i was a little sad this morning, i am putting notes in the stockings i knit for my mom and dad when i was about 13 (which mom kept…. the name mom on her stocking was a little wonky… an upside down U where i forgot to knit the red yarn at the bottom of the O) and two newer stocking for them, one i knit this year for dad though he has been dead for 29 years, and the one i knit about 10 years ago for mom that are more contemporary, completing a new set, now that mom has passed away also.
In the note I will tell my dad that he was an amazingly dedicated man, both to a wife who liked to push his buttons with vulgar speech and who continually spent more than he could earn, and to his children, though we really didn’t know him that well until he was diagnosed with cancer because he was so restrained.
I will tell my mom she was luckier than hell to have met my dad, but that she also dedicated herself tirelessly to caregiving. First and foremost to us as kids, to people she hardly knew, and family, one of my sons, her second cousins, a seminary student, the little girl down the street whose mother died when she was so young, even to strangers, to baby sitters like Ms. Morrison and to relatives like Aunt Charla, and both her parents, caregiving until there was no life left in them, some of whome she watched them pass peacefully into the hereafter like her own husband. That is an amazing trait. I am not a caregiver, just dont know how she did it.
My dad, ha ha, was an artist…. My brother Russ sent glossy pictures of a santa claus that dad drew early on (i can tell by his signature). i think he gravitated toward santa as a an entity who needed to help others, and also dad needed concrete confirmation that there was infact a good god in the universe. I think the latter was so remote to him intellectually (as a chemist and engineer he just wasn’t able to dismiss the unfathomability of an eternal entity — and like some of my sibs, me and anyone with a even part of a brain we have this constant doubt). He became that santa once for the family gathering after his health began to fail. I have a clear picture christmas morning in LA with daniel tugging on the sleeve of his red santa suit but with dad so into handing out presents that it went unnoticed. I am sure this was one of the most significant days in his life.