NaNoWriMo is upon us which means that I’m going to dust off my blog for some good ole procrastination. Also, my heart is really full and I think some writing is in order.

Four years ago tonight, I got a Phone Call. Capital “P”, capital “C”. It was my mother, teary and hysterical asking me, my brother, and sister in law to come to the house because my father had died. It was not the way I thought I was going to end that day.

It has started out as one of hope. It was the day of the Village Venture,  Claremont’s annual craft fair and unofficial start to the holiday shopping season. My friend and I had been planning for months for the booth we rented. She was going to peddle some of her creative knitted creations and it was the world premier of my my infant-stage artisan soap and personal goods business “A Modern Apothecary”. I spent the whole day feeling like I had just started a new chapter of The Book of Liz in the eternally optimistic streets of the Claremont Village.

My Uncle Dave, my dad’s brother, had called me that day. We didn’t talk often so I ducked out of the booth to take the call. He had had an idea of taking a road trip with my dad out to Ohio to visit their parents as a way to reconnect with him and also, to obviously have all 4 members of their family in the same room. Apparently it hadn’t happened in quite a while. He was asking me for my help in convincing my dad to do it and I loved the idea and said I would.

After the day at the craft fair I went to a Chaucer mass at the local catholic church. As you do in Claremont. Card carrying Mormons typically don’t go to mass, especially on a Saturday, but my friend who is a Chaucerian scholar had been asked by the organizers of the mass to do a reading in Middle English and I went to support her. It was lovely. I even stayed for the traditional punch and cookies.

Then I went up to my LDS church where there was a Trunk or Treat Halloween party in full swing, met up with my brother and sister in law and we wrapped up the game booth they were running and decided to head home to watch a movie and end a productive day on a highly entertained note. Right after we pressed play the phone rang.

My little brother hung up the call and said “Apparently Dad is dead”. We all silently got up and got in the car. We took the whole trip across town to my mom’s house in stunned silence but in my head I was violently changing and rearranging the facts that I had (which were few at the time) so they landed in an order that would make it impossible for my dad to be gone. I had never, once, imagined a world without my dad in it. We had never had any end of life discussions with my parents though we should have. I understand now that that was carefully sculpted denial. My dad was really sick. He was close to, if not north of, 400 lbs when he died and had been a food addict for all of the adult portion of his life that I can remember. Some people self-medicate with work, some with porn, some with sex, some with gambling, some with cruelty, some with shoe shopping, some wth Iron Man competitions, and some with food. Kids of alcoholics grow up finding empty bourbon bottles stuffed underneath desks and in trash cans. Kids of food addicts find gas station bags full of empty hostess and snicker wrappers tucked under the drivers side seat when it’s their turn to clean the car. I knew the gravity of the behavior, but at the same time I wouldn’t know. It was too scary and my dad, through my daddy’s girl glasses, was too good of a man to be addicted to anything. He loved all of us so loudly and so perfectly.

He seemed bullet proof to me, despite his disease. I’m pretty sure he had single-handedly willed away diabetes because he danced the blood sugar line a lot but was never diagnosed. He had high blood pressure but had never had a cardiac event. He walked and moved around on his own volition till the day he died. His mind was so strong and his body, despite it’s limitations, followed where his strong mind led it. Nothing seemed impossible to me if my dad had decided he wanted to do it. It was just a matter of him wanting —

He wrestled with mild bi-polar disorder that mostly manifested in him working for a few days at a time and then sleeping for a few days at a time. He worked. That’s what he did. He kept busy all the time trying to be productive. It was normal for him to work most of a Saturday and then nap away the later portion of it on the couch in front of his desk. That’s why it wasn’t weird when he was still asleep into the evening but my brother did not find a napping dad when he went in to wake him up for dinner. He had had a heart attack while he slept and was gone.

When we got to the house it felt like the whole world had gone quiet. Someone, probably my subconscious, had hit the mute button. There was a police car there with the lights on but no noise. My mom was sitting in a chair next to the couch holding my dad’s unresponsive hand and crying, rocking back and forth trying to comfort herself. My brother’s dog was licking my dad’s leg like she always did when she wanted him to wake up. My older brother that lived with them kept coming in and out of the room trying to answer all of the sheriff’s questions and checking on my mom.

I immediately went to my mom’s side and started rubbing her back and she started verbalizing the flurry of facts she had been rearranging in her own head trying to understand what was happening:

“He always takes a nap on Saturday. He loves to nap on this couch. He was fine this morning. He made me breakfast. We’re supposed to meet up with (our friends) tomorrow after church. I was just resting back in my room. I have no idea when it happened. He didn’t make any noise. We didn’t know”

On the drive over I was telling and convincing myself of every possibility to would make my father not dead but the second I saw him the truth and brutal finality of the situation distilled on me. I took a deep breath and prepared for the Long Family Crisis  Mode Metamorphosis. My brothers, usually the picture of calmness and composure, all get super emotional and fly to their respective corners to self-sooth and I, typically a little on the emotional and emotive side, become strangely still and clear minded and I start directing traffic.

