VirusHead

My father died four years ago today. I’ve been thinking of him a lot, remembering that terrible last week. He had been in and out of the hospital, and we had just finally been able to place him at a local nursing home facility. He was going blind, and he couldn’t keep up the situation at the independent living center anymore – not even with the help of my brother and myself.

His dream had been to retire to the heart of the Smokey Mountains, and he moved there from Massachusetts some years before. He had managed to eke out a very minimal living there selling “computerized” photos on mugs and tee-shirts. It was cold in the winter, though, and healthcare facilities that he could use weren’t nearby. He needed supplemental support. His longtime companion Lorraine finally moved back north to live with her family because of her own health issues. Living alone in that environment wasn’t a good choice for him. Harrah’s Casino moved in and changed the dynamic, and it was harder and harder for him to survive. He moved to Atlanta about a year before his death.

I am grateful for that last year, although I also have some regrets. He was always good to our son Ben, and that covered a lot of ground with me. Somewhere I have a video of him pulling Ben in the red wagon – patiently, over and over, circling the front yard. We spent some uncomplicated time together, and that was a priceless gift. We didn’t really work through any issues or anything like that, but somehow just spending some time together made many of them somewhat irrelevant.

He had been on dialysis for a few months. Initially, he was opposed to it. He was more than ready to go and his images of what it entailed were a bit outdated. We talked about it, and he finally agreed to try it – but on the condition that he was absolutely free to stop anytime he wanted. I think it was the only time we ever came to an agreement about something (smile).

He had multiple heath issues by then. He’d been in critical – and a whole team of doctors were needed even to delve into the mysteries of all that was going on in his body. Still, he lived longer than anyone thought he would. When his doctor would say, “Now, be careful of what you eat or you could have a heart attack” his response was always something like, “Promises, promises…”. That was typical of his dry (and sometimes cruel) sense of humor.

In the nursing home, the telephone hasn’t yet been connected. I visited him there and found that his bed didn’t go up and down properly. I asked them please to replace it, because he needed to be able to control that after the dialysis. I don’t know whether they did, and I suspect not – but it can’t be helped now.

Then, I got that deadly flu. I was at death’s door myself – it certainly felt like it. I was out for the count. Even if I could have stirred myself, it wasn’t a thing that one would bring through the doors of a nursing home. I had been planning to bring Dad come to the house for Christmas, but I couldn’t even reach him to let him know that it wouldn’t work. The people at the desk wouldn’t even pass on a message. It filled me with rage. I regret not asking a friend to go over and tell him. I should have done that, but I didn’t think of it.

I talked to him, finally, on the 27th. His phone was finally connected and he called me. He could tell by my voice that I was really sick. I told him that I was so sorry to leave him all alone on Christmas with no word. He just said, “well, that explains it then.” We talked for a few minutes, and then he told me that he loved me. I still smile thinking about it. It’s not something he said easily or often.

That night, he was found unresponsive in his room, and rushed to a hospital about two miles from my house. My brother got the call. He had just returned to town and was exhausted. He says he didn’t call me because I was too sick to have gone to say goodbye. Reportedly, my dad’s last words were, “What’s a guy gotta do to get a cigarette around here?” (He hadn’t smoked cigarettes in some years, but he liked a cigar.)

The next day, my brother Michael showed up at the house dressed all in black. He didn’t have to say anything. My defenses were immediately up and running. I vaguely remember being flippant. I’m a bit like my dad that way; when things are overwhelming I tend to become inauthentic. I shut off. I become darkly humorous. I don’t really connect to the people around me. It’s something I’m working on, but for me it is so hard to be in the moment with another person when things are difficult.

Daddy wasn’t someone who showed his emotions easily, or dealt with them well. For much of my life I thought that he didn’t have them, but now I think his emotional life was so overwhelming to him that he just buckled it down. He was a bit of a control freak. I never thought I measured up to his standards (whatever they were). I wasn’t the perfect child he had tried to raise as a Jehovah’s Witness. That I was female was always a problem, too; he didn’t really like or understand women.

I wish that I had finished the Ph.D. before he died. I was almost there.

Our relationship was complex, ambivalent, frustrating, confusing. We could never get the right closeness, the feeling of authenticity. Everything always seemed awkward. Just awkward. Part of the problem in our relationship was mine. I didn’t really understand until recently the extent to which I had kept him at arm’s length, too. He always remained the archetypal father to me. I never really had much insight into him as a person.

“Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” Renee Stahl’s version of the Elton John Song

I am so grateful to his family and some of his friends for sharing some of their experiences, insights and thoughts with me. Through them, I found out that he actually was proud of me and bragged about me all the time. His friends knew everything I was up to – they had the details.

I think of my Dad, ultimately, as a tragic figure. He had his faults and they helped to destroy the glimmering possibilities of who he might have been. What he was given and what he chose made his life a hard one.

I have some good memories, even so, to call upon. I miss him terribly.

I regret my own lack of insight, compassion, and maturity in communicating with him. I hope that he found the answers he was looking for. I hope that now he understands. I hope that some part of who he might have been is clearer now.

Today, I honor my father, and I let go – finally – of all the issues and negativity. I light a candle in his name, and I send prayers to cosmic benevolence and love to care for his spirit. God and Goddess, bless his soul.

