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[Sound of an ax chopping wood. Quirky music fades in…]
Christopher Gronlund:
I want to make one thing perfectly clear: this show is not about lumberjacks…
My name is Christopher Gronlund, and this is where I share my stories. Sometimes the stories contain truths, but most of the time, they’re made up. Sometimes the stories are funny—other times they’re serious. But you have my word about one thing: I will never—EVER—share a story about lumberjacks.
This time, it’s a sequel to the first November anniversary story I ever wrote: “The Art of the Lumberjack.” I figured, “What better way to mark the 10th anniversary of Not About Lumberjacks than by revisiting the story that started the November tradition?” (In fact, you might want to check out The Quick List link on the site and jump back to that November, 2016 story if you’ve not heard it…or have forgotten what it was about.)
I started Not About Lumberjacks for two reasons. One: I was working toward shopping around a new novel and figured having an online repository of fiction would show that I understood being online as a writer (as well as showing off other writing to potential agents). And two: because I focused so much on novels at the time, I knew starting this show would get me back to writing short stories.
And man, has it ever!
If you factor in the annual Christmas episodes, which contain multiple stories, this story is the 85th short story released on Not About Lumberjacks!
This has become the most satisfying creative thing I’ve ever done. From a podcast-must-equal-growth standpoint, it’s a failure of a show, not really growing much at all in the 10 years I’ve been doing it. (In fact, the best year for Not About Lumberjacks was a couple years ago, and still not having an audience most would consider worth continuing.)
But I’ve heard from people over these 10 years who’ve told me how much certain stories mean to them. I know people listen (and re-listen) to stories I’ve written on road trips. An so-called “good” audience is usually measured in numbers, but for me, it’s knowing people are taking the time in a hurried world to listen to stories I’ve written.
So, thank you all for sticking with me.
And thank you to everyone who’s been understanding about me skipping a story this year after my mom’s sudden and unexpected passing in August. We’re doing well. We miss her terribly, because she was such a badass and a blast to be around. But she had a good life that only got better in her final decades. So, when we think about her, we can’t help but smile.
All right, enough of all that…let’s get on to the 10th anniversary story content advisory.
“The Art of the End” deals with the death of a parent, an argument with an estranged parent, and…that’s really about it. Oh, there is one bit of swearing. I always consider removing things when it’s just one of two instances, but it felt like an f-bomb was needed in a scene, so that’s there, too.
Really, though…it’s a nice, quiet story full of reflection. I’ll get back to fantastic and funny stuff soon…
All right, let’s get to work!
#
My father’s body sits in zazen in the next room, but he’s not there.
What remains is a shell, a vessel for a brain that sensed and experienced the world, a mass of fat and protein that allowed him to think and dream, to write novels and find a way to live a life true to himself. Muscles that pulled stones from the earth and hoisted his massive body to the tops of the highest trees just for fun. A heart that cared for all creatures and wrote stories and poetry that moved me to tears.
My father’s body sits in zazen in the next room, but he’s not there.
#
I listen to the wind from my front porch while waiting for the county medical examiner to arrive. It never gets old, sitting in an Adirondack chair my father helped me make when I first arrived after leaving a busier life behind to live in the Maine woods, looking into a forest that seems to never end. I know birds by their calls and can identify most of the trees and plants on our 45-acre plot of land.
My land, now, I suppose.
The stillness is interrupted by the sound of engines chugging along the dirt road leading to the camp. A patrol car leads the way, followed by the medical examiner’s Suburban. I stand up and wave.
Sheriff LaClair steps out of his car and says, “Erik.”
“Hey, Sheriff,” I say. “Lonnie.”
LaClair’s deputy nods and turns to the medical examiner and her assistant.
“You guys know Erik?”
We all shake our heads “No.”
I’m introduced to Stephanie Ambrose and Trevor Graves.
“Good to meet you,” she says. I’m sorry it’s not on better terms.”
“Thank you.”
“I take it he’s in his cabin?” Sheriff LaClair says.
“Nope. The zendō.”
“The what?”
“Zendō. He made a little meditation house years ago.”
We walk along a dirt path that gives way to a stone walkway and the one section of the property that doesn’t look like a lumberjack’s lair. The glass and concrete structure before us looks more like a modern spin on a Frank Lloyd Wright house than a traditional Japanese building, but the lineage of each influence is there. We walk along a reflection pool toward the building where my father died.