My littlest brother, upon seeing Dad, couldn’t contain his grief, grabbed his wife and they just hugged and cried together. My older brother, I could tell was needing to take a minute or two to fall apart in his own way but we had the sheriffs there. Apparently when someone passes away at home that isn’t under formal hospice care the local authorities can’t release to body to the funeral home without the signature of  or speaking to a primary care physician stating the death was expected. We got them in touch with the doctor and they started in on their respective paperwork. One was the vet who had done this before and the other was the rookie that was being made to learn and fill out the form who couldn’t have been more nervous or uncomfortable.

The older sheriff was the most gentle, grandfatherly public servant I’ve ever spoken to and he had, as you do when you’re a cop, visually inventoried our house, art, and books and had gathered we were an LDS family and was apparently savvy to our support systems. He asked if we had called our bishop yet. I said we probably hadn’t. He suggested that would be a good next step.

We were all just stunned in place. We had weathered our share of disappointments and struggles as a family but this was next level. Weathering a loss of a parent is hard enough when it’s expected and you’ve had time to emotionally prepare but the trauma of the sudden loss and the emotional weight of the loss is a 1-2 blow that none of us were prepared for. I was desperately grateful for any guidance on what to do next.

We eventually found all the people that we needed to get Dad to a funeral home and they arrived in a nonchalant white van to collect him. I was kind of disappointed it wasn’t a hearse. This whole experience felt almost cartoonish. It seemed natural the car that would take my dad away should be as conspicuous as every part of me felt at that moment. I took my mom back into her bedroom with my sister in law because we knew watching them move him would only exacerbate her distress. My two brothers, the bishop, and the two funeral home personnel managed to move Dad and we watched that white van drive away and we all looked at each other with a lot of love but also with a big “now what?”

Mom asked me to come stay at the house so my little brother, sister in law, and I drove home in silence. But this time it was a resigned, grief-stricken silence. The kind of silence when your reconciling the fact that you life will never be the same and not in a good way. My brother and sister in law came with me to my house while I packed. We all were instantly reluctant to leave each other’s sides. It was like this rule of trauma that we all suddenly understood: Don’t leave anyone alone. Protect who we have left. Protect the herd. No one is going to bear this grief alone.

My roommate at the time had lost her mom in a tragic accident when she was 21 so when I walked in the house she took one look at my face and instantly recognized that core-shaken-by-grief look. I said “My dad died tonight”  and immediate hugs and prayers were said but I remember how foreign those words felt in my mouth, like a dance step I was trying to learn that wasn’t in my body yet. I remember thinking and literally practicing saying “My dad is dead. My dad died.” because those were words I had never put together before, never said aloud, but they were part of my script now. They were part of My Story.

I went back to my mom’s that night and didn’t leave for two weeks. The next day more wagons circled. Cousins and friends appeared with cleaning supplies and homemade bread and cute animals and toys for my out of town nephew to play with and more food than any of us knew what to do with. Funeral plans were laid. I bought my dad’s grave plot, literally, on Halloween. There were flowers and transportation to arrange, songs to learn for the service, friends to communicate with, a eulogy to write. It was a comforting flurry of things to do. But there was something that I had heard at my friend’s mom’s funeral that I had attended the year before that kept pinging through my mind. The pastor got up and said “The hard part is when all the commotion with the burial calms down and the family has to go back to their regular lives and figure out how to keep going without the departed there.” I kept wondering how the world could begin to work without my dad in it. He made everything make sense. He made things safe. Understandable. Attainable. He was the glue.

Robert Frost very famously once said “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on”. I very reluctantly agree.

I have managed to figure out how to keep going without my dad. It never occurred to me that I had the luxury of not moving on. I always fully intended to, I just had no idea how to go about it. The thing that guided me the most, though, was the idea that the absolute last thing my dad would want would be for me to wallow. The best way to honor him is and was to be the best version of myself possible and to apply everything he took so many pains to teach me. I made it one of my top tier life goals to make him proud. He would also want to make sure my mom was taken care of. She was his number 1 priority since the second they met and he kept her there for almost 40 years so I took extra pains with her until we lost her 3 years later.

My dad was never a rich man. His legacy, to me at least, are the relationships he had; how well he loved and honored my mom, how much he loved and taught us, the loyalty he inspired in his coworkers, partners, and friends. He was a man of principle and it echoed through everything he did. There was just this strange short circuit when it came to loving himself. I suppose he had to have some flaw or another. When he died he had been working with a therapist and had been making a lot of progress. It was the first time in his life that he conceded enough intellectual and emotional ground to get help. I like to think that that was the final lesson he had to learn and once he did, that’s thats when he graduated to the next phase.

I miss my dad. I’m proud of him. I’m proud of how much he struggled and that he never gave up. He might have taken some breaks but he kept chipping away at the problem. He held tight to the things that he knew to be true and good. I miss having someone that I was so confident loved me and believed in me to talk to. I miss how safe I felt when he hugged me and how I felt like a million dollars when I could make him laugh.

It’s impossible to look at the world and not be reminded of him. So many things that I love are things that he gave me, showed me, taught me, modeled for me. He was, simply, a really good dad and that plain, profound fact is worthy of remembering and celebrating.”It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life”.

I miss you Dad and I’m trying. I’m trying to make you proud.

photo credit: Soosh via Upworthy