We visited Mom and Dad’s grave site today for the first time since dad’s death. (Rocky and Peaches are buried with them, too). One of Dad’s favorite expressions about people who get ignored, rejected or neglected was that “he got the bum’s rush”. His dementia in the last years of his life made him feel, most times, like he was getting the short end of life’s stick, either through his own deteriorating social capacities, through family and friends forgetting about him or ‘running short of time’ to visit with him, or their preceding him in death. Sharon, Pam, and I (and Aunt Susie, and Uncle Ed prior to his own death 4 years ago) tried to bring love and connection to his grieving spirit for the last eight years of his life, after Mother’s death in 2009. As a side note, Sharon (primarily) and I are now doing what we can to keep Aunt Susie from feeling neglected, with limited success. It is so much easier to sit in judgement of another, rather than engage in the struggle to maintain spiritual integrity in all of one’s relationships. My family is no different from any other family in their choices for engagement, or for rejection of the most challenging of members.
When Rocky died in June of 2016, that was when Dad’s final thread of love and companionship with his past was snapped. He asked me over 5000 times where Rocky had disappeared to, after his dog’s death. Our presences were just not quite enough to make all OK with Dad. But, we made him as comfortable as we could until his last days. He never took one medication, nor was I about to force one onto him. Dad’s final three years were a real labor of love for me, forcing me into early retirement from work, and the experience almost tanked me. But I learned how to love another human being unconditionally and completely, though the lesson plan exacted a price from me. I am only just now coming out from under the spells of anxiety and stress around the experience of care giving for my Dad, as well as being fully present for my friend Marty for the several months prior to his own death, which occurred five days prior to Dad’s death.
Dad died in his own bedroom on a Friday evening, and had the look of awe and wonder in his eyes and face. He had found his promised land, where loneliness, depression, and dementia disappears, and where ‘bums’ are converted back into the saints and angels that they always were, but were rarely recognized by others as being so. It took nearly my entire life to release my own misunderstanding and judgement towards my father, and allow for him to express himself in the only way that he knew how to, while still providing a loving protection for him in his time of greatest need….
We who knew and loved you in all phases of your lives miss you both, Mom and Dad. Now being an “orphan” with no children of my own has opened new vistas of understanding for me. The self that I fashioned as a response to my upbringing has no value now. I chose a less colorful persona as a direct response to my fathers’ flamboyance, and now I release that choice, to open the door to a new way of being in this world.
I know all too well the effects of getting the “bum’s rush”, which is the cultural response to my own social insecurities. I celebrate the saint and angel that lives within me, which will be released from within me as I release my past, looking for its own unique new expression in this strange new world. I thought that my life’s work was over when I became sober and had a series of remarkable spiritual experiences in 1987, and 5 years afterward. Now I know that my real life’s work has only just begun.