“That’s quite a thing right there,” Sheriff LaClair says. “He built it?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I didn’t know he was an architect before coming out here. Brought in all the supplies in that old truck a couple years before I arrived. Trip after trip.”
The sheriff nods and says, “That sounds like something he’d do. I saw him in town about a month or so ago. Told me he wasn’t feeling great.”
“Yeah. He thought it was cancer. Told me months ago that it felt like something was wearing him down from the inside. He didn’t want treatment. He really slowed down this past week, but kept meditating more than usual.”
“You do that, too?” the sheriff says.
“I’m more of a walk in the woods kind of guy, but I sat with him for a bit most days since moving here.”
“Gotcha.”
As we get closer, they see him: my father sitting on a cushion in the center of the three-room structure he built in the woods. In the fading light of the day, he seems to glow in a beam of sunlight that’s found its way through the trees. I slide the floor-to-ceiling glass door open and lead them in.
“That’s how I found him. He was always very still, but I just knew he was gone.”
“It looks like it was a peaceful passing,” Sheriff LaClair says.
“I think so, too.”
I excuse myself to the sitting area outside the zendō. I face away, wanting to remember my father’s final pose and not see him moved. I hear Stephanie and Trevor tell Sheriff LaClair they’ll be right back. I hear them wheeling a gurney along the path. Only when my father’s covered and they wheel him out do I get up and join them.
Trevor opens the back of the Suburban, and Stephanie says, “We’ll contact you after completing our examination.”
She gets my contact information and asks if I need anything.
“No, I’m good,” I say. But I’m not.
“You need anything, just call,” Sheriff LeClair says.
“Thank you.”
I watch them all leave and stand there well after the barred owls call out in the dark.
#
My favorite koan ends like this:
In spring, hundreds of flowers; in autumn, a harvest moon;
In summer, a refreshing breeze; in winter, snow will accompany you.
If useless things do not hang in your mind,
Any season is a good season for you.
Before coming to the woods to live with my father, Zen was—at best—a thing I knew through business books: Zen at Work, The Zen of Selling, The Zen of Business Acquisitions, and The Secrets of the Zen Business Warrior. It was a buzzword that had its time when ripping from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War seemed too sharp and people craved a more relaxed style of leadership where anyone finishing the books could act as though they, too, spent a lifetime sitting zazen, when all they did was read a bestseller.
The morning sky glows pink against washboard clouds that show through the canopy like a blurry kaleidoscope. My bare feet welcome the cold of the stone path my father laid with care. I expect to see him already sitting, even though I know where his body is. I clear my mind of him lying in a cold room, waiting for whatever it is the medical examiner needs to do.
I sit on my cushion and look at my father’s impression in his, as though an invisible version of him is seated in Lotus position before me. I pull my body into the pose with no effort, despite it taking several months of sitting with him for it to no longer be a struggle. I found the practice so difficult when I started, believing a stray thought meant I’d failed. Sitting for hours each day was an affront to everything I believed when I came to the camp. Time was money; life was a bone from which we were meant to savor the marrow.
One morning, after spending two hours thinking about what I was supposed to achieve through meditation instead of meditating, I asked my father if he was enlightened.
“That’s never been the goal,” he said. “I studied architecture in Japan after your mother told me to leave. There, I found this. I was taught to sit with no expectations—and because I did, I’ve had a great life.”
“So…does that mean you’re enlightened or not?”
He stood up and told me to follow him into the woods.
“Look out there,” he said.
I stared into the forest.
“It’s not all the same. Creatures move in different times. Some of these trees were here before Europeans, while many of the plants on the floor rise, live, and die each year…only to return in spring and do it all over again. Most insects live very brief lives, while there are turtles out there that live as long as us. I don’t know why it’s my nature to be so content with stillness, but my way is no better or worse than yours. You just need to find a way that works for you. Do you know what koans are?”
I nodded that I did.
My father smiled and said, “Joshu asked Nansen: ‘What is the path?’ Nansen said: ‘Everyday life is the path.’ Joshu asked: ‘Can it be studied?’ Nansen said: ‘If you try to study, you will be far from it.’ Joshu asked: ‘If I do not study, how can I know it is the path?’ Nansen said: ‘The path does not belong to the perception world, neither does it belong to the nonperception world. Cognition is a delusion, and noncognition is senseless. If you want to reach the true path beyond doubt, place yourself in the same freedom as the sky. You name it neither good nor not-good. At these words, Joshu was enlightened.”
