Stuck!

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You ought to write a book.

If I had a nickel for everyone who told me that, I might have enough to buy a newspaper. But newspapers are online, and I am lazy, so for the last 6 years, I haven't even managed to get a blog post published. 

For 25 years, I wrote Christmas letters, until I realized "my" Christmas letters consisted mostly of stories about other people I loved, and most of those people were all old enough to write their own letters. The paragraph about me started, "Not much has changed this year."

In 2012, a lot changed, but there was no time to write. I was scrambling to pack for a trip around the world, working overtime to make things easier for the temp who would step in, gathering my family for the holidays, getting things in order for my again dad, and dealing with a last-minute cancer scare. I took a few Christmas cards with me and mailed them in Hawaii with the last stamps I had. Other years, I started a letter but never finished. 

I started this blog to keep in touch while I was traveling, and I posted over a hundred entries by email from the ship. That flood stopped abruptly when I got home, and it's been nearly seven years since I posted anything. 

Sometimes, there's nothing to say, and sometimes there's so much I don't know where to begin. I was stuck. Thoroughly stuck. Stuck like the Ever Given. Tugging here, pushing there: but still stuck.  

Twitter cartoon inspired by the Ever Given.

There's a massive back-up of ships waiting at each end of the canal, and another whole bunch detouring around the Cape of Good Hope. I have a massive back-up of half-written posts and whispered ideas. Will the full moon and the rising tide float my little boat, too? Stay tuned.

What Children Need from Dad

My father-in-law, dead now almost 20 years, used to pride himself on being "a good provider." Ironically, this was usually said in a defensive way, as if he suspected that he wasn't. "Whatever else, at least I'm a good provider." By this, he meant that he earned a good income and his family had many nice things. He was a broken man who did not feel love and did not extend it to others. The nice things were a poor substitute.

My own dad was emotionally remote in a different way. Family overwhelmed him, and he spent long hours in the basement or his study, coming out to preside over family dinners and occasionally taking one of us hostage to serve as his helper. He was a brilliant and talented man, but he was also a mystery.

My Dad in 1943 or 1944, working his way through school as a nanny

Dad died six months ago, and I inherited most of his household, including the family photo albums, boxes of ephemera, letters written to my mother during World War II, and a big binder of his published writings from the 1930s onward. If family overwhelmed my dad emotionally, his legacy has equally overwhelmed me. It is almost too much to comprehend.

Almost. He left a treasure trove behind, and I am rediscovering him through it, one scrap at a time. Dad was a writer, and when he turned 70, he put together a huge binder of his published writings, Tappings on the Keys. Someone (he? my mom? someone hired for the task?) carefully typed out every word, a chore that boggles the mind.

Dad started writing for the school paper in junior high and wrote for his high school and college papers. When I was a teen, he had a column in our town's weekly newspaper for a couple of years. He also did free lance writing, and worked in advertising and marketing for several different companies, writing for internal publications.

After the war, he wrote advertising copy for GE at the same time and place that Kurt Vonnegut was more famously employed, the Schenectady plant that served as the inspiration for Vonnegut's 1955 story "Deer in the Works." Dad never met Vonnegut, who worked in public relations.  I used to fantasize that, had he not had so many mouths to feed so quickly, he might have made a living at writing. But his gift was in Op Ed, not in fiction.

Years ago, I saw a bibliography that cited a piece he wrote for Parents' Magazine in 1953, "What Children Need from Dad." It was a shock to come across my dad's name in that context, but when my local library didn't have an archived copy, I didn't look further. So I was glad to find it in the binder.

Many of his essays and editorials are followed by his (then) present-day thoughts, but this piece stands alone. I found it odd, presenting love for a child as a "troublesome" and difficult thing to find time for, a competition for scarce resources. He admonishes fathers to stop making excuses and man up, as painful as that will be.

I'd like to know whether he believed that. He brushed our hair and sang to us and encouraged our creative efforts. Our photo albums record trips and adventures with Dad. Among the things he saved was an early Mother's Day present he helped my older sister and brother make. I want to believe he was aiming for his audience (and for the extra bucks he made writing the piece), setting himself above those "other guys." But he was also a harsh critic of himself, so maybe he was writing out of guilt at having brushed us off once too many times.

This is the first Father's Day I haven't been searching for a card to capture my feelings without drowning them in sentiment. Dad is gone, but in some ways, he is more present than ever.

Unstuck in time

As a youth, I loved Kurt Vonnegut's books. In this later phase, I find myself "unstuck in time," seeing the connections and constellations of the events of my life. When I am with my grandchildren, I see myself as a young mother, and I see my sons both as fathers to my granddaughters and as my own babies.

