Really Good Grief
When my father died, grief took on its own life.
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Claire Siegel's Crush

2/20/2014

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Here's a thought experiment: The conversations I had with Dad
in the last months of his life were chosen and designed and outlined with his legacy in mind. He set out to structure a curriculum so he could leave behind his wisdom and learning. Instead of his mind naturally cycling back through a lifetime of obsessions, he was selecting topics for the course "Father and Daughter: Creating a New Relationship at the End of Life" or, "The Stories We Tell: How to Use Your Time Left to Reveal Your Key Message."

Fantasizing that Dad had a list of the stories that he needed to tell me while he still had breath to share gives me some insight into the topics that befuddled and often annoyed me at the time. (Who cares about the names and professions of Carol's second cousins? Hint: Not Carol.) Striving for patience and careful listening, I still rolled my eyes when certain phrases were invoked: the Tarski Symposium, the Forsyte Saga, Alexander Korda, Clara Schumann, Manumit School, Lake Buel and Great Barrington, Claire Siegel.

Carol wouldn't even let him tell the Claire Siegel story in front of her. If she came into the room and he was telling me, she'd leave. As Dad said, "Carol's objection to the story is something like, or has to do with, 'What does THAT have to do with the story?' There's a lot that doesn't have to do with, is not, that's not important."

The story itself is simple ("She had a crush on me, and I thought she was a baby") yet complicated by an abundance of named characters (Doris Siegel Balder Willig, Sylvan Balder, Minkie Walbaum, two stepbrothers named Andy). The overt point here might have been something like when he was an adolescent, Dad had crushes on older girls, who thought he was cute and smart but not dating material. Claire Siegel had the same attraction to him and he lacked empathy. That fits it into the curriculum under the section "Substitution: Seeking love from older women to replace the missing mother." The lessons in this section have to do with the pain of looking in the wrong direction until you finally look in the right one; how growing up means finding the person to love who is the same emotional age as you and neither one of you is a baby (as my parents were when they married and divorced within a ten-year period); the ways people central to your memories find you parenthetical or tangential.

But Claire Siegel is not the central character of the story, despite the title. Dr. Doris Willig is the central character. Dr. Willig was Claire and Andy Siegel's mother, Andy Balder's stepmother and Sylvan Balder's ex-wife. Sylvan was a warm, friendly person. Dr. Willig was not very friendly. Sylvan often sang a song from Brigadoon: "What a day this has been / What a rare mood I'm in / Why, it's almost like being in love."

When Sylvan Balder, divorced from Doris Willig, died, Dad found out from Minkie Walbaum, his French teacher. (Repeating all the names, as Dad did, often infuriatingly, I can see how the listener might not be as in love with the repetitions as the teller is. Yet as his stand-in, I feel like part of Dad's legacy is the references and touchstones he kept returning to, so I'm caught in repeating them ad nauseum as well.)

One day in the summer of 1958, my teenaged father found himself in a conversation with Doris, who was feeling bereft at the loss of her former husband. He thought, "Ohh, is this appropriate? She's now remarried, and she's talking to me about her former marriage.... I don't think she should be telling, talking to this sixteen-year-old about how nice Sylvan Balder was and what a shame it was to lose him."

The emergent topic of this section of the course: Grief and loss and who to share them with and how. What is appropriate? What crosses boundaries more: a 13-year-old girl having a crush on a 16-year-old boy, or a woman in her forties sharing her feelings with that 16-year-old?

From the transcript of our conversation:

Me: ...what comes to mind for me is, um, the ongoing interrelationships, interrelationsh--uh relationships between you and my mother. When I think about--
Dad: We're friends!
Me: I know.
Dad: She's been such a help to me.
Me: So, Doris may have been friends with Sylvan.
Dad: He was dead, I'm not dead! I don't...
Me: Yes, okay. 
Dad: I'm friends with [Uncle] Fred after he's dead. I guess, I guess they could be friends.
Me: But it makes sense to me--
Dad: Okay.
Me: --that there's an ongoing sense of connection.
Dad: Yes.
Me: And that's, that's where the mourning is.
Dad: One thing is, that that goes to show that we like marriage or something like that.

Lessons, topics, curriculum. "We Like Marriage or Something Like That." "Staying Friends with the Dead." "When Older Women Open Up to Younger Boys."

