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.

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.



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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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."

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.

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:

1. Don't use tobacco at all. Not in any form or in any amount.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

According to some estimates, if every single person was totally compliant with these four practices, we could cut the number of US cancer deaths nearly in half. This is astounding. Of course, it also means that about 275,000 people would still die from cancer every year, because, as Ben Folds sings, "shit just happens sometimes."

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.