I point to pictures on my wall.  "That's Daddy, when he was a little boy." It makes no sense:  Daddy is a grown man, over six feet tall, not a baby.  To me, he is a baby, a boy, a man.  I am a girl again, a new mom, a grandmother.  My granddaughter clutches at my breast and shrieks that I can't give her what she wants.  She's angry! I'm just nostalgic for the days when babies fit so perfectly into the curves of my body and nursed themselves to sleep there, when needs were simple and I knew how to fill them.

It's nostalgia!  It isn't supposed to be Truth.  Yes, I was as clueless as any other new mom.  All that falls away with the years. All that remains is the memory of the smell, the touch, the sight of those fat little thighs, and the sweaty heads, and the little fist relaxing on your ample post-partum tummy. Oh, and the post-partum tummy:  I managed to keep that, too.

My Dad had mild to moderate dementia, and he sought refuge in the past. He had lost executive function, that ability to analyze a situation and then take action.  His short-term memory was shot, so he couldn't remember whether he had ordered in a restaurant, but he could describe in great detail the Jewish deli in New York where he first ate a knish, more than 60 years ago. ("Ya never had one before? Well, don't start today!" the guy behind the counter said, which Dad accepted as a challenge.)

The past was colorful and he was the hero.  The present was confusing and painful.  Who wouldn't pick the past?

The past is appealing to those of us without dementia, too.  The older we get, the more we reach back to examine.  How have we changed over time? Remember the day we bought that lamp? Did I ever tell you about when...?

I was talking with my sister today about waving a white handkerchief to signal surrender, and I said, "Remember how Dad always had a handkerchief?" "He should have carried two," she replied. "He was always giving one up to wipe our snotty noses in church."

That's what parents do. They carry a handkerchief not for themselves, but for the runny noses and bleeding knees and teary eyes of their children. They give up their jackets when their children need them, even if their children are 30 and should really know better.  Parents care for their children.

My middle child brought his family home to me for a week last month.  He and his daughter were both sick with colds.  It gives a mama equal pain to hear her child hacking with a cough whether that child is 1 or 33.

I heard my son coughing in the bedroom below me, and I remembered the night when my parents brought me a bowl of ice cream to soothe my throat. (Dairy is possibly not the best home remedy where mucous is involved, but it would have been ungracious to turn it down.)

I read somewhere that kindergarten children don't know what a handkerchief is, because no one carries them anymore.

I do. I collect them, and use them as a decorative window covering.  I have a special set for Christmas. I keep two in the purse I carry to church, one for me and one for a friend.

The day I got married, my dad had a handkerchief ready to catch my tears, a tender moment that brought me to tears this morning.  Lucky for me, he had a handkerchief handy.

From there to here to where

Another of my posts following the death of my dad. It's a different kind of passage, a sail through some rough seas.  I'm trying to recover the person he was to me before his final years as I transverse the passage from child to orphan.  I hope some of these words resonate with fellow travelers on this journey.

I did not intend the visit to be my last. Dad went downhill fast, but I had no indication he would die that day.  My son had given me a report from his visit the day before, and our best guess was a couple of weeks. Speech was difficult for my dad, and I could no longer understand him on the phone.  I knew that the only way to have two-way communication was to do it in person.

I sat with him while he went from responsiveness to a coma over the course of the day. After the first hour or so, he floated in and out of consciousness, eyes staring vacantly, lying perfectly still.  I think his systems were just shutting themselves down, and voluntary movement was gone.  So, mercifully, was his ability to feel pain, since he was unable to swallow even a sip of water.

And so I sat with him, holding his hand, able to stare at him without rudeness.  Pili, his caretaker, told me how much she loved him, even though she'd only worked for him a few days.  He reminded her of her own grandfather, once fiercely independent but now felled by a broken hip.  Helping my father helped soothe her distress at not being able to take her turn by her grandfather's bedside.  I told her what a force of nature Dad was before this final combination of illnesses and old age took him down. We swapped some family stories over the deathbed, two strangers coming to terms with loss and providing an odd comfort to each other. We talked of dying at home, and dying in the hospital, and how to let go.

How to let go of him and how to let him go.  Pili said he had promised not to die on "her watch." She said he knew she was a softie and she worried about him.

The portraits, shot in a hasty photo inventory in 2008.

