Shamrocks and Whiskey

I keep thinking about him, which is ridiculous, isn’t it? Since my family is so much more in tune with him going, right?

My father passed under a month ago. He was sick with cancer, not moving around so well, even when we saw him last July (before they had diagnosed him).

I raced back home to see him after spending the day before trying to get an overnight plane from Los Angeles to Omaha during their College World Series. He was alive then, and hanging on. I ended up flying into Kansas City and driving the two and a half hours, seeing a gorgeous sunrise, listening to satellite radio (jazz, classical, and indy), and drinking bad coffee all the way.

It was corny in a way, saying stuff like, “Come on, Dad, just hold on until I get there.” Right out of a movie. Yet I found myself saying it. And wishing it. Then actually convincing myself he’d be alive by the time I got to my parents’ house.

I walked in the door at 8am, wondering when we’d be going to the hospital. My Mom, reiterating what she’d assumed I’d already been told said, “Well, you know your dad passed away at 3:30. Jack’s on his way over here.” She could tell by my face that I did not know. It was news I wasn’t really prepared to hear. “Oh, sweetie, I thought someone called you.” She hugged me. But I wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready.

I keep saying, in my mind, that death is about all of us who are left behind. Dad is already gone on his great adventure, wherever that may be. But the sadness, longing, and paperwork belong to us. (Mom commented she knew why Indian women threw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre: to avoid the mass of paperwork that follows). And yet even trying to make this brief rationalization hasn’t been much comfort. In the weeks that have followed, I’ve thought about never seeing him again. And how sad that is, that I will not hear the voice of the man who raised me again.

Maybe this ties into my not exactly being a big believer in the afterlife. To me, this is it. And, I guess, I should figure it doesn’t make a damn whether there’s an afterlife or not. When I go, it won’t make any difference, will it? If there’s a place to go, we’ll go there. If not, we won’t. What’s so profound is the hole left here.

My family is still so much to me. They have been since I was created and we relied on each other for support during all those Air Force moves. To think of my mom without my father still breaks my heart, even though my mom is good with it. Perhaps because he spent so much time in that other room for so many months. (Someone commented wryly, “He just moved a little further away.”)

My dad would think I was wasting my time with all of this. He had his bouts with sadness, and he was a big softy under a very tough exterior, but he would say enough is enough. But I’m not ready to hear that. Again. I don’t want to let go and I’m terrifically unprepared for losing a person who is such a lynchpin in my life (his word, lynchpin).

I’ve thrown myself back into work, back into the garden, back into my family, where I belong. I’ve just gotten around to exercising for the first time since his death (okay, I went for a few walks around my home town), but I long for him. That’s probably the best word to use.

I could never think what it would be like to lose a spouse when you have young children at home, or, like our neighbor, lose your 26 year-old child in warfare. My father led a good life and lived to be 70. He tried his damnedest to create a family when the one his father created was ramshackle (my grandfather was an alcoholic man-about-town. When he died and was buried in the cemetery, my grandmother said, “Well, at least now I’ll always know where he is). He strove to rise out of that, and though the alcohol didn’t elude him, he was able to do his best to be fair, send us through school, support our family even during those times we were all on the other side of the fence politically.

The flowers and letters had flooded my parents’ house, and my mother feels inundated. But what a way to be snowed under, with gifts and thoughts of love celebrating what you’ve given to the world. My mom is looking in the checkbook register and figuring out just how much he gave away every year to charity, on top of the tithe he gave to the church. It was a lot. He gave to me in need. His old car when I moved to Los Angeles. Money to help my children go to a decent school. Honestly, I feel pretty much a skinflint in comparison.

I could go on and on. And I’m sure I will in the days and weeks and months to come. I know, as everyone says, the holidays are going to be hard.

I know it will end, and the sadness will cease to seem unbearable. And everything will be normal again, without him.

I guess like most things it just takes patience and time. Two things at which most of us are abysmal.

There's a lesson here somewhere, right?

A Year in Atwater

7.4.06

There are times when I do feel for the guy who wrote A Year in Provence, say for instance, when my whole house is being painted on July 4th and I’m trying to live normally while eight men whistle, sing, and joke in Spanish. It’s hard work for them, so I shouldn’t complain. But it’s hard to try to act normally when there is so much going on and it’s 84 degrees in the house.

The painter, Ricardo, comes from El Salvador, and is about the friendliest painter you’d ever long to find. He jokes, his English is great, and he believes all transactions are for the customer’s sake. I’d be hard pressed to find anyone so conscientious when it came to painting the house. He’d painted the three down the street from us, and now I know why he came so highly recommended.

There is, of course, that stuff you cannot avoid with workmen, the endless amount of trash, broken sprinkler (sigh), and trampled zucchini plant. The dust is the worst. We finally gave in and gave a quick dust today after fighting the urge over the last few days. Every day we would dust and sweep, only to come back and find a thick layer of dust everywhere. I’m just hoping it’s not full of lead.

We have cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. And all the cleaning we did just to get the dust off led us invariably to other areas. Wendy found the source of the weevil invasion, three loosely sealed bags of pizza dough that a friend had given us a month ago. Ridiculously, our friend Denise told Wendy we’d need an exterminator to get rid of them. I reassured her all that needed to be done was get rid of everything milled (flour, corn, etc.) that was filled with the suckers. Clean up, spray some of the least offensive Raid on the market, wash up, and be done with it. We had them all the time in Georgia. They’re a pain, but, hell, in the scheme of Bugdom, “merely a bagatelle” as they say.

We started into the closets, in the living room, under the beds. Lord knows why, it’s supposed to be our day off. But we’re stuck here, and we’ll be going swimming in a little while, so we both figured we might as well make the best of it.

The worst part is trying to keep your wits about you while surrounded by dust and general mayhem (as in, “Oh, no, no bother. Just a little dust, and muck, and everything not where I wanted it to be and the heat, and the flies and leaves coming in the windows. La dee da da…”)

Honestly, I have no idea how people (say the aforementioned author of …Provence) managed not to kill anyone while they tore up his house over the year. He actually had it easy. He didn’t have children, he was with his wife, he was wealthy, and he had a whole new country and culture to explore. Not to mention he was gleaning every interaction he had for the book he was going to write when the whole damn thing was over. Much like some of Wendy’s clients, who can afford to rent other houses while theirs are remodeled, it’s inconvenient, but it pales in comparison to folks like Wendy’s mother who moved her kitchen out onto the back porch for 6 months while new cabinets, stove, and flooring were put in.

This is a small job, and only going to take a week, but with everything else going on (my father’s death, asking our niece to leave after lying to us for what seemed like the 100th time) it’s been a tough run of it.

I guess other folks would probably just head off to the movies.

Either we’re not so bright, or we’re industrious.

Or, of course, we are out of our minds.

I’ll leave that up to you to decide.