Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Now that I've uploaded Dad's farewell message slideshow, which I wrote about in my last post, I thought I'd share it with you guys.



In that post, I focused mostly on the visual aspects of creating the slideshow, but recording the audio with Nate and Vickie was also a therepeutic experience for me.  Plenty of people have told me I should talk about how I feel, and that's certainly good advice, but some circumstances make me more aware than ever of the inadequacy of words.  The relationships I find the most fulfilling and sustaining in life are the ones in which words aren't required, and that's how it was when Nate, Vickie, and I got together to record Dad's final message.  That is also how it was when the three of us stood in front of Dad's niche at the cemetery.  I can feel their love and understanding without them having to speak it, and sometimes that is exactly what I need.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the weekend, both because thoughts of it pervade my waking hours and because I've still been unsuccessful at sleeping through the night.  My biggest regret is that I didn't know what it was I needed from those who wanted to help me.  When so many well-meaning people asked, Is there anything I can do to help?, I think my usual response was I don't think so.  I really didn't know until afterwards that what I needed most to get through the weekend was understanding, emotional support, and validation of my feelings.  And even if I had known that, I'm not sure I would have known how to ask for it.

Sometimes I find handling different family dynamics to be so difficult that being around extended family completely exhausts me.  This weekend, though, I realized that one thing that redeems the family is that there are always people within it who instinctually know what you need even when you don't.  The family members (and friends who have become family) who somehow sensed what I needed from them not only helped me survive the weekend.  Through actions like putting a hand on my shoulder at the right time, telling me my Dad would have been proud of all the work I'd done, making a joke that cut the tension, understanding the way I felt, and validating my sense of profound loss even from within in their own grief, those people helped me to know what I will need to ask for in the future when I find myself pushed to my limit (or even beyond it).

On the one hand, I feel frustrated that I didn't do everything "right" last weekend, and I wish I could go back in time to behave differently.  On the other hand, it's kind of comforting to know that there are still lessons Dad's life will be able to teach me even though he's gone.

I've also uploaded the video of each speech given at Dad's memorial, including my own.  If you'd like to view those you can follow this link to his blog.

(Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is one of David Sedaris's collections of autobiographical essays.  If you ever begin to feel like your family might be the most dysfunctional one in the world, reading about his family is likely to make you feel much better.  I think what he means by the title of this volume, though, is that it's wise to do even the small things within your control to prepare and protect your family from outside threats.  Good advice, I think.)

Touching Feeling

This weekend, Nate, Vickie, and I hosted our dad's memorial celebration.  It came together nicely and I feel like Dad would have been pleased with how it turned out.  I was touched by the people who made the effort to come and the things people said to me while I was there.  Maybe I'll feel like writing more about the memorial itself when I've had a little emotional distance to digest the event.

One of the things I worked on for the memorial was a slideshow of pictures so we could voice-over Dad's farewell message.  Putting the slideshow together was helpful for me.  Vickie had requested photos from several different people, and I enjoyed seeing which ones each contributor collected.  (Thanks to Mimi, Aunt Carrie, Mom, and Shaye for helping us put together a consolidated assortment.)  Vickie also helped me do some of the editing to decide which pictures to include, and it was fun to work on that with her.  Making the slideshow also helped me feel more connected with my dad.  I have always like taking photos, but I never knew how much I would enjoy editing and assembling them until I got a mac.  When I started making my mac photo books, the fun of the process was enhanced by how much Dad enjoyed looking at what I'd made.  Dad was the editor of his senior yearbook, so he knew all about editing and white space and all of that long before the technology made it easy.  It seems to me that one must have an eye for these things to be able to make them look right to other people, so finding that my Dad liked my photo collections so much made me feel like I had inherited that editorial eye from him.

One of the photos I knew I wanted to put in the slideshow is this one from my wedding.

When I think of my dad, this is how I think of him.  I realize that his death would have been even more difficult if I'd had unresolved issues with him, if I'd been unsure about how he felt about me, or if I felt like he was somehow disappointed in me.  I know I'm very fortunate that none of these things is the case.  On the contrary, my dad's death has been especially difficult because, over the course of my life, his love and his understanding been the strongest force I've known.  It's probably not fair to say he loved me more than anyone else, because I feel very well loved by all the people who are close to me.  But I've always felt my dad's love most profoundly and most consistently.  If love is spoken in different love languages, he spoke to me in mine.  It probably is fair to say he understood me better than anyone else.  Everyone has always told me how alike my Dad and I are, so maybe that explains it.   Being so similar meant we ended up in our fair share of fights, but it also meant he instinctively understood how I was feeling or how I was acting.  I love this photo because his body language and his expression capture exactly how I felt like he felt about me.

