I never expected it to be easy. As I've grown older and sidled closer to the outward bounds of middle age, I've been training myself in small bits for my life to come. I mean, programming or music is one thing - all it takes is a bit of study or research and a whole lot of practice and onward ye march. The more people you do it for, the less it really affects you. But how was I really going to feel when my daughters graduate high school (proud?), or I hit retirement age (relieved?), or as I've long suspected some pro sports team finally gives me that long-deserved call-up and I score the winning touchdown/goal (YEEEEEEA.... that's what I'm TALKIN about...) This is just how my mind works with these things, it's a technique I learned in Communication classes at Rutgers a long time ago, to practice things in your mind before they happen. At long last I am forced to admit: A Scout Is Always Prepared. Still, no matter how many times I've dealt with other relatives passing away, or how many times I turned it over in my mind, the one question I really dreaded even pondering was how will I feel when my parents die.
Unfortunately, I now know. I was fast asleep on 6/23/2008 at 4:30 AM PDT when the call came in from my sister. It's well over a month gone by but I can still relive every moment in my head. Your home phone rings, then stops, no message. Your cell phone rings, then stops. Your home phone rings again. Caller ID says it's Michelle. Shit. You know this is bad news. You prepared for this. You knew this would happen. You're not ready. She tells you as gently as possible that dad went into cardiac arrest and died. Remember, you even told yourself it would probably be him first. You're not ready. You fix things, dad was good at that and so are you, you even do it for a living. Every pore in you screams out to fix this. You're not ready. Michelle fights off tears and apologizes for waking you up but she figured you'd want to know immediately unlike your mom, decent to the end, who didn't want to bother you with it until she was sure you'd be awake. You're grateful to your sister. You envy her too. You want to be in the car with her and Max and Bella right now, driving to where you can fix this. But you can't fix this. This is not a machine. There is no undo, no screws to tighten, none of your magic applies. You're not ready. Hang up with Shell. Oh man, my poor mom. Ness is awake now too and wants to know what's wrong. You can't even speak because you're not ready. Saying the words out loud makes it real. After waiting a few seconds that feel like an eternity, you say it anyway. Why are you not crying like Shell? You call mom. She is in nurse mode, trying like you in her mind to fix it. She is not crying either. Then you realize something as shocking as the news you were just handed, and that's that you were never going to be ready for this at all.
My dad was 68, and from all outward appearances the picture of health for someone his age. He had lost a significant amount of weight recently and he was biking 10-15 miles a day. But dad had a horrible history of mistreating himself - he smoked for 30+ years, took prescription/non-prescription drugs he didn't need, and was very inconsistent with diet and exercise. There were times he was normal, times he'd obviously gotten off the wagon and onto the buffet line, and times he was so thin I barely recognized him. The autopsy was officially labeled as inconclusive, but there was evidence of some atherosclerosis that, coupled with the balance of stuff in his blood from all the fasting and binging, probably caused the heart attack he suffered to be fatal. So great, from my mother's side I'm gonna be diabetic, and from my dad's side I'm gonna explode like a whale in Oregon. One more bar I have to jump over from his life...
...which deserves an explanation. It was no secret that dad was not an easy guy to like. We fought constantly while living together....actually more like he yelled at a constant pace and I constantly huffed off after he blew out of steam. But in retrospect I can't really say I blamed him all that much. Dad had a really crappy life by some respects. He was given up to a foster home as an infant, his parents supposedly on the way to getting divorced and unable to care for him. They got back together and had a couple more kids before getting divorced for real, but did not take him back (or his brother). They even kept in contact with him all the way until he went into the Army at age 18, telling him all along that they were coming back for him....and they never did. His foster parents, Ella and Maurice Lewis, tried repeatedly to adopt him officially as their own but the Bodines would not let them. Granted, he had a great life with the Lewises, they were wonderful people and I didn't even know this full story until very recently. But I have two kids now, I am divorced with shared custody, and I see the hurt in their eyes when they can't be with one of their parents for even a few days. I cannot for the life of me imagine the crushing blow of abandonment a kid would feel, being told over and over again that "rescue" was on the way only to never have it show. What level of anger, what sense of loss would that fuel? My heart shatters into pieces just thinking about it because I love my daughters so much...
