California Trip: Work and Tourism

We spent the latter half of our trip to California in Pasadena so I could conduct several days of research in the Mary Austin archive at the Huntington Library.  I had applied in advance for "reader's privileges" and was even awarded a travel stipend by my department to help defray the costs of the visit.  I was a little disappointed that my research didn't garner any big discoveries, but it was still productive. I got to look at plenty of information that relates to my dissertation chapter and even got to read a draft version of the novel that will serve as the focal point in the chapter.  Once I start focusing my work on that chapter, I'm sure I will get a better idea of how the things I read in the archive will be useful.

Billy decided to stay in California with Nora rather than traveling back home early, and I am so glad he did! It was great for me to have them with me for breakfast and dinner each day, and it allowed us to do several "touristy" type things that really made the trip memorable.  One of my favorite Mary Austin stories, The Walking Woman, tells the story of a woman who finds contentment through a combination of love, work, and motherhood.  Obviously, this story has always resonated with me, and it felt just exactly right to be doing my archive research on her with Billy and Nora in tow.

This also meant Billy and Nora got to enjoy plenty of daddy/daughter time while I spent long days at the library doing research.  Fortunately the weather was great for our entire visit, so they went to several different parks and a children's museum in Pasadena.

We also got to see my good friends Krista and Jordan and their girls, Clara (5) and Evie (4).  They live in Oakland now, and thanks to a last minute Disneyland trip, we were able to meet them for dinner on Monday as they drove back up north.  Even for a super short time, it was great to see them and get to see the girls interact for a little while.

One of the unexpected perks of doing research at the Huntington is free access to the grounds, which includes 120 acres of botanical gardens.  I finished my research early enough on my last day to spend several hours wandering around the gardens with Billy and Nora, and we barely saw even a fraction of the property.  I can't believe I never went there as a kid!  We visited the Rose Garden, Japanese Garden, and Children's Garden, but I would have loved to spend another day visiting the others.

We were fortunate to wrap up a great trip with a full day at Disneyland.  Initially we weren't sure how much Nora might enjoy the theme park at this age, but we decided to go anyway because I grew up going there regularly with my parents and siblings and wanted to be able to share the experience with my own little family.  We're so glad we went, because Nora loved it.  She is a big fan of "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse," a tv show for preschoolers, and she was so giddy about meeting the characters that she surprised me when she said the rides were her favorite part.  She handled lines up to 40 minutes long without a single complaint, and stayed cheerful and excited way past her bedtime despite not having a nap.  I was glad she was in good enough spirits to stay for the parade because she was jumping, dancing, and waving to the characters the whole time.  I don't know how much of it she will remember as she grows older, but she loved everything about it and for me and Billy, it was a perfect day.  I wish everyone in her family could have seen how thrilled she was with the whole day... but I guess we'll just have to go back!

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride was my dad's favorite and thus, our first stop.  It was pretty emotional for me to be there with Nora and Billy without any hope of ever going with Dad, but I know he would have been thrilled that Nora enjoyed it even though it "was kind of a little bit scary."

"Wild" Memorials

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.  If you're not familiar with the book, I definitely recommend it.  Strayed writes poignantly about what it's like to lose a parent to cancer when you're young.  I admired the honesty with which she confronts the reckless things she did in the wake of her mother's death, like destroying a marriage to a man she loved very much and getting briefly trapped in a cycle of heroin usage.  I was moved by her description of how spending a summer hiking the PCT alone helped her re-orient herself and come to terms with her losses, even though the real meaning of her experiences only began to make sense to her slowly over the course of time.

