Post pausing

Today I’d like to pause, posting the rest of my “it’s natural” pieces in the bounds of June, and taking a moment to talk about the significance of this day.

June 28th is the anniversary of my father’s death. I was 12. I remember that day vividly and also inaccurately, as skewed as any memory might be; just consider the fallibility of eye witnesses. Still, there are things that are irrefutable, details I can confirm, like the date, which is on his gravestone, or his liver cancer diagnosis, or the fact that he was supposed to be released from the hospital that day, or that I did not go with my mom to pick him up, or that when she came home without him that she said he would have preferred me not to be there, to see him that way. In the rear view there were many things he would have preferred to keep like this, hidden.

With thirty more years of life between us, I think I could have only loved him more for the disclosure, for the kind of relief this release of shame could have granted him. How that grace might have extended over those he struggled to forgive, himself included, and altered his relationship to anger, to family, to his sense of what is included in his definition of what is right and wrong.

Granting him this same kind of complexity, I want to honor his hardships, which included being born in 1927 in Wichita, Kansas, and losing his own father at the age of 9, and having other men as fathers who could be less than kind. In spite of this, he could demonstrate real tenderness, holding walnut sized kittens in his mountain man hands and feeding them with an eye dropper in spite of his hay fever, teaching me to code, and assemble puzzles, and to throw, fly a kite, to respect the sea, and to love to read. He’d hold my sister and my heads on his shoulders and read to us nightly, and I’d escape into worlds painted across pages in words. I am so grateful to him for that.

Still, there were rules forbidding anger and other natural parts of being human in our home, and I wish that our relationship had been broader and deeper, making room for an acceptance of all parts of ourselves, including those we liked less.

I’ve spent my last four days on a retreat in Montana for young cancer patients. Yesterday, we tossed a rock representing these parts of ourselves into the rushing Blackfoot River, where it might be changed by neighboring rocks, time, and current. I hope you are blessed with a chance to open up like this today too, to the parts of yourself that are reactive and to challenge them with breath. Our less than pleasant experiences, emotional and lived, can be used as motivation rather than weaponized. And in this orientation there is more space to connect with one another, to be honest about who we are and what we’ve been through, to carry together the uncertainty that is inherent to life. After all, can we ever really know if our way is right? In spite of the relief, righteousness, and power the claim offers us? It can feel so good, this false clarity, but I wonder if a collective holding of humanness might not feel even better.

So today I write this in honor of my father. He was brilliant, a CalTech trained engineer, a sailor, a father, and above all, a human. I miss him every day, and missed the opportunity to know him beyond the boundaries of what his unprocessed anger-turned-inward and shame allowed. I wish you many things today, but above all, I wish you the chance to open up to someone trusted about the things that you carry. May all of our loads be a little lighter in our collective experiences and may we toss our rough stones into the river where they can be smoothened.

❤️🙏🏼