Your Dad Is Here

I see my husband in my son in small ways:  the way he rolls up his long sleeved shirts, the set of his jaw when he is annoyed or determined to do something he really wants to accomplish and the way he plays chicken with his car's gas tank and won't fill it up until it is almost empty.

When I see those traits it is bittersweet: they make me laugh and but they also make me feel a little sad and wistful.    "He is still with us," I think to myself.  My husband had a very strong personality so I am not surprised that I see some of him in our son.  It's just when those quirky things appear, they always have a way of taking me by surprise.

 

 

 

My thoughts today are with fathers and the important role they play in their children's lives.  While my son's father died nine years ago, I appreciate the important role he played in our young son's life and how his influence can still be felt today.

 

Please read the timely story below which I found on the insightful website, Hello Grief (www.hellogrief.org).  The author, Abigail Carter, sweetly reminds us of the importance of Dads everywhere; the ones who are with us today and the ones that we forever hold in our hearts.

 

Happy Father's Day!

 

 

 

Every Day is Father’s Day

By Abigail Carter
June 8, 2010 

Father’s Day never held much importance for our family until the death of my husband, Arron, father of our two young children.

 

The day usually began with a childish command for him to stay in bed so he could be the lucky recipient of a sticky tray of burnt pancakes and watery coffee, and be handed a construction paper card with “I lov you dady,” in bright red crayon, or a popsicle stick picture frame with a blurry Polaroid of a proud pre-schooler.

 

Later in the day, as he jiggled the kids around on the heavy metal lumber cart at Home Depot, I refrained from my usual “step away from the power tools,” and allowed him to run amuck, our list of supplies forgotten in his pocket. For dinner I would make one of his favorites – chicken stew, or if the weather was nice, a steak grilled on the BBQ and a glass of wine after the kids were in bed.

 

Our first Father’s Day after his death was spent in the company of several other widows on a deserted New Jersey Shore beach watching our children romp around in the waves or play in the sand, wishing we had the ability to play so freely, wishing we could have our old lives back. The male volunteers who grilled hot dogs for lunch just seemed to add salt to our wounds.

 

The days and weeks afterward were spent in a heightened state of agitation to which we were oblivious – fighting, frustrated, exhausted – until someone pointed out how difficult Father’s Day must have been. Finally able to connect the dots between the day and the aggression that had settled upon my family, the black moods eventually dissipated, at least until the next event that needed to braced for, like one of the kid’s birthdays, or another wedding anniversary. Year two was a repeat of year one, the bracing, the beach, the fatherless kids, the male volunteers, the loneliness, the anger, the exhaustion.

 

Friends and family, while well-meaning often added to the stress, building the potential heart-break of the day by calling to offer sad Happy Father’s Day wishes, or to offer to take the kids away, thinking that what they needed was to spend time with a man, one that was usually someone else’s father.

 

There was another year, the year I picked my son up from Pre-K after his class had been busy making presents for their fathers, and when we got into the car, he threw the present at me, something square wrapped in emerald green tissue paper. “Who am I going to give this to?” He yelled. “All the other kids have dads and I don’t!” In one day, with the realization that he was not like all the other kids, he had gone from a sad child to an angry one – anger that eight years later is only beginning to dissipate.

 

For many widows with children, Father’s Day creeps up and pounces on us. Sometimes we just anticipate it with dread – more glaring evidence of what we have lost. Everyone (not just widows) tries to celebrate the day in some meaningful way, trying to honor that special Dad. Newspapers and television ads are filled with things we are meant to buy, sentiments we are meant to feel. There is so much pressure to ‘honor” our loved one properly, even when they are alive, but no one seems quite sure how to go about doing so.

 

We have tried a variety of different activities on Father’s Day. Things my husband would have enjoyed: bike rides in the park, planting a shrub in the garden, an IMAX movie downtown, a steak on the BBQ. The day has become less sad, held less meaning as the kids grow and have adapted to their life with only one parent. But with each passing year, Father’s Day becomes less and less volatile.

 

The kids have almost passed the period in elementary school where presents are being made in class. And if they are, the kids have adapted. Presents have been awarded to grandfathers or other men of importance in their lives at the time. I considered last year a kind of breakthrough when my son, still in elementary school decided to participate in his class’s annual Father’s Day craft project. When the day arrived, he presented his gift to me saying, “since you are pretty much like our dad as well as our mom, this is for you.” It was the compliment of a lifetime, and reminded me how far we had all come.

