Tag Archives: fathers

The Box — Day 3

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Another day, another question in my 10 days of self-evaluation and reflection, aka faux Rosh Hashanah.  The first two questions invoked some strong emotions as I answered the questions.  But, I suppose it wouldn’t lead to true reflection if the questions were soft ball questions.  Asking things like, “Where do you like to eat lunch?” doesn’t really make you think….or maybe it does if you have strong feelings about lunch, lunch foods, lunch habits, and / or lunch places.  I don’t, so the questions that the website 10Q sends are more in line with my expectations.

Question:  Think about a major milestone that happened with your family this past year. How has this affected you?

 

It took me awhile to think of an answer for this question because my first inclination was to try to think of milestone birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, births, etc. that took place this past year.  I couldn’t think of any that I would consider a major milestone.  But it was the 5th anniversary of my father’s death this year, and I relive that milestone each year.

My father’s death marked a major shift in the lives of my family, especially my father’s side of the family.  And while there has been healing, there will never be full recovery.

When I moved into my new house, I also moved a box of files that I brought home with me from Mexico, where my father had been living when he unexpectedly passed away.  Since the time of his death, this box has been sitting in closets, or workshops, or man caves.  Since we closed his estate last year, I had started to finally go through the box and decide what could be shredded and what needed to be saved.  After I moved, it was a project that I took on one weekend.

I only wish that my dad’s box looked so well. A trip from Mexico meant that it was very beat up.

I had looked through this box of files many, many times after my dad first died in an effort to find answers about his health and about his finances.  I knew that the box was a duke’s mixture of items — all the information on the house that he was in the process of buying when he died to a list of the #1 songs on the Billboard chart in 1965.  A single file folder could be a lot of nothing, or it could be full of valuable information.

I hadn’t gone through that box in a couple of years until this year.  And the simple act of cleaning out the box and sorting through his files had a deep impact on me.  I laughed out loud at some of the items that I found, like his application to his 50th high school reunion that took place a couple of months after he died.  On his application, he was asked to answer the question “What have you been doing the last 50 years?”  His response “Living life to the fullest and having a great time.”  Yep.  And he answered the question “What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?” by saying “Being the best at living life to the fullest and having a great time.”  Double yep.

I also felt incredibly sad as I found record of some of the times that he struggled, trying to make ends meet, and sometimes finding it hard to do.

Revisiting this box and its items, without the overwhelming grief that accompanied my first forays into its confines immediately after his death, allowed me to feel like I had spent the weekend communing in some small way with my dad.  That is a major happening, whichever way you look at it.

3 Years

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Today is the 3rd anniversary of my dad’s death.  It’s a weird day.  Because in many ways, it’s just like any other day.  I’ve come to work, I’m attending meetings, I’m eating lunch with friends.  Just another day.

But at the back of my mind is a niggle, a little “mind worm” that won’t go away, that today is different, that today is out of the ordinary.

I have no idea what I am going to write about, but I just know that I can’t let this day pass without marking it somehow.

My personal milestone moment, that 9/11 moment–you know, the moment where everything changes for you and you begin to mark time as “that happened before the event” and “that happened after the event” — my personal milestone moment happened after lunch when my mom called me at work to tell me that my dad had died earlier that day.  I remember exactly what I said to her.  I remember everything that I did from that point forward that day.  I feel like my life changed at that moment:  before she called, I had two parents; after she called, I didn’t have a father anymore.

My dad was one of a kind — funny, charming, generous, smart, talented, charismatic — but he wasn’t the kind of father that you saw on Andy Griffith or The Cosby Show.  He wasn’t around much while I was growing up and hardly at all in my adult years, and as a result my relationship with my dad seemed so very complex while he was still alive.  I spent hours and days feeling mad at, frustrated at, exasperated by, amused by, responsible for, and sometimes even rejected by my father.  These were tough emotions to handle and so I often just didn’t handle them — my response was to isolate myself from my dad for periods of time in order to avoid the “icky” feelings.  My dad, sensing something was wrong, wouldn’t do any better job at reaching out to me, so long periods of time could pass without us talking.  (I inherited my avoidance skills from him, as well as a lot of other traits.)

When he died, he and I hadn’t spoken for several months.  This has become one of the biggest regrets that I have — that I let, that we let, our shared habit of avoiding uncomfortable subjects keep us from talking to each other.

Because, what I have realized over the last 3 years is that, in the end, my relationship with my father wasn’t as complicated as I allowed it to become.  He loved me and I loved him.  The feelings that he could invoke in me could be complicated, but the love is uncomplicated.

I don’t feel guilty anymore for “not being a better daughter”.  I am not angry at him anymore for the things that  I think “he should have done”.  What I am is sad that we don’t have any more time together.  I can still hear his laugh, like it’s in my ear.  I can still hear how he said my name when he would first see me, drawing out the first syllable, “Criiiiiii-sty!”  I can see him sitting on the couch, watching TV, with his legs up and crossed, his hands folded up behind his head, his one foot wiggling (I do the same thing).  I miss him.

I think about him a lot, and one of the gifts that I have been given is that I think about him so often on beautiful days.  I delivered an eulogy (click here) for Tom at his memorial service and I used a quote from the Bible to describe how he lived his life:

Psalm 118:24  This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it

Tom lived his life as each day was a day for rejoicing and living fully.  Now, every beautiful, sunny day, this Bible verse automatically pops into my head.  And I think, “I love you, Tom.”

Home Improvement

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My husband, Matt, has been working diligently around the house the last four days. Mowing the lawn, trimming, grouting the new tile floor in the master bathroom, putting down new moulding around the floor in the bathroom. All this work in anticipation of listing our house with a realtor.
Matt is very handy with tools (one of the talents that Mama said a man should have). He is also very willing to try most any home improvement project. Everything that he has done at our house(s) so far has turned out really great, both in quality and in how it looks.
Whenever I see Matt working around the house (especially so successfully), I have to compare his abilities to my father’s. Home improvement was not his forte. I can understand why — he wasn’t taught home improvement growing up. I don’t remember my Grandfather ever attempting to fix a leaky faucet or unstop a toilet–his talents were elsewhere.
With my father, I vividly remember the time the back door lock jammed — the time I like to call “The Christmas Eve Door Incident”.
Obviously, the back door lock jammed. I don’t remember how long the lock had been broken, but apparently it hadn’t bothered Tom until Christmas Eve. Quite possibly, he was trying to sneak out to his car to gather Christmas presents (just recently purchased, I’m sure).
Thus, when the back door lock interfered with Tom’s plans, Tom decided to “fix” the lock. We’re not sure what Tom did, but a jammed lock ended up being a back door flung into the back yard. On Christmas Eve. In a small town where all stores close early on Christmas Eve and do not open again until the day after Christmas. In the mountains of North Carolina, where it tends to get cold in December. You get the drift that this wasn’t the most convenient time to have your back door in the middle of the back yard.
This ended Tom’s ventures in home improvement — to our relief. I have to admit that one of the (many) reasons that I fell in love with Matt was his ability to fix things. I know with him that the cold air will never come in.