I'm an unabashed fan of the Rocky movies.* I always have been. In fact, one of my go-to cocktail party stories the last few years is the true story of how I was cast as an extra in the last Rocky film, and missed out on the opportunity because I didn't lie to my then-boss. In that movie, Rocky gets back into boxing because of what he describes as some "stuff in the basement." Enduring grief from a life event that he hasn't finished processing or getting out of his system. I can relate.
Most of the time, my dad's absence is a nagging fact I simply live with. I know he's gone, but as I move through each day, meeting my various obligations and challenges, it's not something that slows me down. But every so often I get the feeling that I have my own stuff in the basement. This week it all came roaring back. Twice.
Friday night I had some too rare one-on-one time with my kindergartner, our middle child. We went to the movies and had a great time. We were laughing all the way home in the car until out of nowhere he told me about a dream he had had a few times, where my dad is talking to him, but then he disappears and won't come back no matter how much my son asks him to. He told me he cries in the dream. In seconds he was crying hard.
Every parent sees their kids cry all the time in the early years. It's a routine event. But seeing your child cry from real, unsolvable grief is totally different, and it hit me viscerally. I tried to take his pain away, to comfort him any way I could think of, but he was really too sad to reach, and naturally his grief brought up my own feelings of loss that had long been sitting in the basement. The hardest part was knowing that the best I'd be able to do would be to help my son deal with the grief, because there would be no way to remove its cause.
As part of being Grandma, my mom has a second role for my kids as their connection to my dad. Every once in a while when my older two, who actually knew him, feel sad about his absence, talking to her has made them feel better. Thankfully that worked late last Friday, too. But before we got on the phone, I let slip a secret that I hoped would calm things down, and instead brought us all a second bout of sadness a couple of nights later.
I told my son about a special story book my dad recorded his voice over about a month before he died. By that time the writing was on the wall and my wife wanted my daughter, who at the time was only ten weeks old, to have some lasting piece of my dad. She knew the two might meet only once, and she had the foresight and the heart to buy the recordable book and ask him to read it, so my daughter would at least have that. Recording that book with my dad as he lay in bed wearing an oxygen tube in his nose, less than two weeks before the shit completely hit the fan, was a gut-wrenching experience. It was clear to us both that he wasn't doing it just because we lived in different states, and we wanted our baby to have his voice between visits.
When we got back from that visit I stashed the recorded book in a hiding place, and for the next two and a half years I felt like a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story. I was always painfully aware of where the book was. I could sense the damn thing when I got near it. Once when I was alone in my house I allowed myself to take it out and listen. Mistake. After a few minutes it was hidden again. That was at least a year ago. One thing my middle guy has in reserve is enough perseverance to nearly always get what he's after. I hoped he would forget about the book, but once he knew about it, he HAD to hear it. By Monday night I caved.
I tried to explain to the princess what she was about to hear, but being two and a half, she didn't process it, and continued happily playing. I tried harder to prepare my boys for the feeling of hearing Papa's voice again. I tried hardest to steel myself, because though I know it's OK to cry in front of them (according to one grief counselor anyway), it would be really unsettling for them to see me in that state. I didn't want to upset them more than necessary. It went about as well as I thought it would. Within a couple of pages we were all in tears, and only Mr. Middle wanted to go on, which I allowed. It was not only tough hearing his voice, but it was tough hearing just how sick he really was by then. His voice is weak and his breathing is labored. It is also clear how unbearably sad he was as he spoke to his only granddaughter - a precious baby whom he knew he wouldn't see grow up. It also conjured for me a flashback to that room, that visit, which was not my last time with my dad, but was the last time I'd see him in his own home, under his own power.
The book is safely put away in a new hiding place for a while. When my daughter is old enough to understand but still young enough to appreciate having a story read to her, I intend to try again. But for the moment, it is still too hard to listen to it. Though I can't rule out one of her brothers asking for the book again and maybe again after that. I would let him, but it would be difficult. When he gets thinking about it, the poor boy really misses his Papa.
The farther into the past my dad's death, and particularly his end-stage illness, recedes, the more I come to understand that grief of this magnitude ebbs and flows. Sometimes when I haven't felt it for a while, I wonder if I am an insensitive robot who can't love people. Then I tell myself I'm growing past a traumatic experience, and nobody could bear a constantly high level of grief. The past few days showed me I'm not a robot, I'm just grieving at my own pace. And so are my children.
To bring this back to Rocky, it turns out that Bill Conti, the composer of the unforgettable "Gonna Fly Now" was a high school classmate of my dad's. I don't know if he knew this, and we never once talked about it, but it's true. If you stuck with me through this long post, here is a nice video clip I hope you like.
*Except for Rocky V, which never happened.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
A Dad in Full
When my dad died two years ago (two years ago!) one of the things that gave me solace was that my sister and I were fully formed by the end of his life. Families, careers, communities, plans. We were established. By living to see his children into their 30s and with families of our own, my dad had in some sense "made it." He left behind five grandchildren, and it seems likely that that's how many there will be. So he saw an accurate glimpse of the future of his family.
Of course, that's complete crap, and lately I see that we're all growing and changing in ways I hadn't anticipated. There are whole lifetimes unfolding in which my dad would have been a major player had things been different. But it wasn't until the past few weeks that the fallacy of his seeing something to completion really dawned on me. I realized recently that I've entered some new phase of fatherhood- and adulthood- and I am only just figuring out what's happening and where we go from here.
My children are still quite young at two, five, and eight. Parenting the younger two consists mostly of doing the same things my wife and I have been doing ever since we became parents, but the oldest one is growing into a new phase of life. He is finishing second grade next week, which I realize still makes him closer to babyhood than adolescence, but he is old enough to have had some real life experiences and lessons now. Old enough to have felt real disappointment and real triumph. Old enough to dream about his future beyond the standard firefighter or baseball player dreams. He has what count now as "old friends." He has in some ways become a member of our tight-knit community independent of his family. His security still derives from Mom and Dad (he dropped the Y months ago), but he also has his own identity.
As he changes, what he needs from us is changing, and we're following him into a new and bigger universe of people and possibilities. In time the same thing will happen with the younger kids, too.
I now know that I was not fully formed when I lost my dad, I was just really steeped in a particular phase of life and had yet to move into the next one. In fact, ten or fifteen years from now I also won't be fully formed. There is more to figure out, more to accomplish, and certainly more my kids will need me to be.
Even at the end of his life, my dad also wasn't finished growing as a person. Perhaps nobody ever truly is. And now that I see how much more is ahead of me, I sure would have wanted to benefit from the wisdom of his experience. It isn't just that I miss him, it's that sometimes even a grown man with a family, career, community, and plans, could use some advice or encouragement from his old man. On Fathers Day this Sunday, love your dad and thank him, but also love your kids and thank them for needing you to evolve. And never stop evolving.
Of course, that's complete crap, and lately I see that we're all growing and changing in ways I hadn't anticipated. There are whole lifetimes unfolding in which my dad would have been a major player had things been different. But it wasn't until the past few weeks that the fallacy of his seeing something to completion really dawned on me. I realized recently that I've entered some new phase of fatherhood- and adulthood- and I am only just figuring out what's happening and where we go from here.
My children are still quite young at two, five, and eight. Parenting the younger two consists mostly of doing the same things my wife and I have been doing ever since we became parents, but the oldest one is growing into a new phase of life. He is finishing second grade next week, which I realize still makes him closer to babyhood than adolescence, but he is old enough to have had some real life experiences and lessons now. Old enough to have felt real disappointment and real triumph. Old enough to dream about his future beyond the standard firefighter or baseball player dreams. He has what count now as "old friends." He has in some ways become a member of our tight-knit community independent of his family. His security still derives from Mom and Dad (he dropped the Y months ago), but he also has his own identity.
As he changes, what he needs from us is changing, and we're following him into a new and bigger universe of people and possibilities. In time the same thing will happen with the younger kids, too.
I now know that I was not fully formed when I lost my dad, I was just really steeped in a particular phase of life and had yet to move into the next one. In fact, ten or fifteen years from now I also won't be fully formed. There is more to figure out, more to accomplish, and certainly more my kids will need me to be.
Even at the end of his life, my dad also wasn't finished growing as a person. Perhaps nobody ever truly is. And now that I see how much more is ahead of me, I sure would have wanted to benefit from the wisdom of his experience. It isn't just that I miss him, it's that sometimes even a grown man with a family, career, community, and plans, could use some advice or encouragement from his old man. On Fathers Day this Sunday, love your dad and thank him, but also love your kids and thank them for needing you to evolve. And never stop evolving.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Parts
The last week of his life, I spent just about every minute at my dad's side. I'm still struggling to process the rapidity of the decline. We're talking barely more than a week. Much of the time, especially when we were alone, I stared at his face, his hands, his shoulders, his feet. I was trying to keep what I could forever, knowing that these features would soon be gone from my sight. His essential personhood was literally draining away, and I needed to be with as much of my dad as was still available to me, knowing I would have to make it last the rest of my own life.
