After the pennant

There are tons of anniversaries that are all about celebrating.

Today is not one of them.

One year ago today my father died.  Daddy.  

That pretty much covers the entire feeling of today.  Everyone knows exactly, or can imagine, what that feels like.  I miss him. 

That’s not really fair though, is it.? I have adjusted to life without him, and, to truly be honest, have to tell you that I had missed him for a long time.  He had been sick for so long.  The end of his 85 year long life had been capped with not being able to walk without pain, not being able to breathe without feeling like there was a brick on his chest, not being able to sleep, not being independent, and not having many friends left to commiserate with.  My mom would disagree with me. But my dad loved her so much that he stayed because of her.  He stayed because she needed him to. It was a gift.

Today I will find a way to connect with my mom, to acknowledge her hurt.  I will suck at it, because I am not sad the way she is.  I am much more like my dad that way, not afraid of carrying on, and not afraid of dying.  He wasn’t afraid of it for himself.  Maybe a little, like the rest of us, but he never showed it.  He was ready, in a way that was both resigned and graceful. I hope I can be that kind of cool.

So, to remember him, I invite you to read the blog I wrote about him last year, right before he died.  I loved him then.  I love him now. 

Top of the first, bases loaded:

http://wishesinthesand.blogspot.com/2015/04/top-of-first-bases-loaded.html

Top of the first, bases loaded.

My father is dying.

Even saying out loud sounds weird, and I feel more than a little guilty that I am that kind of blunt, but it is true. His body is failing.  He is being kept in comfort, and pain controlled , which makes him “half” here, and only some of the time.  He is in the hospital and has been for the past 11 days.  We are now just waiting.

So before the only memory I have is the hospital smell in my nose, the taste of hospital food on my lips, and the sound of the snore-gurgle my father makes as he slips in and out of sleep in his bed, I thought I would write this.

This is about my daddy, as much as I can write right now.

I have a picture of me, about age two, riding a tricycle in front of our garage.  The tricycle was purple, though the faded picture makes it look like it was teal.  I am smiling  and being all cheesy for the camera.  My brother, just a baby of maybe 8 months old, is in a wind up swing, sleeping, in just a diaper, looking like he is about to fall out. Sitting in a lawn chair, in the shade created by the open garage door is my dad. Shorts. White T-shirt. Sandals. He is smiling at something, maybe something I just did, or maybe something my mom just said that made him laugh.  I only assume she is the one taking the photo.

In all the years since, as if this memory happened yesterday, this is how I see my dad. Happy.

My dad is the quiet one in our house.  Not a man of many words, though when he did say something, you knew to listen.  His voice and laugh was deep, and you could hear it across rooms, and baseball fields, and lakes.  It spoke volumes in one or two words, knowing right away his mood, or need. Praise was limited, but if given was meant.  There was never anything false in his words. You knew exactly what he meant.

He was not classically affectionate, and I would not need more than one hand to tell you how many times he felt comfortable with hugs, especially in public.  It was not his way.  I often wished it was because the couple of times I remember holding his hand, I knew I was safe. 

He showed love in ways you had to search for. 

He assembled and stained a desk for Christmas the year I was 10.  I still have that desk, and (when not being used as a catch all for laundry) has been a place I have read at, and written in my journal, and sat at just to ponder the world for years and years.  I think about seeing that desk for the first time, with the ribbon on the matching chair, every time I sit down.

He washed my car.  Grumbling the entire time about how I never took care of my stuff, and why did he have to do all the work.  It was spotlessly detailed, interior windows cleaned, vacuumed, and wax applied.

He took me to dinner on my 15^th birthday.  Just me.  We went together to the fanciest restaurant I knew at the time, and alone because one of the few things we had in common was that we both loved crab legs.  We ordered them and ate them by the bucket, which should have been a dead give-away the place was not all that fancy with its plastic bibs, and he ordered me a glass of wine, and then a second one, without even flinching.  We laughed, and tried to talk, maybe the only time we ever really did, and I walked out feeling deliciously happy, and maybe a little drunk.  It was fine.

