This,” he told me when I was a little boy in the 1970s, “is called a life mask.” It was always there in his study, looking down at us with closed eyes, if such a paradox is possible. I’m not sure why he kept it up there. Perhaps it was to remind him that no matter where you are in life, you can close your eyes and ponder possibility.

On that summer afternoon, he pulled his bright orange doppelgänger off of its hook and, with wrinkled hands, held it in the sunlight for me to photograph. I looked at its face and his, and I marveled at the life that had taken place in the seven decades between the moment he cast the mask and the moment in which we were standing.

He’d cast it in the late 1930s in Detroit, he told me, as part of a school project. That day, a teenage version of the person who became my father closed his eyes, dipped his face into something gooey and left an indelible impression behind for what he probably never considered would be posterity.

My father died a decade ago this morning, at the end of a years-long peregrination through Alzheimer’s Disease — a quiet and gradual struggle that we now would call a “journey.” He is buried, with my mother, up on a hill about four miles from our family home.

The face I looked into on that day in 2003 — a face of kindness and knowledge, of tolerance and patience and curiosity — is now gone. The mask remains.

And today of all days, I sense that it has something to say.

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My father with my mother, to whom he was married for nearly 70 years. Photo ©2004, Ted Anthony.

ONE SUMMER MORNING IN 2015, precisely 10 years ago today, my father breathed his last. I missed his death by 90 seconds because I stopped for a microwave burrito. That’s another story for another day.

My parents were older when I was born — 45 and 43. I had two sisters who were already adults when I arrived.

Because of this, I spent far too much time in my childhood eyeing other people’s younger parents, then looking at mine and wondering how much longer they had. Years later, a friend offered me a phrase for it: “mourning in advance.”

I used to look at the life mask and see its closed eyes, and my mind would take me to places I didn’t want to be. I always thought to myself: This is what he’d look like when he died. I was wrong.

Somehow, though, those thoughts never colored my view of the mask on his wall. Silent, ubiquitous, it was a beacon to me when I spent time in his study. It said to me that he had a history, that I was part of some kind of continuity. It was a physical representation of an earlier version of my father that I could never access. That was intriguing, but also a bit sad.

We infuse our fathers with things they have nothing to do with, with expectations and hopes that they are not responsible for, with magic and dreams and superpowers of which they are sometimes entirely unaware.

All these years after my childhood ended, I am realizing that one thing I infused in him — unfairly, of course — was permanence. He was the third Edward Mason Anthony in our line; I am the fourth. When I looked at him, I saw not only myself but a reverse cascade of people going back to those who first populated our nation.

Permanence is a dangerous concept, though, in that it does not actually exist. All space, in the end, is liminal space.

My father with his parents in the late 1930s, around the time he cast his life mask.

In the slow-motion runup to my father’s end, I felt this. He was in a liminal space. From the fall of 2008 to 10 years ago this morning, he — the man he had been — faded almost into nothing, and my mother would follow in the ensuing years as well. Dementia is particularly ugly that way. It snacks away gradually at a person, taking tiny nibbles and leaving no immediate sign that they’re gone.

In my own mind, I vowed I’d reclaim him from dementia. In all of the ways I offered care — the quiet haircuts, the soothing words, the tasks taken on, and eventually the adult diapers handled — I was blocking the inevitability of it all through tasks and trajectory. Action was my denial, and I excelled at it.

The day that he died was the day that I failed. Or, at least, that’s what the voice inside me told me — that voice that doesn’t use language but is the loudest one of all.

For 10 years, through my mother’s cognitive decay and death and well beyond, I grieved. I mourned. I tried to parse those words, what they meant, how they differed. I memorialized and remembered and preserved and ruminated. I did it while living in a generational house that they’d left behind, filled with the pieces of their fascinating 20th-century lives that required scrutiny, assessment, archiving. Or so I’d decided.

I got lost looking back, and I forgot how to look forward.

As I accumulated books in my study — his study — the orange life mask on the wall, the young father gazing upon me with closed eyes, became partially obscured. I didn’t look at it much anymore. I was occupied with other things. I was stuck in the act of saying goodbye.

But in the past couple years, as I work to improve and construct what might be called a 2.0 version of me, I realize that I have inadvertently been in training for today.

And so this morning, on this auspicious anniversary that is as quiet as his voice is now, I commit myself to something:

It’s high time to start figuring out how to say goodbye to saying goodbye.

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Napping. Photo ©2012, Ted Anthony.

MY FATHER SMILED when he napped. It was a small smile, barely perceptible, but it was always noticeable. It only occurred to me after he expired that the smile he revealed while napping was the same smile he imparted to his life mask.

Today, I choose to focus on that smile. It was there when he was young. It was there when he was old. It was there, reassuring me, up until the moment he was gone.

Grief is a curious thing. You want a straight line. You want the five stages and the contours and progress they promise. You want forward trajectory until you get the fuck over it already.

But that’s not how I’ve found it to be. Instead, it travels like Billy in the old “Family Circus” newspaper comics when he was asked to carry something next door. When you want to take a straight route, it meanders and doubles back on itself. If you get lost, you might never reach the other side — if there is, in fact, an other “side.”

©Bil Keane/King Features Syndicate. Used under U.S. fair use principles.

By the end, my father was all but gone. The day before he died, the him that he was managed to surface briefly to tell my two young boys, now men, that he loved them. The next morning he belonged to the ages.

Today, the final years tend to obscure the other ones. I have trouble summoning my parents in their prime — the people who raised me. Their end, in some ways, has overwritten the beginning and the middle.

This is where the mask comes in, and why I look to it today.

Though it is still and mute, it crackles with life. It shows me a young man who — though I never knew him — is looking ahead. It is not about the past — of which I have had quite enough for the moment, thank you very much — but about what is still to come.

When I look at it, though I am still looking back, I am looking back on looking ahead. And perhaps, on this day, that is enough of a beginning.

In writing this, I looked up “life mask” in Wikipedia. This is what I found:

But the redirection is so very wrong.

This was not a death mask. It was a life mask. It represents not who he became — the “decreptitude” that he so often lamented — but who he was at the beginning of it all. The possibility. The hope. The things yet undone, the lessons yet unlearned, the children yet unfathered. The wisdom yet unaccumulated.

That’s the face that I choose to have looking down on me, not the Alzheimer’s-addled professor who forgot his life at the end. The orange plaster doppelgänger of his teenage years is the way I now choose to remember him.

This morning, it is still on the wall of his study in the house north of Pittsburgh where he spent so many of his years — a house that I now own, a study that is now the still somewhat magical room where I do so much of my working and cogitating and contemplating and living. He would be the first to say that it was high time for this change. “For crying out loud,” he’d say. “Go live.”

My father loved filing things — arranging them, organizing them, curating them, finding and assigning them their proper place. “Unsorted but Significant,” he called it. Today I file away that final, weakened, diminished version of him in the desk drawer of my mind.

The death mask is dead. The life mask lives.

So goodbye, Dad — for real, now. The past, in the end, must be right-sized. And you — the bright-orange plaster you, the teenage you, the you that you were before you became the you I knew so well — are just the young man for the job.