So when I was looking through the old photos people sent us, I couldn't believe that he has the exact same expression and nearly the same body positioning in this one from when I was just a baby.

I don't pretend to think there's anything I did to earn the chance to have my dad look at me like this.  It came from him, not from me.  I know there are many people who go through life without ever having anyone look at them like this, so it feels profoundly irresponsible and insensitive to suggest that I've been dealt an unfair hand because I only got to experience the force of this love and understanding for 28 years before my dad passed away.

But this is the best way I can try to explain what Dad's death has meant to me:  The person who loved me and understood me like this is gone.  The love isn't gone, and it sustains me in his absence.  But right now, instead of the pervading force of that love and understanding, I feel the vacuum of the absence of its lived embodiment in the world.  I realize that this particular type of loss is a very fortunate one to feel in the wake of someone's death... but even so, it's difficult to breathe inside a vacuum, in the absence of the one who best understood.

(Touching Feeling is the last book Eve Sedgwick published before she died of cancer, also at age 58.  I think the title and the biographic info make it work for this post, but it also makes sense because it thinks about literature by using affect theory.  Affect theory examines how we give physical, bodily expression to emotions.  Of the nine Silvan Tomkins identified, there are only two positive affects-- joy manifests itself via smiling, and interest manifests itself via lowered eyebrows and eyes that are looking.)

Old Mortality

I used to pride myself on being someone who rarely gets stressed out.  I've been thinking in recent days, though, that there's a difference between managing stress well and finding ways to minimize the stressors of everyday life.

I'm excellent at minimizing stressors.  I'm married to a man who stabilizes me, provides me with a firm foundation, and gives me a soft place to land.  We live within our means, we work to save money, and we pay all of our bills on time.  In my work, I plan ahead, schedule my time, and refuse to procrastinate.  I'm fortunate to work in a field where the work is always rewarding, even though it is always demanding.  I surround myself with people I can depend on-- people who help me carry my burdens rather than adding to them.  Whenever I can, I do favors for other people.  I really don't "sweat the small stuff."  I keep a friendly, cheerful dog in my home who reminds me of life's simple pleasures.  I have an exercise routine that generally keeps me healthy in mind and body.

I was thinking about how, in high school physics, one of the projects is the egg drop.  It's as though I've crafted an excellent egg carrier around myself.  My egg doesn't crack from life's drops.  My classmates frequently say things to me like I don't know how you do it all, which kind of reminds me of the reaction I had when someone in my physics class designed an egg drop carrier that protected his egg.  He said "I just built it in a way that made sense to me."  I really can't imagine going about my life in any other way.

Dealing with Dad's death, though, has been too high of a drop for my egg carrier.  I feel like my egg is cracked.  I no longer feel like someone who manages stress well.  I am sometimes amazed at my lack of productivity on my work-from-home days.  All I did today was read one article and fifty pages of fiction? How is that possible?  I feel like I've been working all day, I think.  Then I remember that on every work from home day, there are also emails to send, phone calls to make, and questions to look into regarding Dad's affairs.  There are also moments when I find myself staring off or mindlessly surfing the internet, unaware of how sidetracked I've let myself get.

So I was thinking about how I might carry the analogy all the way through.  My egg is cracked, but it's not crushed.  I still manage to get something accomplished every day.  Then I started to think, Well, what good is an uncracked egg, anyway?  You can't actually use it for anything.  It's not fertilized, so if you never crack it, it will just spoil.  A crushed egg is pretty useless, too.  You can't sort out egg from shell, and it's all mashed into the carrier.  Maybe a cracked egg is the best, actually, because you can turn it into an omelette or scrambled eggs or something.  (Dad loved to make both.)  Maybe this means I'll have to spend some more time in this frying pan before I'm transformed into something positive.

Today's a work-from-home day, so there are phone calls to be made, emails to send, and questions to be looked into.  Thankfully, though, there's also a lot of Katherine Anne Porter to read-- "Old Mortality," in fact.  Three classes this semester means three research projects/papers, and I've decided that two of them will be on Porter.  I'm trusting that KAP, along with the other usual features of my egg carrier, will carry me through.