My Dad died 10 years ago yesterday. He was 74. As the years go by, the grief becomes less obvious. I don’t fall into a ball of human on the floor and wail. To be honest, for the past two years, I sadly have almost forgotten the day.
When I do recall his death, the memories are quite painful and I wonder how we mentally and emotionally survived 2008-2009. Both my parents were in decline, just at different rates. Mom died from pancreatic cancer in December and Dad died six weeks later on January 31st after long term complications of heart disease. My siblings and I immediately felt like orphans.
As I begin to enter my 60s, about the age my Dad really started to show symptoms of, well, everything related to cardiovascular disease, it’s hard not to think about my own mortality. How is my health compared to his? Do I have high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol? Am I active or do I have a sleep disorder? Am I so tired I just want sleep all the time, even during church or a special event?
It’s easy to go down the dark hole of questions like, who will really care about my parents’ lives? And then I think about how are my children going to remember me. What am I doing or have I done that is truly memorable? Or will I just sink into the void of people past? Millions and millions of faceless, unnumbered, nameless others who we will never know and have no means to remember?
As we managed the estate, it dawned us that there were far fewer trinkets and memorabilia of Dad than Mom. Mom had stuff. Jewelry, a special craft project, collections, notebooks of “to do” lists. A prayer or notation found in a shot glass in a cabinet. An aunt’s ring she had lost in the house but we found. But for Dad, it was more difficult. It’s hard to quantify clothes. He didn’t hunt although there was one shotgun in a closet. There were a ton of old books. But nothing other than his wallet that we could look at say, “oh, that is so Dad.”
There were a ton of picture albums that we eventually sorted through and had professionally scanned in. (I highly recommend that activity). Every year, at their birthday or death, I take pause to review, sort more, label special ones and try to remember that time when my sister and I sat on his lap for a special picture on that amazing, mid-century white couch that I later punched holes in with a red fountain pen.
So what do we try to remember now? The Value of Waiting.
My Dad had this saying that has stuck in my head forever. I personally hated it growing up and particularly when times were tough, but when you are 60, enlightenment generally occurs.
“He who waits last gets best.”
I don’t know if it was a riff off the “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last”, “you usually have to wait for that which is worth waiting for,” or any number of Biblical or non-Biblical quotes that focus on patience as a virtue. Our culture is so set on being first, or first in line. But maybe if we are last, or almost last, there will be a golden nugget that has yet to be uncovered. Once we get past the flurry of excitement, we find a treasure. Perhaps there are things that, with a slower more patient eye, we discover that after everything else has been gleaned away, when all the layers are gone, we find something more meaningful or beautiful because it has been hidden by other “stuff.”
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