I remember mentioning this to someone - my wife maybe, a friend maybe, I'm not sure anymore - and he or she asked why I would want to devote my energy to remembering the last days, of all things. I couldn't put it together at the time, but it makes sense now. I wasn't concentrating on remembering those last days. I was taking what I had left and using it to try and gather in all the good memories and good feelings from all the time long past. Time that now felt squandered, because it had become extremely limited. I didn't see how withered and pale his features had become. To me, they represented what he had been in his prime.
Years ago I had a temp at my office who was studying to go into a real estate career. His fascination was with its finite supply. Never mind that at the time there were huge piles of cash in real estate. He told me again and again that the thing that interested him in real estate was that, "They aren't making any more of it." I think that's debatable, but it helps explain why it was so important to me that last week to take in every contour of what my dad looked like.
Of course, in terms of genetics, they did make more of my dad. They made me. We all get older and examine our behavior, and many of us recoil in mock-terror when we see that we're acting like our parents once did. Some of us see their faces in the mirror. Whole careers in entertainment have been built on this. Myself, I see little reminders all over the place. My hands are my dad's. My knees. My unfortunate belly. The tone of my voice sometimes. My habits, good and bad. My inclinations and attitudes, again, the good and the bad. A lot of small things, too.
I wish I believed in some form of afterlife, but I really don't. I sincerely crave the comfort so many people get from trusting that we'll all be together again somewhere, somehow. I'm just not wired for that kind of faith. But absent the hope of spending time with my dad again - a hope I assume I would have to nurture for decades - I can take a little comfort in feeling like he is with me all the time. He's baked right in. As he went through his sixties, naturally he started looking much more like my grandpa. As I make my way through my thirties, I am definitely looking more like my dad when he was my age. George Clooney and Brad Pitt are probably reading this and shitting themselves.
I remember mentioning this to someone - my wife maybe, a friend maybe, I'm not sure anymore - and he or she asked why I would want to devote my energy to remembering the last days, of all things. I couldn't put it together at the time, but it makes sense now. I wasn't concentrating on remembering those last days. I was taking what I had left and using it to try and gather in all the good memories and good feelings from all the time long past. Time that now felt squandered, because it had become extremely limited. I didn't see how withered and pale his features had become. To me, they represented what he had been in his prime.
Years ago I had a temp at my office who was studying to go into a real estate career. His fascination was with its finite supply. Never mind that at the time there were huge piles of cash in real estate. He told me again and again that the thing that interested him in real estate was that, "They aren't making any more of it." I think that's debatable, but it helps explain why it was so important to me that last week to take in every contour of what my dad looked like.
Of course, in terms of genetics, they did make more of my dad. They made me. We all get older and examine our behavior, and many of us recoil in mock-terror when we see that we're acting like our parents once did. Some of us see their faces in the mirror. Whole careers in entertainment have been built on this. Myself, I see little reminders all over the place. My hands are my dad's. My knees. My unfortunate belly. The tone of my voice sometimes. My habits, good and bad. My inclinations and attitudes, again, the good and the bad. A lot of small things, too.
I wish I believed in some form of afterlife, but I really don't. I sincerely crave the comfort so many people get from trusting that we'll all be together again somewhere, somehow. I'm just not wired for that kind of faith. But absent the hope of spending time with my dad again - a hope I assume I would have to nurture for decades - I can take a little comfort in feeling like he is with me all the time. He's baked right in. As he went through his sixties, naturally he started looking much more like my grandpa. As I make my way through my thirties, I am definitely looking more like my dad when he was my age. George Clooney and Brad Pitt are probably reading this and shitting themselves.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Unfinished Business
In the scheme of things, this bit of unfinished business is more like an itch that was never satisfactorily scratched. We all leave much bigger things undone, but this frustration is nonetheless quite real.
Older readers will remember that magical time before video on-demand, Netflix, and even DVDs, when VCRs were first becoming available. My parents, I'm sure driven my my dad being ever the early adapter in all things technology, brought home our first VCR in the late 1970s. My mom told me that a single recordable blank VHS tape cost about $30 at the time. Think about that. And of course, Blockbuster didn't exist yet.
My parents went out one night and left the new machine (a version of which we've seen at the Smithsonian, by the way) recording an old Frank Sinatra movie called The Man With the Golden Arm, not to be confused with a similarly titled James Bond movie. When they went to watch it, the ending had been cut off for some reason. For a lot of my childhood, the elusive ending of this movie was a sort of cultural holy grail for my parents. Silly, yes, and they acknowledged as much. But it was a tiny enduring frustration that they never knew how it ended.
In the last few weeks of my dad's life, I was both grasping for anything at all that might give him more time, and I was trying to help make what I knew must be his last weeks and days better somehow for him and for myself. One of my favorite things about living in this time is the on-demand nature of just about everything. I am old enough to remember the small thrill of catching a favorite movie on TV, when that was my only shot at seeing it, or lying in wait with my tape recorder for a particular song to be played on the radio. Now we can pull most anything seemingly out of thin air. So in those last weeks I tried to order my dad a DVD of The Man With the Golden Arm. And when I told my wife about this ultimately futile effort to close out a tiny thing for my dad, she reminded me that I actually bought my parents the DVD years before. Wait for it...
The version I got them had an alternate ending! Crap-o-rama.
Older readers will remember that magical time before video on-demand, Netflix, and even DVDs, when VCRs were first becoming available. My parents, I'm sure driven my my dad being ever the early adapter in all things technology, brought home our first VCR in the late 1970s. My mom told me that a single recordable blank VHS tape cost about $30 at the time. Think about that. And of course, Blockbuster didn't exist yet.
My parents went out one night and left the new machine (a version of which we've seen at the Smithsonian, by the way) recording an old Frank Sinatra movie called The Man With the Golden Arm, not to be confused with a similarly titled James Bond movie. When they went to watch it, the ending had been cut off for some reason. For a lot of my childhood, the elusive ending of this movie was a sort of cultural holy grail for my parents. Silly, yes, and they acknowledged as much. But it was a tiny enduring frustration that they never knew how it ended.
In the last few weeks of my dad's life, I was both grasping for anything at all that might give him more time, and I was trying to help make what I knew must be his last weeks and days better somehow for him and for myself. One of my favorite things about living in this time is the on-demand nature of just about everything. I am old enough to remember the small thrill of catching a favorite movie on TV, when that was my only shot at seeing it, or lying in wait with my tape recorder for a particular song to be played on the radio. Now we can pull most anything seemingly out of thin air. So in those last weeks I tried to order my dad a DVD of The Man With the Golden Arm. And when I told my wife about this ultimately futile effort to close out a tiny thing for my dad, she reminded me that I actually bought my parents the DVD years before. Wait for it...
The version I got them had an alternate ending! Crap-o-rama.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
On the Other Side
My dad isn't sick. He's not dying. He didn't die last week or month or even this past summer. When I went to the Yizkor service for him on Yom Kippur, it wasn't the first time. My father's illness and death and excruciating absence are facts of life. They are as much a part of my family's daily life as the fact that my daughter has blonde hair. It's just something we all know.
There is a sort of peace in that. I still miss him, and I still wonder whether we could have wrung out any more quality time together, or made better use of the time we did have. But in the main, I am no longer shocked when it dawns on me from time to time that my dad is gone.
I am reaching a point where I recall things about him and can just enjoy a memory without all the weight of having to relive the last few months of his life. That feels like progress.
There is a sort of peace in that. I still miss him, and I still wonder whether we could have wrung out any more quality time together, or made better use of the time we did have. But in the main, I am no longer shocked when it dawns on me from time to time that my dad is gone.
I am reaching a point where I recall things about him and can just enjoy a memory without all the weight of having to relive the last few months of his life. That feels like progress.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Blocked
I'm not sure the cause, but I haven't been able to write a complete post for weeks. Maybe it has to do with my actually having passed a year of living dadlessly.
Over the month-plus since my post on the first anniversary of losing my dad, I have started posts on the terrifying possibility that my kids will turn into their parents (their father, especially), on avoiding trite memorials, on my opinion that I am starting to physically approximate my dad even more than before as I age, and on the nagging feeling that somehow poor quality hospice care and I contributed to a shortening of quality time during my dad's last days. Yet I haven't been able to finish any of these.
