Two Sides, One Coin

Tomorrow hubby and I will attend the wedding of two friends.

The bride is someone we’ve known only a couple of years, a bright young woman who works as a school teacher, owns a powder-puff pooch, likes (strike that:  LOVES) the color pink (and ice cream), and has more going for her than her soon-to-be-inlaws seem to think.  (We all have faults.  Cut the girl some slack.)  The groom has been part of our family since 2002, when he came to us as a newbie Coast Guard cadet — eighteen and uncertain, but determined to do well.  He’s now a Lieutenant and one of my favorite people in the whole world, a gentleman I consider an adopted son, a man of honor and integrity who sometimes (often) puts up with more shit than he ought because he thinks he should.  He’s good people and we love, admire, and respect him.  Tomorrow will be a celebration of their separate lives as well as the life they plan on forging together.  It’ll be a reunion of sorts as well, as many of our former Coastie family are coming into town for the nuptials.  I anticipate belly aching laughter and an out-pouring of love.

On the other arm of the balance is the news I received yesterday that two friends are ending their 20-year marriage.  Sad news, heart-numbing, although not entirely unexpected.  (One had only to see them in each other’s company to know that something was amiss even before the male partner confided to me their troubles.)  I’ve been divorced.  So has my hubby, both of my sisters, my parents (from prior spouses, not from each other), a niece, two of my bestest friends…well, it’s not like it’s uncommon.  Sometimes ending a marriage is the best road to take.  Sometimes (as in the case of one sister and her alcoholic husband) it’s the only road to take and still remain safe and sane.  But it’s never easy — or it shouldn’t be.  Marriages weren’t meant to be “throw-away” affairs.  You don’t toss aside a marriage over a minor disagreement or annoyance (or you shouldn’t).  You end it when there’s no other choice.  You end it when to stay in it means the death of something important inside of you.  And sometimes you end it when you still very much love the person you’re married to.

It’s a mess.

My friend Andrew, who is getting married tomorrow, once asked me, “How do you know for certain that someone is the Right One?  How do you know it will last?”

You don’t.  There are no guarantees.  If you’re wise, you and your beloved will enter marriage with the very best of intentions and with your eyes wide open to each other’s strengths as well as weaknesses.  (Hopefully you’ve already worked out that you can live with the petty annoyances we all bring to a relationship, and you’ve come to terms with the reality that you’re not going to always have everything your own way.)  You do the best you can.  Some days that best is awesome.  Other days, it’ll suck swamp water.  But there is no certainty that any marriage will survive.  Too many things can crop up to challenge it — minor stuff, sure, but major stuff like infidelities, the death of a child, and illness.  (One friend, whose husband broke his back 20 years ago and has been in a wheelchair ever since, is still asked, every now and then, why she has remained with him all these years, why she didn’t cut and run, why she chose to “tie” herself to a “cripple.”  Her response is never the crack over the head the questioner deserves.  Instead, she calmly states that she loves him and believes in her marriage vows.  Is their life together perfect?  Far from it.  But they make it work.)

I equate the decision to marry (or divorce, for that matter) like the “leap from the lion’s mouth” taken by Indiana Jones in the movie “The Last Crusade.”  Indy stands at the brink of a chasm.  He cannot go backward or his father will die.  But if he goes forward (as he must), he will die.  Or will he?  It’s a moment of profound faith, trusting that no matter how things look, if you take that step, something will catch you.

Chum

   Chum:  cut or ground bait dumped into the water to attract fish.  (Think of the scene in JAWS where Chief Brody is ladling fish guts into the water to draw in the shark.)  That’s what my mother has become in the three weeks since my father’s death.

Bait.

Received a call from my eldest sister today.  (She and I and my niece are sharing caretaker duties regarding Mom, keeping an eye on her, serving as companions.)  I don’t have all the details, but apparently some scam artist showed up and passed himself off as someone contracted to repair the flashing on my mother’s chimney.  No repairman has been called for such a task, but she didn’t know that.  She paid the guy $350 and called my sister (thank God), who immediately called the bank to stop payment and notified the police.  As luck would have it, the bastard had gone right to the bank to cash the check and they got him.

