My dad's sister, Pat, died unexpectedly today. She'd been admitted to ICU just after Christmas for Kidney failure. And suddenly, the women who I had never really known much - my father's four sisters - came rushing into my life just as unexpectedly.
I had been trying for awhile now to find my in. Find a way to reach out to that side of my family that I had been so carefully plucked from early on. I know now that my father had his reason to keep them at arms length, but in the hour surrounding the news and talk of service and ticket prices, a dark and dank fog settled. Among it shards of dilapidated metal and wood.
Some delicate bridge to my past was felled.
I can't tell you the last time I saw this woman. I don't remember how her voice sounds, or the name of her partner of 25 years whom she'd lost three summers ago. I have no childhood memory of her that brings me warmth. Instead, she is simply a name: Pat. My father's sister. A faded image that here, in the shadow of my brother's netbook screen, I struggle to recollect. So why am I so bothered? Why at midnight, incredibly exhausted from having slept so shitty for the last week, migraine poised and ready for attack, knowing I have to drive my father to the VA hospital at 7 am for his routine tests, am I doing this?
I don't know.
I don't know why I cried when my father took the news so calmly, speaking so only the person on the other line could hear. I don't know why I suddenly felt compelled to scream at the top of my lungs and to drive to somewhere, anywhere, because I was suddenly gasping for air in my parents tiny apartment. Why couldn't it have waited? Why couldn't I have asked her who my father was before he was my father. What my grandfather's favorite food was. What perfume my grandmother wore.
Why couldn't I have been stronger for her? Why didn't I reach out sooner? I thought I had more time. I should have had more time.
In 3 days I'll be back in Oakland and for the first time since I've started doing this back and forth from house to home trip, I don't want to go back. I'm not looking forward to having to wake up on the 9th and go back to this sense of normalcy knowing that something is displaced. Altered. Untrustworthy.
I know that if I don't get this job at HNU that I'd finish out my term and leave at the beginning of July. And somehow I feel I won't. So do I choose my kids? Do I choose to stay and fight for them? Or do I choose to come back here, lay low until I start again and figure out the rest as I go?
God, grant me serenity.
Sorry about your loss.
ReplyDeletereminds me, when my Grandmother was alive, I had all these "Aunts". When she died, I never saw any of them again.
My Grandmother had all these photo albums with really old photos. She'd tell me who they all were. Now my cousin has the photo albums, and nobody knows who's in the pictures.
I appreciate that. There's a big gap in the family history on my dad's side, and I've kind of learned to quit questioning it because it just stirs up too much emotional shit for him that's settled along time ago. But it certainly makes you feel incomplete, especially in moments like these. Nice to know I'm not the only one....
ReplyDelete