It also makes me envious.  Even though there were significant differences in our circumstances, I could relate to so many of the things Strayed said about losing her mom in her twenties.  But I just don't have the capacity to do what she did.  Our culture loves these grand narratives-- I loved my mother so much that I smashed up my life once I lost her, and then I took on a grand quest I was ill equipped to conquer and mastered it anyway!  Of course this is a best-selling memoir.  Of course its film rights were optioned by Reese Witherspoon before it was even published and it was selected to reprise Oprah's Book Club. If Witherspoon is not nominated for an Oscar for the film that comes out in December, I'll be shocked.  It will make a boatload of money.  Apparently it's not just our culture that loves this type of story, either-- the book has been translated into some unbelievable number of languages.  To respond to the loss of your parent so profoundly that it takes months of intense hiking to get back on track, and to then spend the next fifteen years of your life honing your craft as a writer so you are up to the challenge of documenting your feelings in an artful memoir-- that is the type of memorial to a beloved parent that everyone except Cheryl Strayed can only dream of creating.

It's not accurate to say I have no "self-destructive tendencies."  I believe I do have them, and they are always looming in wings the herculean tasks I am prone to taking on.  They're there in the big and little things-- when I refused to miss a single mile of training for a marathon, when I obsessively pumped milk before bed every night so Nora would never have to have a drop of formula, when I decided I needed to make an insanely ambitious quilt for my one year old with nothing more than a pattern, and when I left a well compensated job I liked to commit myself to a Master's degree and then doubled down to take on a PhD.  These are admirable ambitions, of course, but I know myself well enough to know that some element of my attraction to them comes from needing to push myself to the ultimate limit of my capabilities, whether or not that is a healthy or sound thing to do at that moment.  It's never "necessary" for me to sacrifice quite as much of myself as I do in these tasks.  At the end of my first semester of grad school, when one of my professors asked, "Liz, do you realize you're the only student who even attempted to read everything I assigned?" the honest answer was no.  It had not occurred to me that there was any other way.

But my self-destructive tendencies are judicious, not reckless. I am the type of person who will burn herself out but will never burn herself up.  To imagine myself in a circumstance where my estranged husband has to physically remove me from the home of a lover who has gotten me hooked on heroin?  This is just something I would never, ever do.  I could not do this, and I would not want to do this.  But you have to be the type of person who would do this, I think, to be the type of person who would then turn around and conquer thousands of miles of trail hiking to "get your life back together."  Strayed says this herself, more or less, when she acknowledges that without the "self destructive" behaviors, she never would have ended up on the trail, and so they were worthwhile. I find myself strangely envious of people who "get their lives back together" because I could never imagine letting my life "go" in the first place.  Somehow I have been conditioned to believe that the more self-destructive Strayed's behavior was in the aftermath of her mom's death, the more it proves she loved her mother.

The book has made me look at my life and think about how people would probably have to be told my dad died when I was young, or they wouldn't even know it.  I do not seem "troubled." I didn't "fall apart" in the months after he died.  If Strayed's inclination was to smash everything up in the wake of loss, my inclination was to work harder at putting the pieces together.  I didn't postpone my plans to get pregnant or take a semester off or ask for paper extensions.  I just did exactly what I would have done if my dad was still alive.  I wonder, or maybe I fear, whether this makes it look to other people like I wasn't profoundly impacted by this loss. I know loss is personal and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about it.  But I'd like to be capable of some kind of grand gesture to memorialize my dad, and I'm just not.  Somehow that feels like a disservice to him.

But then I think about what my dad would have said, if you'd asked him, How is Liz going to react to your death?  He would have expected me to behave exactly as I did.  In the letter he had us read at his memorial, the thing he said about me was:

"Lizzie would hustle around the soccer field, one of the most natural scoring machines we could find, but was always relegated to defending the opponent's best scorer, because we knew she'd keep up and do the right thing."  

My dad described me in this way-- as the one who could be trusted to "keep up" and "do the right thing"-- because this is the way I am.  But it also works reflexively: I am this way because this is the way he spoke about me for as long as I can remember.  I understand this on an intellectual level, because I know, for example, that the legal code not only punishes "undesireable" behavior, but by coding certain behaviors as "undesireable," the laws also regulate the ways we imagine behaving in the world.  I can see, as a parent, that my daughter behaves the way I expect her to behave because the possibilities she imagines for herself are regulated by my expectations.  Some people don't behave the way their parents expect, but as far as I know, I always have-- just as I have always abided by laws.

