I'm dedicating this post to a discussion of my father.
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I think I've mentioned that it was during the time that I was in Vienna that I began to sense that my dad's work might be affecting me. Up to that time I would say that my relationship with my family, and my parents in particular, was pretty idyllic. It's not that I had a perfect family, but it was a pretty good one.
My parents were very conscious about how they raised us and tried to not replicate things they'd had problems they'd had as children with their their own parents. Without going into a lot of detail, I'll just say that dad's dad was, as I understand it, way overbearing and expected perfection, while mom was raised in a family in which there wasn't a lot of harmony and her father was a bit of a womanizer and her mom was somewhat self-centered. I never knew my dad's dad because he did before I was born, but in all of these cases I'm describing the kinds of things my parents have said about their upbringing, rather than relying on my own observations of these individuals and what they might have been like years later or in relation to me.
My parents were fair in their setting of boundaries and rational in their disbursement of punishment (although mom occasionally had problems with this because of things she was going through), and they didn't try to force us into any mold, but supported us in our studies and otherwise tried as best they could to guide us through the treacherous waters of growing up.
Although I got in with a bit of the wrong crowd in junior high (that school and the high school that most of the kids from there went to later were notorious throughout the whole Seattle area at the time for being problem school, like police having to be present at sports games, a reputation of having floozie cheerleaders which was garnered at least in part by how they behaved at regional cheerleader camps), I was for the most part a non-problem teenager, and not needing punishment, my parents and I had a very amicable relationship that continued through my undergraduate years. (I don't mean to give the indication that I never did anything potentially deserving of their ire, but they didn't know about these things, so they didn't affect our relationship.)
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In my undergraduate years I received passing feedback that were memorable in their being unusual or otherwise out of context or out of character, that I could be in for some problems regarding my interest in things Russian. And then I began to actually sense some affect on me after I graduated from my Bachelor's Degree studies and moved to Chicago to go to Bible school and work part-time with Soviet emigrants.
All this so far is by way of background, and is largely a repetition of things I've already said in this blog, although I might not have tied them together like this in one place before. From here on out it should be mostly new information. Also, I'm discussing both my parents together, because my relationship was mostly to both of them together as a unit, and it wasn't until later that I began to focus more on trying to understand my dad in particular.
My parents visited me several times throughout the years when I didn't live near them, which was most of the time. Early on they would say, "It's a parents responsibility to visit their children at least once a year." It's been a while since I heard that, but a lot has happened since then, especially since after my Vienna years and my later move to Siberia. I welcomed their visits, but they were often punctuated by things that served to distance me from them.
I think I told you about the first such visit to me when I was in Chicago and several months later my pastor from Seattle visited me (when I was renting a room from the Orthodox Jewish woman) and back home related from the pulpit his having visited me and how my situation was so difficult, and how this greatly embarrassed my father. I really was in a difficult situation, and that was when I was living off $10 a week for food.
The next time they visited me was in Vienna, so I'll wait to discuss that until I get to that part of my chronology. However, I will say, that over the years it has seemed that times when family has visited me has resulted in one or more of the following: 1) apparently intentional - or at least gross ignorance - of what my life at the time of their visit was really like, and/or 2) the other person gaining something from the visit that could have made me felt like I was being used to bolster the themselves and/or minimize my own accomplishments.
Actually, the first visit was probably when dad visited me in Heppenheim, Germany, when I was with the university in a quarter abroad study program my senior year of undergraduate studies.
That's not to say that visitors never helped me, because that's about as far from the truth as you can get. That is, they usually treated me to something (like traveling around with them on their ticket from my home base) or helped me with something (like work around the apartment). But it always ended out leveling the playing field in my relations with my family. I'm not sure why that is or how that kind of thing got started. It might have just been a quirk of the family.
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But back to my dad. He was very intelligent, well-read and knew a lot about politics, and was good at math. He probably was a very good manager too, which is how he got as far as he did. I think he always won the defense proposals he oversaw. He also had a strong sense of ethics and right and wrong. He was dependable almost to a fault; his word was as good as gold. If he said something, he meant it. While others on business trips with dad might get involved in morally questionable activities dad's reputation as moral stalwart was reconfirmed in comparison.
He was also a sensitive man and had a very strong family commitment. He was a hands-on dad, in that he was very involved in raising us kids. He worked and helped out around the house and garden, did a lot of his own car maintenance chores (rather than sending the car to a shop), and remodeled the initially unfinished basement, including creating three rooms out of one large one and making one of those rooms a fully functioning bathroom/utility room.
