I am sure things stick in your memory as they do in mine.
My parents home on Blackburn Road was the most open home you could imagine.
Strangers were simply people whom you were yet to know.
Week in, week out, on a Sunday our home was open to a flow of family and friends who stayed for lunch and then often stayed for dinner after and afternoon around the pool. All of this occurred while my parents also ran their grocery shop at the front of our property and to which our home was attached.
Often there’d be a dozen or even twenty people for Sunday lunch and my parents were never alarmed when new people showed up, often unannounced.
One couple, apparently our mother’s distant cousins, were regulars. Harold and Muad (of course not their real names) were known for their wealth and their beach-side home in an affluent part of the city.
Harold and Maud were regulars, coming Sunday after Sunday for lunch, often staying for dinner.
After my parents sold the grocery shop and after my mother’s death, dad let me know he’d dropped in to see the cousins while out on a Sunday afternoon drive to ease his loneliness.
“Can you come back later, we are having lunch,” said Harold.
There is so much to learn from two readers who have responded to a recent column about unfinished grief:
“My husband died after a very long illness (about 8 years, although it’s hard to know when exactly it started) and after the initial shock, which lasted about three months, I started to think again. I can now say, five years later, that I am very grateful his pain has ended and some relief has come to our immediate and extended family. Of course I wanted a different outcome but I am now living with what I have.”
“Thank you for sharing the Path of Grief. My husband died almost 3 years ago. I still feel I am on a journey without him and could not contemplate ‘moving on.’ It’s a process and we who are grieving are all on our own path. Life is just so so different after losing a partner, I was married for 61.5 years so never knew a life without my husband but day by day we begin to live again as they would want us to. I’m one of these people who continually talks to my late husband telling him things that are happening in my life and with the family.”
“I am sitting at the Johannesburg Airport Hotel passing time until my flight to reunite with my family in Kuala Lumpur tomorrow. I fell upon your column about dealing with grief. What an inspiring article! Thank you for that. I have not suffered the type of grief one can hardly recover from so far and by God’s grace. I can only imagine one’s loneliness in it. Well done for your advice. Go well my friend. It will be nice to meet you one fine day.”
The reader quoted above was inspired by my writing. I, in turn, am deeply encouraged and also inspired by her response to the column. It’s a very good feeling to open emails to such a warm response. Such responses are what keeps me writing. Added, the writer reveals that she has read the column outside of the usual area of the newspaper’s readership.
Writing about grief usually gets a lot of reader response. There are a lot of people struggling with loss and are at a loss about how to cope. It is apparently a topic visited only when people are in need. This is fully understandable. Who wants to talk about such things when there is little or nothing to grieve?
Disney? Grand Canyon? Broadway? Statue of Liberty? Washington DC?
My dad loved all of the above on his several visits to the United States and recalled them each with great fondness.
But, dad’s real love of this nation was rather peculiar, and once he made me aware of it, it was easy and inexpensive to provide.
He loved the rural breakfast spots. He enjoyed these often-crowded establishments where the waitresses called him honey and sweetie-pie and yelled customer orders at the short-order cook who in turn yelled order up while cracking eggs and turning strips of bacon and shifting piles of hash browns on the crowded grill.
He enjoyed the back-chat between the waitresses and the regulars whose orders they remembered through sheer repetition and whose wives and families they knew.
Dad loved to sit at the counter rather than at a table so he could watch the action, admire the efficiency, and eavesdrop on the behind the counter banter among veteran waitstaff.
On our first visit to such an establishment, his bottomless cup of coffee filled for the third time, dad remarked, “Just like in the movies, bring me here again, this is the real America!”
When conversations occur with strangers – a dwindling pronomen with humanity’s baptism into the Internet, cell-phones and obsessive scrolling – the “what do you do for a living?” question is often asked.
People offer a version of “all I want to be is happy.”
“What does that look like, what does that mean? How will you know when you are?” is met with confusion.
I get the impression I am supposed to know, that there is common knowledge of what it means to be happy.
I’d suggest happiness is the fruit of seeking and finding a meaningful place within a community. It is to “cut your coat according to your cloth.” It is a by-product of having several equal, respectful relationships, relationships where you are not in charge, calling the shots, determining everything but are playing your unique part in mutual endeavors.
It is to be wildly generous with possessions, resources, time.
Happiness is the result of an inward journey to shed aged resentments and petty grievances and to shed even those that are not so petty, even well-earned, and not so aged.
Without a conscious inward journey we will be trying to settle past scores, issues which will continue to disrupt the present and guide the future into emotional pothole after pothole of unresolved history where happiness will remain elusive and beyond reach.
