Beginning to talk

I want to write about my relationship with my father. He was significant in my life from the beginning. He played a critical role in the development of my ideas about the world, how I process life, and what I value. When he became sick, it affected me more than I realized at the time. In some ways it deadened me. Life lost its vibrancy. I misplaced my spark.

And when he died, well, to this I was very present. His death, and perhaps his life, became a challenge to overcome. My mission became finding the value, meaning, and understanding I was never quite sure that he had found. Embracing life and trusting in a way I do not think he allowed for himself. It has been 6 years since he died, 12 since he was diagnosed. I accept this. I understand this. It is no longer painful for me.

But his sickness had stolen my sense of hope as well as my creative voice. Pain can be a catalyst to creative genius, but it an also stifle your sound. I want to unplug that stopper in my throat. When I think about writing anything creative, doing anything creative, it always comes back to this. This. My father. This ghost with my father.

And so this is where I need to begin. With him.

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I have a box of journals I have kept over the years with varying degrees of details, insight, and sanity. They will be useful as I try to reconstruct and express whatever it is that about my relationship with him that needs to come out.

I wrote an entry on a notepad, sized two inches by three, the day after my parents told my siblings and me of my father's illness. This was a notepad I carried with me everywhere, mostly it consisted of random philosophical observations about life and people. If I recall correctly, I was sitting in my car, a 1977 Brown Ford Grenada, waiting for an orchestra rehearsal...

7-20-95
Yesterday, we had a "family meeting" after lunch. Dad officially announced to the family (Mom already knew, of course) that he had been diagnosed with Leukemia (CLL).

"Does this mean you're gonna die, Daddy?"
"We all die sometime."
"But I don't want my Dad to die." -Anne, age 9 1/2

I let my own tears fall--there are times when they are appropriate. But I didn't let myself get all choked up, it wouldn't help anything. Matt kept asking questions, but he remained remarkably calm - the brave knight - he's growing up. Anne took it the hardest which I think would have been expected since she's the youngest and has had the least time with him.

Mom...this was why she didn't want to discuss whether or not she believed in God. (At Hardee's coming home from Quincy). Dad had said he didn't really think so but would like to think there was one. Dad is expected to live twenty years, at least. Because it is chronic and was detected very early. There is not a cure for CLL, but in 15-20 years, who knows?

Anyhow, everyone has to die of sometime, sooner or later, and 73 or 74 isn't all that young. Young enough to be reasonably independent. Old enough to have lived a full life. What it did point out was how precious life is, and how quickly it can be pulled out of you. Life is like a clock put together by an eternally shaking box. And like all things, the material that life is made out of wants to return to a state of chaos. That the life "force" is stronger than the other, it made ways for itself to continue on in the form of offspring. While each house of the life force must return [to chaos] the house will make another so it can continue.

Dad's leukemia is very slight. He has not one symptom. He only found out through a blood test for a safety training thing that his white blood cell count was just slightly too high. There is still a slight chance it is not cancer, until the final tests come back. But I kind of hope it is leukemia, if it's not, it might be something much worse.

Why do I write this first? After all, this is not the beginning of the story chronologically. But it is the point around which everything changed. It has the strongest gravitational pull for me.

In reading what I had written, I see who I was then, and who I am now. I know now I was intellectualizing my pain. It is one method of dealing with grief. Something I learned to do quite well to avoid having to really feel anything. Sort of like being the atheist I was; if you know there is nothing, you don't have to trust that there might be.

And the final word on his prognosis was 6 years, not 20. He was 59.

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I can't find much in the way of journal entries from the summer of 1995 until the summer of 1996.

Excerpts from an email to my dearest friends, almost two years later...

Mon, 28 Apr 1997

...i think i am shallow.
what should i do about this?
that's why i want out of the sciences. i feel that they are making me shallow.
but i know it is not them--it is me.
i can't write anymore. this is frustrating.
i got an a on my bio exam.
and an a on my last rhet paper.
but i don't feel that i am doing well.
am i loosing my voice.
figuratively. literally.
i'm confused. i feel shallow. i feel i can't explain things to my satisfaction and this is what makes me shallow...

...i don't want to feel.
all i want to do is feel...

...nothing is explainable. but i think i accept things. i thought this was good now i'm asking myself is it.
what do you think? there is so much bad, but i accept it. i think there is no choice but to accept it.
my father has leukemia. but he doesn't not really. like knowing you are going to be hit by a bus in ten years. it's not real.

i have no choice but to accept it.
my grandmother is dying. she's been dying since dotty died. dying inside and now on the outside.
the only option is to accept it.
she's buried her whole family. sisters. brothers. parents. grandparents. her youngest son. i was in the stars. her only daughter. it wasn't.
i feel so shallow. now i hate myself for being so concerned about me.
ME. ME. ME. i hate it.
my thoughts. my feelings. what does it matter?
do you think i'm beautiful.
i feel beautiful when i'm naked...

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And from my journal the following the summer after my freshman year of college...

May 26, 1997

...I awoke last morning into loneliness, before the sun had risen to disguise the emptiness of the universe that becomes so apparent at night. (Perhaps this is why we sleep at night--to avoid the obvious truth that we are all loners in the dark sea).

But last morning I awoke before the sun and was greeted by a cold reality. That I am alone in life. And that there will come a time when I will cease to draw a breath and again enter into another phase of loneliness.


June 26, 1997
I want to be a writer. I want to be a massage therapist. I want to have experiences that feed my mind, body, and spirit and through this make my life interesting and worth living. I want other things. I want to live in a house of straw on a lake in the mountains. I want to fall in love but don't believe in it and this causes conflict within me. I want to have a child and love him or her but am afraid of the total consumption of this love and also don't want the responsibility this love entails. Perhaps this will change as I grow.