 

This year will be our eighth Father’s Day without a father to honor, and again, it will likely be passed with very little fanfare. In other years I have felt guilt for wanting to ignore these events, making up for it by forcing a celebration with trips to the beach, riding bikes, making Mickey Mouse pancakes – pretending that our family was still whole, pretending that my husband could still appreciate these efforts. It was my son who finally reminded me of the pressures I was putting on all of us when he asked, “Why do we always do all this stuff on Father’s Day when we don’t even have a dad?” I thought we had been doing it to remember him, but I realized that really I was doing it because I felt like I had to. My efforts were stressing me out and doing nothing to help us remember Arron, let alone honor him.

 

Instead of pancakes and bike rides and beach trips one day every June, I realized that all it takes to celebrate Father’s Day is for me to recognize one of my husband’s goofy expressions in our daughter, or his familiar glint of mischief in the eye of our son and laugh saying, “you look just like your father when you do that!”

 

That way every day is Father’s Day.
 

* * * *
By guest writer, Abigail Carter. View more of her essays at www.alchemyofloss.com ^[2] and learn more about her at www.abigailcarter.com ^[3].

Fathers & Sons

Today I'm going to visit my Dad and celebrate Father's Day a day early.

My son won't be joining me because he is out of town visiting his girlfriend.  Even if my son were here in town, I would still be emotionally torn on Father's Day.

My Dad is still alive and our family is lucky and blessed to have him. But my son's father, who was also my husband, died nine years ago and the celebration of Father's Day makes me feel guilty and conflicted. Guilty because my father is alive and his isn't.  Conflicted because I want to make my son and my Dad happy about this day but I can't.  I know, I know, life is never fair but I wish my son could have had more time with his father when his father was in better health.

 

The memories that hold true for my son of his father involves hospitals, doctor's offices, medicine, and constant badgering from me to get his father to do the things he needed to do to stay healthy.  My son was too young at the time of his father's good health to truly remember the Halloween outings, Christmases, beach vacations and other fun times we did have as a family.  There are lots of pictures to remind him, but that's not the same.

 

 

I can't change that for my son but I still wish for it.

I've asked him about his feelings when Father's Day arrives and he just quietly says he doesn't like to watch other people with their fathers. That's probably the understatement of the century. He also says that he forgot that this weekend was Father's Day. Right. When he does see fathers and sons together, I know his mind starts to wander and he thinks about how it might have been different for him if his Dad hadn't gotten sick and died when he was 13-years old.

And that makes me feel bad even though I have no way to change the situation.

So full of guilt, I go visit my Dad and hang out with him for awhile and wish I could make things different for my wonderful son who deserves to have his healthy Dad with him today.
 

A Positive Attitude In Cancerland

I don't always feel positive about all of the situations that life throws my way but I do feel very positive about life.

 

Would I continue to feel positive if I were diagnosed with cancer?

 

I would hope so!  I would hope that my love of living, my love for my family and friends and my love of life in general would kick my fighting spirit into high gear and that I would become determined not to let cancer win.

 

But that's easy for me to say because I have not been diagnosed with cancer.  I know a handful of people who are battling cancer right now and I have learned a lot from them about life, mental outlook, pain and especially love.  I never take my good health for granted.  I work hard to keep myself mentally and physically healthy and by the grace of God, I will stay that way.

 

In the sweet story below, Joel Achenbach, a fantastic reporter and writer for The Washington Post, writes of his mother's optimistic attitude since her breast cancer diagnosis and surgery.  What a warm and courageous woman she is! 

 

Photo By Joel Achenbach/The Washington Post
Joel Achenbach's mother, selling plants at a spring garden festival
 soon after she has surgery for breast cancer

Cancer hasn’t dimmed my mother’s upbeat attitude. How far can optimism take her?

By Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post 

Published: April 1

 

A few weeks ago, I took my mom shopping for a refrigerator to replace the one that had been in the kitchen since the Nixon administration. Pleasantries with the salesman took a more somber turn when he revealed that his wife has breast cancer and is seeking to heal herself solely through the power of prayer. My mom listened attentively, then touched the salesman on the chest and said, authoritatively, “Carrot juice! And blueberries!”

 

She is a believer in the restorative powers of fruits and vegetables, and of wholesome living more generally. She doesn’t reject modern medicine, nor would she seek a miracle cure through prayer or New Age therapies. But she is not someone terribly interested in medicine, or technology in general, preferring to exist in a world that is like the one she grew up in — simple, natural, earthy. She has spent her years outdoors, growing plants, doing landscaping, surrounding herself with flowers. She has often ended the day with a cold beer under the grape arbor in her back yard. The yard is a two-acre botanical wonder where she and my stepfather, Jim, have their nursery, plus a robust garden, productive citrus trees and winding footpaths among native plants and towering trees.