I think dad suffered from depression of some form, for which he never did get treated. People with depression display it in a myriad of ways - some can't get out of bed in the morning, some can't sleep at night, some can't keep a job, some lash out in anger at everything and everyone because it seems like the world around them just can't fathom their pain. Depending on the degree of their everyday functionality, some people aren't even aware they have this weight on their shoulders. I'm occasionally irritable because I want the world to operate at my speed, or if I get continuously derailed from my current fixated task, or sad if I get dealt a bad hand here and there, but I have no clue what it's like to feel truly depressed, I've only seen it from the outside.
And I now realize why. It's because dad was made out of something different. I have known plenty of people in my life that struggled with depression based in childhood trauma, and the reaction goes a variety of ways. I've known people who put a bullet in their own mouth for less than he went through. I've known some that have turned to drugs, or hurting themselves to numb out the pain. Or seen those that take it out physically, emotionally, sometimes even sexually on other people, more often than not the ones they love. Whatever dad did to himself, he did his damndest to make sure it didn't touch us. Even through all the shouting or the times I absolutely feared his anger, or the times when I saw the other dads at scout camp or sports games or concerts and felt that twinge of jealousy and hurt that MY dad wasn't there, I remember a dad who played catch with me, who dribbled a soccer ball around the backyard until I was big enough to knock him off it with ease, who tried valiantly to help me figure out the mysteries of hitting a golf ball straight even though he'd never swung a club in his life. Someone who struggled through an invisible illness that was killing him from the inside out and still managed to leave some positive memories. Someone who sat me down on more than one occasion and explained that my education was paramount, that I would thank him one day even it bored me to tears, and that above all else "don't you dare be like me" - a highly intelligent mind trapped in a shell that hated itself, underemployed and barely motivated. A lot of people know my mom is a hero for the great way she raised us, but for fighting off the demons and still being a dad...my dad deserves a hero's thank you as well. I know dad was proud of me and the things I achieved in my life - college degree, good-paying job, great kids - it was in his voice every time we went to CompUSA and he told the pimple-faced know-nothing clerk behind the counter "ask him, he should know, my son is in the INDUSTRY". Sadly, though, the thank you here is coming a bit late.
So I don't ordinarily do this, but this song called "The Gradual Process of Letting Go" I wrote is important enough to me that I want to talk about it a little bit. I usually like to let people read my lyrics and decide how it makes them feel, a lot like poets who fiercely guard their real secrets; sometimes you smile when someone nails it, and sometimes you smile when someone's reading of your work makes you a whole lot more brilliant than you intended :) But I figured this one is owed an explanation, and for that I've got to go back to the narrative.
I started writing this song around noon on 6/23, and continued off and on all day in between bouts of fierce house cleaning, calling my boss to tell them I'd be out that week, calling my ex to let her know I couldn't watch the kids, making travel arrangements, etc. When I finally finished all the cleaning and errands around 8 PM that night, the floodgates opened and I don't think I stopped crying for nearly an hour ("I guess I ran out of things to clean"). I went to NJ the next day and jumped into helping with funeral stuff, because keeping busy was the only way I was going to keep my sanity. We viewed the body privately the day after I got there. Mom didn't really think we should at first, but Shell was right - I needed that to really make it real before he was cremated and it was like it never happened. I needed to know he wasn't coming right back in the door at any moment, although part of me still feels that way. Christ, my poor mom. How must she feel, this was someone she'd been with every day pretty much since they were 13 or so. High school sweethearts. Married after his stint in the Army. Moved to the suburbs, had 2.0 children, yada yada yada. Sucks. So we all stuck together and kept busy together. And I gotta say this - my old neighborhood rocks. I really can't see that level of support happening in my hood here in Citrus Heights, even for people I know have lived here for 40+ years like my parents did. Being together with my family and friends for that week made the feelings of helplessness I felt out here in CA completely vanish. Gesellschaft be damned.