I hope that what Strayed's book will do for me in the long run is not to make me envious of her capacity for memorialization-- but to make me more appreciative of my own, even though it is different.  While reflecting on her act of memorialization, I have tried to become more intellectually cognizant of the little ways I memorialize my dad all the time.  Some part of me believes that the type of memorialization he would have wanted most is not the grandest one, but the one of which I am most capable.  And what I have begun to realize is that I memorialize him in little ways he would have appreciated all the time.

Like this week, when I discovered that a lot of the archival and historical research I've done for my dissertation chapter on Josephine Herbst has already been published by someone else.  This devastated me-- I was crying my way through the book chapter, watching my own insights unfold before me in someone else's language.  Part of me felt like quitting, or at least taking a few days off to regroup, but the part of me that felt compelled to dig in and immediately set out to think harder-- that part of me is a result of and an honor to my dad.

Or when I find myself hitting "checkout" on a pair of black skinny jeans I don't really need, but which I have decided should count as a birthday gift to myself because the price is good-- that part of me is a result of and an honor to my dad, too.

When I stop at the grocery store to buy food for dinner before picking Nora up from school, and I find myself choosing drinks and cookies to give her teachers as an afternoon "thank you" snack-- that part of me is a result of and an honor to my dad, too.

When people ask me "What is wrong with her eye?" and I explain why Nora wears an eye patch, but I also can't help emphasizing how remarkable she is and how enthusiastically she embraces each new challenge-- that part of me is a result of and an honor to my dad, too.

Nobody will ever offer me a book advance to write about the ways I honor my dad because they're not very exciting.  No publisher is itching to sell Prime: Skinny Jeans from Amazon and Other Minor Self Indulgences.  But I think that's okay.  Even if my dad always did say he wanted to write a book, he ultimately decided to invest his energy and resources in other types of projects.  So maybe a book is not the way he would have wanted to be memorialized anyway.

But maybe I'm wrong.  I could see Reese Witherspoon starring in a movie about thank you gifts and skinny jeans.

More Light Moving Forward

My dad used to say the winter solstice was his favorite day of the year.  He hated the days of waning daylight that are especially noticeable in Portland, where I remember it being dark at, like, 4pm.  The solstice was his favorite day because it meant from here on out, every day was going to get a little bit brighter than the last.  I spent my solstice grading final exams.  Billy graciously took Nora up to his parents' so I could make my way through them at home.  I finished them before bedtime, thus bringing to an official close the semester that has felt so heavy.  Oscar's ill health and death have cast a long shadow.  I was due to sit for a translation exam on Dec 13 to satisfy our program's foreign language department, so the need to prepare for that loomed ahead of me all term.  Although these things are minor compared to the other heavy sorrows I've shouldered throughout my graduate career, they had an impact on me, and they have made it hard to see how much progress I've made. In the spirit of optimism about the future that the solstice represents, I wanted to write a post documenting all of the things that I managed to accomplish in this term.  Otherwise, I'll be inclined to forget, and that feeling of "I didn't get anything done!" that often plagues me will start to set in.

So, in no particular order, here goes!