He whipped me with a belt one time, for lying and being hours late, then cried more than I did because of it.  He never hit me again.

I only ever saw him cry two other times.  Once the day his father died, and once the day my son died.

He was a really good swimmer, and although he threw me in the lake off the swimming barge once when I am sure I was whiny and scared, he swam behind me all the way back to shore, just out of my reach.  I remember throwing sand at him when we got there I was so mad.  He still brought me a towel.

He made me do yard work. 

He liked to barbeque.

He was wicked skilled at horseshoes. And cribbage.

He built me a toybox at some point before I remember, and put a bunny decal on the front because supposedly I liked bunnies.  I have that toybox.  I refinished it back when my children were too little to remember, but I didn’t cover up the bunny.  It lives in my living room.

The most gentle I ever remember my dad being is when he became a grandfather.  My daughter had him wrapped around her little finger.  She could crawl on his lap any time she wanted.  She could get him to read any book she wanted.  She could give him kisses and hugs and he didn’t flinch. And she could make him smile just by being in the room.  For her (though maybe for other kids too, but not really) he worked the Easter Egg hunt every year, and would point out for her the “hidden” eggs.  My son, the ever crabby baby, could still crawl up on Papa’s lap, and they would watch TV together, both stretched out on the recliner.  My dad taught my son to love baseball.

Every memory I have right this minute, as I see my father struggle, reminds me how much I have loved him, do love him, will love him.  With all the imperfection, kept at bay, I can honor the parts that were and are really good, without any smoke and mirrors to what wasn’t perfect. I can do that right now.  Because there is a complete full life to know before I fall apart. And so much more to remember that is not limited to these final moments.   

This is just the first page, before I forget.

Crackerjacks and Insulin

Last week, my father spent five nights in the hospital.

It was not the first time this year he was there, and I have no doubt it will not be the last.  He is 84.  He is diabetic.  He has had colon cancer removed.  He has a heart issue that can best be described as failure from an unknown cause.  He has severe back pain from years and years of climbing in and out of a dump truck and using the heavy foot-operated pedals to do his job.

He was a heavy smoker for almost 60 years, quitting only after his heart doctor could not hear his heart with a stethoscope through the congestion in his lungs. I think that might have something to do with all the shortness of breath, but no one wants to say that because he quit 13 years ago, and no one wants to admit that crappy choices for decades could have anything to do with right now.

And right now, well, that is all we are concerned with.  Comfort, prolonging, and more comfort.

Our conversations while I visited him in the hospital usually revolved around his medical condition, his medications, and his daily routine.  And baseball.  Always baseball.  So while looking up the scores for the day before’s games, we talked about the nose bleeds.  While comparing pitching stats, we talked about sugar levels.  While watching the play from third for out number two, we discussed how to get in and out of the shower, and if we need to install grab bars, or ramps for the outside stairs.

He did not want to have any of these conversations. I don’t blame him, I didn’t want to have them, either.  We will need to have more because my mom is exhausted, and worried, and couldn’t possible lift him to help him get to the bathroom if it comes down to that.  Right now he is home, and stable.  But he is tired, so tired.

In the midst of all this conversation about health and baseball, the one thing my dad did want to talk about was me, my kids, and what, in his opinion, I am not doing right.

It took all my effort not to yell at him, or walk out. Instead, I listened to him say that my house repairs are behind, my yard work and fence needed to be taken care of and made presentable, and how he had not, in his entire life, ever taken more than a two-week a year vacation.

All those things are true.  I probably should finish putting in my baseboards, and replacing the sink and toilet in the Master bath.  I probably should pull out the dead plants in my front yard, and take the ugly watering hoses to the dump.  I probably should care that I don’t have a lawn, nor will I be winning any Yard-of-the-Month awards from my city. I actually feel blessed that they have not ticketed me for leaving my garbage cans on the street for days after the regular pick up.  What is not true is that I have any regrets that I take my kids on vacation to wherever we can go at every opportunity I have.

