A eulogy for my father

Posted on February 28, 2012 by threlkeld

Today you’ll hear about what my father was like as a brother, colleague, friend and husband. I thought I’d start things off by talking about what he was like as a dad.

What I remember most about him as a kid was that he was always trying to entertain us. For example, he sang in the car constantly, and we spent a lot of time in the car with him over the years, driving to various vacations: camping in Yosemite, rafting on the Colorado river, taking the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. He sang upbeat songs, novelty and pop numbers from the early 20th century, like “Mairzy Doats” and “Button Up Your Overcoat.” No one born in the sixties should know the lyrics to Cole Porter’s “I Get A Kick Out Of You,” but my sister, Susan, and I do.

He apparently liked to entertain himself too. He told me recently that sometimes when he drove through the toll booth on the Golden Gate Bridge he’d pay for the car behind him just to watch the driver’s reaction in his rear view mirror. “Some people looked so angry,” he’d said, incredulously.

My dad was no stranger to anger himself. From him, I learned how to swear properly. He could swear a blue streak and he had an incredible temper, which I unfortunately inherited. But I never saw him direct it at anyone. Instead, he trained it on inanimate objects, assembly instructions and maps. Especially maps. About a year after he and my mother separated, when I was 9 and Susan 13, he took us kids on a long road trip down to Baja, California. He was looking for a particular beach. Susan remembers him driving around, totally lost, swearing up a storm and finally concluding, while looking at the map with absolute bewilderment, “Jesus fucking Christ! You can’t fucking get there from here.”

Yet he nevertheless made his way around the world. There were so many times over the years, when he was in various far flung places, that I worried about him. When I was 10 years old I watched the fall of Saigon, knowing he was there. I remember going right up to the television and watching the people clambering to board the last helicopters out, trying to pick him out of the crowd. I watched, worrying for his safety, as riots broke out in West Oakland during a free grocery distribution program that the Symbionese Liberation Army had demanded from Randolph Hearst. I worried about him when he was in Lebanon. I worried about him when he was in Iraq. One night I turned on the television to find him underwater, floating in the center of a giant cage, cavorting with sharks in a most worrisome way. It’s one of life’s little ironies that a man who lived such an extraordinarily adventurous and dangerous life would end that life in such a mundane way.

And he worried about us, probably more than he needed to. My dad had a huge heart, but he played his emotional cards very close to his chest. He could be very cerebral and in general preferred the concrete to the abstract. For example, he never read fiction or poetry; I don’t think he saw the point of it. But he was a big reader and devoured thick political biographies and books about history. When Susan or I had a problem he was apt to respond with an anecdote about Eleanor Roosevelt or Mamie Eisenhower.

My dad also had a great sense of humor, one that tended toward the absurd. One night in December my better half, Jonathan, and I met up with Dad and Betsy at their apartment before going out to dinner. As we sat with our glasses of wine, their dog, Max, began to frantically mate with the couch. “I don’t care if Max humps the couch,” my dad said. “Just as long as he doesn’t get it pregnant.”

It’s difficult to boil down the essence of a person into a few words, but in thinking about him over these past few weeks a series of declarative sentences emerged that I feel capture his life philosophy, as it were:

Work hard.
Stay curious.
Take risks.
Be generous.

And I’d add to that, as a coda of sorts, Let your work speak for itself. My dad won lots of awards for his work, and I’m glad he was recognized throughout his career by his peers, many of whom are here today. But even though he was distinguished as a television reporter, he was fundamentally a writer. He was such a natural, creative and intelligent writer. His writing was spare and unadorned, yet remarkable for its elegance, clarity and wit. It read well on paper and out loud. I try to write like he did, using those qualities as my guideposts.

One of my best memories of my dad is from that trip down to Baja in 1974. On a beach, warmed by the sand, I sat with him, this man who never read poetry, and watched the sun setting over the ocean. As it got smaller and smaller we spun metaphors.

Now it’s a mountain.
Now it’s a Volkswagen Beetle.
Now it’s a surfboard.
Now it’s a piece of paper.
Now the sun is gone.
Now it is night.

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Questions

Posted on February 12, 2012 by threlkeld

How long is a month?

It’s a long time. But it’s also not long at all.

What’s the difference between grief and depression?

I can’t actually tell the difference right now.

Is there anything good about death?

Nope.

Really?

