I lost my dad Tuesday, January 20th.
I've noticed that I tend to follow this up with a disclaimer, that this is not necessarily as personally devastating a loss as it is for some people. I'm the youngest of a litter of 6, so by the time I came around my parents were a little worn out by the whole parenting thing. And by the time I turned 5 the older kids were starting to hit their teen years, not to mention the fact that it was the 70's, man, and parental attention was, of necessity, generally being pulled elsewhere.
This is all said without rancor. I wouldn't call my relationship with my dad close, but it wasn't hostile, and he was definitely paterfamilias (which was transmuted into our family nickname for dad - Podder), an influential force even if not directly involved. In fact, temperamentally I think I turned out very much like him.
I really didn't know how I was going to react when the moment came. He and I didn't really talk much. Over the years Dad's natural personal reticence (he never really liked talking on the phone, for example) morphed into an insidious type of dementia that stole his emotions and behavior more than his memory, and reduced our communication even more.
I can confidently say I'm well into middle-aged hood, so I'm no stranger to loss. I've come to realize it's a very idiosyncratic thing. There's no "better" way for it to happen, just different. One summer I knew 3 different couples that lost spouses: one married 10 years, one married closer to 20, and one married over 50 years. The grief of losing someone too soon, of feeling robbed of a future, is a terrible thing. But so is the grief of losing someone who has been part of daily existence for a majority of one's life. My elderly neighbor described how she still talked to her late husband because she was just so accustomed to him being there.
So, like I said, I didn't know how I was going to feel. I live in a different state, and our interactions were not frequent, so it wasn't going to have an immediate impact on my daily routine. His health had been failing for some time. In fact, it had gotten to a point where it had become somewhat agonizing for us, his family, as well as, I imagine, for him. Towards the end there were multiple emergency room visits, a place he disliked. His condition was not fixable. He didn't like the intrusions of tests and therapy. In the end all he really wanted was to go to bed. There was a certain relief in him finally being able to go and be at rest. In peace.
But I lost a parent.
I feel like lately I've been writing a lot about Life's Big Moments, those reality bending moments of Things Will Never Be The Same. Although I'm quick to tell people that I'm doing all right, and my grief appears muted, I'm feeling the weight of this moment.
It's one of those times when life strips away the comfort of the mundane. We are pleasantly (sometimes unpleasantly) distracted by the details of day-to-day living until something catastrophic - a crime, an accident, a death - breaks in to remind us that there are no guarantees that bad things won't happen. That loss is inevitable. There is no life without death. We must learn to dance in the face of this shadow.
I'm also slowing piecing together the impact my dad had on my life. For one thing, I'm now acutely aware of how many of my recent conversations with my mom and siblings revolved around my dad, how he was doing, and how we were all coping. Now it's just us.
I'm aware of how little I really knew about the guy, his story and what made him tick. I have questions that will probably never be answered, the dementia having made sure of that years before.
But mostly I think about glaciers. Some time ago I was impressed to read a description of how glaciers move. They don't slide downhill willy-nilly like giant toboggans. Their movement is painstakingly incremental. New ice builds at the back of the glacier and the old ice at the front edge gradually melts or falls away. I see generations as being like that. I lost my grandparents right at the time I was having children of my own. I felt the nudge, my shift from being a daughter at the back of the glacier to being a parent in the middle ice. Someday I'll need to be prepared to be the matriarch, the leading edge. I'm not there yet but I feel it shifting a bit closer.
The other thing about glaciers is how huge and heavy they are, and how they completely shape the land that they move over. Mountains become rounded hills, soil and rock is scraped away and re-arranged, and the sheer weight of the ice carves a footprint into the very bedrock. That's how I imagine all those prior generations molding me. Who I am has so much to do with who they were.
Like I said, I recognize a lot of my dad in me. My sense of humor. My love of theater and seeing life as something of a performance. Intellect. An appreciation of all things English. A curious affection for trains. I'm aware that I am a legacy of who my father was.
And I'm feeling the loss.
As Larry Penn's song "Time to Go" so perfectly put it: "The whistle on the midnight train sounds sweet tonight... and every time the whistle moans it says to me 'I'll take you back to where your soul is free.'"
Enjoy your rest, Podder.
