proteanme

Been in the Hoosier state since Saturday. It’s brutal at times and comforting at others. Spent the first two days dealing with my dad’s house.  My dad lived like a hillbilly. A domicile for a character from Deliverance. I knew it was bad, but on the scene it was worse than I imagined. The fire gave it a nightmarish quality I hadn’t anticipated. I may or may not post photos. I’m not in a good place to decide how much I need to respect his privacy and how much I need to have this witnessed in a more public forum.

My dad had half brothers.  Strange. I forgot that his dad remarried after his parents divorced.  We never had much contact with that side of the family and I hadn’t thought about any of them until I found this letter in my dad’s dresser from one of his half brother’s telling him his father had died.

I’m feeling insular and detached. Not the best one two punch, but my mom is getting sick and my sister is having a lot of panic, so given that I don’t mind my particular brand of coping. I did meet my dad’s best friend and former boss. Man, this guy Joe is a total stand up solid dude from the heartland. Seriously. He looked after my dad. I’d say he loved him. And by extension he’s looking after us. In that sense, my dad is caring for us and for that I feel lucky, even if Joe only half knew we existed before my dad died.

It was a little unreal though at first, meeting him was, even though Joe’s response was restrained in its sincere and sweet “no shit, you’re Truman’s kids” factor. That part only lasted maybe 10 or 15 minutes. And then for me, there’s the part where I kinda look my dad.  That was the first thing Joe said to me, “You do look like Truman. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad but you do look like him.”

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.

That was the theme for today because mostly I was feeling like what was the point of cleaning my house or putting away my laundry or taking out the trash or eating anything besides a bagel and chocolate bar if my dad’s still dead, and this girl I like is still be as sick as she’s ever been, and another important girl in my life is still laid off, and my friend still has cancer, and seven people I work with lost their jobs. What’s the point? But something some where inside said why not, ya know. Why not fold your boxers and make braised chicken with shallots and take the washed glass bottles out to the recyclable tub by the curb. And then  I even went so far as to clean out the bottom of my fridge.  It had been two years. I know that’s gross. This apple doesn’t fall from the tree.

Do I feel better -not really. But I don’t feel worse either. A zero sum game seems ok to me, though. In a Buddhist kinda way.

I read some poetry today. This girl asked me to send her some poems. I swear it’s a task she thought up for me as much as for her; it’s as if she’s saying don’t shut down, man. I’m an expert shutter. She wrote me a letter. At the end she said, “be brave.”

Yesterday it was sunny and RU, who loves to walk as much as she loves the elusive Portland spring, got me to go on two walks. A coup for sure. She even got me to smell spring. Her plate is full these days, but I don’t know how I’d be getting through without her.

Friends are sweet and check on me and tell me I’ll be ok. A couple friends at work take walks with me and let me rail when I’m pissed, or just look at them across the lunch table and say “what the fuck”. People call and invite me over to eat or take me to dinner. And they listen when they should or talk when I don’t wan to. Whatever works. I’m lucky to know such generous hearts.

I’m fucking tired, man. Like a junkie coming off of bad and potent fix. The last two weeks have been full tilt, what with all the details and conversations and decisions about my dad, plus this massive project at work. Reminded me some of the Youth Shelter, which reminded me that I got it in me to be a bit of a crisis hound. Instant meaning, ya know. Instant meaning and instant bonding. At least until today. Today I hit the home stretch on this big web project and I sat at my desk for a good 10 hours or so without making or taking one phone call about my dad. And frankly at the end of it all I felt all hollowed out. Weird, man. But something to remember, because this has probably just been round one. Gonna be a whole different ball game going home. Geez, what’s up with my sports metaphors? I mean, do I use these all the time or am I channeling some good-ole-boy speak in prepping myself for coming home? My dad had prefected his affectation of a certain kind of good-ole-boy. Was damn near authentic. If you hand’t known him for a long ass time.

I quit counting. It’s not really my nature to track like that, anyway.  My dad’s been dead two weeks.  At some point I’ll stop counting the weeks.

Today I had this weird surge of adrenalin. The sun came out after almost a week of fog, which was part of it. And I got back on my bike after almost two weeks of driving and riding the bus, which likely added to the mix. This year I’ve learned that little things like that do add up and mean something to me, so I don’t want to play them down; they are important. But I got a foreshadow of this feeling last week. And I dunno how to quite explain it but to say there is something amazing being revealed to me, and it is that I know myself.  I know myself in this way I wasn’t sure I did or even could, and in this way that only time was gonna tell me if I was right.  Maybe the closest analogy would be to having a child and finding out that the thing you were rolling the dice on was true — that you would love being a parent

For me it was that I reached out to my dad about 12 years ago. I’d quit my job a the Shelter and was in a place of being wholely untethered and I wrote him this very short letter, basically saying I only know a handful of things about you and I’d just like to know you better while I can. Actually Heidi encouraged me to do this. And when he called on the phone to reach back, she also encouraged me to return his message, his “this is your pappy” message, even though I was freaking out because I had no context for the exchange. I remember our call. It was short. He told me “I’m working on a response”. And then on x-mas that year he gave me a 14 page, hand written letter. I’ve mentioned it here before. It was intense, mostly about the war. Since then we’ve tried as best we could to go about the business of making ourselves known and of knowing each other, something I don’t think we could do until I was an adult.