This evening I will board a Delta flight and, yes, I’m going home. This time it’s to a small town in Indiana.
Sometimes people ask me about my small town in Indiana, “what’s it like”, and I say it’s like Mooi River in the 1960s but without the mooi and without the river and without a mountain or ocean within several hundred miles.
This said, it’s home.
My one son is there, the dogs will be excited to see me, and the mayor will wave and ask me where I’ve been as he stops at the four-way stop and sees me walking Maggie and Duke.
I know that I’ll see Rick from Rick’s Brakes and Tires (yes, that’s how it’s spelled) at church on Sunday and he’ll tell me it’s time, referring to an oil-change on my car.
A few interested friends will ask me about my trip home and I’ll tell them about the beauty of the Western Cape and how I loved buying my triplet great nephews and neice a late afternoon Wimpy lunch after a shopping spree for books at Exclusive Books in La Lucia.
My great niece, who recently turned 21, and my sister – the same great niece’s grandmother – are chatting within my hearing as they have done most of the day, as only my sister and any one of her many, many grandchildren can do.
Having covered most topics under the sun — updates on family around the world, the economy, vegan muffin recipes, snippets of friendships old and new, the benefits of infusion face-masks and an invitation for me to try one — the conversation transitions to recent flights.
Amy reports sitting on a plane next to an “old man” who was “so nice” and who told her all about his adult children and found her to be so interesting.
“He seemed like such a nice dad,” she reflects.
My sister listens attentively, as she is prone to do, and recalls one of her many flights where she was seated next to “some nice, very young man.”
I glance up from my computer and ask about the approximate ages of these two men, the one “old guy” and the other who is “very young.”
“In his forties,” my niece says, “he was already in his forties.”
Grandma thinks a little and predicts her “young guy” was at least in his mid-forties.
“It’s all about perspective,” I add, careful to hold my 68 year-old tongue.
I attended a celebration of life held in honor of a former colleague and treasured friend. Among several outstanding speakers, it was her son’s content and delivery which caught my attention. He wrapped his mourning in the sheer delight remembering his mother. With his permission here are a few nuggets from which I think all parents can learn:
“If I close my eyes and think of my mom, I’m usually met with the same image. She’s standing in an apron, while her white hair is littered with varying streaks of color because she has scratched her head with the wrong end of a paintbrush. She is laughing, always laughing, even though there’s probably a pot of rice burning in the background in the kitchen somewhere.”
“For my mom life was meant to be lived and lived well. That was easy for her because she knew Joy. I think she knew joy because at some stage before I was born she traded her sorrows for joy. She made a pact with joy, and no one could take it from her.”
“We were pushed to think big and be brave; we were never mollycoddled.”
“My mom lived without fear because at some point before I was born, she traded fear for the pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, and true understanding.”
Run interference for your child as much as possible and so reduce all possibilities that your child may learn that actions and inaction have natural consequences.
Get (aggressively) in the face of every teacher, coach, referee your child ever encounters (and do it as soon as possible) so your child and all officials know who is really in charge.
Give your child the impression that teachers, coaches, school authorities, even the police are all idiots so they will always feel above the rules and the law.
Ignore common civility so your child will learn to behave similarly.
Praise your child excessively – and suggest others do the same – especially where little or no skill, talent, or meeting a challenge is necessary so the pain of having to learn something new or difficult may be delayed, even avoided.
Blame the teacher or the school if your child doesn’t do homework. Belittle the way it’s assigned, its timing, the lack of access to resources and its relevance – but never, never suggest the child’s homework is the child’s responsibility.
Every time your child (starting when they’re babies) is unsettled or unhappy, put a screen in his or her way to settle things down.
When my sons reveal certain physical aptitudes, expose some odd humorous bent, display a uniquely characteristic nod of the head, tilt of the jaw, it crosses my mind that I may be “seeing” their biological dads, glimpsing some semblance of the men who fathered them.
I do think about these two men — especially on Father’s Day — and hope they thriving wherever they are. In ways that my sons may also ponder, although I have not asked them, I wonder who these men are. I consider if each even knows about the baby he fathered or, if he does, thinks about, grieves about what he has sacrificed, missed, or lost.
I would jump at the opportunity of meeting my sons’ biological fathers. I’d go to such an event alone and find an opportunity to express my thanks for their vast contribution to our lives. I’d try to suss out how they’re each doing in hopes of suggesting an opportunity for them to meet our sons. I’d offer my sons the opportunity to choose his path toward connection with his biological father and hope that each would embrace such a connection and enjoy the long term potential and benefits from such an opportunity.
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