(no subject)
"She was the kind of person who would walk into work on a Monday morning with her travel mug of coffee clenched in one hand; a copy of bell hooks under one arm, and a package of little plastic of "B-Movie Horror Victims" figurines under the other. She looked so normal, but with random clues that one maybe should not trust to judge the book by its cover."
I woke up this morning thinking again about my own obituary; who would write it? What would it say? How do people see me? How would they spin that perception in the hour of my death for a public notice? A eulogy? The stories they'd tell themselves at the wake?
This kind of thinking is, almost certainly, the direct result of seeing my father on Friday. There's nothing like confronting the ugly face of mortality to make you question its inevitable impact on your own existence. History isn't just written by the victors, it's written by the survivors, which means the impressions we leave behind are only as good as other people's willingness and ability to recount them without embellishment. And humanity is a bundle of genetically-manipulated molecules designed for embellishment like nothing else in the universe, perhaps. Part of that embellishment, I suppose, is trying to explain how we get from the images we have in our heads to the hard visual truths sitting right in front of our faces, because there has to be some way of mitigating the pain and fear that comes with end-of-life experiences.
It's not that I want to romanticize my dad or the relationship between us (not as in "romance", but as in "fictionalize with a glossy, beautiful, meaningless cover"). But seeing the man he was become the husk he is - mostly bed-ridden or wheelchair-bound at best, dying slowly of COPD, crippled by recurring TIAs, hands permanently bruised by liver spots or IV needles, manhandled by residence staff for the most basic of bodily functions and reduced to wearing diapers and pads - shakes loose even the vestiges of the images I hold in my head of my *father*. The man who could build anything, design anything... yet still boil dry and burn three out of four kettles in a row. Who worked from home 16 hour days as a self-employed industrial architect, but still took the time to show me how to use his electric typewriter, then his electronic typewriter, then the first TSR computers he brought home. Who threw himself into every project my mother ever suggested. Who always made time to find his finest tweezers when I came to him with slivers. Who hadn't the vaguest clue how to make Kraft Dinner. Who participated every Christmas Day in a worldwide HAM radio network meant to connect parents at home with soldiers stationed on active duty around the world. Who was an excellent photographer, a musician, a frustrated artist. A frustrated husband. A frustrated father. A disenfranchised son and brother. A man who held his secrets close, if only because somewhere along the line he'd come to believe no-one was interested in hearing them.
He was also an alcoholic for most of my life. Caring when he was sober, emotionally absent when he wasn't. One of the most even-tempered people I know... that I saw. I didn't see much of the workaholic hours, though. Who knows how many hours he spent alone and crying in his office, or in his lonely twin bed or (after Mum moved into her own bedroom) in his own bedroom. I remember the man who would build anything for me, but who got frustrated with the fact that I didn't pick up his love of math or music. I remember his delight when I showed an interest in the computers, and he was my biggest fan with it came to my writing, but he didn't know how to relate to the 17 year old girl he was left with with Mum moved out and I chose not to leave my comfort zone and go with her.
It always seemed like he had done everything (fought in Europe late in WWII, flew commercial planes in the 50s, played in jazz bands in the 50's and 60s and played with OSCAR FUCKING PETERSON before anyone knew him as anything other than "that black kid on the ivories", designed massive breweries, built the first scaled-down robotic arm I ever saw, was a professional commercial photographer...), and could do anything.
I had to help him take his birthday present out of the gift bag on Friday and unwrap it for him, because those hands that once could fix watch workings couldn't grasp a box set of DVDs or the untaped paper around them. I pushed his wheelchair for the first time to take him down the hall to the dining room. I put the cloth bib on him and snapped it closed around his neck like I'm sure he must have done for me more than a few times, 45-odd years ago.