I will chalk it up to the season. Summer is exceedingly busy for my family, packed as it is with non-stop activity. I used to actually think the dog days were boring: bad TV, little to no big news stories (substantive ones, anyway), not a lot going on. But the last few years we have been on a tear. Shore trips most every weekend, baseball games, kids at camp, having a toddler tearing through our household again. These things make summer a highly enjoyable blur.
This blog exists because it helps me feel close to my father. Even without explicitly mentioning him, having so much fun with my kids helps in the same way. And the thing about grief is, the feeling may come and go, but the condition is permanent. My dad is gone. He will always be gone. I will always feel that absence, and the grief will be right where I left it once all the summer fun gives way to the school year. No need to spoil a good time. Dad wouldn't want me to.
Over the month-plus since my post on the first anniversary of losing my dad, I have started posts on the terrifying possibility that my kids will turn into their parents (their father, especially), on avoiding trite memorials, on my opinion that I am starting to physically approximate my dad even more than before as I age, and on the nagging feeling that somehow poor quality hospice care and I contributed to a shortening of quality time during my dad's last days. Yet I haven't been able to finish any of these.
I will chalk it up to the season. Summer is exceedingly busy for my family, packed as it is with non-stop activity. I used to actually think the dog days were boring: bad TV, little to no big news stories (substantive ones, anyway), not a lot going on. But the last few years we have been on a tear. Shore trips most every weekend, baseball games, kids at camp, having a toddler tearing through our household again. These things make summer a highly enjoyable blur.
This blog exists because it helps me feel close to my father. Even without explicitly mentioning him, having so much fun with my kids helps in the same way. And the thing about grief is, the feeling may come and go, but the condition is permanent. My dad is gone. He will always be gone. I will always feel that absence, and the grief will be right where I left it once all the summer fun gives way to the school year. No need to spoil a good time. Dad wouldn't want me to.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Rituals
Tonight is my dad's first yahrtzeit - the anniversary of his death on the Hebrew calendar. Having already marked the anniversary three weeks ago, and given my policy of not allowing arbitrary numbers to drive my grief, there wasn't much to feel or do. I dutifully lit a candle that will burn for more than 24 hours, and moved on. Sort of.
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Saturday, June 25, 2011
But He's Not There
The week just ended has been one for the ages. We'll start late in the evening on last Friday, the 17th. Around 10 PM I learned that a friend died very unexpectedly. He was a month shy of 40. His children are 1, 5, and 8 years old. You want to talk living dadlessly? These children, now facing their entire lives without their very loving and attentive father, are all I can think about. His wife is also my friend, and the fact that she is suddenly a widow so young defies all understanding. I've got much more to say about this very good man and his devastated family, but let's take a full accounting of the week.
Last Sunday was my first Fathers Day without my dad, and my wife and kids made it a nice day... until the mid afternoon, when wife and I cleaned up and dressed up and headed to an orthodox Jewish wedding. I mean really observant. Men and women were separated for the entire affair. It was fun, different, and another event that makes this week a stand-out.
Monday was my oldest child's last day of first grade. How on earth did any of us get this old? Oh yes, and I spent that day in and out of press events at the headquarters of the United Nations. Not the kind of thing one does every day.
Tuesday was the funeral for the friend who died. I sincerely hope that my family and our tight-knit community can live up to our promises to help this family move into a future that must seem impossibly frightening right now.
Thursday I flew to my home town with only my one-year-old daughter in tow. She is a delight. That same day I stood at my father's grave 363 days after he left us. I wanted it to feel a certain way. I wanted to feel close to him. I felt not much at all. It wasn't because I don't love my dad or miss him. But nothing about that site connects me to him. I don't believe the deceased hang around near their graves just to hear what their bereaved relatives might say. In fact, I don't believe the deceased are anywhere at all.
Once or twice over this past year I have imagined my father's presence, but I have always very acutely felt the sting of his absence. I felt his absence when I stood in his workshop and wondered what was the last project he was working on, and whether he realized the last time he was in that room that it would be the last time. I felt it on Thanksgiving. I felt it on the April morning when his house was alive with activity as we all got dressed for his unveiling. I feel the sting when I visit with my grandmother. I feel it when my mom tells me how much she misses him. And I feel it every time any of my children hits a milestone or just does something cute - these are daily occurrences. I'm torn between being sad for him that he is missing out on all the fun, and being sad for us because we don't have him to share in our lives anymore.
When I feel that sting of his absence, of being cut off from him, the feeling has nowhere to go. The words I want to say would do just as much good if I spoke them to our gold fish. I can look up to the sky and speak, but he's not there. I can just say out loud what I hope he'll hear, but wherever I am, he's not there. I tried talking to him in his workshop, but with all his unfinished work laying around, I really hope he's not there.
Now we've reached the end of one hell of a strange and emotionally challenging week, and I am marking one year since a nurse named Iffy called me not a half hour after I said goodbye to my dad for what I knew would be the last time, and said to me, "I've got some bad news..." One year since I had to tell my mom that my dad had died. As many families with young kids do, we've crammed a lot of memories into the year that's passed. I want more than anything to have my dad back so he can assume his rightful place in some of those memories and so I can share other ones with him, but I am kind of getting used to the hole. He is simply, finally, irretrievably, not there.
Last Sunday was my first Fathers Day without my dad, and my wife and kids made it a nice day... until the mid afternoon, when wife and I cleaned up and dressed up and headed to an orthodox Jewish wedding. I mean really observant. Men and women were separated for the entire affair. It was fun, different, and another event that makes this week a stand-out.
Monday was my oldest child's last day of first grade. How on earth did any of us get this old? Oh yes, and I spent that day in and out of press events at the headquarters of the United Nations. Not the kind of thing one does every day.
Tuesday was the funeral for the friend who died. I sincerely hope that my family and our tight-knit community can live up to our promises to help this family move into a future that must seem impossibly frightening right now.
Thursday I flew to my home town with only my one-year-old daughter in tow. She is a delight. That same day I stood at my father's grave 363 days after he left us. I wanted it to feel a certain way. I wanted to feel close to him. I felt not much at all. It wasn't because I don't love my dad or miss him. But nothing about that site connects me to him. I don't believe the deceased hang around near their graves just to hear what their bereaved relatives might say. In fact, I don't believe the deceased are anywhere at all.
Once or twice over this past year I have imagined my father's presence, but I have always very acutely felt the sting of his absence. I felt his absence when I stood in his workshop and wondered what was the last project he was working on, and whether he realized the last time he was in that room that it would be the last time. I felt it on Thanksgiving. I felt it on the April morning when his house was alive with activity as we all got dressed for his unveiling. I feel the sting when I visit with my grandmother. I feel it when my mom tells me how much she misses him. And I feel it every time any of my children hits a milestone or just does something cute - these are daily occurrences. I'm torn between being sad for him that he is missing out on all the fun, and being sad for us because we don't have him to share in our lives anymore.
When I feel that sting of his absence, of being cut off from him, the feeling has nowhere to go. The words I want to say would do just as much good if I spoke them to our gold fish. I can look up to the sky and speak, but he's not there. I can just say out loud what I hope he'll hear, but wherever I am, he's not there. I tried talking to him in his workshop, but with all his unfinished work laying around, I really hope he's not there.
Now we've reached the end of one hell of a strange and emotionally challenging week, and I am marking one year since a nurse named Iffy called me not a half hour after I said goodbye to my dad for what I knew would be the last time, and said to me, "I've got some bad news..." One year since I had to tell my mom that my dad had died. As many families with young kids do, we've crammed a lot of memories into the year that's passed. I want more than anything to have my dad back so he can assume his rightful place in some of those memories and so I can share other ones with him, but I am kind of getting used to the hole. He is simply, finally, irretrievably, not there.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Every Day is Kids' Day
It would be too easy to get sentimental on my first Father's Day without my dad. I'd rather share a memory of my dad in his prime. This story has a little of everything: my dad as the skilled and fearless craftsman, who makes a snap decision that saves the day. And the whole reason the day needed saving was that he was trying to make me happy.
When I wanted to play drums as a kid, my father took me seriously. After much searching, my dad bought me a very old jazz drum kit from a very old jazz drummer. Together we learned all about tuning the drums, taking care of the hardware, what to do when it turns out you've bought drums in metric sizes that won't use standard size drum heads, etc.
Since it was a used kit I had to deal with the fact that the drums bore a garish glittery green finish. This was the mid-80s and I was 11. The idea that something could be so dorky as to become ironically cool didn't exist for me yet. In the 80s I'm not certain that concept existed for anyone. But green they were, and there was no getting around it. It was still pretty great to have any drums at all.
