Made it through Christmas. I was so happy to get presents out to everyone on time in the midst of total grading hell. This year of searching brought some changes to my teaching as well. I wanted to make the students' experience mean more. No multiple choice final exam, nossiree. A project! A project that allows people to really synthesize the information of the entire semester. Writing, lots of handwriting. In a class of 130.
It took me three weeks just to grade the finals for that class. Boy, was I ready for Key West.
I was excited to bring Karl to Key West for Christmas. Yes, I was escaping reality a bit, but I was also trying to live in the moment. And my moment wanted sun, warmth, ocean, palm trees. And Karl. I did want an 'anti-Christmas' this year, low key, no santas, no carols, no joy to the world. None of that was for me, much as I tried. The Christmas spirit did not reside with me this year. Maybe next year.
Last year, at Christmas, we were all together at Dad's house, and he, magnanimous host, was spectacular with the grandkids and all their excitement and silly craziness. He looked dapper, and smiled a lot. He ate a little. And because he refused to wear the nasal canula that gave him oxygen while the kids were around, he went to bed very, very early. I think he knew then (and before) that he was dying. I knew two days after, on December 27th, a day I will never forget. The silent drive to the hospital, the phone call to my aunt, the fear unspoken on my father's face; the pain spoke volumes. My gorgeous and soul-friend, Vidya, helped get him admitted into a room on the cancer wing, the hospice wing.
I still have not been able to look at the pictures from Christmas last year.
This Christmas, there was no breakdown, though I was decidedly sedate, melancholy. I tried to find joy everywhere, but what I found was a quiet happiness. I took that, drank it like water, and was grateful. My sweet husband, as ever, was enjoying everything, lapping up the new experience, new location, as he always does. We toasted my father at the restaurant on Christmas night, and I think being in public was good. I cried a little, but not the soul-ripping that was to come on New Year's Eve. We made it through Christmas, and flew back to town just after.
New Year's Eve brought such a flood of emotions; the word "emotion" cannot encompass what I was feeling. I'm sure each of you, each of you who's lost someone knows the depth of pain that escapes from your throat like a wild animal, ripping open the wound that hadn't even begun to heal. I almost vomited from the intensity. I couldn't breathe. I cooked our New Year's Dinner while sobbing. My poor husband, stuck with an injured animal. Last year, the full moon shone in an empty cold sky as I sat with my father in the hospital. My husband had flown home briefly, only to turn around and come back. Looking out the hospital window, I wondered what 2010 would be like, and I could conjure nothing. Now I know. I look back, and don't know what to think. How to describe it? Can one experience define an entire year. Hell, yes. It might end up defining the rest of my life.
I have gone through all the "firsts" this year, but one. On January 13 it will be one year, exactly, that my father died and this journey began. 6.30am.
I have to teach until noon, but I will high-tail it back home for what I expect to be another round of gut-wrenching sob-fests. I am not embarrassed about this, although they are exhausting. My aunt (my father's sister) said to me the other day: "When I die, I HOPE people will be sad for a year!" And we laughed, both understanding what a gift love is, and what the cost of it can be.
It is now 2011. The first year without my father in the world. The first year without either of my parents in the world. And I, at 45, wonder if this will be when the flower finally opens, or withers and falls off its stem.
About Me
- Catherine
- In this blog I have created a haven, a place I allow my deepest emotions to go and sit. I can write easily about what I’ve accomplished. This biography I can recite in my sleep. But I’ve always written poetry and in diaries since I was a teenager. I continued to write poetry in my journals, and not until 2006 did I show them to anyone. I generally write every day, at the present in memoir form. I haven’t written poetry since my mother died in January, 2007. I didn’t write at all between her death and the death of my father three years later in January, 2010. On my father’s birthday in March, 2010, I began this blog, to honor my father and to help me grieve. But I also desperately needed to write, and this stream of conscious style emerged. I needed to find my organic voice.
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