• I finished revising my dissertation prospectus and filed it with our program!  Despite having completely changed my research topic after my comprehensive exam, I managed to get it in just in time to meet the "9 month" guideline our program has encouraged.  
• I made it through another semester working as a TA for a large lecture class.  There are advantages and disadvantages of this arrangement, but I love teaching and often feel handcuffed by being a helper in someone else's course.  I am fortunate to have worked with a professor who has genuine appreciation and respect for me, so that definitely makes a difference.  But next term I get to teach my own course, with my own curriculum, and I can't wait.
• I did my best to work 10 hours per week on the Katherine Anne Porter Correspondence project.  I finished getting all of the 5000+ pages ready for digitization, completed the inventory of them, and did the best I could to correct and complete the metadata records.  My rewards for all this work, so far, are being able to see the letter images together online and being promoted to "content expert" on the project.  This means that moving forward, I'll be doing less metadata work and more work that draws upon my knowledge of KAP.  In other words, I'll get to do the kind of stuff that could make a big positive impact on my dissertation and employment prospects.
• I hosted back to back birthday parties for Nora Jane.  What was I thinking?!  I guess I was thinking I wanted to give her family and friends a chance to celebrate her, and I wanted her to know how special and how well loved she is.  So, mission accomplished.
• I potty trained my not-quite-two year old.  She is now rarely having accidents, even at school.  She still wears a diaper overnight, but I LOVE not having to change diapers. And I love how proud my big girl is of herself every time she goes on the potty.
• I celebrated 10 years together with Billy.  Truly, none of the things on this list would have been possible to accomplish without him.  I hope people read this blog with that fact in the back of their minds at all times.  But sometimes it needs to be stated, explicitly.  My ten years with Billy have been the best years.  They are all helping me become my best self.  Here's a picture of us at Mythbusters Live, celebrating 10 years together while surrounded by a bunch of pre-pubescent boys in sweatpants: 

• I satisfied the foreign language requirement! THANK GOODNESS.  The saga of setbacks I've encountered in trying to get this requirement out of my way is very long, very annoying, and was ultimately very anxiety-inducing.  But it's over now, which means I no longer have to choose between working on my dissertation and studying a language that will not be mentioned in it.  It also means:
• I've advanced to candidacy!  Basically, this means that I have advanced to the status of someone who only has to write the dissertation-- all other degree requirements have been satisfied.  Most people advance to candidacy after passing their comprehensive exam, which I did last year, but the language requirement kept me from reaching this status until now.  
• I completed my first out-of-town research trip to Yale.  This deserves a post of its own, but since I haven't gotten around to that yet, I want to mention it here.  In early November, I drove up to New Haven so I could consult the Josephine Hersbt archive.  It was such a productive trip. I left Monday morning and returned Thursday, which gave me about 26 hours of research time in the Beinecke, which worked out perfectly.  I did a lot of work in advance to figure out what I wanted to see, so in my three days there I found all of the things I was expecting to find AND so much more material pertinent to my dissertation that has never been addressed in Hersbt scholarship.  Meanwhile, Nora and Billy did really well at home together during my 3 night absence.  I can't wait to have a chance over break to start working, in earnest, on the chapter that will incorporate this research!  Here are some pictures of my trip

So while I often felt like I was struggling to keep my head above water this semester, and I have a LOT to do over break if I'm going to have a decent writing sample to submit for my fellowship applications, I am proud of what I managed to accomplish this term.  Maybe next term I'll have a little more time for blogging?

Weekend Festivities

Now that the weather has gotten nice, we've settled into a nice routine of sorts for our weekends. We try to find a variety of outdoor activities that we think Nora will enjoy, we see which of our friends or family members are available to join us, and then all of the sudden another weekend is over.  I haven't been taking too many pictures lately because if we take our eyes off Nora for ten seconds she is off and running... but after realizing how few posts I've shared this month, I made a conscious effort to catch this weekend's outings on camera.

On Saturday, Nora and I went to the trail for a run while Billy did yard work, and when we finished, Nora danced around for a bit while two women played music at the ranger station.  In the afternoon we headed down to an outdoor craft fair near Nora's school.  We didn't find any crafts we couldn't live without, but Nora loved her first taste of a snowball.  (For non-Maryland natives, a "snowball" is like a sno-cone except bigger and more delicious because they don't skimp on the syrup.  And there are snowball stands everywhere.)  She must be a Marylander because she liked the chocolate syrup with marshmallow variety Billy favors-- but that was fine with me, because it meant I didn't have to share my cherry one.  Playing with this balloon kept her happily occupied until she spotted a "doggie" and repeatedly tried to run over to him.