After about three years during which I became an adept drummer, I could take the green no longer. I'm sure my dad felt he could no longer deal with my whining about it. He could stand being in our modest-sized house while I pounded away on the drums for hours without a break, but my complaining about the green drums finally drove him to seek out a solution. He was very handy anyway, and was never afraid of a project. Over the years I'd stood by while he splayed the guts of TV sets and other appliances out over his professional-class work bench. I'd seen him replace a power window mechanism in a car door, and install a tile floor in a large room. Turning my ugly green drums into something better suited to my private sessions re-imagining the drum parts on "Appetite for Destruction" surely was within my dad's reach.
Some twenty years later I still don't really know what his plan was, or how he managed to pull it off, but I can say that a blow-torch was prominently involved in the early steps. The first drum he started with was the floor tom. This is the deep-pitched drum that is roughly the size and shape of a small keg of beer.
Here is where this tale of fatherly devotion turns to one of fatherly calm in the face of serious danger. That glittery green material on the drums turned out to be highly flammable. In the room where he kept a large and valuable record collection, my dad had the drum on its side on a parquet floor when the whole thing went up in flames. He started to roll it on the floor hoping to snuff out the fire. No luck. The smoke alarm started going off and my mom called from across the house to ask what was the matter. My dad had to decide how to get her to help without freaking her out - and he had to do it while holding a burning wooden shell with a blow torch and all his records nearby - not to mention his own body.
He made a split-second decision that made all the difference. He didn't shout, "FIRE!" Smart man that my father was, he shouted, "WATER!" And that is what my mom brought into the room quickly. And that is how he got the fire out and everything calmed down within a few minutes.
He finished the drum job without using the blow-torch, and I played my shiny, black, good-as-new, drums for years after that.
If you are a dad, or if you will be with your dad, I hope you have a terrific Father's Day.
When I wanted to play drums as a kid, my father took me seriously. After much searching, my dad bought me a very old jazz drum kit from a very old jazz drummer. Together we learned all about tuning the drums, taking care of the hardware, what to do when it turns out you've bought drums in metric sizes that won't use standard size drum heads, etc.
Since it was a used kit I had to deal with the fact that the drums bore a garish glittery green finish. This was the mid-80s and I was 11. The idea that something could be so dorky as to become ironically cool didn't exist for me yet. In the 80s I'm not certain that concept existed for anyone. But green they were, and there was no getting around it. It was still pretty great to have any drums at all.
After about three years during which I became an adept drummer, I could take the green no longer. I'm sure my dad felt he could no longer deal with my whining about it. He could stand being in our modest-sized house while I pounded away on the drums for hours without a break, but my complaining about the green drums finally drove him to seek out a solution. He was very handy anyway, and was never afraid of a project. Over the years I'd stood by while he splayed the guts of TV sets and other appliances out over his professional-class work bench. I'd seen him replace a power window mechanism in a car door, and install a tile floor in a large room. Turning my ugly green drums into something better suited to my private sessions re-imagining the drum parts on "Appetite for Destruction" surely was within my dad's reach.
Some twenty years later I still don't really know what his plan was, or how he managed to pull it off, but I can say that a blow-torch was prominently involved in the early steps. The first drum he started with was the floor tom. This is the deep-pitched drum that is roughly the size and shape of a small keg of beer.
Here is where this tale of fatherly devotion turns to one of fatherly calm in the face of serious danger. That glittery green material on the drums turned out to be highly flammable. In the room where he kept a large and valuable record collection, my dad had the drum on its side on a parquet floor when the whole thing went up in flames. He started to roll it on the floor hoping to snuff out the fire. No luck. The smoke alarm started going off and my mom called from across the house to ask what was the matter. My dad had to decide how to get her to help without freaking her out - and he had to do it while holding a burning wooden shell with a blow torch and all his records nearby - not to mention his own body.
He made a split-second decision that made all the difference. He didn't shout, "FIRE!" Smart man that my father was, he shouted, "WATER!" And that is what my mom brought into the room quickly. And that is how he got the fire out and everything calmed down within a few minutes.
He finished the drum job without using the blow-torch, and I played my shiny, black, good-as-new, drums for years after that.
If you are a dad, or if you will be with your dad, I hope you have a terrific Father's Day.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Alice's Bucket List
Yesterday I discovered Alice's Bucket List, the new blog by a 15-year-old girl in the UK who knows she is going to die very young from a cancer she's been fighting since she was 11. She's got two posts so far, and one of them is her bucket list. Imagine being that young and knowing it was time to think about what experiences you want to cram in before you get very very ill and die. Imagine being the parent of a kid in this situation. It's too much to even try to process.
I have said before that while losing my dad has been awful, I don't regard it as a tragedy. The story of Alice is a tragedy of the highest order.
Her list is sweet and simple, and much of it seems within her grasp. Most heart-breaking are the few items she acknowledges it's already too late for her to ever have or do. My first thought on reading the list - and yours will be, too - was to think about whether I could have anything to do with helping Alice get anything on the list. It's not likely, because she lives in the UK, and it really isn't that kind of list. But one thing she is asking is that everyone sign up to become a bone marrow donor.
I'll be honest, I'm not sure I have the nerve. But part of that is because there is so much blather out there about the process of donating bone marrow. So I've decided that if nothing else, I will learn as much as I can about it, and I hope you will, too. It may not be for me, it may not be for you, but we owe it to Alice to at least find out for sure. Here are FAQs about the whole process from the National Marrow Donor Program.
I have said before that while losing my dad has been awful, I don't regard it as a tragedy. The story of Alice is a tragedy of the highest order.
Her list is sweet and simple, and much of it seems within her grasp. Most heart-breaking are the few items she acknowledges it's already too late for her to ever have or do. My first thought on reading the list - and yours will be, too - was to think about whether I could have anything to do with helping Alice get anything on the list. It's not likely, because she lives in the UK, and it really isn't that kind of list. But one thing she is asking is that everyone sign up to become a bone marrow donor.
I'll be honest, I'm not sure I have the nerve. But part of that is because there is so much blather out there about the process of donating bone marrow. So I've decided that if nothing else, I will learn as much as I can about it, and I hope you will, too. It may not be for me, it may not be for you, but we owe it to Alice to at least find out for sure. Here are FAQs about the whole process from the National Marrow Donor Program.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Here We Go 'Round Again
We have these close friends who make a calendar every year with candid pictures of all our kids. When our two families first became friends we each had a lone baby boy. Now there are five children between us. I love the friends and I love receiving that calendar every year. Hanging beside our pantry, it's a daily reminder of the great times we have along the way.
But this morning as my seven-year-old was flipping ahead to preview the pictures coming in the next few months, I momentarily went numb. "Dad, remember when we took this picture? It was last Memorial Day weekend, the day after Roy Halladay threw his perfect game. We went out for ice cream with the L- and the C- families that day. Remember?" The sweet boy has no idea just how much I remember.
I remember that I dropped my wife and kids off at the ice cream place, and as I was looking for a parking space along the cramped and narrow streets of our shore town, my phone rang. Mom was frantic because Dad, who'd already been told to consider hospice, but who until that point had not seemed like he had only four mostly miserable weeks to live, had started slurring his words out of nowhere. It had never happened before. She called an ambulance. That night, the day after Roy Halladay threw his perfect game, the day we went out for ice cream with the L- and C- families, almost fifty-one months after his initial diagnosis, my dad was admitted for the first overnight hospital stay of his cancer experience. A pretty damn good streak was over.
I've said before that before parenthood I had a great memory for dates: birthdays and anniversaries were a snap, and I could remember dates and details about even unremarkable events without trying very hard. Now that I've got some traumatic memories in the mix, I try not to dwell on dates, and I try not to mope just because of a number on a calendar. However, as we're now into June, getting close to the date on which my dad died last year, some date-jogged memories are unavoidable. Here I am doing a lot of the same things I was doing at this time last year, but with my dad simply, irreversibly, missing from the picture. And it was this season, this month, that weekend, when the abstract idea that I would eventually lose my dad became no longer a far off abstraction, but a clear, definite, inevitability.
Any brain can hold only so much info, and it does me no good to devote free disk space to bad memories. When I think about my dad, I'd much prefer to focus on his life than on his death. It's a shame we can't un-remember things.
But this morning as my seven-year-old was flipping ahead to preview the pictures coming in the next few months, I momentarily went numb. "Dad, remember when we took this picture? It was last Memorial Day weekend, the day after Roy Halladay threw his perfect game. We went out for ice cream with the L- and the C- families that day. Remember?" The sweet boy has no idea just how much I remember.
