proteanme

Everyone in my family is grieving differently, although my sister and I share a little more common ground in that we both are my father’s children and that legally it has been our responsibility to take care of the business of his death. I have to stop sometimes and imagine my mom’s grief. My father was the only man my mom was married to and after they divorced they remained friends.  She knew him for something like 56 years. And she likely knows as much about his life as anyone, even as he part and parceled it out amongst various groups of people over the course of his 83 years.  In many ways she is like his widow. The last time we were all together as a family was to celebrate a milestone of being alive — my mom’s 75th birthday. My dad spent a good chunk of time with us during our short visit.  And that was sweet. It felt good, that family feeling.

I also celebrated a personal milestone this week. After putting in some crazy hours for the last month and a half, we launched a redesign of my work’s website.  Our brand has a new point of view and the photography is really the star piece. This is the first time I’ve seen my own design work go live such a big project. To be fair I worked in closely with the Art Director, but the concept was largely driven by me. And of course I wrote some ass kicking CSS/XHTML.  It was incredibly satisfaying work.  Incredibly. Satisfying.

Day seven was about making day six’es phone calls except I had the right SS#.  And then there was this nice visit with my sister, who already had plans to be in town for my niece’s volleyball tournament, which was the best part of day seven and eight. It’s fun to watch my niece turn into a bad ass on the court. And it pleases me to know she read an email I sent to my sister extolling that exact sentiment in a heartfelt, “right the fuck on!” My niece liked that email so much she got my sister to print it out and taped the message to her wall. Then, at my sister’s request before I left the tournament, when I said good-bye to my niece, I lowered my voice and said, “that last play, right the fuck on.” My niece smiled so big and replied, “thank you.” Best damn part of day eight, the one week anniversary of my dad dying.

I left the tournament and spent the rest of day eight in bed. Feeling sick and incredibly tired. I know it could be stressed induced, but whatever. I feel better today, day nine, which is really the beginning of week two. The second week of living with a dead father. Death has not cut through the complexity of my relationship with my father. It’s added a new layer full of details I only guessed at what it would be like to deal with.  Funeral homes, coroners, financial statements, attorneys, sheriffs, and on and on and on.

Or not. Unless we’re talking the wh0le shebang. As in life’s beginning and end.

And that’s what we’re talking about.

Right now as I’m typing I’m pretty sure my sister is talking with the Marion County Coroner who has emailed my sister a photo of my dad’s tattooed arm so that she can identify my dad’s body. Apparently there was a fire at my dad’s house this morning. Firefighters found him. He was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

It’s been an hour or two since I started this post. My sister made the ID. Then she called me after wards. She said the coroner was incredibly nice to her. I asked my sister to send me the photo of my dad’s arm and she did. I needed to see him. Get his death in my mind more concretely. I am so far away and my dad was mostly absent from my life even without all this geographical distance. Add onto that the suddenness of it his death and it was just getting to abstract. I don’t know if this is the right place to air these thoughts. But I think I just want to be witnessed. The experience of having him in my life was not known to many folks and I don’t want his passing to have the same kind of loneliness.

When I was talking to my sister today she told me the sweetest story about my dad comforting her once as a kid when she was sad and angry with him. It was a little heartbreaking, the story she told me, but I was grateful for the tenderness of it.  I think my sister and I both harbored secret fantasies that maybe one day we’d have some heartfelt conversation with our dad about his absence in our lives. It never happened; now, it never will. I was trying to think of my last conversation with my dad. I talked to him on the phone maybe twice a year and it was usually around the holidays. But this Christmas he was sick and we didn’t connect, so that means the last time I talked to him was before the holidays. I think that was when we were talking about this Byzantine church he goes to and I asked him if I could go with him the next time I came home. And he said, “I dunno.” And when I pressed him on it he said,”I gotta go.”

I miss him. I always have.

Thank you all for being my witness here. It means the world to me.