My youngest son Matt (age 6) has days when he clings to me like I'd disappear forever if he wasn't in my presence! Sometimes I'm working on my computer, or watching TV, and he'll stand beside me or snuggle up beside me on the couch, and just 'be' there...nothing more. I may be about to go out the door just to check the mail, take out the trash or take laundry down to the laundry room...reliably, I'll hear his little voice "Can I go with you, Daddy?" It's not as if he's not thoroughly attached to Shari, my wife and his Mommy....for him, there's just something deeply satisfying and comforting to be with his Daddy, even if there's nothing exciting going on in my immediate presence.
One night, Matt and I were laying together on the "big bed"...a night time ritual where he'll come in while I'm settling in for the night, and play on the bed until he's tired enough to either stumble to his own room, or (most often) be carried to his bed in a comatose state. Matt asked me where my Daddy was...I told him that my father had passed away before even David (Matt's big brother) had been born, and that my mother had died just over a year before Matt was born. It seemed inconceivable to him that I didn't have either parent alive and accessible, as he had, and that turned the conversation toward that inevitable someday when his own Mommy and Daddy would no longer be alive. Matt was born when Shari was 37 and I was 40, which mathematically means that, unless both of us live into our 90's or 100's, Matt will have less time on Earth enjoying our company than his peers with much younger parents (which, as an aside, I'll insert that I'm thoroughly disgusted with people who spawn children in their 60's and upward...an incredibly selfish act, in my opinion).
As Matt pondered in his 6-year-old mind what it would be like to not have Shari and I immediately available, his mood turned decidedly sad and morose. Realizing that the conversation topic was probably a bit premature for his developmental stage, I quickly assured him that Shari and I were going to be around for a long time and he had nothing to worry about, at least for (optimistically) another 40-50 years. Eventually, his 6-year-old attention span relieved me of having to explain death further, and we moved on to happier topics. But it struck me afterward how deeply sad, almost hopelessly empty, Matt must have felt ever so briefly at the notion that he'd face even one day without us.
I miss my parents, particularly my Mom. I remember being with her in her hospital room, along with my two sisters, the Saturday afternoon she passed away. She last spoke to us through a strong Morphine-induced cloud the day before, and I'll always count myself fortunate that the final words between us were "I love you." After that, she slipped into a comatose state and never became lucid afterward, probably a merciful thing given the advanced stage of her cancer. Her breathing was labored and irregular toward the afternoon, as we sat around her bed, each of us doing our own thing to pass the time (I was busy on my first pass through Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" as I recall). All of a sudden, Mom sat up straight on her bed, with her shut-eyed face looking off at the ceiling, almost as if she were about to get up off the bed and leave the room with Someone, and even cancer and coma weren't going to keep her in that bed. After a brief moment sitting up, she faded back to the laying position, and shortly afterward took one last gulp of air, and then never breathed again.
Up to the point of her last breath, I'd always known that moment was going to come eventually. Whenever I'd go visit Mom at her apartment, she'd usually ask me to go over to the mail room and retrieve her mail. At the moment I'd turn the key in the mailbox, the notion would come over me that this potentially could be the last time I'd ever have to turn that key, if Mom were to pass away...it was a disconcerting thought that hit me every time. The moments between the last gulp, and when my sister Carol looked up at us from checking Mom's pulse, and finally shook her head, indicating to us that Mom no longer had a pulse, seemed like an eternity. I was reckoning with the reality that what I'd dreaded since I was a little boy (like my Matt) was finally coming to pass...I was without my Mom at last. When the moment was confirmed, I exploded into tears like I don't recall ever crying before in my life. No matter who else remained with me alive, Mom was gone and her unique place in my soul was now no longer occupied by her life.
