Day 74 - Mom's Last Gift

Mom and Dad

I am going through Tivo withdrawal. We had Tivo in Virginia to record programs to watch later. In addition, Tivo would record programs similar to ones we had recorded, so we always had something to watch. We also had On Demand so that if we missed recording something, it was still possible to catch up. But here, we have no Tivo, just cable DVR which doesn't record anything unless we request it, and On Demand seems limited to premium channels which we don't subscribe to.

In desperation, I ended up recording a long string of Lifetime movies the other night. The first two had a similar theme. Daughters, estranged from fathers, leave home or are sent away, as adults achieve a level of success bringing with it connections with important and influential men, and then their fathers died. The death of their fathers meant the daughters reluctantly returned to their homes. And in the course of the days that followed, each daughter discovered how she had misjudged her father. In the case of the first, her father's friends showed her all the letters he had written to them about how much he loved her and how he had fallen so short of what he promised her that he didn't dare reach out to her directly, thus bursting her illusion of his abandonment of her. In the case of the second, her mother explained that the letters the daughter had found from her father to "Betty" were in fact letters he wrote to his wife. Betty was his pet name for her. The second daughter's illusion that her father had been conducting an affair behind her mother's back was also shattered.

In both cases, the daughters regretted all the time they had spent despising their fathers. Those two stories reminded me of what I call Mom's last gift to us kids: the gift of getting to know Dad.

As a child, I considered both Mom and Dad quiet and shy, just like me. When I learned about the scale of introversion to extroversion, I pegged both my parents as introverts, although Mom was a little closer to extroversion on that scale. When we went visiting, whether friends or relatives, Mom was the one more likely to talk than Dad. When we visited, Dad described it as going to see people.  That seemed to be enough for him - to see people.

Over time Mom's confidence grow. It's not that I noticed it, but Mom completed five assignments in an autobiography class and shared them with us. In one of them, she described reaching the conclusion that she should volunteer to teach Sunday School. When she told her parents, her father's reaction was "what makes you think you can do that?" Maybe the question wasn't as full of cynicism as I took it to mean when I read Mom's assignment. But it seemed Mom understood it that way as well. Of course, I always assumed Mom could do anything. Through reading her assignments, I  grew to appreciate what changes she went through as she grew in her own ways while we kids grew up.

Mom was the spokesperson for Dad. I can recall many conversations that began "your father isn't very happy about. . . " Dad never told us; Mom spoke for him. And there were many times when Mom told us something about Dad's health that came with the warning, "Dad didn't want me to tell you because he doesn't want you to worry."

When Mom died, Dad no longer had a translator. He had to tell us himself how he felt. He had to tell us his news himself. He had to tell us himself what he wanted or needed us to do. And in the course of those conversations, we all got to know him a little more.

I recall when Dad called me just to talk. I connected with Mom through email, but that option didn't work for Dad. Eventually he said he had something to tell me, that he had a date. It felt like a good friend sharing his news with me and that felt wonderful. That date was with Dolores and therefore the beginning of her becoming an important part of Dad's life, and ours.

Dad had a much younger special friend, Amalia, from Romania. He and Mom met her at a Sons of Norway meeting in Fargo when she attended with her Norwegian language professor from Concordia. He told me that when he met her, he decided to be the friend for her he hoped I had found in Romania while I was there. Amalia graduated from Concordia and with a lot of help from Dad made her way to Seattle for an internship year. The following year, Dad called to ask me to help Amalia get settled in Virginia as she had received a full scholarship for a masters degree program at Georgetown University. Since he rarely asked for help, and in this case the request was even rarer because Mom was still alive, yet Dad made the phone call. I was happy to do what I could. In the first few months after Mom died, Dad came to visit us in Virginia. For the first time, he was more a guest than Dad. Dad used to find things in the house that needed to be fixed and he'd get busy fixing them. But Dad the guest let us take him around town to see the sights. He came to attend Amalia's graduation, and together the three of us attended a Sons of Norway meeting. Years later as we kids moved him from his apartment to the nursing home, we found documents indicating how much more help Dad gave Amalia than we had known. How would have learned this wonderful fact about our father if he still had Mom as his translator?

Even now when Dad's short-term memory is weak, we have been able to get to know more about him as questions about his childhood (we should have asked them years ago) are now some of the only ones that he can answer. Even what he tells us about what I think are his dreams - he is always traveling these days, at least in his mind - gives us some glimpses of what is important to him.

Thanks, Mom.