Now I wonder, what is my curriculum? My legacy? What is yours?

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Dead Man's Socks

2/13/2014

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Dad was a sock man. He like to match his sock color to his shirts. Though my stepmother Carol made him get rid of a lot of his candy-colored short sleeve shirts (benefitting me in the '80s, when I liked to dress butch), he amassed quite a collection of socks of colors far beyond black, brown, white and blue.

A couple days ago, thirteen months after his death, Carol and my sister Amanda and I met to clear out his closet. He had a couple different shoe sizes, a range of pant sizes, and very consistent shirt sizing: 16-1/2 - 33. And he had about 30 pairs of socks. There was a rainbow of single-color Polo socks, a couple pairs of mild-mannered dress socks, and a bunch of themed socks: sailboats, Mozart, a souvenir pair from Canada. Most of these were gifts from Nadine.

Nadine is one of Dad's great friends. She lives up the street on 5th Avenue and her kids grew up alongside my half-brother. On the day Dad died, Nadine was doing dishes when she suddenly felt drawn his house. She ran down the street and came in to find a ring of family holding Dad as his life wound down. 

She was there to join us in grief. She also joined in washing, anointing, and dressing Dad's body. It was her idea to put the Orcas Island socks on his feet, socks she'd brought him during one of his ultimate hospitalizations.

Carol let Nadine know that Tuesday was when we were clearing out clothing, and called her when Amanda and I arrived to see if she wanted to stop by and get a sock remembrance. Once Nadine saw the pile of socks, she was unable to do much more than choose one pair and cry. Carol escorted her home.

Now everyone in my household and Amanda's has a collection of Dad socks. Some also have shoes, or shirts, or belts. These items feel much more businesslike than the wool shirts and jackets I've been wearing since we spread his ashes in the Pacific Ocean, and I like having a mundane reminder of his presence in my life. 

I like wearing socks with a history.

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A Story of My Life

2/6/2014

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This was probably written in December 1980, when I was 14. Discovering it in my dad's papers today surprised me; I forgot I had shared these intimate memories with him.

Once there was a little girl whose daddy loved her, but he went away, and he could only love her on weekends. She could remember when he went away. It was summer, and hot. The little girl and her big brother came home from a camping trip to a dark house. Her mommy had turned all the lights off the keep the bugs away from the baby, who was crying anyway. It was a sad house, and the little girl's mommy had something sad to say. She said that the little girl's daddy wouldn't be living with them anymore. She said the word "divorce," but the only thing the little girl understood was that her daddy was not going to be there anymore. The only thing she understood was the loss. This made the little girl sad.


She was sad for a long time. She was sad when she sat in the dark in a car and the night demons tried to get her while she waited for her mommy. She was sad when she had to spend the night away from her mommy at the mean babysittter's house instead of with her daddy, maybe. And she was very sad when she had to move far away from her home, far from her friends, and further away from her daddy, who already lived two hours apart. She had to leave it all behind.

The little girl had to "cope with" a lot and "adapt to" a lot in her new big city, and she was frightened. She was desperate for a good home life, and her mommy did her best, but there was always something missing, even though there was something added in the form of her mommy's boyfriend. The picture was not complete, and the girl yearned.

After a while, her daddy, who had a new wife, moved to the same city she was in. In the winter the girl went to live with her daddy, in an attempt at completeness. It was nice, but too neat, and the little girl went home to where her mommy lived. She was happy with her daddy for a while, but she began to feel that although he loved her, all those years apart had separated them, and he had forgotten quite how.

The girl's daddy moved again, in the same city, but to a better house, so the girl went to visit him. She forgot the house number and the street, however, and got lost. She walked all around right near the right place, but couldn't find it, and it started to rain. After hours, and the darkness had settled in, she called her sister, who called her daddy, who came to get her. When she saw him, she wanted to give him a big hug and kiss and say "I love you, Daddy," but the car had bucket seats, so she had to settle for a small squeeze and a small "Thank you."

The little girl's desire to get close to her daddy increased to a point of sadness for her. She wanted to know him, but he seemed to hold back, so she did too, until Christmas, when she gave him a piece of paper that said

I love you, Daddy.

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    Pearl Klein

    I'm a theater artist and poet living in Seattle, where my father lived the last and best part of his life.

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