Life tends to get so busy these days it’s the last thing I think of. Changed jobs, improved my screened porch, settling into my little home with the panthers. Dad is declining quickly. We honestly didn’t think he’d still be here at this point, and it’s been an adventure with many medical ups and downs and surprises.
He started radiation back up today, for two weeks he will be sick and weaker, but then it’ll be done and that’s the last go of it. Directly into hospice after and plenty of new adventures to come, I’m sure.
Dad is the dreamer side of me, the side that thinks out loud yet always had bigger dreams than I could accomplish. He has big dreams too. Always thought he’d end up sailing into the sunset in his final days, never to be heard from again. He still could, he’s going to the ocean in two weeks right after his treatments finish.
Here I am dreaming of doing the same when he’s gone, there is an 18 foot sailboat here on the property that would be rather easy to slip into the water somewhere. Dad will always sail with me and fly with me, long after he’s gone.
Had a rough day yesterday, drove and cried for almost two hours. There is so much of me that comes from him. Some of my favorite parts. My most favorite are from both my folks, and I’ve just been overcome with love for them. Over and over again.
It’s funny how sometimes it feels like although I know all parts of me won’t ever be accepted by them, I love every part of them both. It happens when you grow up with someone, and I grew up so close to them into my early thirties. I didn’t necessarily love some of the ways they’d behave but I understood it. Deeply. I accepted it fully too, in the way a child does because it’s the only way they’ll survive. Instinct to love is so very strong, a survival necessity. Do kids always accept their parents more than the parents can do in return? I think it might be so, at least for a time. Then we become adults and start seeing one another for everything each of us are.
Not one parent is perfect. Not one child isn’t screwed up in some way from them. We all wound our children. And our parents. This just amplified my love for them, I think. Because I see the fullness of each of them as a flawed human and it tempers my love like fine steel. Sharp enough to wound, that blade. But it also heals.
So now I sit with Jimmy Buffet’s memoir A Pirate Looks At Forty opened on my lap and watch the Grit channel with my dad. And we chat about random whatevers. He shuffles off to get a propane heater to show me how it works. His fingers are too weak to push the button and hold it to turn it on and it makes my eyes twinge.
I cooked down sweet onions in butter, then sauteed in some sausage and served it over some German rye bread from Dutchman’s Hidden Valley. It was scarfed down by us both. I sliced tender pears and made a crumble with homemade vanilla sugar. Mom texted that I’ll spoil him but that’s impossible now.
When mom needs me to sit with dad I’ll do so, as much as I can. Tease and poke and scratch his scalp and back until he shakes his leg like a dog. Clip his toenails when they need it. Trace the lines on his hand with a pen like when I was a kiddo in the Kingdom Hall.
And laugh at his stubby fingers.
A Burd in Flight 