I remember that I dropped my wife and kids off at the ice cream place, and as I was looking for a parking space along the cramped and narrow streets of our shore town, my phone rang. Mom was frantic because Dad, who'd already been told to consider hospice, but who until that point had not seemed like he had only four mostly miserable weeks to live, had started slurring his words out of nowhere. It had never happened before. She called an ambulance. That night, the day after Roy Halladay threw his perfect game, the day we went out for ice cream with the L- and C- families, almost fifty-one months after his initial diagnosis, my dad was admitted for the first overnight hospital stay of his cancer experience. A pretty damn good streak was over.
I've said before that before parenthood I had a great memory for dates: birthdays and anniversaries were a snap, and I could remember dates and details about even unremarkable events without trying very hard. Now that I've got some traumatic memories in the mix, I try not to dwell on dates, and I try not to mope just because of a number on a calendar. However, as we're now into June, getting close to the date on which my dad died last year, some date-jogged memories are unavoidable. Here I am doing a lot of the same things I was doing at this time last year, but with my dad simply, irreversibly, missing from the picture. And it was this season, this month, that weekend, when the abstract idea that I would eventually lose my dad became no longer a far off abstraction, but a clear, definite, inevitability.
Any brain can hold only so much info, and it does me no good to devote free disk space to bad memories. When I think about my dad, I'd much prefer to focus on his life than on his death. It's a shame we can't un-remember things.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
You Don't Beat a Disease Like Cancer All At Once
Humor for my dad and me was much more than making each other laugh. It was an active hobby, and a means of communication. Some beaten-to-death punchlines made for great shorthand between us, even when we were talking about serious things.
In that spirit, I want to share a joke, and then lay some pretty heavy stuff on you. My dad told me this joke when I was maybe ten years old, and it became an oldie-but-goodie for us:
I am not being pessimistic when I say that we won't cure cancer. At least, we won't cure it in the way the word cure conjures a magic remedy that makes cancer disappear. We won't cure it in part because cancer isn't an "it". It is a group of many diseases that behave differently and that occur for different reasons. Nonetheless, some cancers already are quite treatable, others are manageable, and some can be avoided. We have made great progress, and much more progress is possible if we do what we already know to be effective.
So, what do we know? There are four things every person can do that can reduce the risk of dying from cancer. Read that last sentence carefully. I didn't say "prevent cancer" or "cure cancer" - I said reduce the risk of dying from cancer. Prevention and treatment are part of the mix, to be sure, but they are a means to an end. The goal is to avoid dying from cancer.
It's also important to remember that many cancer risk factors are beyond anybody's control. For example, what can you do about heredity or age? Anyway, the four things everyone should do:
As a non-smoker who got lung cancer, my dad would have fallen within that unlucky second group. But I don't believe we should become fatalistic or resigned about cancer just because we can't always account for why it strikes. Nor should anyone ever be blamed for getting a cancer diagnosis - it's tempting, but quite unfair, to guess at why a particular person gets particular cancer. You can never know for sure, and except in cases of environmental exposure, what good is it to know the cause?
The point is that the remarkable progress we've seen in reducing rates of people getting and dying from cancer shows that more progress is possible. And since half of all men and a third of all women will have a cancer diagnosis at some point, it is more than worth the effort to try to eat that pig.
In that spirit, I want to share a joke, and then lay some pretty heavy stuff on you. My dad told me this joke when I was maybe ten years old, and it became an oldie-but-goodie for us:
A man happens by a farmer's field and notices a pig with only three legs. He decides to knock on the door of the farmhouse and ask about the pig. The farmer is happy to tell him.In my mind, shaped by this joke and a thousand others like it, cancer is the pig you don't eat all at once. Except, obviously, cancer is horrendous. Cancer is too complex, too multi-faceted to beat with a single devastating move.
The farmer says, "Let me tell you about this amazing pig. This pig saved my life on more than one occasion. Once we had a fire in the middle of the night, and this pig came out of his pen, ran to the farmhouse, woke us all up, and helped us escape to safety. And if that isn't enough, another time, I had an accident while plowing the fields. I was trapped under the machinery, and this heroic pig ran to find help."
The other man is impressed, but before he can ask about the pig's missing leg, the farmer presses on, "Just last year we had a snake loose in the farmhouse, and this fearless pig cornered it until I could trap it and get rid of it."
The man asks, "Is that how he lost his leg?" The farmer tells him no. The man asks, "Well, why does he have only three legs?"
The farmer says, "You don't eat a pig as special as this one all at once."
I am not being pessimistic when I say that we won't cure cancer. At least, we won't cure it in the way the word cure conjures a magic remedy that makes cancer disappear. We won't cure it in part because cancer isn't an "it". It is a group of many diseases that behave differently and that occur for different reasons. Nonetheless, some cancers already are quite treatable, others are manageable, and some can be avoided. We have made great progress, and much more progress is possible if we do what we already know to be effective.
So, what do we know? There are four things every person can do that can reduce the risk of dying from cancer. Read that last sentence carefully. I didn't say "prevent cancer" or "cure cancer" - I said reduce the risk of dying from cancer. Prevention and treatment are part of the mix, to be sure, but they are a means to an end. The goal is to avoid dying from cancer.
It's also important to remember that many cancer risk factors are beyond anybody's control. For example, what can you do about heredity or age? Anyway, the four things everyone should do:
- Don't use tobacco at all. Not in any form or in any amount.
- Protect your skin from the sun. The surest way is to stay out of the sun during the hottest part of the day. Otherwise wear a hat and some kind of clothes. Sunscreen may protect you from sunburn, but it may not offer protection from skin cancer. More on this in a future post.
- Maintain a healthy weight. Get there through a healthy diet and regular exercise. By some estimates, obesity is responsible for about 100,000 cancer deaths a year.
- Get the recommended screenings for your age and gender. There are proven tests that screen for colorectal, breast, prostate, and a few other cancers. Here are the American Cancer Society's cancer screening guidelines. Finding some cancers as soon as possible can give you the best chance at longterm survival.
As a non-smoker who got lung cancer, my dad would have fallen within that unlucky second group. But I don't believe we should become fatalistic or resigned about cancer just because we can't always account for why it strikes. Nor should anyone ever be blamed for getting a cancer diagnosis - it's tempting, but quite unfair, to guess at why a particular person gets particular cancer. You can never know for sure, and except in cases of environmental exposure, what good is it to know the cause?
The point is that the remarkable progress we've seen in reducing rates of people getting and dying from cancer shows that more progress is possible. And since half of all men and a third of all women will have a cancer diagnosis at some point, it is more than worth the effort to try to eat that pig.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Coming Through the Fire
Some things in life, nearly everybody has to endure at some point: The first day of school, leaving home, having your wisdom teeth removed, etc. These are shared experiences in the sense that most people have them, and we can gain insight from others' stories about what happened. But at the core, even with all the support in the world, each of us does these things alone. We don't have a choice. Someone who cares about you may be sitting in the waiting room at the oral surgeon's office, but you are the one in the chair. It's the same with losing people you love. You may be surrounded by people, but it's an experience you go through, maybe not alone, but certainly in your own way.
What makes the process of losing someone so difficult is the same thing that makes those other common-but-solo experiences frightening: the unknown. There are so many ways to feel the anxiety borne out of the unknown. Basically you are trying to predict the future, and you know things are changing in terrible ways. And of course all of it is beyond your control.
There is no sugar-coating this: once my dad finally died it was every bit as painful as I'd envisioned, and as we started living our new reality and turning the unknown into everyday life, anxiety about not knowing how it would be turned quickly into searing grief over how it actually was. But there was one bright spot I hadn't anticipated, and that was the coalescing of people who had already lost a parent who didn't get to grow old.
I've written before about the overwhelming response of my friends and neighbors, most of whom met my dad only a couple of times or not at all, and I will never get over my gratitude for that. But support from those who'd already lost a parent too young felt different. It was as though I'd been initiated into an unfortunate-but-strong fraternity. Collectively, the people in this cohort who offered advice and support were like a big brother who was already established at the school I was starting. Help from a few individuals who could really relate to what I was going through has been a crucial part of my effort to move into the future without my dad.
There isn't any adequate way to repay the kindness, nor did anyone expect anything in return. All I can think to do is help the next friend who needs it. I take my responsibility as a member of this group very seriously. My services haven't been needed much, but I feel like a volunteer firefighter, ready to drop everything and help. It's a group nobody wants to join, but it sure was nice to discover it was there.
