death

Here I am, awake at 3am. I can't sleep and I'm out at the kitchen table. I keep thinking of all the things I feel about everything.

I'm worried about my mom and I don't want her to wake up as she did before. I see a light on my dad's computer and it's glow is somehow reassuring. the radio station he last listened to is glowing on its display, and I know it has to be public radio with orchestral music, and that too is somehow too is comforting. Should I go check on my mom? Why am I up at this hour? I want to go over there, but I've always been scared of the dark. I've been trying to tell myself that there is even less need to be worried about this fear that has always plagued me. I've always worried about seeing ghosts and had a strange fear, not quite picturing what it might look like, but having some sort of dread. Now I know I have one on the other side. If there's anything out there, my beautiful father is there. And I really expect that when I walk in to the living room, he will be sleeping in his chair as he always is.

Instead it's me sitting on the kitchen table as he has a million times in the early morning hours. A couple months ago I would have found him out here and we would have coffee and he'd be reading the paper. Oh I love him I love him I love him.

So many things have come into my head. Luckily the guilt and the regret have only reared their ugly head a few times. It's been crazy and surreal and looking back it's so incredibly hard to believe it has only been two days.

There was the policeman that arrived at the door. I was so strangely calm when they were there. I felt like I wasn't the model of who a grieving daughter should be. I was just so confused. What was a cop doing at the door looking for my dad? He couldn't have possibly done anything. He was in the hospital and then he was gone.

"He's dead" I blurted out. The cop wanted to see my id. How was this all happening? I get my id and hand it to him. He's sees the california id and says "you came all this way?" I didn't say anything, but I'm thinking in my head "of course I came all this way, he's my father you dumb shit!"

He was actually a very kind man, it was all just so strange. and there was a girl with him. the daughter of his friend jean, another man I never met. Mom came out and explained everything to them then, and I felt very protective. I didn't know who any of these people are and I didn't understand why she was going in to all this detail about dad's death. I didn't want her to have to relive it for these strangers. I stood behind her warily and wrapped my arms around her, almost ready to interrupt and tell them that they she had to go, that she couldn't talk, as I had told so many random telemarketers when I picked up the phone to shield her.

After, mom explained that dad had really liked this girl, she was the daughter of his friend at the local car shop where he made a website in exchange for storing one of the many cars that he had squirreled away. Mom said that he had helped her with her computer and had spoken about how he thought she was such a bright girl and admired how she could switch from english to spanish. Later I felt bad, wondering if this girl knew more about my father than I did, I was so far away.

But I guess though she just had a small piece of him that I will never have, that doesn't change what I have and what I have of him is huge.

There was finding his website. Oh that brought tears and tears. I remembered him asking me to check out his new website and I never got a chance to look. I had pushed it out of my mind in a rush of daily life. I had seen so any versions, and sometimes I got frustrated at having to spend so much time working on web stuff. I did web dev for money not for fun, and I loved sharing it with him, but sometimes didn't want to go into it all the time. I wanted to relax and have fun with my parents and not come here and do work when it was the weekend. But I'm so very glad we had that together now.

It was so beautiful, he had come so far and I never got a chance to tell him how great this latest version was. I cried and cried over that.

And then I started reading it. He had written out all his career details. The very things I had wanted to ask again, that I had wanted to get straight so I could remember what an amazing man he was, the ones I was going to ask doug and try to write myself. He had collected all his writings and he had posted copies of his music. He had left me a message. I was grateful that I hadn't seen it until then, because it was like he was talking to me still.

That's been so wonderful, I keep having these feelings that everything somehow worked out the way it was supposed to, the best way it could have. I even feel guilt that maybe I didn't love him enough, how can I even think for a minute that it was ok for him to go? But he had to go. I know he did. And he did everything, everything right. It was a class act all the way.

And yet I looked at his last cars in the driveway and in the garage, and I noticed how awesome they were. I remember not ever really telling him how great I thought they looked either. I was all wrapped up with my mom's worry of how much they cost and it clouded my pure appreciation and ability to share in dad's joy at them. I never really told him.

But I think that's part of a parent dying. You know you can't share everything about them. There are so many things you don't know and will never know. His life was so full. I never shared his love of the softball games. But he never shared many of my friends and activities and loves. He didn't have too. That didn't change our love, it didn't change the fact that he was my daddy and I was his little girl.

I am so happy that everytime one of those thoughts enters my head, there's a calming response that comes too.

And we have laughed so much and so deeply. I always did when I came home. My family always shared politics, and we always shared humor. We may not have always been able to agree on what we should eat, or what movie we should watch but we could laugh, and we could all rally around and talk about how to right the world's wrongs. And my mom and brother and I have been laughing like crazy, deep in our bellies, side splitting laughter. These last days have truly brought out our best selves, as we all try to be strong for eachother, and all let one another have their moments of tears and their moments to comfort the others.

One final event that these last couple days have hung around is when we were at the funeral home and sitting with the woman filling out information to file with his death. She came to the box marked occupation. We had no idea how to answer. He had had so many occupations, and even the ones we knew of most recently it was hard to sum up in a brief word -- inventor? musician? programmer? designer? engineer? how to say all that that man was? it took us over 24 hours, and the input of doug, to try to decide how to narrow it down. Engineer, we decided, was suitably generic yet singular enough. Apparently when Michael called, there was a further narrowing that was allowed. Engineer of computers and electronics it is.

Also, dad's death has not only brought together the living, but reminded us of the other dead that have passed before.

We also had to find out my dad's father's name. Ben, we knew, but was it benoni or ben e. or benny or benjamin. And what was his middle name? When the answer came back it didn't occur to me at first but later when I said it aloud I realized that we had known it all along but didn't make the connection. Benjamin Charles. I knew that name backwards and forwards because I had heard a hundred times that that was going to be my own name if I was the boy that my parents thought I was going to be in the womb. Benji they were going to name me, Benjamin Charles. Though I had heard that, I didn't know I was to be my grandfather's namesake.

And my brother and mom started telling me stories of her father. Michael, being older, remembered him far better than I who had died at 8. He played checkers. He was a smart man who chafed against the factory job that was his lot, who drank to deal with the hard childhood life had handed him. But he took care of people. He took care of his father and built him a little house. He made sure his wife was well taken care of. He once found an error in the banking of Bayport Bank that would have caused the place to shut down. He found it going over the sums of one of the many savings accounts he had started for his loved ones, and he brought it to their attention that a worker was shaving an 1/8th of a percent of interest off all the accounts. He was the source of the math brain that my mom and my brother had inherited, as was his father before him.

We are all united in this tapestry of life, each strand weaving it's way through. Losing my dad just fixed me more firmly in this experience of life.