Dad's death impacted me in a bit of a different way. In the later months of 1992, Dad had taken a fall out of his nursing home bed, and hit his head somewhere on the way down (bed rail? floor?), causing a traumatic injury to the vessels connecting his brain to the inner lining of the skull and resulting in a hematoma. Other health complications, including septic blood, took him down fast the following month. As with Mom, Dad had a lucid moment for us to exchange words, and our final exchange between us was "I love you." Mid-January, Shari and I were making a trip by rail out to Denver, so that I could interview for a graduate counseling program (an awful 20-hour nightmarish trip, it turned out!), and that morning before we left for the train station, I got the call from Carol that "our father has passed away." It was little more than news as I was hurriedly rushing out the door, giving me little more than pause as I wondered to myself why I wasn't more devastated. I shrugged it off and kept moving. Dad's death caught up to me about 26 hours later, as I was sitting in the office of one of the core counseling faculty at the school I was trying to impress, being interviewed for one of the limited few openings in their program.
To set the stage properly, Shari and I had just ridden Amtrak for 20 awful, miserable hours, mostly due to freezing conditions on the rails between Chicago and Denver. We had intended to stay overnight in a Denver hotel, so that I'd be rested and relaxed for the interview. Instead, we "slept" sitting up with too little leg room in our train seat, being awakened every 5 minutes by the chain-saw snoring and gasping of some guy a few rows away with terrible apnea, or the screams of a tiny baby at the other end of the car, suffering from colic. The school was gracious enough to send a graduate student from the program over in his own tiny Mazda, Subaru or some other micro, mini imported tin can, to pick us and our luggage up and take us to the campus. After being dropped off (mostly comatose ourselves from little sleep and cramped bodies) we sat un-showered and un-fed in the lobby of the administrative building of this school, atop our pile of luggage, with me trying to recover some semblance of scholarly demeanor. When I was finally called in, I sat down in a chair across from the faculty interviewer, comfortably seated with a massive hard-wood desk between us. Groggily prepared for what I thought were going to be questions about my philosophy on all things counseling, I was smashed in the heart by his opening question: "Tell me about your relationship with your father." There in my interview, I lost my composure, burst into tears, and sat and wept for 5-10 minutes...the interviewer sat without any demonstration of compassion or concern the entire time I grieved (maybe he thought I was putting on a show of sensitivity?). I didn't make the cut that year, either.
It struck me years later that there was a profound difference between my grief over the passing of my Dad, and the loss of my Mom (and I use the differing terms "passing" and "loss" on purpose). I was always close to my Mom, always knew she held me close to her heart, and that I was never in danger of losing her love. Mom was at every high school basketball game I played; she went back to work my Sophomore year of high school explicitly so that I would have new clothes to wear, and wouldn't have to get "free lunches" due to our poverty; she published every accomplishment I ever had in the small-town local newspaper, proudly stating "Scott Knapp, son of Hazel Knapp" in the leading sentence (Dad didn't pay for the articles, she always said, so he wasn't worth mentioning, either!); I sat for hours and hours in her green formal living room chair, getting advice and perspective (a chair I inherited, kept in my counseling office for several years, and sit in now as I write); she conditioned me to eventually adopt her idiosyncratic phraseology, including "aaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway" when transitioning from a talked-out subject, and greeting my sister Carol on the phone (and now in email) with "Hello Sister" and ending in "Love, brother" because Mom always greeted me with "Hello, Son!" (something about re-stating the relationship moniker felt more meaningful than merely using a given name); ending every conversation on the phone and in person with "I love you"; and for thousands of other intimate, personal reasons my heart was knit to my Mom's each and every day I knew her.
Dad's connection to my heart was a bit different, less intimate than functional. Dad was there, but not "there" for me. Dad was 53 when I was born (Mom was 43), and probably had not planned on being a father again at so advanced of an age...and he often wasn't. I remember a time Dad took me to another local town to wash his car, when I was merely 4 years old. He gave me the money to go next door to the A&W Rootbeer restaurant (alone, no less) for something to drink, but when I didn't get done with my Root Beer and return in sufficient time, I stood there with my 4-year-old comprehension, watching his car pull out of the car wash and drive away down the street without me in it! I remember crying to the lady behind the counter that "my Daddy just drove away" without me, and her promising to get me home herself if she had to...apparently he eventually came back to get me, but I really have few clear memories of the event, beyond the impression of emptiness and screaming alone-ness of watching him drive away. That sense of abandonment characterized my relationship with Dad for the rest of the time I knew him. About a year before my wedding to Shari, I went to Dad's apartment (Mom happily divorced Dad shortly after I left for college, thanks in large part to the sense of independence she'd gotten from going back to work, mentioned a paragraph earlier) and informed him I was engaged. He deadpanned most matter-of-factly, "I doubt I'll be there...I'll probably be sick that day." Dad was an uncannily accurate prophet on that occasion, he was.