My father smiled until I asked, “What does all that mean?”
“That is for you to discover…”
#
Before coming to the old lumber camp, my guilty pleasure was trashy TV, with a particular fascination for hoarding shows. I felt bad watching in ways, because I know producers and marketing teams knew people with their own issues watched and judged the people on screen as a way to not feel as bad about their shortcomings. But I watched to figure out how someone couldn’t see how much things were piling up, despite it seeming so obvious.
There was never a single answer: some people experienced a loss, and hoarding was their way of holding on. Others started collections that multiplied like bacteria. And some had simply become so exhausted by life that one day they said, “I’m too tired to put that fast food bag in the garbage,” and next came the carcasses of four years of rotisserie chickens.
My father was the opposite: everything had a place. Not that he was a staunch supporter of a minimalist lifestyle, he just never needed all the things most of us end up carrying through life and place to place. Why have 20 coffee mugs when 1 or 2 will do? Shelves full of things gather dust, so why have many shelves at all? Unless you host guests to your home, do you really need so much furniture?
Through friends and coworkers, I’d heard cleaning out a parent’s place following their death was one of the most difficult things they ever did. Where to start with a lifetime of acquired things? How can you throw anything away when everything is full of memories and imbued with a part of the person they lost?
Most of my father’s possessions are things he made. He was not a consumer, unless purchasing something allowed him to build. The only space in the camp that seems full is the woodworking shop, and there’s nothing there to go through. In a decade’s time, my father made me a decent woodworker—so it remains as he left it, a place where I will continue to ply the trade he shared with me.
His bedroom is meticulously appointed like other spaces touched by his hand. I’ve passed by the room, but never been in it. Part of me wants to leave it as it is—a little dimension I can look into as I wander by. Remember the man who slept there. But beyond that doorway likely offers a new glimpse into why he was who he was.
I find nothing that changes me, a reminder that coming to things with expectations often results in disappointment. Much like my father coming to his practice of Zen with a beginner’s mind, and me hoping for answers I only found when I stopped seeking them, there is no grand discovery, no, “This! This is the life-changing thing you hoped to find!”
But I also don’t leave empty-handed.
Tucked away in the back of the top drawer of a dresser he made well before I moved here, I find a three-inch square box. On the lid, my father carved an oak leaf. I lift it off, appreciating the precision it took to both allow it to hold fast, but give way when provoked. Inside is a carved wooden heart the size of a walnut and a slip of paper reading:
Margot,
Only you know why
today, tomorrow, and more
I give you this heart.
It’s time to take a trip.
#
I knock on the door to my mother’s house, and I’m surprised when she answers. She’s always had staff for that. I barely recognize her. My mother was always concerned with holding onto her youth; the woman before me is old. Not in a worn-down-by-the-years old—she’s aged gracefully—but the last time I saw her, she still dyed her hair and never let it touch her shoulders. Now, long white hair reaches her lower back. It gives me hope that maybe she’s changed.
“Erik,” she says. “What do you need?”
“I…”
What a thing to say after not seeing your only child for almost 20 years.
“I don’t need anything, Mother.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I came to tell you something.”
“A call wouldn’t suffice?”
“Can I come in?”
She takes a deep breath before saying, “Sure…”
We walk through a foyer bigger than some apartments, through a dining room that can comfortably seat two dozen people, even though I’d guess it’s never used. Her living room reminds me of a wedding cake with its Neoclassical symmetry and ornate plaster details. She carefully sits on a sofa that might have actually existed in the time of Louis XVI. I sit in one of its two matching chairs.
Dad’s dead,” I say.
“Yes. You’ve known that since you were a child.”
“No. He never shot himself like you told me. I found him.”
I study her face for surprise or remorse.
“And…?”
“I thought you’d like to know.”
“Why? He’s not a part of my life.”
“I don’t know, Mother. Maybe because I thought somewhere deep down you might still have a fucking heart?”
“I don’t know what I’ve done to anger you, but it’s very unbecoming.”
I stand up and look to the front door. I take a step and then turn back toward her. I don’t charge, but I move swiftly enough that she leans into the padding of her expensive couch.