But he also really liked playing and having fun, which, it was sometimes said, was to make up for not being allowed to have enough fun in his youth. He loved puns and was a master of groaners. He liked the outdoors but enjoyed theater and the arts too.
He was a good wife, a good son, a good father, a good friend, and also a good church member. He served as a leader in the Awana's boys club at church and supported other Christian efforts with young boys. He also served on the Elder board at church, and before that I think (if I remember correctly) he was a deacon before that. He played an integral role in overseeing the revamping of the church constitution too. The last few years of his life when he had to decrease his involvement in church activities he regularly came to church Monday morning to count the offering from the day before. And after his retirement he and a few other men created a men's Bible study that he enjoyed both for the spiritual impact as well as the social ties with the others in the group, and I understand that sentiment was reciprocal with the other men developing strong ties with him as well.
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So you see, there were a very great many admirable qualities in my dad, and I say this with all sincere conviction. Really and truly he was a good man in many ways. This could practically be his epitaph, and people who knew him well would probably not only agree with these sentiments, but also add considerably to them.
This is why I am so sorry he had to die when and how he did. Really, we were all (including dad) so caught up in taking care of mom during her years of deep depression and us "kids" were in situations that strained our abilities to keep our heads above water, that we didn't pay enough attention to how dad was doing. And, really, I'm crying as I write this.
I don't want to go into the details of "when dad was experiencing thus and so we should have done something that might have averted his untimely death". But I do want to say that he died in a way that epitomized his unselfishness. He was willing to the end to let his concern for mom (at the end that was all he could try to take care of), that he was willing to a large extent to neglect his own needs. (His interactions with the church via the money counting commitment and with the men's Bible study were exceptions, in that these outlets helped him even while he was helping others). If that kind of selflessness isn't Christ-like, than I don't know what is.
I'm thankful for the times that last year that I was able to be with him. That spring I was planning on taking a vacation to Dublin, Ireland, staying in a small town to the south of Dublin where I could enjoy hiking in the nearby hills and the quaint life of the harbor town while being able to take day trips into Dublin or other nearby areas. But a month or two before I went on that trip I got a call that mom had tried to commit suicide by taking a bunch of dad's coumadin.
So I cancelled my vacation and flew out to Seattle (I was in the Washington, D.C. area at the time, having finished my library science studies and having begun to work as a full-time library cataloger) to spend the week with him. I think he really appreciated my coming out, as did my brother living there in Seattle, but mom doesn't even remember that I came except that I tell her I did. So she thinks of my coming as just helping dad, which would have been enough of a reason to come out, for sure, but I came out because of concern for her especially. So I joined dad in visits to see mom in the hospital, but we spent some time together too.
For example, for my birthday, which was coming up at that point, he helped me pick out a nice fashionable hat to go with my new black coat with mink collar (that I'd bought from one of those discount fashion stores). Then he agreed to go with me to the new (at that time it was still relatively new) "Experience Music Project" museum which he (and a lot of other Seattlites, apparently) thought was an architectural horror and blight on the city skyscrape. I didn't think he was particularly interested in the subject matter (rock 'n roll and its predecessors and influence on culture), but in his usual unselfish manner agreed to take me there. (I'm not necessarily a fan of that subject matter, either, but I was curious about the museum.) I think he at least agreed that the inside was better than the outside. And I did agree that whether or not the architecture was good or bad in an absolute sense, it was (and is) a bad fit architecturally for the context - the surrounding area and buildings.
After that we went up to the observation deck of the Space Needle. How I wish I could have tape recorded our time up there, because he had lived practically his whole life in Seattle (except the first 1-2 years of his life) and as we walked around and stopped at various scenic vantage points he started describing how he remembered this or that place or building being different or the significance of it or the importance it had in his life. I don't think I'd ever heard him talk like that, and looking back it makes me feel like he felt like he was at the end of his life or something. He was almost 72 (his birthday was 2 days before mine) and he died some 6 months later. We got our picture taken there on the observation deck of the Space Needle, and that picture means a lot to me now.
That week or so in Seattle and later interactions with him by phone made me realize that dad was burnt out from the care of mom, so I was really concerned for him. I didn't have any more vacation time left, but when Memorial Day weekend came around I took advantage of the 3-day weekend to fly out to Seattle again. Believe me, though, it's not easy making such cross country trips for such short jaunts. To make the most of the time I could while in Seattle, I took the latest flight I could and went straight from the airport to work, with my suitcase and all, upon returning to Washington, D.C.