I wept on occasion for several years after Dad passed away, wondering what in heaven's name I had to grieve over, until one day it occurred to me that I was grieving not over any love that was lost, but over the loss of opportunity for Dad to come to his senses, regret his colossal failure as a father (and husband, for that matter...but that's another story) and come back to make things right. Dad's death meant I had to live with that unfinished business, business he created and never brought to a close; in fact, business he'd contracted to when he lent his sperm to my creation that he never followed through on by showing up personally. I grieved primarily for what should have been, but never had been, and after January 1993 never had a chance of ever being.
Mom showed up. My grief for Mom's passing was bitter and sweet; bitter for what would not continue to be experienced, sweet for the memory of what actually had been. I grieved the loss of opportunity to continue being "with" my Mom again, I reveled in it so. When I go out to my Mom's and Dad's common grave site and look down at the simple headstone, my attention always first gravitates to Mom's name and particulars, and after a few moments I notice Dad's are incidentally there, too. The headstone is a reminder of the two very different responses I have toward either of them.
Right now Matt enjoys "being" with me and Shari, we make him feel sufficiently welcome and loved that he can't imagine the worth of living without us immediately there. Some of that reaction is the result of normal childhood attachment and bonding with a "parental figure" and some of it is the result of my and Shari's choice to love our son's soul well. I'm so in love with both of our sons, I can't imagine life without them, either, and I enjoy being a father to both. At this point in Matt's life, that quality of relationship is fragile; there are so many things I could do through simple neglect to "be there" that would eventually erode his enjoyment of "being" with me, until one day the thought of me no longer being in his life would be more inconvenient than emotionally crippling.
As a father, every day I earn the way in which either of my sons will grieve my passing. And that is what is so humbling about every time Matt innocently asks, "Daddy, can I come with you?" when I'm merely going down to check the mail.
One night, Matt and I were laying together on the "big bed"...a night time ritual where he'll come in while I'm settling in for the night, and play on the bed until he's tired enough to either stumble to his own room, or (most often) be carried to his bed in a comatose state. Matt asked me where my Daddy was...I told him that my father had passed away before even David (Matt's big brother) had been born, and that my mother had died just over a year before Matt was born. It seemed inconceivable to him that I didn't have either parent alive and accessible, as he had, and that turned the conversation toward that inevitable someday when his own Mommy and Daddy would no longer be alive. Matt was born when Shari was 37 and I was 40, which mathematically means that, unless both of us live into our 90's or 100's, Matt will have less time on Earth enjoying our company than his peers with much younger parents (which, as an aside, I'll insert that I'm thoroughly disgusted with people who spawn children in their 60's and upward...an incredibly selfish act, in my opinion).
As Matt pondered in his 6-year-old mind what it would be like to not have Shari and I immediately available, his mood turned decidedly sad and morose. Realizing that the conversation topic was probably a bit premature for his developmental stage, I quickly assured him that Shari and I were going to be around for a long time and he had nothing to worry about, at least for (optimistically) another 40-50 years. Eventually, his 6-year-old attention span relieved me of having to explain death further, and we moved on to happier topics. But it struck me afterward how deeply sad, almost hopelessly empty, Matt must have felt ever so briefly at the notion that he'd face even one day without us.