This afternoon we took her to her first baseball game!  I see babies and toddler at baseball games all the time, but I have no idea how people manage this.  Are other babies and toddlers content to sit still?  Well, ours is not.  We decided we'd start by taking her to a Bowie Baysox game, but we didn't realize until today that it happened to be "Bark in the Park."  There were at least 50 dogs there, which means this outing was basically the best thing that has ever happened to Nora.  She kept shouting "doggie!" and running toward them.  This is when I find myself saying insane things like, "We say hello with our words, not with our hands."  Thankfully, all the dogs she approached were well behaved and all the dog owners were charmed by her.  After being given permission to pet what looked to me like a very tall greyhound, she reached up and hugged him right around the neck and said "awww!"  I apologized profusely for this decidedly un-gentle maneuver, but his owner just laughed, told me it was the cutest thing he had ever seen, and had his wife bring over their other tall greyhound to see she would do it again.  Her other favorite DOGGIE! was a short, stocky bulldog that let her rest her head on his back while tried (unsuccessfully) to wrap her arms around him.  (This dog had three human siblings, including a newborn, and in my conversation with his mom I learned that he is quite accustomed to rough affection.)

She did not love the Merry-Go-Round.  When it started going, she got this semi-terrified look on her face, but she let me talk her through it for a few spins before she asked to get "up up up!"  Once I picked her up she seemed to like the spinning, and when the carousel stopped she wanted to get back on the horse.  Of course.

As for the baseball, she did better than we were expecting.  The anecdotes above reveal that I had to take her out of the seating area several times to walk her around, but she did stand and watch the game for a while when we first got there, and then once we introduced milk and snacks she sat patiently on my lap for quite a while.  I loved going to baseball games with my family when I was little, so I hope that she will learn to enjoy watching the game, too.  It choked me up a little to see her there with her Daddy in her Orioles hat.  I can honestly distinctly remember the first time my dad took me to a game at Oakland coliseum, if recalling the long walk through the sloping cement concourse and the A's teddy bear Dad bought me counts as "remembering."

There was one key sign that she might be a baseball fan at heart: the clapping.  She joined in with the clapping so frequently and with such good timing that it was hard to believe she honestly has no idea what warrants a clap in baseball.

You know how in Field of Dreams, Ray's daughter Karen says "Daddy, there's a man on your lawn," and it means she can see what her dad dreams?  That is what I like to imagine is going on in this picture.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Today's my dad's birthday.  He loved his birthday and he made a huge deal about it every year.  He would've been 60.

Billy and I went to see Louis CK in Baltimore on New Year's Eve.  It was a perfect evening.  The mexican restaurant we ate at beforehand had delicious food, powerful and interesting cocktails (habanero infused Patron is the real deal), and seven options for made-to-order fresh guacamole.  Billy didn't think he liked avocado until he tasted it.  Billy and I had a great time being out alone together.  And Louis was great.  I laughed so hard my face actually felt sore the next day.

Louis makes me laugh so hard because he speaks to me right where I'm at.  His willingness to face the darker aspects of life head-on is always undergirded by an overall appreciation for the human experience that conveys a sense of flickering yet persistent optimism.  That's how I feel most of the time, too-- especially these past few years.  At some point midway through the set, Louie was talking about how being 45 means he's not too old yet because people would still be surprised if he died.  He said the cut-off for death shock value is 60.  If you die before 60 people act like you've been robbed, and it's a tragedy that you don't get to know your grandkids, but if you're over 60 people are like "Well that's pretty sad, but, you know... nobody lives forever..."  I started crying, thinking about my dad and how he didn't get to see his grandkids.  This was serious, true sadness about the profound absence I feel in my life and my heart, but somehow I was laughing hysterically at the same time.  I was thinking to myself, I really lucked out that he died at 58.  He maxed out the amount of time he got to live and I still get to play the "my dad died too young" card.  Two more years and people would've been thinking, "He didn't get to meet your kids?  Well he *was* 60, maybe you should've had your baby a little younger."  As I type this, I fear it's not going to come across as funny, except maybe to my brother or sister.  But I could just imagine my dad and I laughing through a conversation about how he really got the best of both worlds by dying at 58, about how somehow that number means he lived a full life but still died too soon.  Well played, Dad.  Well played.

