the last burnt sienna crayon

It’s days like today that make me feel like I perhaps should have never come here, and then I would never have to wrestle with the question of going back. Can one ever go back?

Days like today that are filled with memories, happy ones, important ones, trivial ones. It wasn’t always wonderful, but it always happened, and could be relied on. Days like today are filled with traditions, that perhaps mean nothing in and of themselves, but mean everything in the observation. Days like today used to be filled with people who are no more. People who weren’t always easy, but they were reliable, but now will never be again.

Memories and traditions and people. that I now feel that I have thrown away. That had been my intention, wasn’t it? Starting over can’t be done half heartedly.

And I didn’t do it half heartedly. It’s only that some days it just hurts a little more than others.

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. Believe me, I am thankful.

I generally try not to make a habit of taking my clothes off in public. But that’s what seems to have happened yesterday.

I mean, swimming was bad enough on Saturday (I said to some friends afterwords, “So why is it that if we dressed like this in any other public venue in any other context we would most definitely be deemed as, at least vaguely, offensive, but put a huge vat of water in the middle of us and push us in, and suddenly it’s ok??), and I at least try to forget when my skirt fell off during coffee time after church a few weeks ago, but bursting into tears in front of a large group of people from my church yesterday was not in my plan. It feels a bit like taking one’s clothes off to testify to something personal.

It was actually a beautiful communion service. And I suppose, I was the one who said:

I heard or was told somewhere along the line that there can be no true communication between two people, no real friendship, no love, familial or otherwise, no meaningful interaction with God, and no honesty without mutual vulnerability that stems from trust.

but in a way I’d made myself really very vulnerable over the last week, and I had been feeling it since then. When becoming vulnerable, I usually get scared of ending with the consequence of regret, loss, offense and error.

What I said that made me cry was very short, very simple and didn’t nearly express what I wanted to say (I still can’t seem to do that). I said, to a group of people from my church who contained some of my dearest friends, some slightly less close friends, some complete strangers, and some empty spaces where other people who could/should have been there but weren’t, “I lost my first family. But God brought me here and gave me you. You are my family.”

I didn’t get to say why that meant so much or how it happened, and I don’t know whether or not I feel better for saying it, but I was surprised by the response. Two friends approached to put their arms around me as I cried, a man I am not close to gave me a hug after the service, a woman I had never spoken to before told me that I was very brave, another friend kissed me on the forehead and served me the communion glass, and one of my oldest friends put a hand on my arm and said something I can’t quite remember except that it touched me.

I’ve made pretty clear that to me family is a bigger thing than the one that lives and moves inside the four walls we inhabit. It overwhelms me that after nearly 15 years, I still have this second family and they haven’t kicked me out yet. I need my family.

And I’m so afraid of losing it again.

I found out this morning that my friend’s dad died.

When did my father die? I can’t remember anymore. Was it the 3rd or the 9th of October? I remember the year, at least, 1997. Twelve years ago, not quite 2 months after my wedding, which he couldn’t attend.

It’s all a blur. The wedding, the new house and the landlord’s cat, dad’s death, visas, immigration, the funeral and the three months living with my mother, sister and husband all together afterwards, the unemployment, the lost university course, the relapses, the wheelchair, the steroids and anti-depressants, the generous gift from an anonymous stranger so I could get afford my visa and return to my new home. It all seems so distant and like it happened to somebody else. And the strongest memory of the day that he died is is not of the phone call but of our friends M and J buying us fish and chips so we didn’t have to cook.

I think he had already died to me, when his brain became too damaged to know anyone, remember or understand anything. He wouldn’t have known if I had managed to fly back before he died. I tried, but I didn’t make it. And he wouldn’t have known. The last time I had seen him was at the airport nearly a year before when I had to turn my back and walk away from him, wondering if that was the last time. I hardly knew how soon.

I walked myself down the aisle when I married. He wasn’t there, he was too ill, though I barely knew how ill. I had always said that it was either both my parents or me alone. So as it was, it was me alone, sobbing to Pachelbel’s Canon, part because at that stage of my new illness I was overwhelmed to be walking at all, and part because of an immigrant’s overwhelming experience of the simultaneous experiences of the joy of marital gain and the grief of homeland loss. And I knew he would die. . . though not so quickly. I knew I was leaving and losing everybody for good. . . though not that it would become so irreversible and sealed by so many deaths and changes. So I sobbed the whole way, clumsily knocking pew ends off with my massive bouquet of sunflowers.