I hope he fries in Hell.

This bothers me on a lot of levels because it could have gone so much worse.  My sweet, innocent mother let this stranger into her home.  He could have extorted more money from her, beaten her, terrorized her, even killed her.

I’m not sure how we’re going to handle this.  For now, Mom must understand that she’s not to open the door to ANYONE.  Age and infirmity have already made her something of a prisoner in her own home, so we hate the thought of compounding it.  The solution may be to sell the house and have her move in with either my eldest sister or myself.  This is something we’ll have to figure out…and soon…because the sharks smell blood on the water.

Postscript

A ladybug standing on a leaf. Photograph taken with a Canon D60 camera Türkçe: Uğur böceği. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I wrote in my last post, my dad died on May 8.  In the six-to-eight months prior to his death, Dad finally gave up his driver’s license.  It was a momentous occasion on many levels.  For most of us, we felt a huge rush of relief that this then 93-year-old man with failing eyesight, bad hearing, and poor reflexes would no longer be behind the wheel of a two-ton automobile.  For him, it was the last relinquishment of his independence and a situation to be mourned.

Since he and Mom no longer needed the car, Dad decided to sell it.  I put it on Craig’s List, but wasn’t surprised when it garnered little response.  Although the car is in good shape, it’s a boat of a 1993 station wagon with almost 100,000 miles on it.  There was no way Dad would get the $2400 he wanted, let alone the $1800 or so recommended by Blue Book.  So the vehicle languished.

With Dad’s death, all bets were off.  We offered the car at a much reduced price (receiving no takers) and debated the idea of donating it to charity.  Then Fate intervened.  My sister’s best friend knew of a family in Vermont with several children (including at least one with disabilities) who needed a vehicle but could not afford one.  Would we be willing to donate the car?

YES!

I’m not sure Dad would  have been happy with our decision, but the rest of us were quite pleased.  On the day before the father of the family came to get the car, my husband made sure it was running smoothly and I went over it pulling out any personal items belonging to my parents.  There wasn’t much — my father (OCD in so many ways) kept the interior of his car as clean and well-maintained as he did the exterior.  I left behind the few folded road maps and all things pertaining to the car itself.  I removed several pairs of sunglasses, a plastic urinal (poor Dad), and a few Swiffer sheets they used for cleaning the inside of the windshield.

Then it happened.

Beneath the driver’s seat (what I always thought of as “Dad’s Seat” even though Mom drove the car as well), I found a discarded brown paper sack, folded and flattened and crinkled.  Assuming it was garbage, I was about to chuck it in the trash when something in me suggested I open it.  Inside was a pair of earrings, silver hooks with a line of beads descending, ending in a ladybug-shaped charm.  I stared at them, dumbfounded.  What on earth?

All we can figure is this:  At some point, back when he could still drive, Dad must have seen these, thought Mom would like them, and bought them for her.  Then he stuffed them under the seat (maybe because she was traveling with him and he wanted them to be a surprise) and forgot about them.  Never mind that I can’t remember my father buying anything for anybody more than three or four times.  (At Christmas, he let Mom shop for the rest of us and gave her money to buy whatever she wanted.  I never knew if he was worried he’d buy the wrong thing or didn’t want to bother with shopping.)  I have a hard time imagining him finding the impetus to purchase these earrings, but where else did they come from?

At any rate, Mom calls them her “gift from beyond the grave” and wears them often, along with his wedding ring on the gold chain I slipped it onto the night before he passed.  Those things bring her peace at a unpeaceful time and lay a warm hand on her aching heart.  In the end, it doesn’t matter if Dad bought the earrings or not.

But I like to think he did.

Oh, Dad

I’ve been trying to decide how to begin this post.  In the end, straight to the point seems best.

On May 9, 2012, at roughly 11:30 pm, my father died.

I’ve had a couple of weeks to get used to the idea, so it doesn’t seem entirely surreal to see those words appear on the screen and yet…well, let’s just say I haven’t  quite gotten comfortable with the notion of a world without Howard Limbacher in it.