I knew, as my dad was complaining about my yard, and my garage, and about my vacation choices, that he was not really looking for me to say anything back.  He wasn’t even really mad at me about what I was doing, and why.  I don’t think he was really expecting me to suddenly like yard work (I haven’t in 48 years, so not like I will be starting that up any time soon), or for me to put a priority on painting my hallway. I will get to it, eventually.  I always do.

 And while I know that he thinks I should probably not be taking my kids to Kansas City in July (our next road trip) in favor of spending the money on a weed-whacker and a good handyman, I don’t think it was about me at all.  I think the entire conversation was about him.  About his decisions.  And about him being scared that I was judging his choices, for a perfect yard and no vacation, as something missing in my life, and maybe, in the long run, something he missed in his, by doing something different.

I will admit, I made that choice a long time ago, to not be him.  Not because of any judgment I have that his choices were wrong, but just that I wanted something different with my children.  I am grateful for the home and the security of my parent’s house.  I never wanted for anything, all  of the basic needs taken care of, though we were not rich.  I had clothes and food. I had a bike.  I always had gifts and parties for birthdays and Christmas.  I also have zero memory of a movie with my parents, or a museum with them, or a trip to a national monument or place of interest.

Every year we went on vacation.  Two weeks of camping, and either fishing or hunting.  The camping involved a trailer and cooking every meal.  The fishing was trout, either stream-fishing or fly-fishing.  The hunting was deer or boar, but since I never went out with my dad, I don’t actually know what that was about.  My experience of it (contrary to the memories my brother is sure to have) is that I sat around a lot, bored because I never brought enough books or paper or art supplies, in the dust and heat of whatever remote campsite near a lake that we were at.  I should sound more grateful that I was allowed nature, and any form of recreation, but I feel like I missed something.

The memories I have of vacations with my dad is of him, as I watched from the bank, as he fly-fished.  I have one intense memory of a wasp nest swarming because we parked our trailer a little too close. I remember the rifle shot that echoed from the hillside as my father and brother went after a deer that was illegally shot by someone else, and was now suffering and dying because of it.  They never fired a shot, but the sound is still in my ears, and I am still a slight bit frightened by the memory some 35 years later.

I have never been anywhere else with my parents.  No skiing trips.  No drive-ins.  No city cafes.  We never took a ferry.  We never went on a train.  We never took a trolley, or a gondola, or a horse.  We did the same thing, every year, once a year, for as long as I can remember.  There is no judgment about if this is right or wrong.  It is just is.  I wondered why the memory I have of losing a fish from the line one year is so strong , when it struck me that it is just because there were no other memories to hold on to that could make this small one less significant.

I picked something different for how I spend my time with my kids.  We have been to Yosemite, and Washington DC.  We have taken a train to Denver and a plane to Seattle.  We have visited monuments and historical places, and taken ferries to offbeat islands with weird little artist’s colonies.  We have gone to plays and movies and festivals and concerts.  We have road-tripped, and accidentally met potters who gave us pieces of clay to play with, and poets who wrote haiku for us about the color of our shirts, and musicians who sang us songs they just made up, and laughed at all the silliness of the moments as we let ice cream melt on our chins from homemade stands on the side of the road.

So back to my dad.  I did not point out to him that I was making specific different choices based almost solely on the lack of choices I had as a child.  That would have been cruel. And I am not cruel, I love my dad.  So I sat there, and listened as he planned how I was going to have to buckle down and get my lawn planted, and how I should not be driving my kids half way across the country in the heat of summer.  I knew he was not judging me with his words.  He was, in fact still taking care of me, like he did when I was little, knowing maybe that his time to do this is getting short.  He didn’t want compliance.  He wanted validation that his choices would be remembered.

I get that, dad, don’t worry.  If there is nothing else we can ever say to each other amidst all the talk of medicine and home safety, we will always have baseball.  As a matter of fact, on that road trip you don’t want me to take to Kansas City this summer we will be going to a Royals game.  Stay out of the hospital long enough for me to tell you all about it when we get back, so we can have some more memories together, with baseball at the center. I'll bring the Crackerjacks.