I miss my parents, particularly my Mom. I remember being with her in her hospital room, along with my two sisters, the Saturday afternoon she passed away. She last spoke to us through a strong Morphine-induced cloud the day before, and I'll always count myself fortunate that the final words between us were "I love you." After that, she slipped into a comatose state and never became lucid afterward, probably a merciful thing given the advanced stage of her cancer. Her breathing was labored and irregular toward the afternoon, as we sat around her bed, each of us doing our own thing to pass the time (I was busy on my first pass through Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" as I recall). All of a sudden, Mom sat up straight on her bed, with her shut-eyed face looking off at the ceiling, almost as if she were about to get up off the bed and leave the room with Someone, and even cancer and coma weren't going to keep her in that bed. After a brief moment sitting up, she faded back to the laying position, and shortly afterward took one last gulp of air, and then never breathed again.
Up to the point of her last breath, I'd always known that moment was going to come eventually. Whenever I'd go visit Mom at her apartment, she'd usually ask me to go over to the mail room and retrieve her mail. At the moment I'd turn the key in the mailbox, the notion would come over me that this potentially could be the last time I'd ever have to turn that key, if Mom were to pass away...it was a disconcerting thought that hit me every time. The moments between the last gulp, and when my sister Carol looked up at us from checking Mom's pulse, and finally shook her head, indicating to us that Mom no longer had a pulse, seemed like an eternity. I was reckoning with the reality that what I'd dreaded since I was a little boy (like my Matt) was finally coming to pass...I was without my Mom at last. When the moment was confirmed, I exploded into tears like I don't recall ever crying before in my life. No matter who else remained with me alive, Mom was gone and her unique place in my soul was now no longer occupied by her life.
Dad's death impacted me in a bit of a different way. In the later months of 1992, Dad had taken a fall out of his nursing home bed, and hit his head somewhere on the way down (bed rail? floor?), causing a traumatic injury to the vessels connecting his brain to the inner lining of the skull and resulting in a hematoma. Other health complications, including septic blood, took him down fast the following month. As with Mom, Dad had a lucid moment for us to exchange words, and our final exchange between us was "I love you." Mid-January, Shari and I were making a trip by rail out to Denver, so that I could interview for a graduate counseling program (an awful 20-hour nightmarish trip, it turned out!), and that morning before we left for the train station, I got the call from Carol that "our father has passed away." It was little more than news as I was hurriedly rushing out the door, giving me little more than pause as I wondered to myself why I wasn't more devastated. I shrugged it off and kept moving. Dad's death caught up to me about 26 hours later, as I was sitting in the office of one of the core counseling faculty at the school I was trying to impress, being interviewed for one of the limited few openings in their program.
To set the stage properly, Shari and I had just ridden Amtrak for 20 awful, miserable hours, mostly due to freezing conditions on the rails between Chicago and Denver. We had intended to stay overnight in a Denver hotel, so that I'd be rested and relaxed for the interview. Instead, we "slept" sitting up with too little leg room in our train seat, being awakened every 5 minutes by the chain-saw snoring and gasping of some guy a few rows away with terrible apnea, or the screams of a tiny baby at the other end of the car, suffering from colic. The school was gracious enough to send a graduate student from the program over in his own tiny Mazda, Subaru or some other micro, mini imported tin can, to pick us and our luggage up and take us to the campus. After being dropped off (mostly comatose ourselves from little sleep and cramped bodies) we sat un-showered and un-fed in the lobby of the administrative building of this school, atop our pile of luggage, with me trying to recover some semblance of scholarly demeanor. When I was finally called in, I sat down in a chair across from the faculty interviewer, comfortably seated with a massive hard-wood desk between us. Groggily prepared for what I thought were going to be questions about my philosophy on all things counseling, I was smashed in the heart by his opening question: "Tell me about your relationship with your father." There in my interview, I lost my composure, burst into tears, and sat and wept for 5-10 minutes...the interviewer sat without any demonstration of compassion or concern the entire time I grieved (maybe he thought I was putting on a show of sensitivity?). I didn't make the cut that year, either.