I never really held the anniversary of his death, and so I don’t remember the date. I’m sure it was early October. I have a feeling he died on the 3rd and the funeral was the 9th. The time that reminds me of his death every year is not October, but actually in June when all of the shops start advertising for Father’s Day. People in the country where I now live scoff at the holiday as a fake capitalist construct by Hallmark, but it meant something to my dad. It took me many years to pass a shop in early June and stop thinking “Oh, I need to get a card for dad. Oh, I can’t.”

He just missed his 80th birthday, and his 25th wedding anniversary with my mom. That was 12 years ago, so that means that this month, had he lived, he would have been 92. wow. His birthday was at the end of October, either on Halloween or the day before, I never remembered. I just knew how much he hated Halloween. Not because of his birthday or for any principle or religious reason. . . it was just one of the many things in life that annoyed him.

Like the NASDAQ. He just hated the sound of it. He was obsessed with the news, but complained each and every time he heard a financial report, because he hated the pronunciation and the sound of the NASDAQ. Which I only mention at all to demonstrate that he was a strange man with many quirks. I inherited many of his quirks. I am bound by so many of them. We are so subject to what our parents give us, for good or for ill.

Dad was born in 1917. Which meant I had a somewhat different kind of upbringing for someone born in the mid 70s. The early 20th century in my home country (any country), was a very different world to the one I was born into, and he struggled to parent a child in the late 20th century. He saw so much. His brothers fought in WWII (one died in the Philippines), he was medically discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (or at least I was told once). He was in the army air corps, he ran his own garage, he kept and remodeled classic cars, he drag raced other drivers on the highway, he snored loudly, he was in a country band that played on the radio in the 1930s, he got thrown out of university for walking a girl home and standing on her porch, he was reinstated and became an engineer, he started his own gym/training centre in his 70s, he had been electrocuted so many times that when he tried to teach me to use a compass, the needle would point to him, not north, he would come looking for me at 3 am when I was 18 and out with my boyfriend, telling me to come home, or else, and when that little girl of his came home a few years later from a foreign land and could no longer walk or pick things up or write or see and could not even lie in bed at night for the raw, heavy pain of the sheets on her legs, he stayed up all night and let her cry. So much happened to and around him. I can hardly blame him for the things he got wrong.

I have not been to his grave since the day of his funeral (now that was a strange experience! The service was run jointly between my mother’s Evangelical minister, my sister’s high Anglo-Catholic, gay priest and a an old friend of my father’s, a man who had spent time in jail for militia involvement and tax evasion as he believed the money belonged to God and not Cesar!). My mother has moved on and can’t go back. I wanted to go there when I recently travelled to the homeland, but there was no one to take me, and I never dared ask anyone. There were too many memories to drag anyone through.

Dad didn’t want me to go, but he knew he couldn’t/shouldn’t stop me. And now, just as I never knew my grandfather, my daughter will never know hers. I wonder if he had lived, if I would have stayed here, in my chosenland quite as long.

I wonder what a person is willing to give up for their family. He gave up so much. Family was everything. It was the only thing.

And I still left. Sorry dad.

I never thought that I would do that. I never thought that I would stop appriciating what I had. But perhaps one only knows exactly what they have when it begins to fade.

I know now that I never fully appriciated my first family until it began to die, disappear and break apart.

Then, I chose a new family. A new family, not of blood, and not of marriage, and not of relation. It was bigger than any of those. Family was suddenly wider and all emcompassing. Bigger than a surname, than even a way of life. It was extended family in the truest sense. How could I have found a new family so large without those natural ties? I took for granted that it could stay the same forever, and I would never lose that again.

I know now that I never fully appriciated them.

My first family used to gather, and tomorrow would have been one of those significant dates to gather. Gathering was a way to reaffirm that family is family, blood is thicker than water, that despite the rest of the year, at least we still gather on this day and ‘do this’, because we are family and this is what we do and this is who we are, whether we like it or not. It wasn’t always pleasant (because family isn’t easy), but it was affirming.

My second, chosenfamily, as well, used to gather. Again, it wasn’t always pleasant, but to me, it was reaffirming, a way to define ‘this is who we are’ and who I am. I knew who I was in the midst of them. But now the whole looks a lot smaller to me, a bit more fragmented.

And rationally, I know that’s ok, and I know that moving on is a normal and grown up thing to do. But emotionally I fear the segmentation. The move from defining that ‘we are we’ to ‘I am me’ looks scary from this angle, because suddenly there are fewer landmarks, fewer guideposts. And I continue to try to find a cord to tie the parcel back together again. Whether it’s the right thing to do, or not.

It may be the grown up thing to do, but for this disabled woman, who has spent so many years leaning on the crutch of her new family, going out into the big wide world looks a bit scary and I simply want to have some chicken soup and go back to bed where it’s safe.

Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone?