What makes the process of losing someone so difficult is the same thing that makes those other common-but-solo experiences frightening: the unknown. There are so many ways to feel the anxiety borne out of the unknown. Basically you are trying to predict the future, and you know things are changing in terrible ways. And of course all of it is beyond your control.
There is no sugar-coating this: once my dad finally died it was every bit as painful as I'd envisioned, and as we started living our new reality and turning the unknown into everyday life, anxiety about not knowing how it would be turned quickly into searing grief over how it actually was. But there was one bright spot I hadn't anticipated, and that was the coalescing of people who had already lost a parent who didn't get to grow old.
I've written before about the overwhelming response of my friends and neighbors, most of whom met my dad only a couple of times or not at all, and I will never get over my gratitude for that. But support from those who'd already lost a parent too young felt different. It was as though I'd been initiated into an unfortunate-but-strong fraternity. Collectively, the people in this cohort who offered advice and support were like a big brother who was already established at the school I was starting. Help from a few individuals who could really relate to what I was going through has been a crucial part of my effort to move into the future without my dad.
There isn't any adequate way to repay the kindness, nor did anyone expect anything in return. All I can think to do is help the next friend who needs it. I take my responsibility as a member of this group very seriously. My services haven't been needed much, but I feel like a volunteer firefighter, ready to drop everything and help. It's a group nobody wants to join, but it sure was nice to discover it was there.
Monday, May 16, 2011
The Birthday Post
Today my dad didn't turn 68. It's a good day for me to pick the blog back up after more than a month of silence. I never intended to leave the blog dark for so many weeks, but I was rendered more or less speechless by the double whammy experience of my first trip back to my hometown since losing my dad, and his unveiling - the first time I stood at his grave and saw the words on the stone. These are events I need to hash out with myself before dealing with them here. But, gentle (and few) readers, there is a lot to say about both in future posts.
My father had his own father well into middle age, and one thing I learned from my dad was how to be a son. He was always so proud of my grandpa's career as a musician, and so connected to his dad through their shared appreciation for the era of my grandpa's prime. As he was an avid collector of radios, sheet music, and records, my dad maintained a collection of music and memorabilia from Tommy Tucker and His Orchestra, which was the band where my grandpa started his career. Consequently, my childhood was steeped in my dad's devotion to the big band era, and though I resisted it, called it dorky and boring, and basically reacted the way most kids do, I am glad now that there are sights and sounds in this world that give me a feeling of closeness to both my dad and his.
In looking around for just the right song to share for my dad's birthday, I was pleased to find that my grandpa gets a mention on the Wikipedia page for Tommy Tucker and His Orchestra. Check the Career Highlights and Associated Talent section. The name you are looking for is Mac Becker. I wonder if my dad even knew it was there.
Here is what I think of as the signature song from Tommy Tucker. It was a huge hit for the band in 1941. My dad loved it, and his dad played sax on it. Enjoy.
My father had his own father well into middle age, and one thing I learned from my dad was how to be a son. He was always so proud of my grandpa's career as a musician, and so connected to his dad through their shared appreciation for the era of my grandpa's prime. As he was an avid collector of radios, sheet music, and records, my dad maintained a collection of music and memorabilia from Tommy Tucker and His Orchestra, which was the band where my grandpa started his career. Consequently, my childhood was steeped in my dad's devotion to the big band era, and though I resisted it, called it dorky and boring, and basically reacted the way most kids do, I am glad now that there are sights and sounds in this world that give me a feeling of closeness to both my dad and his.
In looking around for just the right song to share for my dad's birthday, I was pleased to find that my grandpa gets a mention on the Wikipedia page for Tommy Tucker and His Orchestra. Check the Career Highlights and Associated Talent section. The name you are looking for is Mac Becker. I wonder if my dad even knew it was there.
Here is what I think of as the signature song from Tommy Tucker. It was a huge hit for the band in 1941. My dad loved it, and his dad played sax on it. Enjoy.
Friday, April 8, 2011
The Most Depressing Thing I Heard All Week
A much-respected public figure and member of my community died suddenly on Monday. He was only 51, and he left four children, the youngest of whom is only nine years old. It's a flags-at-half-staff kind of death, and it has sent a shudder through the close-knit town I live in.
This death marked an unwelcome, but inevitable change in my perspective, too. More than any other death that has touched my life, and this includes close friends dying in their (and my) teens and early twenties, this was the first time I felt sharply, if it happened to him, it can happen to me. It isn't as though I just found out I was mortal, but I have clearly moved from worrying about what would happen to me if this person or that person died, to worrying about what would happen to them if I died. And this week's news was all the evidence I needed that it can happen. It does happen.
But none of this was the most depressing news I heard all week. I also recently, though not this week, got news that a friend of mine has eight inoperable brain tumors. She is not yet 32. Devastating, but still not the most depressing thing.
And I learned that a little girl I know and love who is in kindergarten has a tumor. Chemo once a week indefinitely. She may have a good prognosis, but this has wrecked her childhood, at least for now. Sickening. Heart-rending. Not the most depressing thing.
The most depressing thing I heard all week happened in a casual conversation with a couple of other men who are 40-ish. We were talking about the sudden death, and how awful it was, when one of them inadvertently dropped the bomb. We were saying that it makes you think about how you live, and wonder whether you should behave differently, make some sweeping changes. Make your life what you want it to be, and what your wife and kids need it to be. Then he nailed us all. He said, the thing is, none of us will do any of that. We'll be upset by this news for a while, and then we will just forget about it and go back to the way things were. And he's right.
Naturally this brought me back to last summer, watching my dad waste away by the minute. As I stood vigil, I promised myself I would make something positive out of this loss. I wasn't sure what, but I would take the energy and the frustrated feelings of helplessness, and do... something. Maybe it would be small. I'd be more patient with my kids. Maybe it would be large. I'd start the family business Dad always said he would want to invest in. Maybe I would start that novel already. Take a trip. In some way mark the time before the bad experience and the time since.
Have I made significant enough changes to satisfy my need to make my father's loss mean something? That conversation made me review the scorecard. I said in my Spring Renewal post that I had set some personal goals, and had been making progress toward them. It's true, but I have stalled out lately. I need to re-light that fire. And I said in the Patience post that kids deserve patient adults, and that I was struggling to get some mastery over that. Also true, but not nearly enough. It is still too easy to raise my voice, and too easy to forget that they need me to be patient, even when I have always known that my kids deserve kindness and patience. What else? No novel, no business, no life-altering moves.
While I hope there is still time to create something positive from the ashes, you can never really know. I've got a good life, and one that I'd be envious of if I were outside looking in. But there is a lot I more want to accomplish - a lot more work I have to do if I am going to make this life, as I said, what I want it to be and what my wife and kids need it to be. What the hell am I waiting for?
This death marked an unwelcome, but inevitable change in my perspective, too. More than any other death that has touched my life, and this includes close friends dying in their (and my) teens and early twenties, this was the first time I felt sharply, if it happened to him, it can happen to me. It isn't as though I just found out I was mortal, but I have clearly moved from worrying about what would happen to me if this person or that person died, to worrying about what would happen to them if I died. And this week's news was all the evidence I needed that it can happen. It does happen.
But none of this was the most depressing news I heard all week. I also recently, though not this week, got news that a friend of mine has eight inoperable brain tumors. She is not yet 32. Devastating, but still not the most depressing thing.
And I learned that a little girl I know and love who is in kindergarten has a tumor. Chemo once a week indefinitely. She may have a good prognosis, but this has wrecked her childhood, at least for now. Sickening. Heart-rending. Not the most depressing thing.
The most depressing thing I heard all week happened in a casual conversation with a couple of other men who are 40-ish. We were talking about the sudden death, and how awful it was, when one of them inadvertently dropped the bomb. We were saying that it makes you think about how you live, and wonder whether you should behave differently, make some sweeping changes. Make your life what you want it to be, and what your wife and kids need it to be. Then he nailed us all. He said, the thing is, none of us will do any of that. We'll be upset by this news for a while, and then we will just forget about it and go back to the way things were. And he's right.
Naturally this brought me back to last summer, watching my dad waste away by the minute. As I stood vigil, I promised myself I would make something positive out of this loss. I wasn't sure what, but I would take the energy and the frustrated feelings of helplessness, and do... something. Maybe it would be small. I'd be more patient with my kids. Maybe it would be large. I'd start the family business Dad always said he would want to invest in. Maybe I would start that novel already. Take a trip. In some way mark the time before the bad experience and the time since.