So the funeral happens on Saturday, and I'm due to fly out early Sunday morning like 6 AM. I get to see a ton of people there I haven't seen in 15-20 years. I don't see some I'm somewhat surprised by. I help the way I know how - setting up the audio for the music to play after the service is done. I wear his old Harley suspenders in tribute under my suit jacket. Michelle gets up and reads this great blog entry she'd written the night before - you can read it here, I think it's wonderful. A couple others get up and say things as well, including my godfather Jack Hill (as in who the hell knew Jack was that f-in cool??!!!) As I sit there listening, my mind is racing with things I could be saying if I stood up there. But pretty much everything I came up with was either too jokey or too much of me trying to get attention for myself like I always do in front of a crowd of people. Plus Michelle really nailed it and quite honestly I didn't want to burnish that moment for her or my parents in the least. Some examples :
- the "hero" bit from before, with some added details
- "After dad got through the stream of obscenities about this thing since he didn't want a funeral, I think he would have liked it....except he'd say these mains need to be just above ear level, we need a center speaker up here on the cross, stick two side fills and two surrounds in the back, hollow out this altar and jam in a subwoofer, BAM....we're good to go...."
- turning around to the Reverend mid-sentence and saying something like "damn, it's hard to keep this clean up here, isn't it..."
- knowing that dad loved comedy, I could tell everyone that they were taking this thing "far too seriously, and something must be done about it", at which point I would put on my shades, slide off the jacket in one shot, snap the Harley suspenders, snarl and do the Elvis finger-waggle while saying "a-thankyouvurymuch...."
Ok, you get the idea, not really appropriate. Being a front man for a popular band in Sac may have brought me out of my shell, but it really didn't teach me much useful verbage when it came to more sensitive public speaking. I highly doubt that "OKAY YOU MOTHER-F'ERS ARE YOU READY TO ROCK" is gonna go over too well in a church full of grieving people. I'm just sayin. The bottom line is I ended up sitting on my hands and not saying a damn word, just holding my mom's hand and being quiet. Afterward, I initially felt like I'd missed some opportunity with this, I even remember remarking to Shell at one point - "should I feel bad because I didn't say anything?" She said no, and she was right again that week (and soak it up cause it won't ever happen again you Old Shoo). In fact, it was very fitting. 15-20 years is a long time, and I'd undergone so many transformations in that period that I totally forgot what I used to be like - a nerdy room-rat Napolean Dynamite look-alike who never spoke a single word. Now once I get going you can't shut me up. Those people don't know me now, they know me from then, and by being quiet I actually did as expected. You guys know me now, so you're getting both barrels.
So you can apply a great deal of what I've told you to the song, with one big addition I'll make right now - this is not just a tribute to my dad, but a way to say thank you to both of my parents. I didn't get to say thank you this way to my dad before he died, but my mom is still here, she's heard the song and seen the video I made for it (below), and now it's your turn to hear that I am fully grateful for the life I was given and that my only regret in the least is that I can't be as close geographically to my old family as I am to my new one. I hope you enjoy this, and this is me signing off until the next time I damn well feel like posting. Love you all, good night.
THE GRADUAL PROCESS OF LETTING GO
I sat silently
Letting others speak for me
As hours pass me by
I still feel inside
Like I just owe you one last thing
You gave me all I ever wanted
Sip comfort from a screen
Just like you always did for me
To break the will
Of this cycle
Of never having anything
And getting all you never wanted
And for having been someone that I loveYou gave me all I ever wanted
Here's what it takes to let you go
This is the only thing that I know
Here's what it takes to let you go
And for having been someone that I loveAnd getting all you never wanted
Here's what it takes to let you go
This is the only thing that I know
Here's what it takes to let you go
You gave me all I ever wanted
And getting all you never wanted
Thanks for giving all for me
