My dad is gone.
I am more alone than I thought.
It’s a strange feeling when you lose both parents, now the buck stops here, and there is no plan B. It feels a bit like the rug is pulled out. Like I got on the wrong bus and it just sailed off a cliff and I”m looking out the window OHHH SHIT watching the oncoming trees, shrubs, and not so soft ground growing larger…Houston, we have a problem.
There is a beautiful memorial service, and my dad’s friends get up and say all sorts of wonderful things, a lot of which… I never knew.
And I regret. Oh my God, do I regret.
All of that time I spent in ministry, my family, my brothers, sisters, Mom, Dad, friends who weren’t in the church, took a back seat to my supposedly noble venture. Maybe you have friends like this, who are involved in church and you never really see them because they do everything with their “church family”. Or maybe you don’t have friends like this because… well, are those really friends? Aren’t they just people you know who are perpetually at church? I know I was. I imagine my family thought I was a bit nuts. And they weren’t wrong. I was disconnected from regular society, from the non-churchgoing folks. The heathen. Sinners. Infidels. Ordinary people who didn’t spend every spare moment trying to save the world.
As I listen to my dad’s close friends explain what a wonderful person he was, I have so many questions.
I want to ask him about these things his friends are talking about. I want to know about his time in Chicago on the board of surgeons, of growing up poor and working his way through medical school. I want to know the techniques he invented in surgery, want to know about the hysterically off-color roast they threw him when he left to start his own practice, about his upbringing and parents and family farm and ohh, the everything and I want to ask my mom a bunch of questions too, but I CAN’T BECAUSE THEY ARE GONE. And it’s too late. There isn’t a minute more I can spend with either one of my beloved parents. The regret is a swirling pool and I am sinking. Glistening visions of so many things I could have done with them shimmer by in the water over my head, but it is all out of reach, all untouchable now that they are gone.
And I make a commitment.
Never again will I let anything get in the way of me and my family. Never again will I put off saying the loving things that should be said while people are still with us. Never again will I put off seeing someone until it is too late. For those of you who have heard me say relationships are paramount, this is why. It’s because with my parents, I totally fucked up and lost a mountain of opportunity to be closer, to communicate more, to give and receive love and support, to be more connected, to give back some of the care they gave me in my childhood…
The karmic lesson in how totally alone I feel now is not lost on me. I need to learn to be there for people. I need to learn to make my friends and family important again.
I need to get my shit together.
After the relocation, and the loss, I’m not doing so hot. Many days I am too depressed to get out of bed, and I am dead weight in the mornings, unable to get up. I’m finding it very difficult to move at all. Around noon, I usually find the energy to force my legs off the mattress and onto the floor, one foot connecting then two, bend those legs and push up that ever-heavier body until it is standing at last. It’s embarrassing. I tell no one.
I feel paralyzed, but that’s not entirely true.
I blew up my life and now I’m searching for the right bricks to create a new foundation. Every day I (eventually) get up and work on my new life, picking through the rubble of my old life to find the good stuff I can still use. It’s a demented cha-cha dance of three-steps forward, two-steps back, extremely inefficient but it still totals forward, and I creep ahead dragging concrete blocks with me… one block, two… I pick up some furniture… three, four, five…I make my first real friend at work in Big Suburb…six, seven, eight… I meet some other high school parents… building a new life that has nothing to do with my old one.
Spring blends into summer mushes into fall morphs into winter, and gradually I am getting a little stronger. Every new client is a step, every time I drive somewhere I learn the area a tiny bit better, every person I meet is another connection. In spite of the lingering and oppressive dark blanket of depression, in spite of the grief and all I have lost, in spite of me not knowing what the hell I’m doing at all, I am somehow moving forward. I’m playing a complicated board game and the directions are in Swahili and half the cards are missing and the parts are made of ice and they’re rapidly melting and making a total mess of the board, yet my piece somehow inches ahead. It’s slow, and it’s the kind of forward like when you are watching a snail and he’s barely moving but then you look again after half an hour hey buddy, how’d you get all the way over there?
Because slow progress is progress nevertheless, and I’m still moving.
After all of the years of being told what to do, each day I’m gaining my independence. I’m getting stronger. I’m learning to take care of myself.
Aren’t ya wondering where Prepdude is?
Worship Leader Gone Wild 