In Memoriam

I understand that this isn’t in my usual comic format, and for this blog in general, this isn’t really even going to be comic, or upbeat.  But, this is something I feel compelled to do for no one else other than myself.

As I’ve mentioned briefly in a short post last month, on Tuesday, August 7^th of this year, my father passed away.   It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but being so also did not make that fact any easier to bare.  It’s been over a month since his passing, and I still have trouble with it.  In the typhoon of responsibilities that washes over you when an immediate family passes away, you really do not get a chance to breathe, let alone given the chance to grieve in a way that is best for you.   Nothing about my father’s passing has been easy, or “Traditional”.  Even though nothing was in writing, his wishes were well known that he did not want a funeral, and he did not want to be buried (one of the last conversations I had with him on the subject he had quipped “Just throw me in the woods” – we will be doing no such thing, by the way); as such, he was cremated.  Though we did have a “Memorial”/Open House event dedicated to his memory, he was never truly eulogized.  And since we’ve been so non-traditional throughout this whole ordeal, I see no reason why we shouldn’t continue in the vein of being non-traditional, so I would like to attempt to do so here on my blog.  It feels almost fitting to do it here anyway, as he always encouraged me to do what I loved (as both of my parents always did, and my mother still does), and here with my little corner of the web I’m doing just that.  Even though it’s (my comic) not the most polished, popular, or depending on your point of view, very good, at least I’ve finally started to try.  In a way, with every strip that I put out, I put it out with his encouragement (and hopefully, somewhere out there, his approval).

And that was Dad, even though he had a penchant for self deprecation, he always wanted his family to shoot for the stars, and be happy.  He loved nothing more than his family; his children, and even more so his grandchildren.  Nothing meant more to him than they/we did.  My earliest memories of Dad were before I was of school age, while he was still a social worker; working with less fortunate, abused, and/or troubled children.  My days were just fine, I had fun, I played like any normal child, but when the front door would open upon his return home, I would immediately drop whatever it was that I was doing at that moment, and make a sprint for the door, and like every parent, he would lift me into the air and give me just the biggest hugs.  To this day, I repeat that ritual with my oldest daughter, and when they are old enough, I hope to continue with our twins. 

Eventually my parents got divorced, and those daily hugs had to eventually be replaced by weekly hugs once he moved into his own living arrangements.  Throughout Elementary school, and until I was a teenager, I would spend Friday nights, and the majority of Saturdays with him.  We had good times on those weekends, just the two of us.  We would watch our favorite sitcoms Friday nights, eat pizza, or quite often he would fix me some of the best (albeit not very healthy) dinners a kid that age could want.  My favorite food as a child was Kraft Macaroni & Cheese (still is now that I think about it), and he would fix a box for us every Friday night, but he would tweak it to make it as cheesy as he could. He would add more butter, use more milk, or I sometimes wonder if he didn’t just open up another pack of cheese powder from another box.  I have no knowledge of how he did it, but along with that, he would always buy a giant pack of ground chuck hamburger, pound it all up into paddies by hand, fry it up on a skillet, and top it off with two or three slices of cheese.  It was some of the biggest “homemade” cheeseburgers you would have ever seen, which he affectionately called “Monster Burgers”, well before Hardee’s coined the term for their own burgers.  It was one of the first questions he would ask me after picking me up on a Friday, “Should we get pizza for dinner, or make MONSTER BURGERS?!”  And we would drive off to his apartment, or eventually, his house for our time together.  

On Saturday mornings during those years, we would spend either watching my Saturday Morning Cartoons together, or depending on the time of year, he would take me to my soccer games.  And that was another thing that Dad loved:  sports.  He loved to watch sports, and for a period of time, would love to play sports, and always, always wanted his kids to play and succeed in sports.   My older brother did just that;  and he played lots of them, and for most of them he seemed to excel with ease.  Dad was always so proud of that; whenever my brother’s name made it into the paper for whatever sporting accomplishment, he would always find some way to work that into a conversation with his neighbors and co-workers as often as he could.  I sometimes wondered if he wasn’t a bit disappointed in me as I wasn’t the athlete my brother was.  I didn’t enjoy sports very much; at least not as much as my brother, and the ones that I did attempt to play, I wasn’t very good at them.  I also spent a period of time a bit overweight as a child. 

However, like a good parent, instead of forcing his beloved sports on me, instead, he found out what interested ME, and he shared THAT with me.  Sports were what he and my brother shared.  What he eventually shared with me, was my love for art, and my favorite form of art: Super hero/science fiction comic books.  What was eventually entered into our weekly rituals were trips to the comic book store to pick up the latest X-Men or Wolverine books (yet again another ritual I continue to this day with my own children).  When I got to be old enough, he eventually shared with me his own penchant for art, and showed me how he could sketch and draw, and something I had not known until then, was that he loved to write (and in the early 90s) was a published poet.  On our weekends, if our shows weren’t on, or if they were repeats, while I would sit at his kitchen table and draw to my heart’s desire, he would work on his poetry across from me, or in his chair.  When he thought something was finished, he would have me read it, and asked what I thought.  It was wonderful to share that with him.  It’s something that I miss dearly; as we both got older, our weekends together were shortened to just a few hours of a visit maybe on a Saturday or Sunday.  For a long time I stopped drawing altogether, and of course he stopped writing.  Like other things, I sometimes wonder if he stopped writing because I stopped drawing.  Drawing got replaced by other High School “things”.   Going through some of his books for the memorial, I found in one of the poetry books he was published in, an “About The Poets” section. It had mentioned that one of his long term goals was to get an entire book of just his own writings published.  That never came to fruition, and I’m sure that was something that he would have loved to have done.