It’s not like I haven’t had plenty of time to get my head around the idea that he was going to die at some point.  The man was 94 years old, after all, and encumbered with apnea, respiratory affliction, diabetes,  and high blood pressure.   As a result of his circulatory issues, his legs were huge with edema, blistered and weeping fluid like a squeezed sponge as he tottered from place to place, held up by his walker and (I’ve come to realize) sheer will-power.  He had bed sores, could not sleep laying down because he could not breathe in that position, was in constant pain from bad knees grinding bone against bone, and humiliated by incontinence.  More than once, he spoke of his desire to die and the allure of suicide.  (No one would have blamed him had he done it.)  He worried about my mother, touched by dementia, and what would become of her if something were to happen to him.  The last several years of his life were sustained by his determination to not leave her before he was forced to.

Dad was an intensely private individual even with family, so in many respects I didn’t know him at all.  In fact, I’ve gained more insight into the man in the two weeks since his death than I ever had when he was alive, which makes me immensely sad.  Details of his life were few, sketched in seemingly on whim or in an unguarded moment rather than by a desire to share his thoughts and feelings.  Snapshots of his childhood show a slightly pudgy blond-haired angel of a boy who grew to love his involvement in 4-H.  (One of his proudest moments was meeting Eleanor Roosevelt.)  He dreamed of becoming a dairyman and owning a farm, but that dream died, a casualty of World War II and, perhaps, other things.  He spoke fondly of a few relatives, beloved grandparents, aunts, and uncles he rarely saw.  He was intensely proud of his time in the US Army and as a reservist.

We were not close.  When I was very small, he seemed a shadowy character not quite present in our everyday life, being always busy either at his job in an Albany bindery (which he hated), or with duties around the house, or asleep in his chair before the television.  When overtime was offered, we saw him even less.  I was called a “Daddy’s Girl,” but I’m not sure what it really meant.  I have a vague recollection of following him around, wanting to be with him and involved in what he was doing, but Dad wasn’t much inclined to include a child in his chores…or anything else for that matter.  He taught me to play checkers and helped me build a wooden pot stand for my mother, but not much beyond that.  The rare things we did together (fishing, bowling) were done because he wanted to do them.  (His constant push for my own perfection in both sports eventually caused me to leave them behind forever.)  He never read to me but once (forced into it by my mother when I asked and he refused), never played with me but once (a three-way game of baseball toss during which he threw only to my pal David but never to me, until I left the game in frustration), and never attended a single concert or play or any other school event in which I was involved.

It’s difficult to grow up under those conditions and not come away with the idea that your dad doesn’t much care for you.

He expressed resistance to my growing up — telling me to do so more than once, but not liking it when I moved in that direction.  My first foray into lipstick was met with disgust and derision and a refusal to let me kiss him on the cheek.  God knows what he thought on those few occasions when I was asked out on a date.  When I strove for independence, he squashed me flat.  He pried into my private journals and read my early stories without permission on the authority that  it was his house and he could do as he liked.  If I was in the middle of a television program he didn’t enjoy, he would haphazardly change the channel to something he wanted to view.  If I was listening to music and he wanted to watch television, he summarily turned off the stereo.  There was no sense of respect.  It was Howie’s Way and no other and he bitterly resented anything that interfered with his plans.

What made him this way?  I’ve no concrete ideas, only clues.  Years ago, when I was living in Pittsburgh, he and my mother came to visit for a long weekend and he told me that his mother was very hard on him, playing the game I call “Kiss Me, Kick Me.”  You know what I mean — love you one minute, destroy you the next.  Back and forth it went — he was her little darling who didn’t measure up to his brothers, her golden boy who was stupid.  (That particular lesson was so instilled in his heart that only a few days before he died he mentioned how stupid he was.  That’s a word I hate above all others and it galls me to think he labored under it all these years, unable to break free.)  He hinted at physical abuse as well as mental.  Who knows what went on?  But it left its mark, scars that never healed.  It drove Dad inside himself to hide, showing his inner core not at all, only an unyielding exterior.  He was hard on me, hard on us all, pushing away all attempts at affection.  I was in my thirties before he ever said “I love you” to me (on the occasion of my divorce from my first husband).  I near-about passed out from astonishment.