Have I made significant enough changes to satisfy my need to make my father's loss mean something? That conversation made me review the scorecard. I said in my Spring Renewal post that I had set some personal goals, and had been making progress toward them. It's true, but I have stalled out lately. I need to re-light that fire. And I said in the Patience post that kids deserve patient adults, and that I was struggling to get some mastery over that. Also true, but not nearly enough. It is still too easy to raise my voice, and too easy to forget that they need me to be patient, even when I have always known that my kids deserve kindness and patience. What else? No novel, no business, no life-altering moves.
While I hope there is still time to create something positive from the ashes, you can never really know. I've got a good life, and one that I'd be envious of if I were outside looking in. But there is a lot I more want to accomplish - a lot more work I have to do if I am going to make this life, as I said, what I want it to be and what my wife and kids need it to be. What the hell am I waiting for?
Thursday, March 31, 2011
The More You Know, The More You Know Can Go Wrong
I'm reading the book Manhood for Amateurs at the moment. It's a collection of essays by Michael Chabon. Among many poignant exchanges between brothers, parents and children, spouses, one stands out to me. The narrator and his adolescent son are using an extremely high-powered telescope to explore the night sky. The son is swept away by the enormity of the universe, especially vis a vis the smallness of our planet, and our corner of this galaxy, which is one of likely a few hundred billion galaxies out there. The son remarks that given how small Earth is, we mean nothing. The father replies, "Except to each other."
As a reader, I love the scene. As a dad, I admire Chabon's quick thinking and sensitivity. There is so much in those four words. He let his son know he loved him, and he gave him a little to chew on about the meaning of life.
While we may enjoy (fiercely guard) our periods of solitude, so much of life comes from what other people mean to us. And no matter where love for others falls on your own ranking of sources of the meaning of life, it is surely one of your biggest vulnerabilities. Mine too. Everybody's. We put everything we have into our children, our partners, even our pets. But there are no sure bets, and if you allow yourself to see far enough into the future, one way or another it all disappears. The more people you let in, the more you invest in them, the richer your life, and the greater the risk of tragic loss.
I don't often paralyze myself thinking about all the different ways I could lose people I love, but sometimes you get hit hard with news about people you know and care about, and it makes you wonder when your turn for devastation will come. By the way, my dad getting sick and dying was sad and feels unfair to him and to those of us who love him, but I would not term it a tragedy. Sickeningly sad, yes. Tragedy, no. Once in a while I have to remember that. Keep perspective. But watch the news any given day, read the paper, just talk with people, and you will learn about real tragedy. In fact, the chance that you and yours will have long, healthy, happy lives starts to seem like a near-impossibility. Kids get sick, violent crime happens, car accidents, natural disasters of course...
So how can we deal with the knowledge that risk and danger are everywhere? For one thing, we can live like they aren't everywhere. Otherwise we'd never make a move. For another thing, we can keep maybe one percent of that notion and use it to inform our thoughts and actions. It may lead us to broaden our circles, collect more people, care about them, love them. Spread the risk around a little. And it may help us remember to be careful out there. Not "wear a helmet for no reason" careful, but reasonable stuff. Seatbelts, no smoking, etc.
Then with any luck, as we float through our galaxy (one of hundreds of billions, remember) and through a sea of 200 sextillion stars (a legitimate estimate), maybe we will give meaning to other people's time here. We can set aside whether any of this means anything in some grand scheme, and make it meaningful ourselves.
As a reader, I love the scene. As a dad, I admire Chabon's quick thinking and sensitivity. There is so much in those four words. He let his son know he loved him, and he gave him a little to chew on about the meaning of life.
While we may enjoy (fiercely guard) our periods of solitude, so much of life comes from what other people mean to us. And no matter where love for others falls on your own ranking of sources of the meaning of life, it is surely one of your biggest vulnerabilities. Mine too. Everybody's. We put everything we have into our children, our partners, even our pets. But there are no sure bets, and if you allow yourself to see far enough into the future, one way or another it all disappears. The more people you let in, the more you invest in them, the richer your life, and the greater the risk of tragic loss.
I don't often paralyze myself thinking about all the different ways I could lose people I love, but sometimes you get hit hard with news about people you know and care about, and it makes you wonder when your turn for devastation will come. By the way, my dad getting sick and dying was sad and feels unfair to him and to those of us who love him, but I would not term it a tragedy. Sickeningly sad, yes. Tragedy, no. Once in a while I have to remember that. Keep perspective. But watch the news any given day, read the paper, just talk with people, and you will learn about real tragedy. In fact, the chance that you and yours will have long, healthy, happy lives starts to seem like a near-impossibility. Kids get sick, violent crime happens, car accidents, natural disasters of course...
So how can we deal with the knowledge that risk and danger are everywhere? For one thing, we can live like they aren't everywhere. Otherwise we'd never make a move. For another thing, we can keep maybe one percent of that notion and use it to inform our thoughts and actions. It may lead us to broaden our circles, collect more people, care about them, love them. Spread the risk around a little. And it may help us remember to be careful out there. Not "wear a helmet for no reason" careful, but reasonable stuff. Seatbelts, no smoking, etc.
Then with any luck, as we float through our galaxy (one of hundreds of billions, remember) and through a sea of 200 sextillion stars (a legitimate estimate), maybe we will give meaning to other people's time here. We can set aside whether any of this means anything in some grand scheme, and make it meaningful ourselves.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Fridays with Kenny
Tonight, in the unlikeliest of kitchens under quite unlikely circumstances, a warm and funny acquaintance of mine started singing the novelty song "National Brotherhood Week" by Tom Lehrer. The song is at least fifty years old, and so is the acquaintance, but he was shocked when I joined in singing. How could someone my age know it? My dad is how. By the way, when you are done reading this post, check out the song here, http://t.co/LtAMYkz.
Of all the things imprinted on me nature- and nurture-wise by my dad, the most direct link I have with him, and with his dad for that matter, is a deep appreciation for humor. And on many a Friday night while I was growing up, we took time to work on it. I can't look back and pretend that either of us had any agenda beyond sharing some laughs together, but it does seem like he opened an avenue of literacy for me. These are some of the most important and best memories I have of my growing up years.
Late on Friday nights over games of Scrabble and Monopoly in his den - it wasn't THE den, it was DAD's den - we would get into all kinds of TV shows and comedy albums. The Honeymooners, Carson's Comedy Classics, Carol Burnett, every George Carlin record from the 60s and 70s, Lenny Bruce, Stiller and Meara, and albums by guys I didn't know even had stand-up careers. People like Gabe Kaplan, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen, and more. Some of the material flew over my pre-adolescent head, and some was wildly inappropriate, but he trusted me to handle it, and I did.
More special to me now than was the comedy itself, was that he shared it with me. He let me discover it. It was our time together even if he was tired from a long week or had other things he needed to do.
And while I remember it as an endless string of Friday nights stretching out over a few years, I am sure he would tell me that it all ended too soon. At some point, in accordance with the same stupid narrative convention that will rob me of time with my kids, I grew to feel like it would be dorky to sit home on a Friday and hang out with my dad. Like so many things we do and do until we don't, I can't remember the last Friday night we spent together like that, and I am sure neither of us realized at the time that it would be the last.
Of all the things imprinted on me nature- and nurture-wise by my dad, the most direct link I have with him, and with his dad for that matter, is a deep appreciation for humor. And on many a Friday night while I was growing up, we took time to work on it. I can't look back and pretend that either of us had any agenda beyond sharing some laughs together, but it does seem like he opened an avenue of literacy for me. These are some of the most important and best memories I have of my growing up years.
Late on Friday nights over games of Scrabble and Monopoly in his den - it wasn't THE den, it was DAD's den - we would get into all kinds of TV shows and comedy albums. The Honeymooners, Carson's Comedy Classics, Carol Burnett, every George Carlin record from the 60s and 70s, Lenny Bruce, Stiller and Meara, and albums by guys I didn't know even had stand-up careers. People like Gabe Kaplan, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen, and more. Some of the material flew over my pre-adolescent head, and some was wildly inappropriate, but he trusted me to handle it, and I did.
More special to me now than was the comedy itself, was that he shared it with me. He let me discover it. It was our time together even if he was tired from a long week or had other things he needed to do.
And while I remember it as an endless string of Friday nights stretching out over a few years, I am sure he would tell me that it all ended too soon. At some point, in accordance with the same stupid narrative convention that will rob me of time with my kids, I grew to feel like it would be dorky to sit home on a Friday and hang out with my dad. Like so many things we do and do until we don't, I can't remember the last Friday night we spent together like that, and I am sure neither of us realized at the time that it would be the last.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Crappy Anniversary / Happy Anniversary
I have a mind for numbers, dates especially. I used to have a very sharp memory before I had kids. In the pre-Facebook era it was very handy to remember everybody's birthdays, anniversaries, and other milestones. In the post-cancer chapter of my life, I sometimes have to work to purposely forget the dates when certain things happened, because there is plenty I do not want to commemorate. In some ways I am grateful that parenting has turned portions of my brain into mush. And really, there are only so many dates on the calendar. Live long enough and almost every day could be the anniversary of something.