Dad of course was not without his own problems, problems for whatever reasons he had, he tried his best to shield me from.  I don’t know if he thought I just wasn’t able to cope (as there are so many things that I do not cope very well with), or if he was just ashamed.  To this day, I still do not honestly know what was there.  Words that I’ve caught over the years have been “chemical imbalance”, “bi-polar”, “schizophrenia”….I am no psychiatrist, and I don’t know all of the details of those particular phrases, but I do know that Dad did have his demons, and when he had an “episode”, there was nothing behind his eyes.  Growing up, the episodes seemed to be once every couple of years.  Most recently, though, he had not had one of those episode since before my wife and I were married, 8 years ago.  I don’t know if it was finally under control, or if he just seemed to learn to live with it. 

But even with all of those demons and issues, there was one constant:  His undying love and devotion to his children, and grandchildren.  During my senior retreat in high school, I had received a letter from him apologizing for what he had called “his crazy” and extreme regret that he hadn’t been with me more during my childhood.  But growing up, every sporting event I participated in; (almost) every soccer game, every track meet, he was there.  He did not like being around large crowds of people, so he always hid himself off in a corner, but the fact remains.  He was there.  And he was always there.  And I swear at every one of his grandchild's soccer game, he will always BE there.

He lived his own life as a pauper, so that in case his children or grandchildren needed any help, he could afford to give us that help, no matter how much it cost.  If we ever needed anything, we knew we could always go to Dad for help.  We hated to do so, but if we did not, or if we kept it from him, it would anger him more than dropping a large sum of money in our time of need.  It was actually because of his enormous generosity that my wife and I have been blessed with our twins.  The year before our oldest daughter was born, we were told we could not have children, and our only hope other than adoption was to go through one of the most expensive forms of IVF.  We were unable to afford it, and because Dad was who Dad was, he supplied us with the money for the procedure.  After our first attempt failed, we ended up having our first daughter completely on our own. When we tried to return the money, he refused to accept it. "No, you take that money, and get ready for that baby" he had said.  So, when we were ready, we went back for the embryos we had left at the clinic, and I now honestly believe it was fate that they both survived, and we now have our twins.  All because of Dad.  Paw-Paw to his grandchildren.

There are so many other things that I wish I could say, conversations I wish I could have had with him, things I wish we could have done together.  I wish the twins would have had more time with him, and that they could have known just how much he loved them, even though he only saw them twice before he was gone.  Three weeks before he passed, we actually almost lost him from COPD, due to his heavy smoking.  And there he was, with all of the wires and all of the tubes, scratching things down on a scrap of paper with a pen, asking how his grand kids were.  "How are grand babies" he had written.  I assured him they were well.  I am at least thankful that our oldest daughter got the time that she had, though it saddens me that she will eventually lose those memories as she has just turned 3.  I try to talk to her about him as much as possible to keep his memory alive in her for as long as I can.  She may have already forgotten how she used to wait at our front door on Saturdays when Paw-Paw would drive out to our house for us to go get "chicken and tatoes" (mashed potatoes).  She would get beside herself with excitement upon seeing his car finally pull up.  How she would throw her arms up for him to pick her up, and he would hold her up in their air....The same way he did with me when I was small.
 

 

Above is my favorite picture of Dad with Olivia; my mother, Olivia and I had gone to his house to pick him up and take him to breakfast with us.  Olivia forced him to hold her hand and walk her down to the car.  For me, this picture sums up the love that existed between Dad and his Grandchildren. Though he was uncertain he could keep her safe as his health had already started to decline, one of his Grandchildren had asked him to do something.  So he did it.

Below is the song that has come to embody the grieving that I have done, and continue to do.  It may not be the most fitting, but a lot of the content seems to mirror what I've felt and been through during this whole ordeal.

 

This is not the end, this is not the beginning

(So my Catholic Faith would have my beleive)

Just a voice like a riot rocking every revision

But you listen through the tone and the violent rhythm and

Though the words sound steady, something empty’s within ‘em

(Recounting everything to guests at the memorial somehow seemed scripted and robotic)

We say yeah / with fists flying up in the air

Like we’re holding onto something that’s invisible there

(Perhaps Dad's hand, wishing to reassure us everything is okay, as he always would)

‘Cause we’re living at the mercy of the pain and fear

Until we dead it / forget it / let it all disappear

Waiting for the end to come / wishing I had strength to stand

(Self evident - something like this takes the strength out everything)

This was not what I had planned

It’s out of my control

(Even with failing health, I had planned and hoped for him to see my children grow up to at least school age...But obviously, it was not up to me.)

Flying at the speed of light / thoughts were spinning in my head

(The Flurry of responsibilities that washes over those left behind is dumbfounding)

So many things were left unsaid

(SO, so many things..)

It’s hard to let you go

(Harder than I anticipated)

I know what it takes to move on

I know how it feels to lie

All I want to do is trade this life for something new

Holding on to what I haven’t got

Sitting in an empty room / Trying to forget the past

(Sitting in the front room of his now empty house, surrounded by Dad's things, remembering the times from those weekends long, long ago...And then trying to swallow them before they destroyed me)

This was never meant to last

(Whether his heavy smoking or his over-eating, we all knew it was coming, but...) I wish it wasn’t so

(See end of last sentence)

What was left when that fire was gone

I thought it felt right but that right was wrong

All caught up in the eye of the storm

And trying to figure out what it’s like moving on

And I don’t even know what kind of things I said

My mouth kept moving and my mind went dead so

(Back to the scripted, robotic responses when recounting the situation to various people)

Picking up the pieces now where to begin

The hardest part of ending is starting again

(Returning to "normal" life...Nothing will be "normal" again. Something always seems to come up that will remind me of Dad, and a fresh waive of grief will wash over me.)