Legacy of Words 6 comments

By Brian Volck

My father, Art Volck, died three years ago this July. His death was not unexpected – he was 91 years old—though the timing surprised us. He died just before I began my low residency MFA program, so my father’s death and my attempts to become a better writer are linked in my memory.

Art Volck, after all, loved words. He was a man of words, a man of his word, a man of the Word. He savored words, loved the way they danced on the page. He rolled them over his tongue like a sommelier, tossed them across a room to see how they bounced. I remember him, in his eighties, quoting Homer, from memory and in Greek, to my children’s baby-sitter; part of a conversation on how sense can be echoed in sound.

Words set to music, the full concert of sound and sense, graced his days. He and my mother met in the choir of the church my family now attends. Singing sustained and enriched their long marriage. He took care in his music, as he took care in his words, knowing how such mysteries, used unwisely, wound those we love.

He loved the word of God and studied it often, as his bedside Bible—with its penciled annotations, post-it notes and inserts—silently testified. Scripture’s words formed the architecture of his prayer. He understood the gospel, like Torah, must be heard, proclaimed in liturgy and through the shape of lives lived together.

He was a doer of the word, not just a hearer. He told me of mornings during the Depression, riding the streetcar downtown to high school, catching a glimpse of his own father, up before dawn, walking door to door searching for day labor. On weekends, the two of them walked together, selling vegetables from a cart. I believe that’s where he learned to give so freely of himself, serving in soup kitchens, teaching night classes, fostering a love of learning.

Strangers tell me they learned public speaking from my father. They remember him fondly, but with a respect tinged, perhaps, with fear. He wanted his students to serve words well, to love every vowel, to make each consonant count. Listening to Congresswoman Barbara Jordan’s keynote address at the 1976 Democratic Convention, he shouted, “You can hear the “t” in the middle of “department!” That’s how I want them to speak!” Though his politics tacked rightward of mine, he often recalled her diction with admiration and his response with a chuckle.

Art loved words that made people laugh. While my mother always had a joke to share, my father preferred witty asides. At the end of my mother’s carefully scripted funeral mass—jokes included—the organist began the recessional hymn, “How Great Thou Art.” My father smiled, turned to me and said with a wink, “She’s singing that one to me!”

When, a few years before he died, he fell and shattered his hip, medicine’s vast power threatened to steal those wits away. Anesthesia from his operation left him confused, disoriented. We, his children, watched what we believed was his end. He proved us wrong. Some days later, his mind clearing at last, I entered his room to find him in a hospital gown, speaking to my mother, their wheelchairs pulled close, hands entwined. He reluctantly broke his gaze from her and, catching the surprise in my eye, said, “You’re wondering if I know you.” Before I could answer, he smiled and added, “Just like Odysseus with his father.” Surely, he knew, a man joking about the last book of the Odyssey had his wits demonstrably about him.

The evening he died, I stood at his bedside and we talked. He’d been feeling ill, a bad cough growing worse. He asked me to recite the Lord’s Prayer, his failing voice sometimes joining mine. Then I read him the twenty-third psalm, his favorite. As far as I know, those were the last words anyone read to my father. Immediately afterward, he told me he was tired, and needed to sleep. I said goodbye. Two hours later, he was gone.

At the close of his funeral mass, he left the house of the church as he once entered it: draped in white and an infant—Latin for “unable to speak.” Just so, Christ himself once entered the creation he loves, the Word unable to speak. I no longer speak to my father as I once did, and must now find subtler, more intimate means. He’s left us—left me—as I always knew he would, through that common door, to enter more fully the one Word he most loved.