 

I called to check on her the other day. After quickly assuring me she was fine, she launched into a prescription for how I might reduce some minor leg pain that’s been bothering me: “Point one foot at the North Pole and one foot at the South Pole and bend over and touch the floor,” she said.

 

Though full of medical advice for others, she doesn’t talk much about her own illness, and it didn’t seem to occur to her to tell the appliance salesman that she, too, has breast cancer, stage 3. Here’s the key fact about my mom: She doesn’t consider herself sick.

She’s the opposite of a hypochondriac, never missing a chance to brag about her unusually good posture and the physical strength that many women her age would envy. She informs doctors that her nickname is Tough Lady. When I asked her if I could write something about her medical situation, she said, “Make sure to include what I tell every doctor: ‘I’m not old, and I’m not sick!’ ”

No question, she has a wonderful attitude, and her sunny disposition if distilled and bottled would be sold in every drugstore on the planet.

A fine line

But an objective account of Emily Notestein’s health history, and of her attitude toward medicine, would surely note that she has not been a diligent student of her disease and that she showed no interest in seeking aggressive treatment when it first appeared. There is a fine line between optimism and denial. The power of positive thinking goes only so far.

How aggressively we deal with cancer hinges in part on age and whether the disease threatens to truncate a life dramatically or merely lop off some years in the final decade or two. And cancer in a septuagenarian can be more indolent than cancer in a young woman. Thus, an older person like my mother faces a different mental calculation than someone who is in the prime of her life. Cancer at 76 doesn’t feel like a tragedy.

My mother first had breast cancer two years ago; she had a lumpectomy and no further treatment. She insisted that she didn’t need chemotherapy or radiation or a combination thereof. A plausible scenario is that she was stunned by the high cost of the procedure, and lacked Medicare Part B coverage, because back when she was 65 she felt no need to sign up for something that would be useful only on the very off chance that someday she would have a medical problem. (“I was healthy!” she told me when I pressed her on it.) What’s indisputable is that the cancer came back in the same breast.

On my Mom’s 76th birthday, in late January, her surgeon performed a mastectomy and also removed 22 lymph nodes.

“Everyone was so nice to me!” Mom said that afternoon, groggy from the outpatient procedure. She didn’t feel as if she’d been mutilated. She felt that she’d been the star of the show.

The next week, she heard the pathology report, and it wasn’t good: cancer in all 22 nodes, officially stage 3 cancer. The initial chest X-ray showed no tumors in vital organs; a subsequent PET scan also turned up no sign that the cancer had spread beyond the nodes. “It’s curable,” Mom said, getting right to the point.

 

She’s being treated at a cancer center by an oncologist who has his hands full. Twice during the brief initial consultation, he was summoned from the small examination room by nurses dealing with emergencies.

I asked him if the cancer looked aggressive.

“It has some characteristics of being rapidly acting,” he said.

He went through the whole scenario: Chemotherapy for 18 weeks, then radiation for six weeks, then years of hormone therapy. Mom would get a port surgically implanted, then receive three cycles of cytoxan, epirubicin and fluorouracil for nine weeks, followed by three cycles of Taxotere for another nine weeks.

My mother took no notes. I later suggested that she research her disease thoroughly. But whereas I saw a problem to be solved, she saw one to be ignored to the extent humanly possible. Her doctor is the expert; she’s the plant lady. She’s going to live her normal life, and won’t spend time, mentally, in Cancerland.

Built to last

All is not as it was, of course. She’s slower since the surgery. She’s got less “steam,” she says.

She hasn’t had the easiest life, though her third marriage has lasted nearly four decades now. She was a divorced, single mother by the age of 25, working as a saleswoman at Sears while trying to take care of two semi-feral boys in an old wooden house with a leaky roof. We had some lean years, but my brother and I knew we were loved unconditionally.

My mother inherited a strong work ethic, and remarkable powers of endurance, from her forebears back on the farm in Indiana. Her family didn’t have indoor plumbing until she was 12 years old. My grandfather as a boy would plow the fields behind two Belgian draft horses, and would know it was time to come home for supper when his mother hung a sheet in the window. “Tell me about the horses, Dad,” my mother would say to my grandfather when he was deep into his 90s and clung to his murky memories as if they were handrails. He and my grandmother both lived nearly a century. So my mother is built to last, if she can just make it through her next challenge.

