Losing You, Becoming Me

A little over two months ago, my father passed away. Dad was 76, had metastatic skin cancer, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and diabetes. He was ill, and he was old, and so it should not have been a shock to me. But it was. My father was the strongest, hardest working man I ever knew. He was ageless. I thought he’d be here forever, too stubborn and bull-headed to listen to God even. Losing him was a sudden thing, a surprising eruption of emotional chaos that has left me grief-stricken and grasping.

My father had very specific ideas about the world, and about his place in it. He was often poorly connected to reality. He simply thought things should be a certain way, and that was that. We called it “The World According to Jim.” He was a dreamer, and he passed that down to me. He also had a very weird sense of humor. We all do. Thanks, Dad!

Dad was an odd man, a force of nature who I often struggled to understand in my younger years. He liked being in control, especially when he was spiraling out of control. I know now he was insecure and searching for a way to keep his anxiety in check. Dad was also capable of great generosity and understanding. He could be tender and caring when he chose to be. That became much more prevalent after he retired from work.

We were naturally close but too much alike not to clash. There was no shortage of discord among all six of us, beings my parents were both high-strung and conflict driven. But we seemed want to stick pretty close together for the majority of our adult lives. We always laughed a lot and managed to enjoy each other’s company. In fact, we remained close with our aunts, uncles and cousins as well. That is something I am even more grateful for as time passes!

We were a family. There was great love, and a deep and certain affinity, a bond built of trauma. That kind of relationship can be alternately wonderful and devastating. My parents moved us often; they were driven to find greener pastures no matter how good things might be. That was mostly Dad’s doing. Mom followed along. We were uprooted again and again, and my parents never stopped moving throughout their nearly fifty-seven-year marriage to each other. Mom seemed somewhat happy or at least content once they settled in Southern Oregon. I never saw Dad happy until much later in life. I am grateful to at least have had that.

My parents both came from difficult families, from parents who didn’t quite know how to love or be loved. Knowing some of the details of that forces me to accept the fact that my parents were just doing whatever they could to survive that, and to survive themselves. With time and perspective, it matters less and less how much hell they put themselves and us through. There is little room for bitterness in the wake of good things. As years passed and they grew, they progressed beyond their beginnings and ours, and I realize now we don’t automatically become perfect when we have our children. That is a myth. It’s a story we tell, a should that we impose on life and an expectation we invent. Expectations can be as damaging as the real disappointments we experience.

There is a harder struggle, I think, in finding ourselves amid a chaotic upbringing. It is made more difficult when you feel, like I always have, like there is no room in the family dynamic for a person like me to truly be me. I am willing to bet everyone feels that way to some degree. When you want to make everyone happy, there’s little chance to be happily yourself. You’re too busy trying to be what everyone else needs, or worse, protecting yourself from who they are.

What was probably a genetic wanderlust settled on me as soon as I graduated high school. I was a gypsy like Dad. It was a terribly long and painful learning experience made worse by a mistake of a marriage. I simply could not build anything within it. I was gifted a child young in life and that is something just short of miraculous, but I regretfully I brought my daughter into that tumultuous era. How she survived me is a wonder; how she became such a caring and loving woman is beyond words. She has remained the one good thing I’ve done in that old life, and the thing I am always proud of.

I moved to Alaska permanently when my brother died. My daughter was here, and my grandchildren, and I needed a new start. Dad told me he always thought I’d move back home to Oregon because that was what I always did before. Honestly, I felt I never had anything worth staying anywhere for until I came here. In that way, a vagabond life seemed my destiny. I struggled as much to find myself as to find a place to really belong.

When my life started settling down, I found myself in a relationship with a very stable and habitual man. A career military man, Brick likes routine and schedule. He likes to plan things, so much to the point where he can’t commit to leaving the house without 48 hours’ notice! I always have craved that sort of regularity but have never had much discipline of my own. Brick is the other side of the coin, the balance I need. He is my love.

I found us a home on a little over an acre, a prow front cabin full of windows and twice as big as we needed. The house needed work (still does and probably always will) and that suited us fine. We set up housekeeping, and because I liked my life but missed “home” intensely, I proceeded to create a very “Oregon” home right here in Alaska. It made those loved ones seem a bit closer. Coming here was the first thing I had done that was truly “away’ from the family. I think Dad was disappointed in that, but I also believe he respected it. At 40, I was starting to make my own way in life.

Ten months ago, our family lost first my uncle Mike and then, weeks later, my Aunt Peggy. Beings that the oldest, my aunt Connie, passed five years ago and only a few months after my brother did, Dad was the last of his original family. These were my father’s siblings. He was an orphan for only nine months before he went. There is a photo that hung in the living room at my parents’ house. In the photo are the four of them, in no particular order of age, but the order of them in the photo, left to right, is the order they passed in. I’ve been haunted by that fact.

Dad moved himself and Momma up in November. They sold their home and most of their belongings and came to Alaska to be with us. We had such plans for the summer! We had projects to do and things to build, and we were going to get a boat and go fish Big Lake. There were streams and rivers begging us to find some gold in them. Dad knew his time was short and he told me all the time he was on borrowed time. He didn’t know just how short, because we had those plans, didn’t we?

The man who came to Alaska was different than the one I knew before. He was quieter, gentler. He was, I think, happy. I’d never seen that before. I think Dad wanted one last adventure, and maybe the move itself was that adventure. I can’t question God and come up with a clear answer on that one. We always loved one another. In the end, I believe Dad and I liked and understood each other, and with that hard-won understanding comes a sort of peace you yearn to keep, a surety you can only regret was short lived.

In the wake of all these losses, the first of which I can honestly say I nearly did not survive myself, and the last of which I am nowhere near coming to terms with, I have come to realize I cannot go home again. It is not there. They are no longer there, the people I loved my whole life. For me, Oregon was the place of dear people, of family. It was where a large piece of my heart stayed no matter how far I would roam. Because location and possessions are of no real consequence to me and because I’ve spent my lifetimes letting go of houses and the things in them, it is only people I can return to. There aren’t enough people there to go back for. It now becomes a place I will visit, to see the few remaining there that I love.

I’ve tried very hard, no matter the circumstances of my own life, to make my parents proud, particularly Dad. I was a daddy’s girl from the word go, and I always tried to learn to do things he would be proud of from a young age. I learned to cook and clean and decorate because they were things that I could show my father, win his approval. I am glad he saw me have some success in my work life, but I know I could always have done better

I wonder if he knows how much he meant to me. I hope he knows he made me strong and resilient and adaptable. I hope he knows he was more a good thing in my life than bad, especially as we all got older. I hope he knows he was loved, and his love in return was valuable to me. I loved my father, despite all my shortcomings and downfalls and his, despite our insecurities and inabilities, and despite the fact I wasn’t as accomplished as I should have been while he was here on earth.

I’m glad he saw me try and fail at some things, because I got to be brave enough to try in front of him. I have always liked learning new things and wasn’t afraid to change jobs or even vocations if the interest was there. But Dad thought I was smarter than all that, and he wanted me to make something of myself as a writer. That is what this work is about, and something I will have to tell him about when I see him. I am happy Momma will see it all unfold.

Losing Dad has made me realize now is the time for me to establish me, to become what I would and should become. It’s time for me to find out who I am in my own right. I must establish expectations for myself, invent my own traditions and decide what my legacy will be. I think I have lived theirs as long as time would let me.