Things Forgotten

One of the best gifts I’ve ever received is little more than an inch long, a fragile thing made of metal and plastic. It arrived on my doorstep two weeks ago, the hard work of a cousin who spent the last several months converting old family reels into digital files.

I knew so very little of my father’s childhood. His mom died when he was a little kid, and his dad passed not long after my father went away to college. What I knew of the years in-between was a very sad time, coping with the loss of his mother and dealing with an abusive stepmother.

My dad spoke of it sparingly, but he would occasionally make the passing remark about how he wished his dad was still around. About how he wished he’d had a chance to meet my siblings and I. I knew he played the saxophone in a band. I knew he was a railroader who was away from home a lot, and he eventually kicked out the woman when he realized how badly she was treating his three youngest kids. I knew he sometimes took my dad and his brothers on trips to lakes “up north” but never realized how frequent or full of joy those trips were (nor how far away they sometimes traveled to get there). I never knew he was the source of my dad’s silly demeanor until I saw him wipe away fake tears and pretend to be devastated when my dad was leaving for college.

Or perhaps he wasn’t really pretending.

All of my childhood, I would hear about these old family reels, tucked away at my dad’s brother’s house. But we never got to see them. Never got to see my grandfather smiling and laughing. Never got to watch this footage with someone who was there (my dad passed away three years ago, as did the brother who had these reels).

It’s been a rough three years. So much death I can hardly stand it. And most recently: a beloved aunt who was like a second mom to me passed away on Christmas.

This past week when everyone was waiting to learn whether or not a groundhog would see its shadow, I whispered a “happy birthday” to her and told her I missed her. Like all of these other recent losses, she was gone too soon. The life expectancy is dropping, and I’m seeing the data that proves it in real time. In real life.

And then we had another bittersweet day yesterday: my dad’s birthday. I had a few reasons to make a trip home to Indiana — baby hand-me-downs for a family member, a birthday present for a niece, etc. What better weekend to plan the trip than on my dad’s birthday? My entire life, no matter where I lived, I made it home for his birthday (or called that day and visited soon thereafter).

As luck would have it, we wound up staying in a lake house “up north” thanks to a friend and her kind family. It was our first time visiting this town and this lake, but being there reminded me of the reels: Was this one of the many lakes he visited with his brothers and their dad? Had they ever stood where I was standing?

I will never know for sure, just as I will never know the names of most of the people in these reels. But I know they are smiling; laughing; enjoying life. I can see they loved my father. That he was happy.

And that, as it turns out, is enough.

The Missing Pieces

It’s been a year.

12 months since I last heard my mother’s voice. 

365 days since I last felt an iota of hope.

I marked the occasion at her home, where I’ve spent the last few months digging through boxes, unearthing parts of my parents that had been tucked away for decades. I’m realizing that as much as I love and miss them, the fact remains that I knew them first and foremost as my parents, and not entirely as the people they were.

I’ve found a treasure trove of letters my mom saved from her time as a school bus driver: notes from students telling her how much she meant to them. Because of her kindness. Because of the interest she showed in their lives.

I’ve found old report cards and citizenship awards: some moldy and ragged at the edges.

I found invitations to their wedding, cards from those who attended and endless mementos whose significance I will never have the chance to understand.

I’ve found photos of them young, happy, smiling: photos of them together, photos of them with family, with friends.

I saw my paternal grandfather’s handwriting for the first time in one of my dad’s high school yearbooks: a brief message that made it clear he believed my dad would be the first in their family to go to college. He lived just long enough to learn he was right.

Elsewhere in the book was a message from my father’s youngest brother. He also died in 2020: just three months after my father and three months before my mother. He was in junior high when he scrawled his message: TO MY DUMB BROTHER.

I laughed out loud when I read those words, knowing that was likely the closest they ever came to swapping terms of endearment.

In other boxes, less pleasant memories – ones I witnessed in real life and in full horror – are also to be found. Old test results. Brain scans. Liver scans. Half-empty pill bottles. Unfinished crossword puzzles.

And the part that really stands out to me — the part I don’t fully understand — is that I feel the same gut punch whether I’m opening a box full of sad memories, or a box full of happy ones.

They are all pieces to the same bittersweet puzzle: a reminder of hope reduced to ash. A reminder of life’s frailty and time’s cruel passing. A reminder of those we are missing.

A reminder that, when they were here, our puzzle was complete.

And the realization that it never will be again.

The Impossible Journey: Overcoming Loss in a Post-Pandemic Future

Waiting for “Do You Believe In Madness?” to begin, just a couple days before the state of Illinois went into lockdown.