Happy Birthday, Dad.  We miss you so much.  I wish you could see us all now.  I wish you could hold Everett, and see Nora running around hugging and kissing everyone and everything, and have a drink with Nate and Ashley at their pub, and talk to Vickie about poop explosions and penis reconstructions, and talk to Billy about moving up the management ladder at work.  I can't begin to list all the things I wish I could talk to you about.  I wish I could've read what your Christmas letter would've had to say about me passing my comprehensive exam and everything else that our family has accomplished this year.

I can't have that conversation, though, so instead I watched Dad's farewell message slideshow again.  He says about me, "Lizzie would hustle around the soccer field, one of the most natural scoring machines we could find, but was always relegated to defending the opponent's best scorer because we knew she'd keep up and do the right thing."

Keep up and do the right thing.  I try every day, Dad.

Heavy Silence

What do you call a witch hunt when it finds a witch? And how it feels to be George Hincapie right now but also for the past 15 years.

Blasting Carbonleaf, Mumford & Sons, and fun. in the car to calm Nora down when she's crying: good or bad parenting?

The fact that my students are capable of discussing a novel for 75 minutes with about 75% participation without a word out of my mouth: proof of merely excellent students, or excellent students and good teaching?

Billy's dominance at work and home, as evidenced by his always improving managerial and bottle washing skills.

How great it is to have Vickie in Baltimore and how Nora seems to think she is the B team Mom.

How Nate is taking care of business like a boss-- in life and in work-- and how the people of Bend are the lucky beneficiaries of this fact.

Speculation on how Ashley's influence on Nate manages to flare up in funny ways, like his willingness to pose in baby bump photos and post sweet captions to Instagram pics.

How hard Katie is killing it in our program and in the classroom, and how proud it makes me as her friend and fellow waitlister.

How Anne-Marie's anxiety about the uncertainty of parenthood manifests itself through stressing out over baby monitors, how I worry that my own struggles after Nora's birth might be adding to her stress unfairly, and how I know that by this time next year, she'll have it all under control.

Whether or not it is appropriate for me to psych myself up for my exam by doing the "rage" motion fans do when the A's closer comes in.

Which baseball team is the only one to have three golden glove winners, and how lame those trophies are given the prestige of the award.

The theoretical concept of "cruel optimism" and how I've been trying to use it to think through how I can improve my relationships.

These are all things I would've been talking to my dad about lately. Instead there's just this heavy silence.

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day, Billy!  I always knew you would adore our child and love her with your whole heart.  But since I didn't realize how much of a test motherhood can be, I only now know how much your love and support of me also helps to make sure Nora gets the best from both of us.  Thank you for keeping me balanced and focused on what's really important.  Nora and I both appreciate all the work you do to give us the stability and support we need to be such a happy little family.

One of the things I've learned since my dad died is that you can experience extreme sadness and happiness at the same time.  To say I have "mixed emotions" about Father's Day doesn't really do the feelings justice, because that phrase has a pretty negative connotation and the feelings don't really mix together for me.  I miss my Dad a little more than usual today, and I feel a little more appreciative that Nora has such a loving, supportive, and stable Dad.  My happiness about Billy being a dad doesn't mitigate my sadness about my dad being gone, and my dad's absence doesn't interfere with my happiness about taking a day to celebrate Billy's role as Nora's father.  I feel both of those emotions simultaneously.  Together, they combine to make me feel a great deal of gratitude that I had such a devoted Dad and that my daughter has the good fortune of having the same.

For Nora's gift to Billy, I purchased some wood letters and planned to pose her holding them in some picturesque locations to spell out D-A-D in a triptych frame I purchased.  My plan is to re-take the photos every year and update the frame for Father's Day.  I am in no rush for Nora to grow up, but as I tried to decide on locations to use, it was fun to think that in the future she'll help me decide where to pose.  This was the first location we used to shoot:

But as you can see, Nora was intent on helping me choose the locations from this year onward.  Obviously she was not impressed with this one, no matter how scenic I found it to be.  After trying to get her to smile in this field, I realized I would have to take her picture in familiar environments to get her to act like herself.  This was a helpful suggestion she made, actually, because it occurred to me that Billy wouldn't care where she was sitting in the photos; he would be looking right at her.  So after a few shoots around the house I ended up settling on these three photos for the frame.

