Tag: father

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Book ‘Em

I come from a family of book readers and writers. My mother often read the dictionary for fun. We had seven: American Heritage, Oxford, Webster’s. You get the idea.

“Daddy always told us to look it up if we didn’t know how to spell a word,” my mother said last week, my grandfather suddenly cast as my father in the tangled branches of her Alzheimer’s family tree. “In that book with all the words.”

As an only child, books served as surrogate siblings. My childhood was filled with an eclectic mix of books, from Nancy Drew to Narnia, Little Women, Little House, and edgier titles as I approached adolescence:  Harriet the Spy, The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode, The Stand. The books are still in my childhood home, relegated to a distant corner of the attic.

This summer, as we readied my father’s house to be sold and I waded through the stacks and shelves and boxes of his books — 3,000-plus dusty, stinky, moldy hardbacks unwanted by anyone but him — I was motivated to declutter my own collection. Like newspapers and postage stamps, books felt like relics of half-dead generations.

Kondo inspired, I pruned the shelves. Weeded through overgrown piles of books on nightstands and coffee tables. And kept the ones that bring me joy.

As for the rest? They’re not far away. “They’ll be happy in their new home!” the librarian chirped, as I unloaded the boxes of my past life on the metal library cart. “Thank you for thinking of us!”

In keeping with my primary intention this year, I am creating more space in my life, in the figurative sense of being open and present and this literal tidying up, creating a wide-open yin to the musty mothball clutter of my parents’ homes.

And I have not lost my passion to read.  

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Ties that Bind

We were both only children, John and I, united as siblings in our pre-teens when his mother married my father. For while, I chose this family, mirroring my father’s departure as I left my childhood island home and my mother on her own.

But, like so much of the future I envisioned for myself, this idyllic second family was as transient as I. At sixteen, I moved in with a boyfriend and soon after, my father and stepmother divorced.

John and I have stayed close all these years. We’ve shared our own divorce woes, visited each other across countries and continents. We spend summers together at the family lake house; I’ve watched my nieces go from cartoons to college.

John has also kept in touch with my father, the man who raised him. He’s nearing his nineties, insistent on living alone in his island cottage. He still drives, although his macular degeneration worsens each year.

Over the past five years, I’ve spent more time with my parents in the than I have in my entire life, and what I’ve found is this: it’s easier to be patient toward a mother with Alzheimer’s than a father who, in his ruthless determination to be terminally unique, is stubborn and quirky to a fault. He recalls very vehicle he’s ever owned in vivid detail. He prefers befriending the mice in his house to a visit from the exterminator. Often, his dinners consist of dark chocolate and a handful of peanuts.

Recently, John and I took our father on a riverboat cruise along the Seine. At first, I was a basket case. Dad complained. A lot. He slept through the whole excursion to Normandy. His breathing was as labored as a freight train going uphill. It took a week aboard that ship and John’s patient reassurances that I was a good daughter to finally accept my father for who he is.

Like the recent death of my husband’s daughter, I’m doing my best with a situation I’ve never been through: being a parent to my parents. Although his legs may be slower than his thoughts, my father’s mind is still razor-sharp.

And for that, we’re all grateful. 

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Heaven Can Wait

“What if you die before me?” she asks. “What happens then?”

We’re walking through Paradise Memorial Gardens, across from my mother’s care home. Max, my black lab puppy strains at the leash, lunging closer to the pond where two swans glide gracefully along the duck pond.

She does not realize we’re in a cemetery, an appropriately ironic place to have this difficult conversation. In my lifetime, my mother and I have never talked about death. Like disease of any sort, her religion has taught her to deny death.

Conversely, my father keeps a list called “The Departed,” a sheet torn from a legal pad, the names of friends and acquaintances written in his shaky octogenarian penmanship. It’s taped to the dining room wall of his tiny island cottage, a maudlin catalog of death that grows longer by the moment.

I, too, am surrounded by death. The recent suicide of my husband’s daughter. Our Golden Retriever. A stepmother and stepfather. Ex-husband who overdosed. The death of my career. And the agonizing death of my mother’s brain.

I am not equipped to deal with the grim reality of dying. Or this conversation. By the time we walk home, she’s forgotten the question entirely.

And slowly, I learn to appreciate the moments when life seems worth living.