I've got dates on the brain because one unfortunate anniversary is looming and there is no escaping it. This Sunday will be March 13, which marks five years to the day that my dad - and the rest of us - first learned he had cancer. Though I can remember every detail about the day we got the call, the date itself wasn't important to my dad. I reminded him once or twice of passing that date and he seemed surprised each time that we had marked another year.
This year the date was to have incredible significance. For one thing, at the beginning of his cancer journey, his oncologist predicted he could live with his disease about five years. I hated that he was given an expiration date. Furthermore, epidemiologists record cancer survival rates by those who have lived five years after being diagnosed, even if they are in active treatment. As I addressed in a previous post, only one percent of those who have the kind of cancer he had ever make it to that milestone. I never doubted he would be one of those longterm survivors.
Instead of celebrating a huge victory against cancer this year, we will be missing my dad. But March 13 won't live in infamy. We're already taking it back. This year we celebrate the most special thing any family can gain: new life. My daughter will celebrate her first birthday on the 12th, and have her first birthday party on the 13th. If that doesn't make the 13th a day worth feeling good about, nothing ever could.
I've got dates on the brain because one unfortunate anniversary is looming and there is no escaping it. This Sunday will be March 13, which marks five years to the day that my dad - and the rest of us - first learned he had cancer. Though I can remember every detail about the day we got the call, the date itself wasn't important to my dad. I reminded him once or twice of passing that date and he seemed surprised each time that we had marked another year.
This year the date was to have incredible significance. For one thing, at the beginning of his cancer journey, his oncologist predicted he could live with his disease about five years. I hated that he was given an expiration date. Furthermore, epidemiologists record cancer survival rates by those who have lived five years after being diagnosed, even if they are in active treatment. As I addressed in a previous post, only one percent of those who have the kind of cancer he had ever make it to that milestone. I never doubted he would be one of those longterm survivors.
Instead of celebrating a huge victory against cancer this year, we will be missing my dad. But March 13 won't live in infamy. We're already taking it back. This year we celebrate the most special thing any family can gain: new life. My daughter will celebrate her first birthday on the 12th, and have her first birthday party on the 13th. If that doesn't make the 13th a day worth feeling good about, nothing ever could.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Where do we go from here?
What do you believe happens when a person dies? Where do you think we go from here? There is no point asking what you know about it, because we all know exactly the same: zilch. And anyway, I would bet that for most people, what they believe is really more like what they want to happen.
With all the things happening in my life and in the lives of my kids, and with my constant frustration at not being able to have a simple conversation with my dad, you would probably think I want him to be, in the classic vision, "up there smiling down". You would be wrong. I don't intend to demean anybody's beliefs, or deny comfort to those who find it in their faith, but the older I get, the harder it has become to force myself to believe in heaven or any afterlife, really. If you believe that our souls go somewhere else, or that we become something different after this life, I envy the comfort you derive from it.
That is what I believe, but here is what I want: Of course I want there to be something after this, and paradise would be nice. But failing that, I would love to know that wherever our souls go, beyond being happy, I hope we aren't concerned in the least with earthly affairs. Imagine how frustrating it would be to be able to see your loved ones go on with their lives without you, to witness, but not be able to influence, their worst experiences along with their best ones. No thanks.
I hope I will somehow have time with my dad again in the distant future, after my lifetime, but in the mean time, I hope he has no emotional attachment to anything going on "down here".
Just to show you I am not made of stone, here is a funny clip about this topic from the immortal George Carlin. The needle on the irony meter broke when Mr. Carlin died only a few weeks after this HBO special aired. I can only assume he is smiling down on this blog post. And I think he's pleased.
WARNING: If you watch this at work or around kids, keep the sound low. Some of the language isn't safe for work.
With all the things happening in my life and in the lives of my kids, and with my constant frustration at not being able to have a simple conversation with my dad, you would probably think I want him to be, in the classic vision, "up there smiling down". You would be wrong. I don't intend to demean anybody's beliefs, or deny comfort to those who find it in their faith, but the older I get, the harder it has become to force myself to believe in heaven or any afterlife, really. If you believe that our souls go somewhere else, or that we become something different after this life, I envy the comfort you derive from it.
That is what I believe, but here is what I want: Of course I want there to be something after this, and paradise would be nice. But failing that, I would love to know that wherever our souls go, beyond being happy, I hope we aren't concerned in the least with earthly affairs. Imagine how frustrating it would be to be able to see your loved ones go on with their lives without you, to witness, but not be able to influence, their worst experiences along with their best ones. No thanks.
I hope I will somehow have time with my dad again in the distant future, after my lifetime, but in the mean time, I hope he has no emotional attachment to anything going on "down here".
Just to show you I am not made of stone, here is a funny clip about this topic from the immortal George Carlin. The needle on the irony meter broke when Mr. Carlin died only a few weeks after this HBO special aired. I can only assume he is smiling down on this blog post. And I think he's pleased.
WARNING: If you watch this at work or around kids, keep the sound low. Some of the language isn't safe for work.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Silver Linings
Did my dad die while still in his prime from a terrible disease that struck at random? Or did he stave off a killer for much longer than most anybody does, and manage to have a good few years of enjoying his hobbies and his family? If he were here to answer, unquestionably he would say simply, "Yes."
Pick up two different newspapers some time and read their coverage of the same event. What exactly happened? Perspective matters. Attitude matters.
Even though I had my dad for 31 years before cancer, and only four and a half with it, life before we entered the cancer universe is hard to separate in my memory. Earlier today I flipped through some pictures of a long ago visit to my parents' house. At the time we had "only" two kids, and the older one was not yet three. The baby was all of three months old. There are some great photos of my dad holding the baby, and as I tried getting into my memories of 2006-2007 it dawned on me that we weren't sure these two would ever get the chance to meet. He is the second of my parents' five grandchildren, and my dad got his diagnosis a couple of weeks before we even got to tell everyone that my wife was pregnant with him. As it turned out, they did have time together. The few years they got to enjoy each other's company was entirely too short, yes, but it was all borrowed time. When I think about it, I am grateful that there was any time at all.
Terminal illness forces you to mark time that you might have let slip by without a second thought. It makes a lot of first times that much more important, because they might be "only times". This was exactly the case with my baby daughter and my sister's baby son meeting my dad last spring. But instead of crushing myself with the thought that the grandchildren won't have their papa as they grow up, I try to focus on the silver lining: He got to see them all in the flesh - even the two who were weeks old when they lost him. He held them and kissed them and played with their tiny baby fingers and toes, heard them cry in the same room. Posed for more pictures than he probably wanted to, but that he knew we needed to have.
You can't squeeze a lifetime into a long weekend, but for the babies and for my dad, at least we had the long weekend.
Pick up two different newspapers some time and read their coverage of the same event. What exactly happened? Perspective matters. Attitude matters.
Even though I had my dad for 31 years before cancer, and only four and a half with it, life before we entered the cancer universe is hard to separate in my memory. Earlier today I flipped through some pictures of a long ago visit to my parents' house. At the time we had "only" two kids, and the older one was not yet three. The baby was all of three months old. There are some great photos of my dad holding the baby, and as I tried getting into my memories of 2006-2007 it dawned on me that we weren't sure these two would ever get the chance to meet. He is the second of my parents' five grandchildren, and my dad got his diagnosis a couple of weeks before we even got to tell everyone that my wife was pregnant with him. As it turned out, they did have time together. The few years they got to enjoy each other's company was entirely too short, yes, but it was all borrowed time. When I think about it, I am grateful that there was any time at all.
Terminal illness forces you to mark time that you might have let slip by without a second thought. It makes a lot of first times that much more important, because they might be "only times". This was exactly the case with my baby daughter and my sister's baby son meeting my dad last spring. But instead of crushing myself with the thought that the grandchildren won't have their papa as they grow up, I try to focus on the silver lining: He got to see them all in the flesh - even the two who were weeks old when they lost him. He held them and kissed them and played with their tiny baby fingers and toes, heard them cry in the same room. Posed for more pictures than he probably wanted to, but that he knew we needed to have.
You can't squeeze a lifetime into a long weekend, but for the babies and for my dad, at least we had the long weekend.
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