He lay underneath his portrait and my mother's, the place he had slept all the years of my life.  They joked they had hung the portraits over the bed to settle any questions about whose side of the bed was whose.  They are beautiful pastel portraits of a beautiful couple in their late teens or early twenties. Since I first learned to crawl up onto that bed to bounce, in eight different bedrooms, my parents slept under those portraits.  They'd overseen heart-to-heart conversations, joyful girls-only slumber parties with my mom, the "nest" my daughter made at the foot of Grandma's bed, a few very difficult conversations, a couple of surprise presents, mother-daughter reviews of Mom's jewelry, some memorable breakfasts-in-bed.

And now he was dying in this bed, almost unrecognizable to the youthful self above him. I studied his face, looking at the curves and the angles, the spotted skin stretched tight over his head, the skin loose on his hands from rapid weight loss. I remembered my visiting his father, my grandfather, in his last days, an incomprehensible sight for a five-year-old child. I recalled more vividly being with my father-in-law as he lay dying in a cold emergency room bed, wondering what kind of comfort I could give.

I was not there when he died.  Pili sent me away, saying he would not leave until I left him.  Not on my watch, either, I guess. I did not leave because Pili told me to, but I did leave, and he died shortly after.

In my family, we have always talked about dying, never passing on. We never talked about heaven, and Dad told me after Mom's death that neither of them had faith that heaven existed.  Dad used to say he wanted to be hit by a truck (and sometimes he drove as if he wanted it sooner rather than later...).  He did not fear death, but for a long time he feared dying.  He had pamphlets from the Hemlock Society, yellowed with age, in his "when I die" folder. He feared the loss of control, the loss of choice.

For a long time, he feared losing his independence, losing his intellect.  He posted a DNR in his house, in his car, in the minds of his children. He was terrified of being in a vegetative state, but he was also terrified of being in assisted living. In the end, he was ready to go. He had lost his short-term memory almost entirely and he was easily confused.  He relied on his impressive long-term memory to dazzle and distract, and he managed to fool a lot of people that way.

I don't know how the dying goes, I don't know where the dying go.  In many ways, Dad was lost to me long before he died.  I am doing my best to find him again.

Let me tell you something

My dad thought ahead.  When he bought something big and expensive, he might say, "You kids will fight over this when I'm gone."  (Sometimes, I thought:  what you don't realize is we will fight over who has to take it.)  When Patrick was born, he didn't ooh and aah over his beautiful first grandson.  He started calculating how much of Patrick's life he would likely get to see.

For years, I've known there were envelopes "to be opened after I die," with letters from my dad.  Having spent years carefully prying tape off of Christmas packages to check out the contents beforehand, I found it difficult to wait. What did my letter say?

Dad died December 1.  I was with him as he faded from life, the light going out of his eyes.  He lost his ability to speak or move and drifted along the borderline between sleep and coma. I said goodbye, and I took my letter. Halfway home, I got a call that he was gone.

What did the letter say?

We've had our times, my dad and I.  Mostly good times, but some monumentally bad ones, too.  Dad rarely hesitated to deliver advice, and he wasn't entirely clear on the concept of "opinion," being pretty sure that he was right about all things. He was given to the grand gesture, like pulling the phone out of the wall when I was not quick enough to end a conversation.  (Back in the day, the phone--and there was only one per floor--was hardwired into the wall.  And you probably shared a party line with some cranky old lady.)

He clearly loved me.  Just as clearly, he saw room for improvement.  He was more forthcoming with advice than with love. Stand up straighter, lose some weight, get my hair out of my eyes, tuck in my shirt, get my elbows off the table.  Study harder, revise that college essay, practice the clarinet.  Save more money, hire someone to do that, and for god's sake, don't get married before you graduate from college.

He was a great one for the object lesson, and I was a great one for rebelling against the object lesson.  He favored the surprise attack. It is a kindness to both the living and the dead to leave that area unexplored.

My older sister and brother absorbed a lot of my dad's self-improvement energies, and that led to a lot of fireworks, especially with my brother.  Dad said to me once that, while they had pushed back, I just used humor as a weapon until I got my parents into shape, and then I eased up on them.

And every once in a while, when I really, really needed it, my dad came through for me in an unconditionally supportive way. The letter he left was one of those times.

I wanted to be alone when I read it, but I also wanted to be in a safe place.  I drove to church and read it in the empty sanctuary.  I knew I could draw on a circle of support there.

So what did the letter say?

He wrote about the joy I had brought him, about the love and respect he had for me.  He said he could never repay me for what I had brought to his life. He said he hoped when I looked back at my children, they brought me as much joy as I had brought him.