Maybe there is an atom or two floating in the back yard…

I call upon the someone that he was and the someone that he could have been. That energy and those bits live on through his children and grandchildren – sending love back into the webs of being and non-being. He lives on through us, and we accept him as part of who we are. I miss you Daddy, and I love you always.

“Hushabye Mountain,” Stacey Kent’s version

Roy Walter N. Jr

Nov 5, 1935 – Dec 28, 2003

Miss you, Daddy.

Mourning is not forgetting.
It is an undoing.
Every minute tie has to be untied
and something permanent and valuable
recovered and assimilated from the dust.
- Margery Allingham

Saturday Slant (ok, yeah, a little late)

Defining Childhood Event
If asked to pick just one, what event of your childhood most shaped the person you are now? We are all the sum of our laughter and tears. As children, events occur in and around our lives that shape our world forever more. Which one event—for better or for worse—might you say shaped you? Why was it significant? How do you feel about it? How does the effect of that event reach across the years to influence your adult life now?

There are a dozen or so such events, having to do with being involved with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, with changes in socio-economic class and with important support and influences. If I were to choose the event that most shaped the person I am now, I would be hard-pressed to choose. I don’t think I can do it, really.

I’ll pick one that is in the top five – my parents’ divorce. It isn’t the most unusual or even perhaps the most interesting, but everyone needs to keep a few secrets.

My parents divorced when I was 9. I remember that my parents actually told me that they were getting a divorce, but I didn’t know what a divorce was – I had some idea that it was something like a business trip. One day, my father (who I feared and adored) was just gone – along with a lot of our stuff. For some time, I thought he was coming back. After a while, we started to see him on either Saturdays or Sundays.

We moved into a new apartment and I went to a new school. In place of a wonderful yard with lilac bushes and a big swing on a huge crabapple tree and wild grapes and the freedom to range around in the neighborhood, I looked out on a backyard that was simply a sandpit full of dog excrement. The neighbors were.. um.. less friendly. My imaginary world turned away from the extensive fantasies I had projected onto the outside world – no more worlds of the faery and the magical. I started to play the piano and to dance and to read, spending almost all of my time indoors. The public library was a block away, and I spent a lot of time there as well. My mother was working all of the time and we became latchkey kids. I took over responsibility for my two younger brothers – whether to the good or not they would have to say. Truth tell, I was a little bossy, when I paid attention to them at all. At 9 and 10 and 11 – I wasn’t ready for a parental role – I did my best.

My relationship with my father was troubled, partly because of his own problems and vulnerabilities that I didn’t grasp at all. Like many children, I felt that if I had been better he would still be living with us. This feeling was compounded by the complications of being a Jehovah’s Witness – a matter too convoluted to get into here, but suffice to say that the feeling of not being good enough was only amplified. My image of God became a lot like my “father” of the imagination (one more reason that I prefer other metaphors for God than that of the father). For many years, I had a very twisted idea of what had actually happened between my mom and my dad, and even now, even now, I’m not sure that it’s all settled inside me. The one thing that has become clear is that blame is pointless and that it takes two to make or break a relationship. My parents subsequently remarried, leaving me with steps (and later ex-steps, since they both eventually divorced their second spouses as well) that could be the topic of many more strange and awful posts of the future – unlikely that I will write about them, actually.

Between the divorce and my parents’ other issues, I began to feel that no matter how good I was or how smart I was or how well I did anything, that I would never be good enough – not good enough for anyone to truly care about me or love me, not good enough for God, not good enough for myself. I became at once tremendously insecure and extremely critical of others, holding them up as well to the impossible standards that I had internalized.

My orientation is still critical, and one of the things I’m always working on is to become more patient, welcoming, compassionate and forgiving of myself and others. That I am intelligent only makes this more difficult because I more easily slip into a perspective in which I feel I’m surrounded by idiots. Then I have to remember that I’m an idiot too and that there are many kinds of intelligence. To the extent that I accept myself I am able to accept others. It is surprising how long it took for me to reach what seems like a simple piece of wisdom.

My concern with contextual ethics – that all sides of a situation be voiced, and as many perspectives as possible explored before making judgment – stems from this stormy time. My lifelong insecurity and the nervous laughter that still infects me from time to time also dates from this period. I am thankful that I have finally understood some of the dynamics, but I also have many regrets, including the gap that was never entirely healed between my father and myself. He died in December 2003 and although I sought his love and acceptance all my life, I never really acknowledged the ways in which I continued to keep him distant until he was gone.

The divorce changed everything, everything. I think it has a lot to do with why I was a “serial monogamist” for so long, and with why I was in my 30’s before I was able to have a healthy loving relationship in which I felt confident and secure. My terror of abandonment, my feeling of being unlovable and my inability to allow love had complicated things for a long time.

I understand that some marriages are very destructive, but I also understand how profoundly divorce affects kids. I also understand how difficult it is to be all alone in raising a child or children – this very difficulty may well have influenced my mother’s choice for our stepfather.

Now, a mom myself, I look at our son and I can finally understand how wrong I was about myself when I was young. Ben has taught me more than any study or introspection or analysis.

In my imagination, I travel back to that little girl, hug her tight, and tell her it is going to be all right… and it is.