I can’t be sure of this, but she seems to be appreciating the world more than ever. My mother is not a society lady, isn’t a member of a club and hasn’t been to church in quite a while. But she is interested in everyone and everything. She is egalitarian down to her last molecule. When we went to Wal-Mart, it was hard to make much progress toward the kitchen section because she wanted to greet everyone along the way. She doesn’t seem to grasp the concept that the official Wal-Mart greeter is supposed to be an employee, not a customer.

Throughout her life, small pleasures have struck her as marvelous. A sandwich nicely prepared is a cause for rapture. In a field of weeds and rubbish she will see, and rejoice in the miracle of, the lone flower.

“Death holds no terror for me,” she always says.

Fear and anxiety are adaptive traits to some degree, and the perpetually sunny disposition may not invariably offer an actuarial advantage. I worry that her rose-colored glasses are blinders. But her attitude makes the process easier on everyone else. That’s a form of caregiving. It’s a gift from the sick person to those who worry about her.

I called her from Washington after her first round of chemotherapy.

“It was a nonevent!” she reported. “It lasted awhile and I got hungry, so afterward we went to Wendy’s and I had a baked potato. It was delicious!”

Chemotherapy, in time, will surely beat her up, and she’ll lose her hair, and her melodious singsong voice, her trademark feature, may weaken. But will she ever feel sorry for herself? I don’t think she’d know how.

As an analytical person, science-oriented, I find it hard to ignore the medical realities here, but my mother in her congenital sunniness is strangely persuasive. And so I have no choice but to believe her: She’s not old, and she’s not sick.

© The Washington Post Company

Reflections of Nora Ephron's Son

 

Nora Ephron

Crying is unsettling.  Especially if you are watching one of your parents do it.

 

My son hates it when I cry and has said that when I would cry all the time immediately after his father/my husband's death, he would feel this mix of emotions that he didn't want to feel and so he would walk away.  I understand it and think his reaction was perfectly normal.  He was thirteen years old and dealing with something that adults find hard to handle.  He was just trying to survive.

 

Now, at twenty two years old, my son explains his reaction this way: "When children see their parents cry, it's like a wall being broken.  It messes everything up.  I wanted you to be my Mom but when I saw you cry, it's like you weren't my Mom anymore.  You were a person and I didn't want that. I wanted my Mom."

 

It makes sense to me and I love him all the more for his insight; as painful as it was, and sometimes still is, for both of us.

 

That is why Jacob Bernstein's long and loving story about his mother, Nora Ephron, is so powerful and compassionate.

 

It's a universal story of how children feel about their parents as children, and as adults, and especially sons and their feelings about their mothers.

 

But having an accomplished, high-profile, multi-talented mother such as Nora Ephron is a unique story. And Jacob Bernstein writes it beautifully.  I knew it was a long story so I only intended to read the first page and then come back to it later, but then I couldn't stop reading it until I reached the end.

His mother is proud.  He took good notes.

Please click on this link to read Jacob Bernstein's story as it appeared in the New York Times magazine this past weekend:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/nora-ephrons-final-act.html?_r=3&hp=&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1362652331-n02tv3ThoWXX1qcUk6JoRw

A Mama Hug

I took a quick one-night trip to New York City on Monday to attend a senior awards dinner at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus.  I was invited by the Dean of Students and was asked not to tell my son that I was coming because my son didn't even know that he was going to receive an award.  My lips were sealed.  There was no way that I was going to miss this event because this is the kind of stuff that parents live for.

This past weekend, my son had called me and asked if I had received anything in the mail about the awards dinner.  No, nothing came, I said.  I was very casual about it and said I  guess he would have to go to the dinner like everyone else to see who ends up with an award.

He never suspected that I had taken off work and traveled to New York just to see him until he got to the table where I was already seated.  I stood up and turned around and he was genuinely so surprised and taken aback to see me.  "MOOOOM," he said enthusiatically.  As those around us watched us hug, my son spontaneously said in a voice louder than I wanted, "Mom, you are such a good liar!"  Yes, I thought to myself, that's just what every mother wants to be known for...her ability to lie...Oh well.

In the spirit of Fordham's Senior Leadership Awards, I'd like to give a big shout out -- WOOOO WOOOO -- and a huge Mama hug to my son who has worked so hard these past four years!  Single parenting can be such a crapshoot but in this case, right now, it's all good!!!!!!!

I am so proud of him and his work ethic.  I have never seen him happier than he was on Monday night.  Fordham was a wonderful and challenging experience for him.  He discovered for himself that you get out of life what you put into it, made a lot of new friends and found his passion which has turned into a paying job after graduation. 

His smile and demeanor was priceless...Isn't that what every parents hopes for?