“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.” ~ Susanna Kaysen, from Girl, Interrupted

Sunrise on Hambledon Hill, Child Okeford, UK, by MarilynJane (FCC)

                   

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic . . . Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.” ~ John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Wednesday afternoon. Sunny and cooler, high 40’s.

Ann called early this morning to tell me that her father, my kids’ grandfather, had died. She’s lost both parents within five months.

Frosty Sunrise, Morebath, UK, by me'nthedogs (FCC)

I was never as close to my ex-father-in-law as I was to my m-in-law, mostly because he wasn’t an easy person to be close to. He was a very quiet man who spent most of his time watching sports and old war movies, or sitting in his study looking through his stamp and coin collections. He was a Navy seal before they were called Seals (UDT), and our friends used to joke that he would probably die one day sitting on the couch, drinking a soda and watching a game.

After he retired from the Navy, he became a middle school shop teacher, and it was at the middle school that he met the woman he would leave my m-in-law for after almost four decades of marriage.

Once he left my m-in-law for the evil step-m-in-law, I saw little of him. My ex used to take the boys over to his house to fish when they were younger, but as the years passed, my kids mostly saw their grandfather at Christmas and possibly once during the summer. That is until his health started to decline. Then there were the visits to the hospital.

The man smoked way too much, and his body finally caught up with the smoking—emphysema, COPD, and finally, cancer.

I think that I will miss the idea of him more than the actuality of him, if that makes sense. It’s hard to quantify my feelings as I felt for a long time that he completely abandoned his family. He left before the boys were old enough to know him, but Alexis was the grandchild who was closest to him for the longest time. She loved her Grandpa, and she is feeling the loss keenly.

“I am haunting your dreams,
conducting these fevers
from a distance,
a distance that leaves me weeping,
and storming,
and bereft.” ~ Katie Donovan, “Yearn On”

It’s very strange, this losing people in your life. I acknowledge that this is the natural order, that people inevitably get older and die; this does not make the process easier to bear.

Through the Trees, Dorset, UK, by MarilynJane (FCC)

I find that as I type these words I am more numb than anything. There have been no tears, and I’m not at all certain that I will go to the services as I am unsure of my welcome there. There was never any question with my m-in-law, but this is different. The evil step-m-in-law made it quite clear after my ex and I separated that she was cutting me out of that side of the family.

Perhaps I’ll go and sit in the back. I just don’t know. I suppose that I will take my cues from Ann and the ex. In this, I am only a bit player.

I keep getting flashes of memories, just glimpses, really. Nothing concrete: him sitting on the end of the couch, an RC Cola in front of him. His biggest physical exertion came through golf. Although, I know that he did take up growing roses in later years, which is odd as he never spent any time at all in the yard or the gardens of my m-in-law’s house when they were still together. She did all of the yard work, kept the house, did all of the cooking. The house was her domain, the garage his.

He sat. A lot.

I remember that she told me that he never took care of the kids when they were babies, no bottles, no diapers. I suppose it’s one of those generational things. Instead, he usually showed his feelings through the things that he made. He was a master woodworker, and he built all kinds of things through the years, everything from small Christmas ornaments to blanket chests and coffee tables. He built a set of Adirondack chairs for the evil step-m-in-law that I coveted.

“before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.” ~ H.D., from “Eurydice”

Years ago he had promised to build built-in bookcases in the living room for me. It never happened.

Strange the thing one remembers in the midst of trying to remember more significant things. When I was writing about my m-in-law, the memories and thoughts came like a flood, one upon another, unabated. Now, it’s more like staccato, intermittent, jerky.

Morning Mist on Hayward's Bridge, Dorset, UK, by MarilynJane (FCC)

On reflection, it must sound terrible, like I have no feelings whatsoever about the man, his life, or his death, which is not true. Perhaps it’s more that I loved him as he required love: with more reserve, less open emotion.

I wonder how much guilt he bore in later years, how much he thought about his long marriage, his relationship with my my-in-law, if he realized how much he hurt her, how much disappointment his actions bred. I wonder if it ever even occurred to him. I do not know, yet I do not believe that he was a man prone to serious introspection. I could, of course, be completely wrong about all of this.

“‘Who are you really, wanderer?’
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
‘Maybe I’m a king.’” ~ William Stafford, from “A Story That Could Be True”

This post isn’t at all what I had in mind when I sat down here, although what I had planned I really couldn’t say for certain.

Misty Sunrise Over Robin Hood's Bay, UK by PaulArthurPhotography (FCC)

The pageant of people who travel through our lives is part of what defines us. Some of those people we choose, and others are chosen by fate. Some of them become part of our lives for just a moment, and their departures barely register in significance. Those in whom we place the most significance, those we open our entire hearts to—they are the ones who leave deep indentations in the tapestries of our lives.

The longer they stay with us, the more that they contribute and require, the richer the pattern of the relationship.

My personal tapestry is many-colored, and the fabric is both rough and smooth. At its center are the richest colors and the tightest weaves. Everything radiates from the center. In my mind’s eye, it is crimson and purple and gold; it is as smooth as velvet and as rough as burlap. The stitching is as fine as it is irregular. There are rips and tears that have been mended again and again.

But it holds.

At the center are Caitlin and my father. The births of my children. My marriage to Corey. There you will find the embellishments of first loves and the tears from first heartbreak. Everything radiates from this place of love and loss, truth and lies, poetry and prose.

Somewhere in the bottom right corner is where you will find my father-in-law. Here the fabric is a heavy twill, sufficiently strong to last, without glamor or added decoration. This is not a place of dishonor or disregard, but it is not the center. He is there, firmly enmeshed in that part of my life that is the permanent periphery.

As the song says, “We’re older now and still running against the wind.”

Peace be with you and yours.

(I had a heckuva time figuring out what kind of pictures I wanted to include with this post. I finally found some lovely pictures of mists at sunrise from different places in the UK.)

Music by Bob Seger, an oldie that I heard on the car radio this morning that felt strangely appropriate: “Against the Wind”

                   

January Drought

It needn’t be tinder, this juncture of the year,

a cigarette second guessed from car to brush.

The woods’ parchment is given

to cracking asunder the first puff of wind.

Yesterday a big sycamore came across First

and Hawthorne and is there yet.

The papers say it has to happen,

if just as dribs and drabs on the asbestos siding.

But tonight is buckets of stars as hard and dry as dimes.

A month’s supper things stacks in the sink.

Tea brews from water stoppered in the bath

and any thirst carried forward is quenched thinking you,

piece by piece, an Xmas gift hidden

and found weeks after: the ribbon, the box.

I have reservoirs of want enough

to freeze many nights over.

~  Conor O’Callaghan

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