“You know why I’m angry. You lied to me about Dad killing himself! I missed out on 43 years with him. I got four years as a kid that I don’t even remember, and then the last decade. How dare you rob me of that and act like I’m the one with an issue. Not only that, but you hit me the night you called the cops on him! If you have some fucked up reason for all you’ve done, I’m listening.”
She swallows and says, “Well, at least it’s good to know you’re not the timid little boy you once were.”
“How could I not be, Mother? First, you yelled at me if I called you Mom. You yelled at me if I made too much noise. You yelled at me if I was being too quiet and not doing something productive. No matter what I did, you bullied me.”
“There are therapists for this kind of thing, Erik. Let it go.”
This time, I do walk toward the door.
“You’re just like your father,” she shouts. “Running away!”
“There’s a big difference between running away and leaving, Margot. And you would know because you’ve been running from things as long as I can remember.”
I reach into my pocket and pull out the small wooden box. Run my thumb over the carved oak leaf on top before throwing it at my mother as hard as I can. It hits the back of her sofa and bounces to the floor.
“I missed on purpose,” I say, before showing myself out.
Instead of walking to my car, I wander to the side of the house and look through the living room window. My mother stands before her gilded coffee table, holding the box. She runs her thumbs over the carving my father made before I was born—removes the top and pulls out the wooden heart. She raises it to her lips, kisses the sculpture, and weeps.
I don’t know why it means what it does to her, but I know this: some people may never change, but they also never forget.
#
I’ve forgotten how stressful being out in the “normal” world can be. How did I endure hours stuck in traffic each week? At least a couple times each year, I ended up behind a wreck that took all morning to clear. Once: all day! But when it’s part of your everyday life, it’s a necessary inconvenience, a demand of suburbia.
I drive through my hometown, looking for fields that are now housing developments lacking craft or charm. It’s strange how we mourn for the loss of spaces that shaped us, when the houses we lived in were built in rolling fields or small forests I’m sure others once loved. My childhood home could have been a special place for someone who came before me, so why am I so disappointed that my places are gone?
Only now do I realize how crowded and noisy the suburbs are. We don’t build spaces for interactions with others. We drive everywhere because nothing is connected. We ache for our children because they don’t go outside as much as we did, but we’re the people telling them to stay in. We don’t give them sidewalks or bike lanes or other things encouraging them to explore. Why move to spaces strategically built between cities and open lands if you don’t believe they’re safe?
I understood why my father moved away from it all, but now I feel why. My shoulders and neck are stiff after a couple days away from the lumber camp. Several close calls while driving—people paying more attention to their phones or in-dash screens than on the road. In the rental car’s rearview mirror, I see the grill of a massive pickup truck several feet off the bumper and know I’ve made the right choice.
#
I check email before boarding my flight back home. After deleting 17 spam messages, there are 2 I’ve waited for. The first is from the County Medical Examiner’s Office, stating my father was right about what was wrong with him: pancreatic cancer. Stephanie’s email also mentions that his body is now in the possession of the Biondi Funeral Home and Crematorium.
The other email is from Lonardo Biondi, the director of said funeral home. He’d like to meet in person, and I know it’s to sell me on additional services beyond my father’s cremation. I get it, it’s a job like any other, and there are quotas to be met and money to be made. He also includes a template for an obituary: discussing where the deceased was born, what they did for a living, and any significant relationships. Any military service. What they accomplished in life and did for fun. Who they left behind.
I’m somewhere over Ohio when I give it some thought.
How do I sum up the life of a man I’ve only known for a decade? I can cover all the things in the template that applied to my father, but a life is more than a set of talking points. Anything I write will not convey his spirit, all he carried and cherished in his heart. It would be strange to mention his deep voice that echoed in your chest when he spoke. The way his eyes crinkled up at the edges when he smiled. How gentle his massive, calloused hands were.
I look out the window, watching the hills of eastern Ohio pass by 34,000 feet below. When we begin our descent to my connecting flight in Philadelphia, I write the following in the notebook I carry with me:
“Torben Oscar Nilsson placed himself in the same freedom of the sky. He is survived by his son, Erik Viktor Nilsson of Camp Nowhere, Maine. His ashes will be returned to his path in a private ceremony.”
#
When he wasn’t meditating or reading, my father was building. I go to the woodshop and look through his sketchbooks for anything he was planning near his end, but never got around to making. That’s one of the things that amazed me after moving to the woods: even when time is mostly yours, there are still tasks and dreams never explored. I find no designs that seemed to speak to him, and nothing that calls to me. I go to one of his standby books: The Japanese Print, An Interpretation by Frank Lloyd Wright.