But, again, rationally, I know that the best families help their children to stand on their own two feet. To leave their father and mother and do their own thing instead.

Thing is, when I left my father and mother, the thing I chose to do. . . was to form a new family.

So now what do I do?

I’m not homesick. That’s not what this is.

The keener eyed of you will have noticed that I wrote a story last week that I then went on to delete. It wasn’t quite complete and felt a bit too raw to share in such a level of my incomplete description. The problem being that so much of the description lies in the experience, which none of you could ever have had. At least not in exactly the same way, as it’s mine. You didn’t know my family. I’ve put the story back up, but know I may be the only one to undertand it quite.

I get updates from NPR (national public radio) which give me interesting photography stories, high quality news and tips on new music. Yesterday I was sent some links to listen to Moby’s new album. This track struck a chord with me and when I found the video, even more so. The simple line drawn alien conveys more to me about how it feels to be outside of one’s country, one’s culture, and one’s family perhaps more than I could have expressed in writing. Notice that the friends he imagines and draws for himself do not only look like him, but move like him too. He smiles, until they fade away.

I didn’t know a line drawn alien could break my heart.

Difference is good. Difference is important. But understanding is comfortable. And death is so final. I didn’t realise, until recently, that in embracing difference that I would be giving up so much understanding.

I left without realising that I could never go back. And without realising that no one would wait for me to try.

“Put me on the train, send me back to my home
Couldn’t live without you when I tried to roam
Put me by the window, let me see outside
Looking at the places where all my family died”

I stood on the old whitewashed, wooden, wrap around porch with the two squeeky porch swings and the chimes blowing gently in the breeze and felt something well up in my throat. And the ancient general store next door where I used to run my fingers through vats of nails, bolts and washers as a child, as so many generations of children did before me, stood empty with a large “For Sale” sign in the window. The soda fountain, deserted.

The place, the old towering Victorian mansion, I had so often played there as a little girl. Just as I had on the farm accross the river, with the acres of cornfields and rusted, antique machinery, the hummingbird feeder and the stray cats, the dog lead, belonging to collies long dead, lying limp on the gravel.

And the family. The family were always there. The family were always there, and difficult.

The women collecting in the kitchen, to swap gossip, coupons and recipes. The men in the livingroom by the wood fire arguing politics and religion, with a freshly piqued anger that could strip the wood panelling with their curses, determined to win their battles at all costs. When nobody won, the misery of failing health and old age was always a comfortable armchair to retreat to. The children looking for cats and dogs and playing hide and seek in the barn, blissfully unaware of consequences of the battles that were being engaged in in the liiving room. The women pretending that their lives were not engulfed in the wars fought by elderly men and their slightly younger apprentices in these matters, who looked to the faltering wisdom of years to guide them as they clung to their Budweisers and foul mouths for ammunition. The children just accepted and ignored. Until they were older. I left. Most didn’t.

Both places were void of human life on that day that I returned, but the ghosts came in their cavelries to trample the unfaithful heart who had left them so many years before. I never had said good bye. And now there was no one to say good bye to. No one was at home that day, and I stood breathing the memories with dry and silent tears invisible on my cheeks. I held it back, partly for the sake of myself, partly for the sake of the woman who uncomfortably journied with me that day.

I don’t quite know why it overwhelmed me that day, but something happened. Something changed. I think I said good bye.

I had a leaving party before I left on my recent trip. It was kind of a strange thing to do, as I was coming back, and I knew it at the time, but I still felt like I had to do it. I knew that there was a good bye in this trip somewhere, but to feel it so soon, before I had even stepped on a plane, was odd and confusing. It was decisive. It felt as large as the final battle.

I didn’t understand it at the time, and was aware that I was acting strangely to everyone; the party, saying good byes, hugging people, sitting on my own in the park, looking whistfully at the ducks and feeling so sad, like i would never come back. It felt like I was leaving, like the little death that I had to die to come here to begin with. I had a return ticket and my travel plans and knew that realisticly and sensibly, it was rediculous, but still it felt somehow like i was leaving, like what I had done so carelessly before.

I know now that I was just feeling, experiencing, what I was always going there to do, but would not be allowed to express while there. I know now, that I did leave here for the last time, because now I am somehow different.

You see, the first time I left the homeland, I never said good bye. I just got on a plane and left. I never looked back. I convinced myself for practically a generation that it had never exsisted. Now that I’ve been back there and have felt the ghosts, recognised their monuments and paid hommage to their memories, I can no longer deny any part they have in my own history, the part they played in making me.

The soldiers in that war have almost all died. But those places, those battlefields remain. They’re where I came from. And I’ve finally begun to say a propper good bye.