A year ago today, I went to Target to find empty shelves but somehow managed to grab one of the last packages of toilet paper. I felt like I’d won the lottery.

A year ago today, my mother-in-law was in town for a rare visit, and my three-year-old daughter eagerly escorted her to a beloved store: a rock shop with dinosaur fossils in the basement. My daughter, now four, hasn’t been inside of a store since.

A year ago today, I was coming down from the high of a rare post-child outing: my husband and I caught a show at The Second City. It was their last revue before they, like other theaters, shut down.

A year ago today, we were realizing that adventure would be our last for awhile. That even though we had so many plans for places to take my mother-in-law — and places to go at night while she babysat our daughter —  our options quickly narrowed to nil.

In fact: she had flown in on my birthday a couple days prior, a time now forever marred in my head as “the beginning of the end.” We were worried about her flight, the airport, all of it. The virus seemed to be airborne but much was still unknown, and masks weren’t yet the norm.

She quarantined in our home for two weeks before going to stay with my mother, who was chronically ill but refusing to move in with us no matter how much I pleaded. She welcomed a visit from my mother-in-law, however, and saw it as an opportunity to get to know someone previously separated by a continent. At the time, we saw it as a light in the dark. My mom, still grieving from the recent death of my father, would have company for a few weeks. But not just any company: a talented chef who knew how to cook a liver-healthy diet so we could hopefully slow my mother’s decline while we battled to get her on a transplant list.

My mother, like us, had so many things she wanted to share with my mother-in-law. People to get to know, waterfalls to observe, antique stores to shop. We had planned on spending weekends and holidays with them, but everything shut down, social distancing was a mandate, and all of those options drifted away. They were alone in a house. We were alone in an apartment 160 miles away. Everyone was alone, and though we video chatted every day just as we had done before, we longed desperately for it all to end.

We thought that if we wore our masks and kept our distance, the virus would have nowhere to go. That after three months of hardship the world would re-open and normal life would resume. But we hadn’t accounted for widespread resistance to safety measures, and this thing just dragged on and on and on and...

It was discouraging, but my mom never gave up. I continued to coordinate her transplant evaluation appointments, though many were postponed indefinitely and others were switched to telehealth visits (a true obstacle for my technologically challenged mother, but she was determined). When in-person appointments resumed, I drove her to several but kept my distance (and my mask on). And then she made the transplant list and the world felt so much brighter again. We were on the right path, and we made plans to move our bubble and stay with her post-transplant. But the light was a mirage, and the closer we got to reality, the more it dimmed. My mother never got to hug my daughter again. The last time she saw me, I was wearing a KN95 mask under a cloth cover. It was red with white birds, their wings spread mid-flight.

Her last conscious moments were with strangers in an ambulance. Their objective: to take her home to die. I asked to ride with her, but it violated COVID protocol. They told me she asked for water but they couldn’t give her any. She fell asleep soon thereafter and never woke up.

 I see her face every time I wear that mask. I think of how thirsty she must have been every time I take a sip of water. I think of her, and how desperately she fought to outlive the pandemic (“So I can hug my grandkids again”), every time I look at the box that holds her ashes.

Some day, we will have a funeral for her and a proper burial for both of my parents. Some day, we will gather again with the people who remain, but we will do so knowing that a return to “normal” is a luxury well beyond our reach. That while the world slowly re-opens and the universe breaths a collective sigh of relief, those of us who suffered loss during the pandemic will be tasked with rebuilding our lives like a contractor building a house without nails.

It is essential that we continue on – and we will – but our world will be new and unfamiliar. We will be charting foreign land in our own backyard, every step forward weighted by memory and lifted by hope.  

This Is Jeopardy

Every day while growing up, if Jeopardy was airing and my father was home: our TV was tuned to precisely that. He’d shout out the answers before most contestants, solidifying his place in my mind as a human encyclopedia. My mom would implore him to try out for the show, and I’ll never understand why he didn’t. But as I grew older and absorbed book after book, it became a contest between us to see who could shout out the question/answer first. 

The tables turned, in a way, and though he continued to have an edge against me, he started asking *me* to audition for the show. Whether he wanted to live vicariously through me or just thought my odds of winning were better (they weren’t), I’m really not sure. 

Little by little a few years ago, he stopped beating contestants to the punch—and then stopped responding altogether—and I became suspicious. But then my mom found all of his crossword puzzle books in the trash, and I knew: something was terribly wrong. As his condition deteriorated, I would sometimes think back on the Jeopardy era of our lives and would break down into panicked, crocodile tears. Gasping for air, shaking, unable to reconcile the present with the past. 

