Things You Inherit.

Stomach pain became a hospital stay which became a panel of tests which became a recommendation to Hospice care which rapidly became a series of voicemails, texts and calls between my mother, her sisters and his grandchildren to communicate his passing.

He didn’t raise them. He didn’t go to school functions. He didn’t walk them down the aisle. He didn’t behave much of his life like a father is expected to and the position of “Dad” belonged to someone who was there and shared those relevant moments in their lives. But he was still their father and it was hard to pinpoint exactly what caused the pain they felt.

They didn’t miss him as a human being, or not enough to explain that depth of hurt. I think it was that they now had to accept the hole he left in their childhoods was irredeemable; what they regretted more than his passing was what they never had with him. They missed what never was and now could never be because his life was over and all that was left were a mobile home, a few vehicles, a little bit of cash in his bank accounts and a blind, fat little dog named Pixie who was the last love of his life.

After a home was found for Pixie, there were things to go through that a stranger could not be expected to deal with so two of the sisters went to the trailer to sift and remember and decide after touching - each object having once been important to someone - which things should be held, which should be passed on and which should be discarded.

Everything, every canned good, walking stick and small appliance he owned had written upon it in fine-tip black permanent marker the word, “Got,” and a date.

In the process of sorting it was discovered that he seemed to buy certain things in sets and that these things were tucked in random places and never taken out of their packaging. There were cards, letters and photographs that had survived changes of address, and one in particular – black-and-white with scalloped edges of a baby born in 1958 – that had been handled often enough that it was almost falling apart.

It was simultaneously comforting and heart-breaking: He had obviously thought about them enough over the years to buy gifts for them and look at their photographs, but did not give these gifts or tell them that he loved them as often as he could have because he did not know how.

Everything he ever “got” was recorded, but how would he ever record or contain what he had lost? How could someone who could only joke when he should have loved express sorrow for not being a part of a daughter’s life? His life seemed to have room only for laughter and regret: In the last couple days when even Pixie knew something was wrong and sat at his feet whimpering, he turned to my aunt and said, “I am sorry I was so mean to you,” and she replied, “You did okay, Dad.”

I couldn’t understand why I had been asked to write an obituary but had been given no deadline until I was told the sisters decided against a public funeral because of who might randomly show up. I envisioned the type of person who could inspire that kind of decision: The kind of people who had maybe had a disagreement in the 1970’s over a forklift, or a foreskin. I am not really sure, but whatever it was, they haven’t spoken since and my mother and her sisters didn’t want these people dropping by unannounced to say whatever they felt they had to before the family could get out of the way.

To stubbornly hold to what we think is important, our small noses that are slightly turned up at the end, to be territorial over our families and possessions, to sometimes love in secret because people should just know they are loved when we harass them, to desire to give but to sometimes not know how, the need to make laughter when tears might be more natural, knowing that stories are important and that simple things are what life is made of: After all things have been said and there is nothing left to divide, these are the things we inherited from the man who left a larger void than a presence in our lives.

I was told as a boy that people start over by being Born Again and I have heard you can never really go home once you are grown because childhood is a one-time thing. I have witnessed a lot since then, and have noticed that some people just start over and when they find they can no longer go home they make a new one. So I imagine my mother and her sisters standing at a gravesite taking note of the passing of a man who had so much influence – but at the same time so little involvement – in their lives and waiting for the childhood they remembered to reconcile with the lives they have built for themselves.

The gap is too large and as the afternoon wears on I know they will finally stop trying and will turn and go, instead – two north, one south – taking their inheritance back to the homes they have created for themselves when childhood got too small to hold the lives they needed.

SPM

Sigh.

I have learned that drunk Democrats sound a lot like sober Republicans and wonder if the reverse is true...
SPM

All in one's perspective...

"My mother gave me a completely priceless life."
Little Edith Bouvier Beale

Lilacs and Lullabies

“Earth gave us all the satisfaction we asked.”
Virginia Woolf, Reminiscences


It has been an odd kind of spring that has promised to warm, but then gone back to ice, and wind and unseemingly long dark nights that give way to frost on young leaves.

Lilacs have come bringing with them so many memories of other springs when a grandmother sat in a backyard swing with her arm around me - back and forth, squeek-squeek, back and forth, sigh-and-smile - softly singing "You Are My Sunshine" and talking of future evenings that would be lit by fireflies.

I can bring those evenings back (with a suddeness that sometimes brings tears) as long as the breeze has a hint of lilac left on it...And when the last hint is gone, all such memories are soflty folded away for another year.
SPM

Keller Williams Red Day

The sky was roughly the color of the flakes of slate that once made up the roof of the Hill House but lay now on the ground at its foundation. Well. Lay in the mud at its foundation, is more accurate because it was pouring cats and dogs. Or ponies and sheep...or radiatiators and wrenches, or...

And in this weather were tromping a little over a dozen Keller Williams agents, friends, family and a random little person. They had all come out to help get the new neighborhood garden started by planting perinnials along what would one day be a fenceline and gate arch but was today just a field of mud under pouring rain.

The effort was one more wonderful contribution of neighbors in the broader sense of the word coming together to help boost the gathering vitality in a pocket of one of Saginaw's wrongly-dreaded East Side neighborhoods. And, Surprise: The rain was the worst thing to befall any of them, and even the rain couldn't dampen grins in the mud...
SPM

All mothers give up something to be what they are...

 “When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated, and so I conceive that there were many reasons then to make your mother show herself a little other than she was. We lived in a state of anxious growth; school, reports, professions to be chosen, marriage for the elders, books coming out, bills, health – the future was always too near and too much of a question for any sedate expression. All these activities, too, charged the air with personal emotions and urged even children, and certainly “the eldest,” to develop one side prematurely. To help, to do something was desirable, not to obtrude diffident wishes, irrelevant and possibly expensive.
So your mother, whose sight seemed in some ways so clear, took it upon herself to be what people call “practical”…”
Virginia Woolf, Reminiscences

There are things we can describe, sketch or photograph so that another can hear them, touch them and know what it is that they are...but there are some things that we cannot begin to contain in a bowl made of words or images; then it is only possible to describe how precious they are to us and hope that someone will take the time to try to understand before it is too late. And even as spring unfolds it seems the year is going to be a single, long struggle to describe things faster than they disappear...

SPM