The loss

My dad passed away last weekend. There was less clarity before than there is now, which is not what I expected. Anticipating Dad's passing was like an amplification of the anticipation of a painful procedure with no anesthesia for several years, and now, it's over. For ten years, it was cancer and treatments and surgeries and side-effects. My dad's health declined steadily in stages, each surgery literally and emotionally taking a little bit more out of him each time. Radiation treatments and infusion therapies that poisoned his cells and took the pigment out of his skin, inflamed his arthritic knees until he could barely walk and made it next to impossible for him to eat a real meal. Tumors fractured bone, infections regularly sent him to the ER, and life-threatening pulmonary embolisms popped up that could end it all in one fell swoop.

That's the ugly.

Playing in my favorite arms

Now that all of that has passed I have more room to remember a man with a dark and imposing figure and the gentlest of spirits. Someone who once called me every Monday morning before school to make sure my homework was packed and my shoes were tied. Someone who gave me pearls when I turned 16, mailed blue irises to my office at 23 and hand delivered a Jane Seymour pendant on my 25th, even though he didn't celebrate birthdays. I remember being tossed in the air by his strong and able six-foot-four-inch frame. Games of tickle monster, very big shoes, Star Trek marathons, and Evergood hot link sausage sandwiches during basketball season. I remember every admonishing smack, every blow-up, and every make-up. I remember Take-Your-Daughter-To-Work days at the office and bumper car rides on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. A man who twice drove me from San Francisco to Alabama to spend the summer with my grandmother. A man who taught me to read by opening the Bible and to spell by playing Scrabble.

I remember Johnny Williams Jefferson as a man who made me his own only child by raising me from infancy to womanhood as a true surrogate dad, when my own father was absent. Through his divorce from my mother and our own seemingly insurmountable spiritual differences, Johnny, has always been there.

Learning to drive at three years old!

Not only was he there for me, but as an elder in the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses, he was there for everyone in his congregation. He advocated for the rights of Jehovah's Witnesses in hospital to not receive blood as a tenet of their beliefs. He saw countless others through bible study and baptized more. He did what he loved the most by serving his God and telling as many people as he could about his faith. He always hoped that one day I would find myself on that path and I regret I couldn't tell him what he wanted to hear before he died. But while he taught me about Jehovah he also lived in his truth, teaching me to do the same. In a mainstream culture that sees his faith as fringy and strange if not cultish, my dad stood in his truth, teaching me to embrace my odd pagan earth-worshipping Tibetan buddhist spiritual hybridism in a family chock full of Jehovah's Witnesses.

Dad and I at a convention of Jehovah's Witnesses when I was a teenager. He was in a biblical re-enactment that year. I'm trying so hard not to blush.

Holding the hand of someone I love who is staving off spiritual crisis when their beliefs are different from my own, has shown me the true meaning of compassion. In that way, I have come out on the other end of this journey a better person.

I've wondered why I'm not more tearful... and then I think about all the years I spent crying in my room so that my dad wouldn't see and the inescapable pain wracking his body that sent tears streaming down his face. I think about the night he died, still trying to get out of bed before collapsing right in front of me... And then I think I've cried enough.

I have wept. And while there is the blindsiding grief every time I think about him and all the days more I wanted him to live, I wished that they could be healthy days. He's finally free from the most awful of diseases and I can finally let the memories of his healthier more vital days fill the void he has left behind. My dad can be as he once was in memories present. He can be the man that once chased mirages with me through Death Valley on a trip to Eclectic, AL when I was four years old.

July 4, 1949 - October 12, 2013

Dad owning the Golden Gate Bridge

Preparing for Loss

... for me, is full of strangeness. At some moments, I feel extremely restless, while completely serene in others. At the same time, I feel acutely that I am an alien in unfamiliar territory. It's like one of my dreams, where everything seems the same but is painted a different color; every thing feels backwards and inside out; everything smells different, tastes different, looks different but I'm somehow still able to identify the world for what it is. Yes, this is still the world. Yes, I am still Shari. I'm falling between what has passed and what hasn't happened yet, dancing between the life of yesterday and the surrender of tomorrow. I'm a stranger in the bitterly uncomfortable transitory present.

Sitting with my dad in chemotherapy today was a journey into this very weird plane of existence. Outside the hospital window, a beautiful urban sprawl beneath blue sky and soft heat. Inside, a man being eaten alive by his own mutated cells. Outside, a billboard reads, "1 in 3 children born today will live to be 100." Inside, a 63 year old life veteran, teeters between mania and orneriness because of the breakthrough pain that makes living almost unbearable, because he's been cheated by something he can't name.

I feel so irritable, so imperfect, and so damn uncomfortable, all the time, my own grace and ugliness underneath a self-imposed microscope. Seemingly everything in existence - themes and objects and emotions -  is in constant juxtaposition in front of me. Everything is either living or dying. People are either in the throes of euphoria or in the depths of depression while I'm in grey limbo. That's the lense of my world these days. Everything though, seems to stand in opposition to my dad. I see what he sees on one side of a boldly delineated line, which is the potential, opportunity, hope, and wonder of unlived years.  Today, dad is on the other side of that line.

The me I know well is disappearing. I wonder how this painful transition will birth me into my tomorrow. I have no idea. There is no instruction manual on how to lose someone you love. Anything and everything is a possibility.  And somehow I have to let the river run its course knowing I will come out on the other end, not quite different, but not quite the same.