I left before I had to watch his wife cut up his dinner for him. Spending a few hours on an afternoon with him, watching him check the clock every few minutes to see if it's 5 o'clock and time for dinner yet, because dinner is a big deal in his day when he can leave the room, and afterward he can come back and go to bed, since there's not much else to do except sleep. His life is, I think, governed by the meal schedule; there's nothing left for him to do. When the TIAs robbed him of motor control he stopped typing, and eventually his wife took the laptop home rather than leaving it in his room. He lacks the hand/eye coordination to operate the remote for the TV/cable box to watch TV or listen to music. His wife natters and fusses, like the residence staff natter and fuss, but there's very little to engage that massive intellect that was one of the hallmarks of the man my father used to be. He has trouble following conversations now, so engaging him in discussion is an apt exercise in coming to understand why non-geriatric adults often wind up talking to seniors like they're children, or imbeciles, or both.
He turns 91 today, and while there's a tendency to want to say, to eulogize, that "he's had a good life" as the story I want to tell myself, the truth is that I don't actually know. I know what he'd say if I asked him, because I *have* asked him. He'd say everything turned out all right in the end, and the road has never been anything but interesting. And he'll decline to elaborate. "What's in the past stays in the past." He's said that too, on several occasions. When I tried to tell him I've taken the Murphy family bible for full restoration, he had nothing to say. I wondered if looking at me was a different mirror of his own mortality, because beyond me there is nothing, and very little of him in me. He use to make oblique references to that fact, to me being the end of his line, when I was younger. It was impactful enough that I didn't change my name the first time I got married, though there were MANY emotionally-extenuating circumstances around that choice on my part. His sister had children, but they're Goodwins. MY father's father was one of eight children, seven who lived, five of whom were boys; it's not like the line of Nelson Murphy Esq is going to die out for good, I just can't find any of them.
Someday I will, and then all of the remnants of a family I've never know will be completely removed from my purview. In writing that, I wonder if that's at all how it feels for dad, or if he even thinks of it any more. If he even thinks of how to fill the time between breakfast and lunch and dinner any more.
I don't ever want to be that old, if it means watching all of my own history fading away like that. I'd rather go while those who write the obituaries and eulogies and tale-tellings have something more vibrant to share, whether they do so in love or in anger. I want to leave them with something closer to the image I have in my own head, rather than something so eroded by time and failing biology that it erases all the other tales.
I want there to be something more - so much more - to be said than, "She had a good life... I think."
I woke up this morning thinking again about my own obituary; who would write it? What would it say? How do people see me? How would they spin that perception in the hour of my death for a public notice? A eulogy? The stories they'd tell themselves at the wake?
This kind of thinking is, almost certainly, the direct result of seeing my father on Friday. There's nothing like confronting the ugly face of mortality to make you question its inevitable impact on your own existence. History isn't just written by the victors, it's written by the survivors, which means the impressions we leave behind are only as good as other people's willingness and ability to recount them without embellishment. And humanity is a bundle of genetically-manipulated molecules designed for embellishment like nothing else in the universe, perhaps. Part of that embellishment, I suppose, is trying to explain how we get from the images we have in our heads to the hard visual truths sitting right in front of our faces, because there has to be some way of mitigating the pain and fear that comes with end-of-life experiences.
It's not that I want to romanticize my dad or the relationship between us (not as in "romance", but as in "fictionalize with a glossy, beautiful, meaningless cover"). But seeing the man he was become the husk he is - mostly bed-ridden or wheelchair-bound at best, dying slowly of COPD, crippled by recurring TIAs, hands permanently bruised by liver spots or IV needles, manhandled by residence staff for the most basic of bodily functions and reduced to wearing diapers and pads - shakes loose even the vestiges of the images I hold in my head of my *father*. The man who could build anything, design anything... yet still boil dry and burn three out of four kettles in a row. Who worked from home 16 hour days as a self-employed industrial architect, but still took the time to show me how to use his electric typewriter, then his electronic typewriter, then the first TSR computers he brought home. Who threw himself into every project my mother ever suggested. Who always made time to find his finest tweezers when I came to him with slivers. Who hadn't the vaguest clue how to make Kraft Dinner. Who participated every Christmas Day in a worldwide HAM radio network meant to connect parents at home with soldiers stationed on active duty around the world. Who was an excellent photographer, a musician, a frustrated artist. A frustrated husband. A frustrated father. A disenfranchised son and brother. A man who held his secrets close, if only because somewhere along the line he'd come to believe no-one was interested in hearing them.
