Be the change you want to see.

Eighteen years ago yesterday, my dad breathed his last at around 3 am in a room in Kaiser's Morse Avenue branch in Sacramento. Mom and I got a phone call somewhere around 5. I figure now, that was when the shift change happened, and that's when a nurse discovered he'd passed. ( possible trigger warning for description of death circumstances )

I find myself using words and phrases he commonly used. It's a surprise almost every time. I'm mostly going grey like he did... very silver at the temples, though in the last couple of years I'm getting more salt-and-pepper scatters like my mom had.

Mom called me yesterday and told me again how much she loved me and appreciated the way we had each other's backs during his final illness, and how supportive I was as she transitioned from mother and wife to widow... "the start of her independence" she called it. And it was, no kidding, I mean after years of nursing him as he got weaker and crankier, she recovered a lot of her personal power. She really blossomed after we both did a bit of recovering from the shock. She got her master's degree, she researched real estate and bought a house on her own with the proceeds from the house we grew up in...

I did pretty well myself. Had a job for eight years as a junior high librarian. It was good work, worthy work, with a visible end-result and an obvious positive impact. Worked there from when I was 24 till I was 32. My brother was on track to graduate college in '94, I got a good job, mom had a good job, Jenny had a good job... and it's always felt like Dad sort of waited till all of us were kind of "settled" before he let go. I'm glad of that. Bit weird taking bereavement leave after only being two months in a job.

Still struggling with some of the secrets he kept and the ways he functionally lied to us about who he was and what he felt and what he had experienced as a child. Formative stuff, you know? Stuff that influenced the fact that he barely touched us growing up, for good or for ill. I didn't know I was a huggy person for 18 years basically... having a boyfriend made it okay to ask for touch, and I didn't know I'd been touch starved ... my whole life, I think.

I don't even think I can scratch the surface of explaining the depth and quality of the hole he left in my life... not only from his dying but his inability to connect to us at a heart level. He was always distant and funny and sarcastic, and you wanted his approval SO BADLY but never could figure out how to get it. THAT messed me up until only three or four years ago... He was so smart and so many people liked, even loved him. But he was adversarial with us kids, not cooperative. And Scotty, the Only Son, was the favored child. And now Scotty's dead too. (six years and two weeks ago.)

I have all these ideas of what a father "should be", you know, like ideally? And, at 42 I'm still shocked when I see dads being affectionate in public with their kids, carrying their kids or horsing around, and dads being actually tender with their child invariably makes me cry. Dammit. *wipes face* Because we really didn't get that. At least not that I can remember. I hope someday I can sit with my sister and try to get her take on how that all went down, I just remember being unbearably lonely all the time and basically hiding in my books, on the front porch or up a tree, because dad "liked to tease"...

At this point in my processing and life, at this distance, I can say that it's certain dad was hurting for most of his life. I'm pretty sure his dad hit him, it's sort of "what was done back then" but also, my grandma divorced my grandpa, in the early 50's when You Didn't Do That... She's gone too, gone since I was eleven, I can't ask her why. I'm not very close to my aunts but I would like to ask them if they knew what was going on and why Grandma left.

At this point that's all such old news it's moldering. And I do really have to do The Work based on the Here And Now. What I have is What I have. That's it. That's depressing, but that's it.

Usually What I Have is enough. I don't have quite enough resources to do anything further with Dad at this moment, so I'm just going to lay this here and leave it. My heart feels a bit flat and stony at the moment, I know that will pass though, particularly if I let myself have a good cry and go Do Other Things Instead of Brooding. Heh.

I think it might be a night for crochet and candlelight meditation. After the yoga and the groceries.