6:16am July 15, 2014

Another reason I’m upset about my father dying…

As if I need reasons. But this one is…

He’s the last connection to memories. To history. Once he’s gone, those memories are gone. Not just his own memories, but the memories of people who came before him.

He was writing it all in a book. He planned to finish the book before he died. Now it looks like the cancer may have other plans.

As a child, I picked up on patterns really well, same as I do now. And I picked up on them well enough to piece together, without ever being told a word about it, just from being around certain people… to piece together things about the farm in Oklahoma. Mostly feelings, impressions, things like that. Hard work, dryness, bareness, death, heartache.

Unfortunately I associated those feelings with that entire side of my family, and with my Okie heritage, and it made me not want to connect with that heritage at all. It made me profoundly uncomfortable, and I had no conscious awareness of why, so I just pushed those parts of me away.

Now I’m an adult, I understand better. And I feel deeply connected to that heritage, including through those secondhand memories and feelings I picked up from relatives. And I want to know more. And now there are things I may never know: My father is dying. HIs closest relative that I’d have any interest in asking quesitions of, has severe dementia if she’s still alive.

History slips away when old people die.

Real history. Real history as lived by ordinary people. Not just famous people. My family is deeply ordinary in some ways and unusual in others (at least I suspect the amount of disability in our family is unusual). But mostly deeply ordinary. And the history of the deeply ordinary is the most interesting history for me. It clearly interests my father as well or he wouldn’t be writing his book.

He was born in 1941. People born back then are becoming in shorter and shorter supply.

I remember when 1941 didn’t seem like that long ago, really.

Now, when I watch shows on TV set in the forties and fifties, they’re described as “period pieces”. That amazes and scares me.

But I don’t want to spend his last days interrogating him about family history. I mean, I really don’t want to. At all. What I want to do is love him strongly and love him fiercely and love him deeply and tell him so at every opportunity, both verbally and nonverbally.

But if he were going to live, then we would be having those conversations, and he would be finishing his book, and things would be different.

But still… now when I talk to him, all I want is the love. I want to sit there as if we’re in the same room, like we used to do, not needing to say a word to each other half the time. Just being there. And loving each other. And saying we love each other in words – but also broadcasting it on every level beneath words that there possibly is.

But that doesn’t change that there’s a huge loss of history, personal history, family history, people who matter to me who are already dead, but live on in his memory, but not in mine. All that is lost with him, and more.