But a week or two before I went to Seattle mom asked me if there was anything I'd like to do while I was out there, and I said I'd like to see the cabin again and we decided that maybe we could invite dad's sister and the cousins. The cabin had been dad's mom's, and they obtained it sometime during dad's youth, but I don't remember when exactly. We often went to the cabin growing up, especially in the summer, when we might spend a whole week there. But later on, as an undergraduate, I went up there a few times on my own in the nice weather to combine study and a change of scenery. Eventually, though, as we grew up, dad's sister was given the cabin and her kids used it a lot.
When I was a child the cabin was small and rustic and had running water piped in from the lake (which was tested every year for purity) and electricity. It didn't have a phone and we had to use an outhouse (which I dreaded because of the occasional big, black spider). Before my aunt even took the cabin over she added a nice addition with a large front window facing the lakes and the mountains on the other side, and she also added a fireplace. There were probably other improvements as well, but I can't remember them now.
I don't remember much about that Memorial Day weekend other than our gathering at the cabin. There are a couple things that I remember especially about it. One was related to our old canoe that was there. I always really enjoyed canoeing and growing up we had a very nice fiberglass canoe. After I could drive I often went canoeing locally by myself or with another friend, and dad and I had once gone canoeing from Union Bay through the Lake Washington Ship Canal to Lake Washington. As a child, maybe 12 or 13 years of age I was proud of being the only female out of two families (our families and some friends) that was chosen to row the boats back to our point of origin when we got caught in a bad summer storm on a mountain lake in Glacier National Park, because I was strong enough and my canoeing skills were good enough to row against the wins and waves that were blowing against us. So, sort of for old times sake and because our old canoe was there, I asked dad if he'd like to go canoeing with me. I understood he wasn't feeling well, so I tried to get him to let me steer, but he wouldn't let me. So we didn't get very far at all when we had to turn back because it was too much for him. We were out maybe 5 or 10 minutes at the most. I think he still felt like he had to take a male protector role in relation to me. Also, another thing about this incident that sheds a little light on dad's character, was that I was pretty horrified at how the canoe had been apparently neglected and the shape it was in, but dad responded in a way that made me place the condition of the canoe in the broader scope of things and see that it wasn't really all that important. I don't remember exactly what he said, but this was a short interaction of one sentence by me and a one or two sentence response by him.
The other aspect of going to the cabin that weekend was one that I didn't realize until later, and that was that that was the last time my aunt saw my dad (her brother) until he was put on life support for long enough for me and my other brother on the east coast to get back there to see him before he was pulled off life support because his brain hemorrhages had affected too much of his brain to hope for any kind of recovery. In hindsight, then, going out to Seattle for that weekend and us all going to the cabin seemed like it had God's hand in it.
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When I say, though, that we could have saved dad if we'd been more attune to his health needs, I mean the week prior to his being rushed to e.r., when he started having bad headaches and vomiting. In hindsight, of course, it's easy to kick oneself for not making the connection between taking coumadin and the risk of internal hemorrhaging. However, I do know that what I did do that last year did make his last year alive easier, in being with him when mom was in the hospital and coming back out again a few months later, so it's not that I get obsessed with regrets, but they do sort of linger in the background a bit when I think about dad's death and know that it didn't have to be, at least not at the time or in the way it happened. It's also a sad irony that mom tried to end her life with coumadin and didn't succeed, and dad didn't try but did die from it (in the sense of he wouldn't have had the hemorrhaging if he hadn't been taking the coumadin).
Dad had really tried and tried to help mom and she had balked at some things, but eventually she agreed to some of the things he'd suggested and she's now a lot more functional, although she does have a lot of other health problems. My brothers didn't want me to live with mom, saying they thought I'd just make things worse, and mom didn't seem too convinced it was a good idea either, so now my brothers do most of the caretaking and, as usual, about the only thing I can do to help is by way of encouraging her and the like. They deny that anything I do in this realm is trivial (as did dad when he was alive), but really it just reinforces the gendered relationship structure of the family. It's not that I'm against being an encouragement, but I am against the gendered aspects of it as being limited to it. So... what goes around, comes around and we're back to an old familiar subject again, that has affected my relationship with my family, with churches and with the Vienna mission, namely, gender stereotypes and expectations.
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I decided to make this a whole separate post and take a break from the text discussion. And, since you already know that there were also rocky aspects of my relationship with my dad, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that you haven't heard the last on that topic either.