It struck me years later that there was a profound difference between my grief over the passing of my Dad, and the loss of my Mom (and I use the differing terms "passing" and "loss" on purpose). I was always close to my Mom, always knew she held me close to her heart, and that I was never in danger of losing her love. Mom was at every high school basketball game I played; she went back to work my Sophomore year of high school explicitly so that I would have new clothes to wear, and wouldn't have to get "free lunches" due to our poverty; she published every accomplishment I ever had in the small-town local newspaper, proudly stating "Scott Knapp, son of Hazel Knapp" in the leading sentence (Dad didn't pay for the articles, she always said, so he wasn't worth mentioning, either!); I sat for hours and hours in her green formal living room chair, getting advice and perspective (a chair I inherited, kept in my counseling office for several years, and sit in now as I write); she conditioned me to eventually adopt her idiosyncratic phraseology, including "aaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway" when transitioning from a talked-out subject, and greeting my sister Carol on the phone (and now in email) with "Hello Sister" and ending in "Love, brother" because Mom always greeted me with "Hello, Son!" (something about re-stating the relationship moniker felt more meaningful than merely using a given name); ending every conversation on the phone and in person with "I love you"; and for thousands of other intimate, personal reasons my heart was knit to my Mom's each and every day I knew her.
Dad's connection to my heart was a bit different, less intimate than functional. Dad was there, but not "there" for me. Dad was 53 when I was born (Mom was 43), and probably had not planned on being a father again at so advanced of an age...and he often wasn't. I remember a time Dad took me to another local town to wash his car, when I was merely 4 years old. He gave me the money to go next door to the A&W Rootbeer restaurant (alone, no less) for something to drink, but when I didn't get done with my Root Beer and return in sufficient time, I stood there with my 4-year-old comprehension, watching his car pull out of the car wash and drive away down the street without me in it! I remember crying to the lady behind the counter that "my Daddy just drove away" without me, and her promising to get me home herself if she had to...apparently he eventually came back to get me, but I really have few clear memories of the event, beyond the impression of emptiness and screaming alone-ness of watching him drive away. That sense of abandonment characterized my relationship with Dad for the rest of the time I knew him. About a year before my wedding to Shari, I went to Dad's apartment (Mom happily divorced Dad shortly after I left for college, thanks in large part to the sense of independence she'd gotten from going back to work, mentioned a paragraph earlier) and informed him I was engaged. He deadpanned most matter-of-factly, "I doubt I'll be there...I'll probably be sick that day." Dad was an uncannily accurate prophet on that occasion, he was.
I wept on occasion for several years after Dad passed away, wondering what in heaven's name I had to grieve over, until one day it occurred to me that I was grieving not over any love that was lost, but over the loss of opportunity for Dad to come to his senses, regret his colossal failure as a father (and husband, for that matter...but that's another story) and come back to make things right. Dad's death meant I had to live with that unfinished business, business he created and never brought to a close; in fact, business he'd contracted to when he lent his sperm to my creation that he never followed through on by showing up personally. I grieved primarily for what should have been, but never had been, and after January 1993 never had a chance of ever being.
Mom showed up. My grief for Mom's passing was bitter and sweet; bitter for what would not continue to be experienced, sweet for the memory of what actually had been. I grieved the loss of opportunity to continue being "with" my Mom again, I reveled in it so. When I go out to my Mom's and Dad's common grave site and look down at the simple headstone, my attention always first gravitates to Mom's name and particulars, and after a few moments I notice Dad's are incidentally there, too. The headstone is a reminder of the two very different responses I have toward either of them.
Right now Matt enjoys "being" with me and Shari, we make him feel sufficiently welcome and loved that he can't imagine the worth of living without us immediately there. Some of that reaction is the result of normal childhood attachment and bonding with a "parental figure" and some of it is the result of my and Shari's choice to love our son's soul well. I'm so in love with both of our sons, I can't imagine life without them, either, and I enjoy being a father to both. At this point in Matt's life, that quality of relationship is fragile; there are so many things I could do through simple neglect to "be there" that would eventually erode his enjoyment of "being" with me, until one day the thought of me no longer being in his life would be more inconvenient than emotionally crippling.
As a father, every day I earn the way in which either of my sons will grieve my passing. And that is what is so humbling about every time Matt innocently asks, "Daddy, can I come with you?" when I'm merely going down to check the mail.
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