He was also an alcoholic for most of my life. Caring when he was sober, emotionally absent when he wasn't. One of the most even-tempered people I know... that I saw. I didn't see much of the workaholic hours, though. Who knows how many hours he spent alone and crying in his office, or in his lonely twin bed or (after Mum moved into her own bedroom) in his own bedroom. I remember the man who would build anything for me, but who got frustrated with the fact that I didn't pick up his love of math or music. I remember his delight when I showed an interest in the computers, and he was my biggest fan with it came to my writing, but he didn't know how to relate to the 17 year old girl he was left with with Mum moved out and I chose not to leave my comfort zone and go with her.
It always seemed like he had done everything (fought in Europe late in WWII, flew commercial planes in the 50s, played in jazz bands in the 50's and 60s and played with OSCAR FUCKING PETERSON before anyone knew him as anything other than "that black kid on the ivories", designed massive breweries, built the first scaled-down robotic arm I ever saw, was a professional commercial photographer...), and could do anything.
I had to help him take his birthday present out of the gift bag on Friday and unwrap it for him, because those hands that once could fix watch workings couldn't grasp a box set of DVDs or the untaped paper around them. I pushed his wheelchair for the first time to take him down the hall to the dining room. I put the cloth bib on him and snapped it closed around his neck like I'm sure he must have done for me more than a few times, 45-odd years ago.
I left before I had to watch his wife cut up his dinner for him. Spending a few hours on an afternoon with him, watching him check the clock every few minutes to see if it's 5 o'clock and time for dinner yet, because dinner is a big deal in his day when he can leave the room, and afterward he can come back and go to bed, since there's not much else to do except sleep. His life is, I think, governed by the meal schedule; there's nothing left for him to do. When the TIAs robbed him of motor control he stopped typing, and eventually his wife took the laptop home rather than leaving it in his room. He lacks the hand/eye coordination to operate the remote for the TV/cable box to watch TV or listen to music. His wife natters and fusses, like the residence staff natter and fuss, but there's very little to engage that massive intellect that was one of the hallmarks of the man my father used to be. He has trouble following conversations now, so engaging him in discussion is an apt exercise in coming to understand why non-geriatric adults often wind up talking to seniors like they're children, or imbeciles, or both.
He turns 91 today, and while there's a tendency to want to say, to eulogize, that "he's had a good life" as the story I want to tell myself, the truth is that I don't actually know. I know what he'd say if I asked him, because I *have* asked him. He'd say everything turned out all right in the end, and the road has never been anything but interesting. And he'll decline to elaborate. "What's in the past stays in the past." He's said that too, on several occasions. When I tried to tell him I've taken the Murphy family bible for full restoration, he had nothing to say. I wondered if looking at me was a different mirror of his own mortality, because beyond me there is nothing, and very little of him in me. He use to make oblique references to that fact, to me being the end of his line, when I was younger. It was impactful enough that I didn't change my name the first time I got married, though there were MANY emotionally-extenuating circumstances around that choice on my part. His sister had children, but they're Goodwins. MY father's father was one of eight children, seven who lived, five of whom were boys; it's not like the line of Nelson Murphy Esq is going to die out for good, I just can't find any of them.
Someday I will, and then all of the remnants of a family I've never know will be completely removed from my purview. In writing that, I wonder if that's at all how it feels for dad, or if he even thinks of it any more. If he even thinks of how to fill the time between breakfast and lunch and dinner any more.
I don't ever want to be that old, if it means watching all of my own history fading away like that. I'd rather go while those who write the obituaries and eulogies and tale-tellings have something more vibrant to share, whether they do so in love or in anger. I want to leave them with something closer to the image I have in my own head, rather than something so eroded by time and failing biology that it erases all the other tales.
I want there to be something more - so much more - to be said than, "She had a good life... I think."