When his disease (Lewy Body) got the best of him, and his time with us was running out, I struggled to find a way to pass the hours and bring him peace. I read some of his favorite poems to him; I played some of his favorite songs; I played soothing sounds of nature and daydreamed about stealing his hospital bed away to the woods and letting him die where he was most at peace. 

At one point between the pacing and the reading, I momentarily turned the TV in his room to Jeopardy, so he could hear his favorite show one final time. And then I turned it off, because I feared it was torture not just for me: but for him, too.

And now I hear Alex Trebek has joined him in death and for some reason the screen is blurry as I type this, and I can’t breathe, and all I can think about is how desperately I would like to return to my parents’ living room and hear Alex read the answers: and my dad shout out the questions just one more time.

The Gift of Light

My daughter’s high-pitched voice is typical for someone her age: it drips like honey so damn sweet, some days I could eat her words. But when she recently said, “I want to make a gift for Grandma and Papaw,” it was the resolve in her voice—a drive well beyond her years—that really caught my attention. “I want to make something they can see from heaven,” she said.

The words hit like a gut punch that re-filled my body with the same sadness I’ve been pushing down for what feels like eons. Think of a video game character low on life force receiving a sudden surge of energy; now, imagine that energy is fueled entirely by grief that never truly diminishes.

And no: this sadness isn’t rooted in my mother’s recent passing, nor my father’s passing just a few months prior. Rather: if really pressed to trace its origins, I’d say this melancholy Big Bang sparked when my father first started losing his balance and dexterity, and then multiplied exponentially with every new symptom, every fruitless medical exam, every horrifying prognosis (and so on). These things pulled me toward the event horizon, and their deaths pushed me the rest of the way in.

There is no turning back, and most days I feel like I’m floating weightless in space, witnessing life at a distance and just waiting for cosmic forces to do what they will. But occasionally my daughter pulls me back down and wakes me up, a 33-pound anchor with just enough force to tether me momentarily to this planet.

“OK,” I said, looking down as she strained her neck to make eye contact. “What would you like to make for them?”

I expected a lot of hemming and hawing, but her quick reply indicated she’d been giving this a lot of thought long before she vocalized her request.

“A rainbow for Grandma and a sun-catcher for Papaw,” she said without missing a beat.

I told her we would make both, or we could possibly even make a rainbow sun-catcher—a single gift they could share—but it would be a few days, because we needed to think about the best way to approach the project(s). So we studied rainbows and light, and I explained how, in a way, a rainbow is a sun-catcher: that it is a refraction and dispersion of light cast by the sun. 

And so one day while watering the flowers at my mother’s house, with the sun beating down from over our shoulders, she hatched an idea: “We can make a rainbow for Grandma to see right now! You make the rainbow, and I will catch it for Papaw!”

And so I did. And she did. And I thought our project was complete.

“No, no, no,” she said when I intimated as much later that day. “I still want to make a rainbow for Grandma and a sun-catcher for Papaw. Something they can see forever. I want to draw the rainbow, but I don’t know how to make a sun-catcher.”

I told her I would research ideas. A few more days passed, and she grew increasingly insistent.

“Mom, I really need to make those gifts for Grandma and Papaw,” she said. “How else will they know I love and miss them?”

There was no denying the urgency in her voice. I gathered the necessary supplies and we got to work, the only real hiccup being the lack of proper “indigo” and “violet” markers (she was insistent we make the rainbow exactly according to prism specifications). But we improvised with what we had, and she beamed with pride upon the completion of each project.

And then even more so a couple days later when we turned her drawing into a t-shirt she can wear whenever she wants to send a message to her grandmother. And I suppose she’ll beam again when we frame the original, but that is a project for another day.

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Somewhere in-between the first arch of the rainbow and the finished shirt it hit me: we were completing these gifts on the eve on my parents’ wedding anniversary. Their first one since my father passed away. Their first one since my mother passed away. Their first once since my jaw became inexorably clenched in its current position.  

I gaze at the sun-catcher, now irreverently taped to our window, and notice a puff of air eke out of my lungs. It travels up through my trachea and escapes from behind my teeth. A sigh.

I try to focus on the light but find myself succumbing to the push and pull of gravity and inertia—of nothingness and everything—all at once.

My feet rise from the Earth and then come down again, every hushed step and terrible stomp a battle between unseen forces. 

I go where they take me.