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.

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.