October 16

One angsty note from 1979, an old Inktober thing, and a glimpse of 2023

1979

Today’s “Voices in the Wind”, discussing parents and children, is beautiful. What did my parents give me? Their dreams and fears. The brown eyes and hair I could have gotten form anyone; the dreams and fears only from them. Mom is afraid of being poor and alone. Dad is afraid of growing old and being “stuck” in one place. I am a mix; I am afraid of growing old without accomplishing something important. I have my mother’s fear of losing love. It seems so impolite to want to reject these gifts, such as they are.

They aren’t so horrible. My fear of losing love leads me to reach out to others. My fear of being bored keeps me curious. They are only faults in excess. 

2016 (Twitter)

How awful do things have to get before we can begin to reconcile?

2018

I am not ambidextrous. “weak” Inktober2018

2023

That first entry is one of those grad school era posts that make want to travel back to 1979 and throttle my 30-year-old self. Trying so hard to express deep thoughts, but just managing to be awkward, shallow and pretentious. I barely knew myself at thirty, and I sure hadn’t figured out my parents. Still don’t, and still haven’t.

This has become even more obvious in the last 24 hours. I am in Richmond, Virginia for the weekend, helping some of my cousins cope with the aftermath of their 91-year-old father’s sudden death. Yes, sudden death can happen even at that age. My aunt, his wife of 66 years, is the fragile one, and Uncle Joel was the vigorous one, the man in charge of everything in their lives as she descended into Alzheimer’s. But he had a sudden medical emergency that landed him in the ICU; he died a week later. My sweet Aunt Carol is confused. Maybe it was her father who died. She saw an old man in the hospital and it couldn’t be her young, handsome fiancé.

My cousins are taking turns staying with her as they make funeral arrangements and try to sort things out enough that they can arrange a better situation for her. I came to be present and help where I could, which turned out to be tech support. My uncle’s phone and laptop were frustratingly secure, and it took me hours to get into them and reset them so my cousins could use them.

He never deleted any emails, so now I know more than I wanted to know about my peace-loving, generous, super smart, deeply religious uncle, a retired Air Force general with a PhD in math, who had once considered a career in Lutheran ministry. Let’s just say I suspected he leaned politically to right, and I was correct. That may also be true about my cousins, but it didn’t come up. It never does, mostly because despite living a few hours apart, we don’t socialize much. Probably we have all being avoiding each other, afraid to open the barrels of worms that exist in our family.

At any rate, that’s where I’ve been and what I have been up to this weekend. Lessons learned:

1. Alzheimer’s sucks

2. Being prepared for your own exit includes leaving clear instructions for accessing your important stuff.

3. I still have a lot to learn about me and about my family.