FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
NEW YORK – By David Frumformer speechwriter for George W. Bush and magazine columnist Atlanticyou have also read the opinions in Italian in our newspaper: my colleagues and I interviewed him in the past for the Corriere della Sera.
Now, in the most monstrous circumstances a parent could imagineFrum wrote a article full of pain but also of graceon the loss of his daughter Miranda and about the wonderful things she left him, including her last gift, the ungovernable spaniel Ringo.
Miranda was survived a brain tumor, but was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment at three in the morning, after a series of flus that had overwhelmed his weak immune system.
«And I think: in her 32 years of life, Miranda has given me many gifts – writes her father -. It gave me joy and pride, and the wisdom you can only learn when you love another human being more than yourself. In the end, she left me one last gift, the most immediately needed of all. She left me the tools to atone for all those sins of omission and commission that crowd my mind at three in the morning. Ringo left me».
Ringo is a spaniel, but not a cinnamon and white Blenheim spaniel, the obedient and relaxed ones often portrayed in aristocratic paintings, that is, the dog that David Frum and his wife Danielle had thought of buying for their daughter. Ringo has «the color of a cup of espresso» and the character of a Rottweiler in miniature.
They bought it when Miranda, a model who had worked in Milan and Tokyo, returned to the United States after four years spent in Israel, with a broken heart for a relationship that ended badly. He moved to Los Angeles because the landscape reminded her of Israel, even though her Israeli friends told her it was too fake a place. “Better false and kind than authentic and rude,” she said. But the superficiality and the distances to travel made her feel isolated, until Ringo arrived.
The dog was totally disrespectful and intractable than anyone else, he barked at birds in the countryside destroying everything in his path (including doors), but he let Miranda do everything – says his father – including being dressed as a hot dog for Halloween or as an elf at Christmas (he had taught him to pose for photos, bowing his head slightly). She held him tightly in a sort of imprisoning embrace: the dog’s little head gave way, his eyes closed, he fell asleep snoring cheek to cheek with her.
When Miranda was hospitalized, Ringo understood that something was unusual: “He reinvented himself as a completely different animal,” who accompanied his owner to the hospital during every terrifying minute and remained calm beside her. When Miranda’s operation seemed to have gone well, after the Covid year of living at her parents’ house in Washington with her brother and sister, and after she moved to New York, the Frums’ life seemed to return to normal.
The day after Valentine’s Day this year, her mother Danielle called Miranda on the phone to tell her a surprise: she had found it a way to bring Ringo to London by overcoming the quarantine problem for animals, something her daughter really wanted. But Miranda didn’t answernot even to text messages. On the morning of February 16th she was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, with Ringo lying next to her.
«For me the thought of my own death has never been a disturbing topic – the father writes -. We live, we love, we leave the scene to our children. I hoped that when that time came, I would have a chance to say goodbye. If that wish had been fulfilled, I would have been totally satisfied riding that train to my destination. It had never occurred to me that my children might get on the train before meleaving while we parents remain at the station in tears.”
The nights, writes Frum, are the worst time of the day: the mind is crowded with thoughts about the signals he could have picked up, about every pleasure denied, about every wrong or impatient word to his daughter. «Like seasickness, the pain ebbs and rises. There are intervals of relative calm, punctuated by spasms of overwhelming pain.” In those moments David Frum gets up so as not to wake his wife who is suffering from his pain, goes to Miranda’s room where Ringo jumps on his feet like he did with Miranda, the last time, when they took her body by plane for burial in the countryside.
At the beginning, after the disappearance of the mistress, Ringo didn’t want to be picked up anymore. Frum absolutely did not dare to do so. But then he remembered something his sister had taught him when Miranda was an uneasy teenager. “Sometimes the kid who doesn’t seem to want to be hugged is the one who needs it the most”. So David imprisons the wild Ringo in his arms who initially resisted a couple of times, then accepted him, and now seeks that embrace.