None of the art leaps off the page and demands my spin on what my father deemed perfection, but a bit of Wright’s writing about simplifying design stands out: “The process of elimination of the insignificant we find to be their first and most important consideration as artists, after the fundamental mathematics of structure.”
My father was a simple man in the truest spirit of the word. To call one a simple person is not a compliment in our world, but I hope I’m no longer the stressed, supposedly complex person I was over a decade ago. There is beauty and even strength in simplicity, a structure that strips away unnecessary things and allows us to focus on what’s most important.
I find six pieces of oak and spend the day in silence, making a box by hand. I scribe lines for the fingers of the joints that will hold it together. Remove material with a small hand saw and chisels. A fitted lid snug enough to not tumble off if knocked over. No hinge or nails or screws; no intricate carvings based on nature or artwork and designs my father loved. Just a simple box, finished with tung oil, to hold my father’s ashes when they are ready.
#
I wait for a sense of mourning to come, but it never does. I can hear my father in my head, reminding me how it’s best to go into things without prescribed expectations. We see people break down after deaths in movies, know people who carry grief with them decades after a loved one has passed. Why wouldn’t I shut down for some time and think about all I’ve lost?
But I was fortunate to have the time I had with my father. It would be easy to dwell on the decades with him stolen from me by my mother, but that is not the reality I’m dealing with. The time I had with my father was good, and in those years, we discussed so much. Nothing was left unresolved. I like to think, even had he been there my entire life and we butted heads when I was younger, that we’d have still ended where we did: two people who loved each other and accepted what we’d become.
I’ve shed tears for his loss, but I have not wept. I miss him, but I am not wounded by his absence. When I think about him, I don’t hurt; instead, I smile.
Maybe the day will come when I find myself curled up in a ball, grieving his passing, but that is another expectation I feel will never happen.
I loved my father dearly, and as long as I carry him in my heart, he is never gone.
#
Lonardo Biondi offers his condolences and little more when I pick up my father’s ashes from the funeral home. I wait for him to say, “Are you sure you don’t want a service for your father? We have packages for all budgets,” but he lets me leave without another sales pitch.
I take the black plastic box holding my father’s remains to the woodshop and pry the top open with a flathead screwdriver. Inside, a clear plastic bag holding what’s left of my father’s physical body. Such a massive man reduced to so little. I transfer the bag to the box I made and place the lid snug on top.
I started writing a eulogy because it seems like the end of one’s life is a big enough event to memorialize. Perhaps if my father had been closer to more people, I’d have taken Lonardo up on his offer for a funeral service. But it’s just me, and I don’t need anything more than the good memories of him I carry with me. So, the eulogy was tossed into a fire several nights ago. Instead of a grand sendoff, I do something I believe my father would have liked: I take his remains to the zendō and place him on his cushion.
I will sit zazen with him daily until, like him, I exist only in memories.
#
In the months that follow, my mind becomes more clear. I’ll never be as still as my father, but I’ve found my peace. I’ve waited for old urges to rise up: turning the property into a meditation retreat, writing business books capitalizing on a decade of living deep in the woods, seeing how far I can take the little furniture business my father did locally to make ends meet. Things to track on spreadsheets like I once craved. But those compulsions never come.
I suspect they never will.
The seasons turn, and I follow along. The winds of autumn arrive and the sun hangs lower in the sky. Leaves burn red and yellow and orange like fires in the treetops before breaking free and covering the earth in decay. Soon, the first snows will arrive and the world will slumber until spring, when green shoots force their way through soil and branch—and new life begins again.
#
[Quirky music fades in…]
Christopher Gronlund:
Thank you for listening to Not About Lumberjacks.
And thank you for everyone who’s been listening for 10 years! It means a lot to me.
Theme music, as always, is by Ergo Phizmiz. Story music this time is by me, using the Instruo Pocket Scion, with one background track licensed through Epidemic Sound.
Sound effects are made in-house or from Epidemic Sound and freesound.org. Visit nolumberjacks.com for information about the show, the voice talent, and the music. Also, for as little as a dollar a month—or even free—you can support the show at patreon.com/cgronlund.
In December, it’s the annual Christmas episode!
[Quirky music fades out…]
[The sound of an axe chopping.]
Until next time: be mighty, and keep your axes sharp!
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