Billy liked the gift and agreed that these pictures do a nice job of capturing different aspects of her little personality.  I hope that seeing them in his office each day will remind him how thankful we both are that he works so hard to make sure we have all the things we need.

I also wanted to share some of my favorite out takes from the photo shoots as a way of saying Happy Father's Day to my father-in-law, Chuck, and all the other dads out there, as well!

Sugar and Spice

Sometimes, when Nora is being especially:
spirited
ornery
independent
curious
funny
or
squirmy,
all I can think is how much my dad would have adored her.

Timshel

I don't believe in a lot.  I do believe art is meaningful, though.  I don't really pretend to know much about most forms of art aside from literature, but today I had one of those sublime artistic moments that is hard to explain.  But I'll try, even though I am pretty sure this chain of ideas will not make sense to anyone else.

I have been missing my dad very badly lately.  My mom is coming to visit us soon, and I'm really excited for her to get to spend time with Nora now that Nora is so much more engaging.  The flip side of this excitement, though, is that it also heightens my awareness of the sadness I feel about the fact that my dad never got to know my daughter and never will.  And he never got to know me as a mother, and I'll never get to share the experience of parenthood with him.

A few days ago I posted this photo of Nora on facebook, and Nate messaged me to say she is smiling Dad's smile.  I didn't realize it until he said it, but he is right.  There's something about the openness of her mouth, the angle of her head, and the proportions of her chin and cheeks that reminds me of my dad's real smile.  That made me go through more recent photos of Dad to compare, and it made me pay special attention to the events in which he is giving his real smile rather than his forced photo smile.








Real smiles: Playing washers in our yard in 2008.

Riding the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls in 2009.

At Vickie's graduation in 2010.

I was so thankful to Nate for bringing this to my attention.  I was thinking about this on my way to school today, though I'm not sure why.  I was also listening to a Mumford and Sons CD that was popular with the rest of the world 2 years ago, but which I didn't bother to download until today.  And then these lyrics came on:

And death is at your doorstep
And it will steal your innocence
But it will not steal your substance

And I thought, true.  Dad's death stole whatever innocence I might have had left.  It did not steal his substance.  I hope it did not steal mine, either.  And then the song continued:

But you are not alone in this
And you are not alone in this
As brothers we will stand and we'll hold your hand
Hold your hand


And now I'm thinking, okay, this is getting really weird.  Dad tried to teach us that we don't have to go through life on our own.  And the very best thing that has come from his death is the effort Nate, Vickie, and I have made to be supportive of one another.  And just when this song came on I had been thinking about how my brother had been, figuratively, holding my hand "in this."  And then the song continued:

And you are the mother
The mother of your baby child
The one to whom you gave life

What?  Now, tears.  I could not actually believe these words were coming over the speakers.  I hit the back button to listen again, so it was a little while before I heard that the verse continues with:

And you have your choices
And these are what make man great
His ladder to the stars

And when I heard that, I began trying to figure out where this comes from.  I knew I had never heard this song before, but I knew I have heard something like this quote.  But I couldn't figure it out.  And I listened to the song over and over until I got to school, and I could not figure out what the mother and baby child portion could possibly have to do with the rest of the song, but it touched my heart.

But when I got to my office, I looked this up, and I see that the song is called "Timshel."  Oh, right, I think.  East of Eden.  I've never read it, but I know this concept of Timshel, and I realize that I recognize the quote from this novel.  (We won't digress to talk about how come I know quotes from novels I've never read.)  Further, East of Eden is one of my brother's favorite novels.  One he has been trying to convince my sister to read for years.

