Really Good Grief
When my father died, grief took on its own life.
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The Sphinx's Riddle

3/20/2014

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Picture1994, on our own four feet
At the end of my father's life, when I was getting to know him in new ways, he spent all day in bed. Before that, he got around in a wheelchair. And when I say got around, he really got around. He took the bus everywhere and was happy doing so, even when that meant taking 3 buses and having to choose stops based on sidewalks and curb cuts (which don't exist everywhere in Seattle). 


Independence was very important to Dad. He frequently left himself voice memos, some of which were affirmations: "I travel around the city by myself on the bus. I am good at that," and "I do family bookkeeping. Also I am good at maneuvering my wheelchair." When well-meaning people would push his electric-assisted wheelchair without asking, he bristled. A wheelchair is personal, an extension of the body, and even medical personnel sometimes fail to recognize that.


Before the wheelchair there were arm crutches, the kind with cuffs that go around the forearms, and before that, a cane. He was walking with a cane at my wedding, and when we danced together, he felt steady and light on his feet.


It's hard for me to cast my mind back before concerns about his health became central to my life. Certainly, there were big chunks of time when he wasn't doing so well and I wasn't aware of it. While my attention was focused on him at the end of his life, I need to remind myself that there was a time when he was active in the outdoors, taking bike-camping trips and hiking the beautiful Pacific Northwest woods. 


I liked dancing with him at my wedding. It seemed symbolic, traditional, a ritual that signified my participation in some ancient customs of transition. Like the transition from my father's home to my husband's home, which in my case was pure symbol, since I'd only lived with Dad a total of about a year from the time I was 4 and my parents divorced. My struggle between wanting to see myself as a rebel and wanting to embrace what little tradition and ritual I can goes on. Yet MY dance with MY father at MY wedding felt personal and right, and I'm glad he was able to share it with me.

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The Best Person I Ever Knew by Steve Klein

3/13/2014

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Picture1970: Pearl, Amanda, Gert, Danny
I've been trying to write about Aunt Gert and I can't seem to get the words to come out the way I want them. So I'm falling back on the words of one who knew her and loved her: my father, who was raised by Aunt Gert and Uncle Fred after his mother died and his father flaked. 
 
My Aunt Gert told your mother (never told me this, but) when she married Fred, he was the head of the New York State Communist Party. After my performance in "The Crucible," she told me she had been a member of the Communist Party. --Oh, an aside: One of your mother's daughters said she didn't have a very good memory. --Well, when Fred was called in to testify he quit the Post Office. And tried to start building a work record. Oh, he had a used car business for a time now, I don't remember how that goes. And then he worked for his cousin--what was his cousin's name? I don't remember--And what was the name of the business? It was a discount business, selling things at a discount, things like watches and radios. The name of the place was Tesla, T-E-S-L-A. So I think he never, he did not testify. Gert was called to testify. She had family strains, family stress, stress in family matters led her to quit the CP. Her energies, her priorities were to put family matters first, and there was a lot required to deal with family.

Did you know that
--this is a well-known fact, you probably know this--Fred referred to me as Gert's son? Well, he did. He would tell her, if he has something to say to me, he would tell her. "Tell your son…" when I was in the room. 

If I sat in his chair, he wouldn't speak to me, he wouldn't ask me to leave, he'd go like this [waves hand]. I asked my brother Jerry who lived with him for the summer if Fred ever shooed him out of the chair. He said, "Only once."

Oh, here's an idea. Let's have a drink of high-powered Ensure.


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The End of Boredom

3/2/2014

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PictureOne of Dad's baby friends
This is hard to say, but sometimes my father bored me.

Alone with Dad, I often struggled to keep conversation going. This became even more true when he was in the hospital, especially but not exclusively after his strokes. The iterative nature of his obsessions felt like a rejection of the “real” conversations we could be having, the ones where we shared our deepest thoughts and feelings and really connected.

I've always said boredom is frustrated desire. My daughter says “I'm bored” when the friend she wants to play with is unavailable, or when the internet connection is slow and somebody else is using the TV. I wanted Dad to play with me on my terms, to connect the way I had in mind and not the way he was connecting. I wanted to talk about our relationship – I wanted him to want to talk to me about me – instead of Clara and Robert Schumann or the Korda brothers. Not to mention Alfred Tarski.

It wasn't until the last two years of his life that I figured out how to handle the boredom. A couple days ago, I watched a crappy video I made of him during his rehab hospitalization in 2011. The camera was focused on him, making it especially clear that I was doing most of the talking. I'd just returned from my cousin Lizzie's wedding in Dallas, and I was telling Dad about all the people I met, mostly my mother's relatives by marriage.

It was a relief to have a full roster of conversation material. Once I'd exhausted tracing all the relationships and sharing my observations about the horrors of the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport (designed, presumably, by a native of that part of the world, where walking is such a foreign concept that the airport would be better converted to all go-kart traffic), Dad talked about his friends who were babies or were having them.

Thus we kept connected, sort of. Maybe not the deep, meaningful connection I craved, but started to find satisfaction with the kind of “difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate” conversations Joan Didion talks about in her essay “On Going Home.”  The satisfaction of “talking in code about things we like best.” Babies and distant cousins are topics each of us is drawn to in our own way – though I egocentrically preferred to hear what he said about my daughter as a baby to what he said about the baby he compares her to. I was greedy for the personal because even dealing with family memories, the remove from “us” could feel like rejection.

I'd like to tell you that something broke the ice. In truth, my thinking shifted. I realized that a) what I was gonna get was a lot like what I'd already gotten, b) Dad was dying, more clearly and quickly than he had been, and if anyone was going to change the conversation, it was me, and c) the things that mattered to him mattered to me because they mattered to him.

This evolved into a practice of paying attention to his repetitions, the places his mind wanted to go, the memories and people who were important to him. Writing his memoir has been a way of solving a mystery based on clues: Why these obsessions? Why these moments? Those are much better questions than Who are these people? and How did they get into my conversations?

Boredom didn't simply end. I was bored plenty of times during the following two years. Putting aside my agenda and living within his meant more clues were coming in all the time, and when I paid attention to reality, to the topics he was actually pursuing, I could understand.

So I put aside the wish for a different conversation, and listened to the self he was presenting. Allowing myself to listen to the real Dad makes me miss him more now. That's the risk of loving. That's what takes the place of boredom.


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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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