Okay, maybe it’s not all bad. I found this interesting quote from from Ann Lamott’s memoir Traveling Mercies:

Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit. Mostly I have tried to avoid it by staying very busy, working too hard, trying to achieve as much as possible. You can often avoid the pain by trying to fix other people; shopping helps in a pinch, as does romantic obsession. Martyrdom can’t be beat. While too much exercise works for many people, it doesn’t work for me, but I have found that a stack of magazines can be numbing and even mood altering.

But the bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you. A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear disillusion. You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

And here is what Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whose name is practically synonymous with death, has to say:

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.

These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep, loving concern.

Beautiful people do not just happen.

That sounds great. What’s wrong with that idea?

Because I’ve already been through plenty of defeat, suffering and loss. I get it, okay? I’m trying to be as beautiful as I can be, and I think I’m doing a pretty good job. You can give it a fucking rest now.

At least I’m not this woman. There’s always someone else with a greater burden to bear, equipped with more strength and grace than you with which to handle it. And that’s pretty inspiring, somewhat comforting, and not a little intimidating.

My dad’s memorial service is in two weeks. I keep thinking something magical is going to happen after that, like it’s some sort of grief threshold I’ll cross and then everything will start getting better instantly. But I know better than that.

So you’re sad right now. That sucks. What else are you up to?

I’m working, but not too much and thankfully it’s from home where I’m free to have the unexpected emotional meltdown. I’m trying to decide if I want to pursue a lead I got on a freelance gig with a VERY BIG NAME (rhymes with “schmoogle”), but I don’t know if I have the energy right now.

I’m running, although I don’t really have a plan other than to try to run at least five days a week and do two decent workouts in there somewhere. Most of it’s unstructured. I’ll go run around on the XC course at Van Cortlandt Park. Today I went into Central Park and did 25 minutes of fartlek running, chopped up into 3-7 minute segments over a full park loop. I passed a lot of people and felt like a badass for 45 minutes. I mostly just go run and do whatever. I have a race next weekend, the Cherry Tree 10 Miler Relay, with two of my favorite people. That’s for fun, although I’m hoping I can do something with the 5K fitness I spent months working on building and did not get to use in Houston last month except for running through airports.

I don’t sleep very much. I am plowing through my generic Ambien at an alarming rate. My neck and back are a holy mess — I basically go for the same massage every 10 days or so. My massage therapist is a funny woman, about my age, who has lots of stories about death. We’re going for drinks some night soon, since I’m usually lying face down when we converse and I’d like to change that.

I have neglected fruits and vegetables. I need to get back to those. Also: flossing.

I drink to excess some nights, but that was something I did in the best of times, so don’t worry.

I’m writing up an absolute storm these days.

I am hoping to hit some open mics this month, although that’s been a lot of work since I have to have very short pieces for those and everything I write is about 8 minutes too long. But I have one new piece that’s short and will be working on others. I’ve been going to a few to listen (and mostly rule them out). But I do appreciate living just north of NYC, where if you can’t find an open mic at least four nights a week then you are either blind or not very resourceful.

A few months ago I signed up for a beginner’s acting class that started a week after my dad died. I deferred that and will instead be taking that in about two months. I’m nervous about it, because I’m a terrible actor, but that’s why I’m taking a class, isn’t it? (I don’t want to be an actor, by the way. I just want to learn to be less self-conscious when I’m up on stage telling a story.)

The truth is, I feel awful much of the time. I’m not fun to live with. I get brief waves of levity and then I ride those waves (usually in the form of making amusing Facebook posts, seeing friends, or getting my shopping done) for all they’re worth. I don’t think I’m wallowing in self pity. I believe it’s good to acknowledge and feel pain for the reasons Lamott states above. It would be helpful to have some sense of when it will lessen. But I know things don’t work that way. I have Kleenex boxes in every room of the house. My entire house looks like a psychoanalyst’s office. It’s actually sort of funny, when you think about it.

I’ve developed a theory that the periods of reprieve we get from the soul-crushing sadness are some kind of evolutionary mechanism; they keep us from shutting down completely in order for us to survive. That theory is extending into the idea that maybe death as a physical and psychic experience is also not that bad, or perhaps even fantastically pleasurable. We can only hope.

Thanks for the kind comments on the previous blog post, as well as the various notes and other condolences. I hope that I can be as generous, wise and buoyant a presence for others when I hear the call.

Everything is going to be okay.

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