Remembering my Father: Boundaries of Order Pilgrimage
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Bretigne
 February 06 2020
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    My father passed away on December 29th of last year. He had been sick for a while, but none of us realized how sick he was until the day before he died. So it was a huge blow to all of us when he went. ...which of course it would have been even if we had known months ago. There is nothing good about death, and nothing good about losing a parent. I'll write more about him when I'm ready, but for now I'm just really sad and really exhausted and really missing him.

     

    Which is why my birthday, which falls about a week after the day he passed away, could have been a really, really crappy day. Thankfully, I have two sisters who weren't about to let that happen.

     

    Sister One arranged for celebrity birthday greetings from Oliver Phelps and Nicholas Brendon. Greetings for which I don't even have words. You'll just have to watch them yourselves.

     

    And Sister Two accompanied me on the pilgrimage I had decided I would do that day. I knew that the only way I could make the day anything other than miserable was if I did something to honor my dad. I decided I would take a bunch of his books to all of the Little Free Libraries around town and deposit them. So, that's what we did. We found eight Little Free Libraries, and deposited eight copies of his book Boundaries of Order

     

    That night, my husband, sister, and some of our kids went out for dinner at one of our favorite Japanese restaurants: Honda Ya. It was the last restaurant we had taken my dad out to, last spring, back when he was still able to get around easily.

     

    Looking at this picture now, I feel so grateful that we took him out that night. I am so grateful for so many of the things we did with him, and for him. There are things that I can see clearly now, that I could not see until right after he died.

     

    Things like:

     

    1. Before someone dies, it's so easy to think about all the "important" things you need to say to them, or do with them. And I'm so glad I did say the things that needed to be said. BUT: It's not the "important" things that necessarily matter the most. What matters most is just being with that person. Just hanging out with them, talking about anything at all. I don't really remember what I talked about with my dad that night at the Japanese restaurant. But it was one of the most important things I've ever done.

     

    2. Re: Cultures that place a lot of value on "honoring your elders." From the outside, it would be easy to think that they do this for practical reasons: To encourage the preservation and appreciation of learning and wisdom, etc. Or even self-serving reasons on the part of the elderly themselves. But what is crystal clear to me now is that there is another reason. That honoring our parents in particular (not always an easy thing to do, I know) is not only for their benefit, but also for ours. 

     

    I could spend the rest of my life wallowing in the regrets I have about my dad: That I didn't spend enough time with him, didn't just go over and hang out very much, didn't take advantage of the fantastic opportunity I had to do that by living so close by. I could add to that all the ways I might have been able to help him survive his cancer if I had urged him to try something else earlier, if I had known what to urge him to try. The list could go on for a very long time, and I could really torment myself with it if I chose to.

     

    But I also know that I did the best for him that I could figure out to do, once he was sick, that I was there for him in the ways that I thought he needed me to be, and I also know that he appreciated me for that, because he said he did. So, even with the regrets I have, I can have some peace. I'm not tormented by the thought that I wasn't there for him when he needed me to be. And I know now that I would have been, if I hadn't done the things I did.

     

    So this whole "honoring your parents" thing - it's more than just a practical tool, or self-serving tradition. It comes from a recognition that the bond between parents and children is a real thing. It is a deep thing, and a meaningful thing. And if you betray it, you are hurting yourself. You are giving yourself a terrible burden to carry around for the rest of your life. I don't think I realized that before, but I do now.

     

    I don't know if there is an afterlife. I think there probably is, but I can't say that I "believe" there is. I hope there is. And at times like this, I completely understand why - if there ISN'T - humanity has had to convince itself that there is. Because the thought of this loss being permanent is too hard to bear. So I don't know. But if there is, and if my dad is able to see us from there, I know he would be happy to know that just a few days after the Great Boundaries of Order Pilgrimage, my sister and I returned to three of the Little Free Libraries to find that two of his books had been taken.

     

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