Happy Birthday, Daddy Jim

My Dad, September 2009

Today would have been my father's 96th birthday, had he still dwelt among the living. I almost feel guilty, so raw and fresh is my grief in having just lost my mother, that the pain of my father's passing - three years ago - feels most pale and ghostly by comparison.

Mom & Dad on his 89th birthday, 2006

Thankfully, the vivid memories of the horrible three months of his dying are fading, and what remains are wistful, warm memories of the loving father he was, my whole life.

Me & Dad on my high school graduation day, 1977

Dad loved celebrating birthdays, and there were so many memorable parties. I traveled to Sarasota Florida for his 80th, a bash he threw at Pelican Cove - the retirement community my parents were living in. Dad was in his element, surrounded by friends and family, drinking champagne and telling stories.

Mom & Dad at his 90th birthday party, 2007

For his 85th, I couldn't travel - being in the middle of my pregnancy with the twins and grounded by my OB - so I threw him a party here in New York.

The cheapest space I could find turned out perfect - the local Hungarian Hall, as my dad was always proud of his Hungarian (Jewish) ancestry, even though the only words he could speak in Hungarian were "Jo Istenem!" (pronounced yo ishtenem, meaning "Oh, my god!") and something filthy taught to him by a Hungarian cook at summer camp that caused his mother to wash his mouth out with soap when he repeated it to her upon his return home.
 

Dad with daughter-in-law Bern and his 3 grandsons, 2007

One unfortunate consequence of having the generations in my family so spread out, is that my children never got to know the vital, full of life man he was, as his fading away began when they were toddlers still. My kids' main memories of their Grandfather are of him sleeping on the sofa through most family gatherings. Though in pictures there is evidence of how much he enjoyed his grandsons' presence in his life.

 

Dad, you were a good man, a good father. Mom loved you right up to the end and missed you, acutely, every day of her nearly three years without you.

Happy Birthday Daddy, wherever you are.

March 25th will always, for me, belong to you.

Dad, 1961, photo by Bruce Steinhardt

Three Years (and nearly two months)

Me, Mom & Dad, Summer 2009

Three years ago, today, just after the 12th slipped into the 13th, my beloved father died.

Every year since then it has been a day of mourning and reflection for me, becoming a little less intense with each passing year, but still the ache remained acute.

But this year, today felt very odd, eclipsed by my mother's much more recent passing - nearly two months ago on January 17th.

My mother's death still hangs over me, feels much more recent still than two months.

If I close my eyes and think of her, I am, unfortunately, transported back to the final minutes of her life. That moment when her heart snapped and everything changed is burned deep into my mind's screen, sharp and bright, hopefully to be fading in intensity over the coming years.

But for now I remain somewhat ghost-ridden.

I regretted not being there, by my father's side as he passed. I had taken my first break in months, and many people told me that they think that allowed him to finally let go, that my absence was giving him permission to die.

Maybe.

He managed to do it quietly, with no one there to witness.  My sister Lois had gone to the bathroom down the hall, and said she felt a wave of heat and nausea pass over her, out of nowhere, at what she later calculated was probably the moment of his leaving, for when she came back into his room, he was gone, my mother unaware, fallen asleep sitting upright in the chair by his side.

At the time I felt like had missed out on something.

Now I'm not so sure.

The look on my mother's face as her eyes popped open, bugged out, unseeing, as she huffed and puffed as her heart was literally bursting, is something that will probably haunt me for the rest of my days.

I can talk about it most freely with my cousin Jessica, who, as an ER doctor, is no stranger to death. Other people I know I will creep out, make uncomfortable, so I hold this moment silently, in my mind and heart. But there it remains, indelible, most every day.

Even today, when I feel I should be remembering, mourning my father, yet still, my mother and her death hangs over all.

Though it is comforting to think back on the two of them at the same time, for they were such an entwined and loving couple. Fifty one years together.

I don't know where our spirit, our essence, goes when we pass. Truly I don't. I feel something remains, for I felt it leave my mother, witnessed how her body was just so much lumpen clay after it was gone.

And so, in the not knowing, I can only conjecture and hope that whatever wisp of energy that was my bright mother has found my father's counterpart out there, in the ethosphere, and their stardust particles are swirling about the universe in tandem, dancing together once more, forever.

Each mourning is different

Me & my parents, 1962

Second time around and I'm realizing... each mourning is different. A mother is not a father, and the missing manifests in different places in my body, in my life.

And then there's the fact that it's both of them gone now, and as an only child I am thusly the sole surviving member of my nuclear family. The only one who knows, who remembers our own particular family's micro-culture... what we ate; what we sang; what we said to each other to greet the day, to bid goodnight; what we liked to do on long summer days, on starry winter nights.

The people that brought me into this world are gone. Elvis has left the building. And while it's ridiculous to think of myself as an orphan at 52, with all the attendant images of storm-tossed waifs and wide eyed boys in desperate need of mothering, there it is - that term - popping into my brain at odd intervals.

"You're a member of the orphans club now... so sorry." says my friend, softly. My dear friend, Rachel, who I do not think I could have gotten through these three weeks without, is herself a long-time member, the edges of her pain blunted, but never quite extinguished.

And I don't know how this would feel if I'd had a conflicted, difficult relationship with my parents. My guess is both easier and harder. More relief, more longing, less simple loss and keen missing. But it's all conjecture.

I had these parents: a pair of interesting people who loved me much and well. They were kind and generous and never withholding in their love. It was unconditional and freely given. I always knew I was both loved and accepted.

And now, of course, that spigot is shut off. Gone.

As much as my children and husband may love me - and they do, as much comfort as that brings me - and it does, it is not the same as the way my mother's eyes lit up as I entered the room, thrilled by my mere existence, my simple proximity to her.

And I know how lucky I am to have had that. I know far too many who have never known this kind of love. And I know that at times in my younger life I have felt burdened, smothered by this love, for yes there was some neediness on her part in there, too. But that has all washed out, years ago now, water long passed under all the bridges.

And what I am left with is a wistful aching, memories that are both fond and painful because the wound of losing her is still so fresh and new. Everywhere I go, everything I light upon, I find traces of her.  And I find so much evidence that so much of who I am has come down from her.

I am in the dentist's chair and the radio is tuned to the classical music station.  Beethoven's 6th symphony comes on (the "Pastorale") and I find myself conducting with my idle hands. "Oh, you know this one?" he asks, surprised, explaining that he usually has the radio tuned to classic rock but his previous patient expressed a strong preference for WQXR.

"Yes," I tell him, after I have spat blood and grit into the tiny sink, "it was my mother's favorite symphony, she played it often in my childhood."

"Sorry," he says, knowing my news, "that must be painful." But somehow it isn't. It instead fills my heart to the brim with gratefulness that my mother passed on her love of music, that she shared with me, her child, the things that brought her joy, and that their beauty lives on in me now.

My mother always liked the springtime best. Whenever I spot the first yellowing blooms bursting from the branches of the forsythia bushes that line Central Park's transverse passages, I am possessed by the urge to share this vision with my mother. Golden harbinger of spring, forsythia made my mother deliriously, unreasonably happy.

I am prepared for the mix of heartbreak and bittersweet pleasure this spring will bring, as each fresh round of blossoming unfolds.

And now Mom has managed to derail her winter's memorial service, which had been due to be held this past Sunday. She has somehow summoned an icy February Frankenstorm to come upon us, necessitating the postponement of her ceremony; kicking it down the calendar into late winter or early spring.

Forsythia season for sure.