Yet something — someone – unexpected emerged in the three days before his death.

When the doctor called and told me to gather the family, that Dad was in respiratory failure, that this was it, my eldest sister and I looked at each other.  “We’ve been expecting this for 20 years,” she said.  “But I’m not ready.”  I knew what she meant.  Dad’s health had been bad for a long time.  Often, he was so downright hateful to us that we longed for his passing.  Now here it was, the stepping-off point, and we weren’t ready.

Our family has seen a lot of death, and some of us deal with it better than others.  A great-grandson estranged from my father for the past year came to the hospital despite his fear and stood at the foot of his grandfather’s bed, tears streaming down his face, unable to move forward.  I leaned toward my father.  “Dad?” I said.  “Luke’s here.”

Dad, already beginning the slide into the pipeline where the real work of dying occurs, opened his eyes.  “Hi, Lukey.”

Luke moved to the side of the bed.  “Hi, Grandpa.”

Dad’s eyes slid closed, but he smiled.  “You’re a good guy, Luke.”

“You’re a good guy, too, Grandpa,” Luke choked out, having finally heard the words he needed to free his heart.

It went on in that way.  Oh, par for the course, Dad interjected his share of jibes and jabs, some of them not altogether nice.  Even as death approached, he couldn’t quite make an Ebenezer Scrooge sort of turn-around.  But he held my mother’s hand and winked at her and they kissed like teenagers.  He told us he was happy and pain-free, at peace and ready to go.  He gave me his wedding ring to put on a chain for my mother (his wife of almost 62 years) to wear around her neck “So I will never leave her.”  She leaned forward then and put a hand on his arm.  “Is there any way I can go with you?” she asked with extreme sweetness.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.  Who was this guy?!

Dad slipped away in the wee hours of the night, alone, as I expect he wanted it.  His funeral was simple, straight-forward, and to the point.  No wake.  No embalming.  No flowers except what others sent.  A plain pine box draped in an American flag.  At the veteran’s cemetery in Schuylerville, NY they offered up a gun salute of three volleys, played “Taps,” and presented his flag to my mother.  And my niece Ellery — all ten months of her — threw back her head, pursed her tiny lips, and howled like her beagle Gracie.  It was a fitting tribute.

Now we move on, reconfiguring our lives around a missing piece that in some ways has always been missing.  I’ve had some in-depth discussions with my mother about Dad since he died and it’s a funny thing — before dementia, she probably would have shrugged away his behavior and said (as she did many times), “Well, you know your father.  That’s just how he is.”  The conversation would have gone nowhere.  Now, with her memories faded to sepia, it’s as if some introspective door has been allowed to open.  She explained to me that, yes, he could be hard and, yes, he was private even with her — but it was a carapace to protect that soft center where that little boy still lived, wanting to reach out and be loved, and give love, and unable to do so.  He was tough, she explained, to make us excel.  Unfortunately, he never tempered that toughness with affection, and so it back-fired on him in many ways. setting us apart.

“But he loved you very much,” she told me.  “He was so proud of you.”

I started to cry.  ”Why didn’t he ever say so?”

She shrugged.  “I don’t know.  I guess he couldn’t.”

And that, in the end, is where my real grief (and anger) comes from.  It’s difficult to mourn a man I hardly knew; hard to come to terms with a father who, yes, gave of himself in sweat equity, but never said I was smart or pretty or that he was proud to be my dad.  I mourn what we could have had…and never did.  I mourn what was stolen from us, and the gulf that opened between us so long ago and could not be bridged, no matter how I tried, because he stood on the farther shore with his arms folded across his chest, afraid to reach out, afraid to trust even me.

 

 

Shameless

It’s been pointed out to me that I’ll blog about anything, that no subject is taboo.  I think that’s true.  I hope so.

Intertitle from the Showtime television series Shameless Français : Logo original de la série télévisée Shameless (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I choose a topic, my intent is to come at it honestly.  Sometimes I think I choose certain subjects because of their fear quotient, their level of personal difficulty, just to discover if I have what it takes to stare them down.

