Editor's note - 2014 has not been a good year for me; before this post, I only had two blog entries for the year and they were both tributes to lost loved ones. On the summer night described below, I was overwhelmed with the recent changes in my world and later felt it might be therapeutic to capture my feelings. And so I decided to 'blog about it. As usual, it took me some time to get my thoughts into words. Reading it now, my description almost seems over the top, but the feelings were genuine and undeniable. I hoped this process would help me make sense of where I'd been and where I was headed.
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August 2014
Evening
My mother, for her own good, has just been placed in a nursing home in the town where she was born and raised. Her partner of 60 years, my father, died 11 years ago. Dorothy has just plain kept going, with 3 artificial joints and a frame that hosted 11 babies. At this point her body is so worn out that doctor's orders have her confined to a wheelchair. To make things worse, she's also lost touch with reality. Despite all that, she lives on, confused and helpless. Although she certainly has led a full life (she will be 90 in 2 months), this is heartbreaking.
I've been helping two of my sisters sift through my mom's belongings, assorted memories of a Midwestern child of the Depression. It's apparent that she hadn't thrown a single thing away since roughly the spring of 1941. I just left my sisters and I'm driving the 30 miles home, on the back roads, where there's no traffic and it's easier to unwind and reflect on what was. And also to think about what will be.
At some point for me, memories started to mean more than tangible things, but I collected a couple of trinkets nonetheless. I have my father's 1951 drivers license. 5-10 & 1/2, 153 pounds, already the father of 6 at the age of 30. My father as a young man stares back at me through 63 years of time and space, impossibly thin, smiling, youthful, seemingly immortal. I imagine that just outside the frame, in his right hand, he holds his ever present Winston. Half smoked, it would send its vapor skyward. And I wonder, at that moment, what he was thinking. Had it occurred to him yet at that young age to contemplate his mortality, his legacy, his mark on the world, as I do now?
Picking through my mother's belongings earlier in the day, I read an entry in her diary from December, 1941: "we declared war on Japan". The small, faded print betrays the significance of the event, both for her life and for the world. This memory, too, will soon be dust along with everything else associated with my parents.
Any more, I only occasionally get a glimpse of my mother as I remember her, a rock in my life for the last 56 years.
Recently it's occurred to me - after your foundation, your base, is gone, what do you have left?
To make things worse, a sibling has now abandoned me, claiming I have betrayed her. It all started when I offered up an uncomfortable truth: our mother was no longer safe living alone in her home. It went downhill quickly from there. I had been a good brother to her and she had certainly been a good sister to me. What I expected from her was a fair shake, nothing more and nothing less.
Unfortunately, squabbles have flared up between us siblings over the last few years, over my mom's living arrangements, over divvying up her belongings, over selling her car, and on and on and on. My parents battled through the Great Depression and World War II to raise what amounts to a small tribe. Along the way they saw us through illness, economic strife and countless other challenges. For what? So that we could all quarrel like children as adults?
Is this really happening?
Will there be anything left of my parents but memories? Will there be anything left of the bonds with my brothers and sisters but memories? What should I think life is all about, exactly, when I watch as my family comes apart at the seams?
Contemplating my parents' demise, I can't help but consider my own life, which not so long ago seemed to spread endless before me but which now seems to be playing out at triple speed.
My "little" brother, whom I've been close to since childhood, had a heart attack and bypass surgery right after the first of the year. It was a close call that scared all of us. My 2nd oldest sister, dear soul that she was, died in the spring. Gone too soon she was, and she faced a most unpleasant and drawn out ending. My mother, for all practical purposes, is gone. Then there's the ex-sister.
It's all starting to pile up. Rather than desperation, I feel more of a grudging and unhappy acceptance, of things I can't change. Depression, void of light and hope, envelops me.
So on this beautiful late summer evening, I pull off the road and watch the world go by. While my engine idles and the crickets chirp, I contemplate my significance and I wonder; If I do have a soul, what will become of it when I expire? And what difference have I made with my life, with regards to anyone, anywhere, at any time?
Really, what will ANYONE say was the meaning of any of our lives when we're all gone? Would anyone ever pause to consider?
As I survey the landscape, even the blinking lights of the windmills seem to mock me, being all about the ongoing business of the present day world and the future. And I am all about the past, a past which is proving to be insignificant and irrelevant. And one which is fading, oh so fast.
'You will have your brothers and sisters in your life. ALL your life. They will never leave you.' That was what my parents taught us, from the time we were children. And now my estranged sister has taught me a different lesson: Our parents' dogma was bullshit. Family actually IS disposable, and at the drop of a hat.
As for me and my siblings, the truth is that we've never really grown up, any of us. We are now "adults", in adult bodies. We have some accomplishments to our credit and we appear "grown up". Deep down though, we are the same people we were as children, in that tiny house on 2nd Ave. And we are the same people we were as young adults in that big old house on 4th Ave. The same insecurities, biases, selfishness and egos that made us who we were then STILL define who we are now.
We have spouses and children and grandchildren and jobs, gray hair, no hair, and everything else that goes with being an adult. And still, we've not been able to escape our pasts as imperfect and immature children, no matter how hard we may have tried. Our flaws and conceits lie dormant just below the surface until stress and crises prompt us to reveal them, shamelessly and in full bloom. Being human, it would seem, makes us helpless to change that.
So with all this sense of loss and hopelessness, where do I go now? A profound insight would be appropriate here but instead, I'll give you a simple confession:
I got nothin'.
This inescapable and profound sadness just won't go away.
Wearily, I put the Ford in gear and my flesh and my bones proceed to make their way home, at 60 miles an hour. As for my soul, my essence and every living human being I hold dear in this world? We all race headlong into oblivion. At the speed of light.
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