I burst into tears.

Dad wrote that letter in 1979, 34 years ago, and felt no need to edit it as the years went by.

I did plenty of editing of my own over those years--gaining a couple of kids, losing a husband, dropping out of the professional world, learning to take care of myself, learning to ask for and accept help. Dad had touched the essence of me and of our relationship and written me a letter that crosses the decades to speak in a universal way.

What would you write in your letter? What are the things your family needs to hear from you, or you need to tell them?

My children will surely find mine in snippets on my computer, in version after version, as unfinished as my Christmas letters from 2009 to 2012.

Or maybe they will just know that, yeah, they do bring me as much joy as I brought him.  Yup, they surely do.

The Right Place at the Right Time

My dad died recently, so I've been thinking a lot about love and loss, and especially about my parents.  When my dad was alive, we used to tease him, saying, "THAT'S going into the skit at your funeral!"

I did not attend the memorial service, but if I had, this is what I might have said.

My father was a demanding man, driven to perfection (and generally coming pretty close).  He was hard on himself, and he could be hard on us as well.  He was the first of his generation to be born in the US, and he believed that brains and hard work would guarantee success.  We were born with the brains, and he created incentives to ensure the hard work.  I remember earning stickers for staying dry at night (which perhaps was not as early a memory as I might like to think) and quarters for good grades, an incentive program for his children that mirrored the ones he created for Fortune 500 companies.

I stayed in school for a long time, eventually earning a Ph.D.  As I neared the end of my graduate program, I bogged down, and Dad sent me an inspirational graphic.  He drew a thermometer of the sort that fund-raising campaigns favor, with Ph.D. as the final goal.  Along the way were marked progress points like “Entered Kindergarten” “Moved to Chagrin for seventh grade,” and “accepted to college.”  The thermometer was filled very nearly to the top, a reminder that I had nearly reached my goal. 

I graduated a few months later, and my parents came to my graduation.  A couple of years later, doing some career development exercises, Dad wrote that he considered my earning that Ph.D. as one of the top ten achievements of his life.  He was proud of what I had accomplished, and he also took pride in setting an expectation for success, creating the conditions necessary for achievement, and supporting me psychologically, emotionally, and financially every step of the way.

The last time I talked to my dad, we talked about my son Jefferson’s upcoming graduation from his nurse anesthesia program.  He sighed.  “Boy, I wish I could be there,” and we both knew that he wouldn’t.

My children were lucky to live only an hour from their grandparents throughout their school years, and Grandma Janie and Grandpa Tak attended every concert, school play, and graduation--just as they had attended all of mine.  But Dad was too frail to make this trip. He died a week after that conversation.

Today is Jefferson’s graduation.  He’s graduating from the #1 nurse anesthesia program in the country. It’s been a long slog:  six years and his second master’s degree in nursing.  Along the way, I’ve had the opportunity to offer the same kind of support to him that my dad offered to me.  Today, his success is his own, but I share in the joy it brings.

Team Jefferson, with scrub caps in VCU black and gold

Addie is not too sure about this.

Horribly out-of-focus pic of Jeff's newest scrub cap.  

When my first child was born, Dad said to me, “If I am lucky, I will live to see this child graduate from high school.”  Patrick is 35 now, and my parents attended his graduations from high school, undergraduate school, and his Ph.D. program. He would have enjoyed Jefferson’s graduation, and I know he would not have wanted me to miss it.

Expectations

Oh, life is full of disappointments, anywhere you care to look for them.  The greater the expectation, the more likely the disappointment to follow.  Still, I was surprised to see this warning in my local K-Mart.

I've decided not to pursue it further:  I have no need to seek additional disappointments in my life.  I'll never know why this particular magazine moved an anonymous shopper to post a sad little warning.

I am reminded of the six-word Hemingway novel--

For sale:  baby shoes, never worn.

I find this real-life six-word story equally compelling.  Is this a person disappointed in love, or perhaps one ruing the thousands spent on a less than perfect day?  Maybe a person of limited means frustrated by an inability to fund a dream wedding?  So many ways to disappoint.  I am happier with the mystery.

My own baby granddaughter wears no shoes.  Her fat little feet don't hold her up yet, although they will soon.  She hasn't learned to plant them flat and wide.  She does a hundred squats a day, hauling herself up on with whatever she can find, and plopping down again on her diaper-padded bottom.  She learned to climb up one stair this weekend, and found it both surprising and terrifying.  It's only one step, but there she was, out on a ledge, not knowing what to do next.

I feel like that sometimes, too.