The things I choose to write about (as well as the things I say) occasionally piss people off.  Ah, well.  It’s a writer’s job to elicit emotion.  I don’t write for shock value.  I’m not interested in getting someone’s panties in a twist, but if I do, well, maybe they needed twisting.

I write because some things need to be said.  Like as not, I’m exploring my own interior landscape, poking into holes where dark things reside, sharp teeth bright against the gloom.  It’s funny, though…those moments when I write most for myself (to lance some boil left too long untended) are the moments when I connect most deeply with others.  (At least that’s what they tell me.)  There’s a commonality to the pain we experience as human beings.  Some readers become outraged by what I’ve written, but I suspect that’s because I’ve struck too close to the bone, to a personal pain they’re having trouble dealing with.  Others seem relieved to finally have it out in the open, even if the “it” is my personal issue and not theirs.  Being able to say, “Oh, yes, I’ve been there” makes you feel less alone in the maelstrom of life.

We’re taught that it’s not good manners to air our laundry in public, that we should remain prim and polite and quiet.  Maybe that’s one of the things I love most about middle-age:  by this point, I just don’t care.  I spent far too many years with my mouth sewn shut, my ears stopped up, my eyes blinded.  Be good, do as your told, take care of everyone else.  If you feel pain, don’t show it, don’t talk about it.  Denial, denial, denial.

No more.

The words are mine alone.  If I feel like talking about something, I will.  With words, I am free.

 

FOUND IT!

So, I’d just published a blog based on a writing prompt that drew on memories from July 1990.  And in looking online for a picture of a calendar of that month, I came across this:

and I knew screw the memories of that stupid failed marriage.  THIS was the memory that spoke to my heart from that time.

I was standing in my then mother-in-law’s kitchen in the Chelsea section of New York City, talking with her, my husband, and my brother-in-law when the news came on the radio that Jim Henson had died.  The brother-in-law (a dweebish teenager at the time) had the nerve to laugh because for some stupid reason he found it funny that Henson had died from complications of the flu (as it was reported).  I nearly decapitated him.  For me, the news opened a chasm inside.

Sesame Street came along when I was a bit too old for such things.  My first experience of Henson and his Muppets (although I don’t believe they were called “muppets” yet) was Rowlf in his regular appearances on the Jimmy Dean Show:

and other variety venues.  (I was a kid when I first saw the Mahna-Manha song performed.  It still makes me laugh.)  I stayed a fan (a bit on the periphery, perhaps), but when The Muppets emerged and gained their own television program, I was hooked.  Not only were they funnier than hell (still are), but they are some of the sweetest, gentlest teachers we will ever know.

So that’s my memory from July 1990, the thing my heart knew:  That the Earth shook one day, leaving behind a Jim Henson-shaped hole that no one has ever been able to fill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRSptCfn5WY

Search Me

A writing prompt came under my eyes this morning:  “What did you know in your heart one day in July 1990.”  (Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend from Far Away).  Is she joking?  Pluck a 22-year-old memory out of thin air like that? <snaps fingers>

Still…what can I recall?

Let’s see.  July 1990.  I was 33, three years away from meeting the man who would become my second husband.  Two-and-a-half years from divorcing my first one which means (ugh) that we were still married.  1990 is before the move to Pittsburgh.  That happened in 1992.  We must have been living in Troy, NY, in the second floor apartment owned by our somewhat crazy, but good-hearted Texas-born landlord.

1990.  Five-and-a-half years into the marriage.  Could it be that July 1990 is when we briefly split, the moment when I finally admitted to my heart that I’d had enough and kicked him out, only to take him back a few months later…mostly because I felt sorry for him?  There was a certain sense of freedom in being cut loose, even for that short space of time.  I could breathe again.  What on earth made me decide that suffocation was the better route?  Well, obviously, I had more to learn.

God, I hate it when I’m dense.

But that’s when I knew (in my heart, like the prompt says) the marriage was over.  Oh, it would struggle on for almost another two years, but I knew it was damaged beyond repair…beyond any desire of repair…and carried that knowledge in my heart until a bright moment of epiphany (the crack of a single straw crushing a camel’s back) showed me there was no way to go but forward.