I still have no idea what the stanza about the mother is doing in the middle of this song.  Maybe Nate could explain it to me.  But thank you, Nate and Vickie, for holding my hands and always reminding me I am not alone in this.  And thank you for this song, Mumford and other musicians I think are too old to really be your sons.  Somehow you made me feel like my baby will make some of my sadness okay, by way of a song I was not trendy enough to hear until now, which seems to be derived from a book I have not had a chance to read, immediately after my brother who loves that book pointed out that my baby is capable of smiling my dad's smile.

And since that probably didn't make any sense at all, here: listen to the song yourself and make your own memory.  And maybe you can agree with me that Dad probably would have liked Mumford and Sons's kind of Simon-and-Garfunkel-ly vibe.  Or maybe he did like them and he just never told me.  I still get his subscription to Rolling Stone, so he probably knew plenty about Mumford and his theoretical sons.

Thank You

I just wanted to say a quick but sincere thank you to everyone who reached out to me yesterday, and over the past couple of weeks, to let me know that you were thinking about me.  Your emails, phone calls, texts, facebook posts, blog comments, and more have meant so much to me.  I know it is difficult to know what to say on a day like yesterday, but those of you who made the effort to say anything at all touched my heart.  We think Nora is hitting her three month growth spurt because she is nursing almost continuously throughout the day, so I haven't had a chance to thank you all as I would have liked, but your kind words have served as a buoy to help keep me afloat during this difficult time.

I also wanted to encourage you to read Vickie's blog post from yesterday if you haven't had a chance to read it yet.  You can find that here.

On Dad's birthday, Vickie took the card I made for Dad up to his niche and sent me this picture, which helped me feel included even though Nora and I weren't able to visit the niche with Nate and Vickie.

And yesterday, Shaye sent me this photo she took when she and the boys visited Dad's niche on Christmas Eve.  I'd posted a video of Nora to facebook that day, and she played it while they were up there.

In the letter he wrote me to open after he passed away, Dad emphasized the importance of sharing your life with others and allowing them to help you along.  So as my friend Catherine wrote yesterday, it is "amazing to be human," and I know I am fortunate to have the chance to share that humanity with such special people.

One Year

She shaved his face.

Billy, Vickie, and I had been sitting with Dad when his breathing changed and we knew he was about to go.  Billy went to get Aunt Carrie and Judy, and we were all there when he took his last breath.  And then Vickie shaved his face.  Then we noticed that there was barely a trace of yellow left in his skin.  Then we realized that his face had relaxed into a sort of grin.

Every day from January 1 to January 12, 2011 was the worst day of my life.  Every day it got harder to see my dad get worse.  Every day I woke up feeling less prepared to take on the unknown challenges I waited to endure.  I don't know how Vickie brought herself to shave his face, or how she knew what a difference it would make, but that was the sign that healing could begin.

I wish I could make this easier on you guys, he had told me.
That's not your job, Dad, I had responded.  You're the one who is dying, I had thought.  And anyway, the only way this would be any easier is if we weren't going to miss you so much, I'd said aloud.
Thank you for saying that, he'd whispered.

It's not easy.  It's very, very hard.  But I have now seen what it is like to die a difficult death before your time.  And I have now felt what it is like to endure the loss of your father before his time.  There is no question, in my mind, about which one is more difficult.  And I know that any sadness I feel about being unable to tell Dad about what has happened over the past year, or heartbreak I feel that he didn't get to meet Nora, is far outweighed by the sadness and heartbreak Dad felt in the days, weeks, and months leading up to January 12.  He may have put on a brave face and made us laugh, but he knew what he was going to be missing.  And still he managed to be concerned about us.

We're okay, Dad-- Nate, Vickie, Nora, and me.  We have good days and we have bad days.  We have each other.  We have Billy, Ashley, and Tres.  We have plenty of other people around us who love and support us.  And we miss you terribly.  But we have known that you wanted us to heal, and we've been working on it since she shaved your face.  We know because you taught us.  You refused to allow cancer to define your life while you were fighting it, so we know we can refuse to allow it to define our lives now that we've lost you.

I love you, Dad.  I didn't know it then, but you did make it "easier" to live without you by teaching me how and when to stand tall on my own and how and when to lean on others.