But back to my original point about self revelation, the endeavor of getting to know each other was something I was rolling the dice on, in that it would make a difference to me when he died. I was betting that the right thing to do for me was letting go of the need for him to be my father and detaching from the desire for him to make amends to me for not being a regular and dependable part of my life. In fact, I was agreeing that we wouldn’t even talk about that, the obvious part of why we were even trying to get to know each other, he being my father and me being his child.

Sitting here now, I know I rolled right. I bet the right hand. It’s incredibly, incredibly comforting because with lots of other relationships, ‘m not sure I’ve known myself as well. And business of predicting the future. Tea leaves and horoscopes, man. But with him I knew myself in it.

Maybe I’ll go home and find stuff in his house that will shake me. Maybe. Dunno. But I don’t think it will be about the last 12 years as much as it will be about the 35 ones preceding them. I’m not gonna speculate on it too much. I trust that I can manage. Plus, friends are a call a way, and in this instance, some are less than an hour’s drive away.

I realized today I’ve been spending all the executive functioning in my brain everyday for the last 10 days trying to figure out all the details of my dad’s death, plus the one’s we need to know about his life in order to deal with his death. And that was not working for me. At all. Not only to I have to get sleep but I’ve got to narrow down the scope of decisions we need to make. And soon.

Plus, there’s this boat load of people kinda on the periphery and some who are “knocking at the door” – like the Catholic priests, a pushy funeral director, strangers on the phone at the VA and the bank and the Social Security Administration, the adult children of my dad’s last marriage whom none of us have ever met, an old lady friend of my dad’s who claims my dad was storing stuff for her in his house (including her deceased husband’s ashes), and some other folks who are going unnamed for right now because it would probably just hurt my family’s feelings to even mention them here.

No one tells you that it’s like this. That it’s the brutal task of making a bunch of decisions and you’re not even sure who you are making them for. You get to a point where you just to get it over with. You don’t want to make another fucking decision or phone call, but you have to. No one else is gonna do it. No one else can.  And the one dude that could have shed the most helpful light on the subject is dead. And he was pretty tight lipped on the matter beforehand. So now it’s our job. We have to bury my dad. And we’d like to do it some grace and dignity, which is hard to conjure up when trying decipher the pricing list from a funeral home that looks about as easy read to as papers from a mortgage broker. The shape of these days.

Just to top it off. Just because day ten needed to be the noisier than the preceding nine, my mom wrecked her car today. And tonight, after a really nice visit with RU over here at my house, when she left she found the wall of her rear tire had blown out and of course she needs to drive tomorrow. Luckily, I don’t. I can bus it. But dang, man. That shit ain’t fair.

Learning curve -not getting sleep is making me sick. And when random thoughts cross my mind about understanding that sleep deprivation could be used as torture, it’s a sign I need to go to bed. Oh man. This is weird. And the getting sick thing is humbling because by and large I am a hardy dude. I come from a long line of hardiness on both sides, maybe not always the best luck, but hardy.

The other thing I’m learning is to connect to people, however I can make that connection, which may look kind of complicated and untraditional, but it’s still me reaching out. That’s part of why I’m blogging.

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.

On day five, I called a bunch of places with my dad’s SS#, but it wasn’t the right SS# number. Nice. Day six, I tried to call a couple of those places back, like the VA, and the call volume was so high the computer generated voice told me to call back. I’ve always hated automated phone scripts, but right now I find them particularly soul sucking. Yesterday when I called Social Security Admin, I went through this inane exchange where I kept saying my dad’s name and spelling it and the phone system kept getting it wrong. I would say Truman then spell it out, t-r-u-m-a-n, and the computer would say Tree and spell it back t-r-e-e. That sucked.

Day five was also marked by a marathon family phone conference, complete with all the things that seem normal when someone dies in a fire without leaving behind any instructions, recaps of calls with Sheriffs, Fire Marshalls and Coroners, debating different funeral plans, the random exchange of memories, doling out new tasks and scheduling the next call.

Day sisx, today, I woke up feeling sick. Went to work. Came home and tried to sleep. Without luck. I really, realy, hate throwing up. I hope I don’t.

I agree with editor B.  He summarized the historic and proud nature of today much better than I can right now. I watched the inauguration at work, sitting in the factory lunch room with a big group of employees, mostly folks from the floor. And mostly folks from the floor are immigrants. And that felt really right to me.

I talked to a Hamilton Country Sheriff today and to the Deputy Fire Marshall in Carmel.  They were very nice to me. For some reason I want to mention them here even though I thanked them on the phone.  It’s like I want to document and connect with every person who’s come into some kind of contact with my dad. The sheriff told me something I didn’t know but did not surprise me and that is my dad had been carrying around his Marine ID card in his wallet since 1946.  Of course. To me it makes perfect sense. There’s not much left of it. Not because of the fire, but because it’s 63 years old. But for my dad, it’s just like it was yesterday. That’s what my dad told me once.  It was like WWII was yesterday. This other guy, this stand up guy who was my dad’s emergency contact, and who is being soooo good to us, he told me today how my dad’s Marine unit suffered this horribly high casualty rate. Horribly high. This guy said, “your dad must have been charmed”. Funny thing was this woman said the same to me this summer, which pissed me off at the time.