My father passed away last week after a struggle with depression and an indecipherable dementia. The last day before he died, he stopped speaking yet could still respond through his eyes or gentlest of nods. I spent most of that day trying to connect, to offer up words that might make any sense to him, given he’d still not looked his dying squarely in the eye.
The whole year before had been a reckoning with his sudden fragility and now his mortality. After an innocuous hernia surgery, he returned to his solitary life in a cabin by the Yakima River a different person. He’d lost his desire to cook for himself, he couldn’t remember having slept and was haunted by strange dreams, frightening images of what seemed like long buried parts of his psyche.
My dad was a category 5 stoic. So, it came as some relief when he admitted he couldn’t take another winter alone, a well-tended woodstove his only company. That month, a year ago this September, we adjusted our sails and tacked in a new direction that would take us on an epic journey, an odyssey. This odyssey consisted of four moves in twelve months as we tried to find a place for him to land--to live and be cared for--while his mind frayed and betrayed him.
But this odyssey also involved slogging through the difficult terrain of our fraught, mostly painful, relationship. A physical journey and a psychic one. Both took their toll, though it was the inscrutable terrain of our relationship, the one between a father and his only child, that would ultimately deliver us to a new shore…and a new, liberating vista.
My dad had left when I was two and I’d spent 50 years trying to dismantle and then rebuild craggy, misshapen walls around a broken heart. As much as we tried to connect, these walls of mine and his own impenetrable barricades kept us painfully separated from each other when all we wanted was acceptance and a tenderness I sensed we could both imagine but rarely experienced.
After a failed attempt to live in an apartment on his own, a series of disappearances from an assisted living facility, then a grueling and unexpected week at Harborview after he almost drowned in the middle of the night, we finally arrived at a secure spot that did not require him to reside in memory care. It was 10 blocks from where I live and I started to develop a routine of sharing a meal with him several times a week. That lasted about 3 weeks.
Then COVID hit. Quarantined to his room, and cut off from any visitors, my dad fell further into depression’s vortex, even as my ridiculous walls started to give way. Every other day I dropped off flowers, a book he might like, or whatever interesting family photos I could find. I called often but he was drifting away too fast for me to keep up. After the third month or so, he started to believe he was a prisoner. And in many ways, he was.
Sometime in July, the nursing staff emailed me to say he’d lost another 10 pounds, leaving him with 135 for his 6’ 2” frame. I was desperate and furious. I spent a month, along with several other daughters, sons, husbands and wives, pleading for more creative solutions than ongoing isolation. Miraculously, my dad’s new doctor, an angel of mercy whose ministries shall be enshrined, wrote a prescription for daily walks that I could facilitate. ‘Doctor’s orders,’ so I was finally able to see him.
Yet our first walk together was our last. Two weeks later, he was barely able to stand on his own. A week after that, he refused any morphine and died a few hours after I’d gone home for the night. In spite of the year’s relentless labors, it felt like I’d blinked and he was gone.
My dad’s four moves meant he had pared down quite a bit. Sorting through his handful of western shirts, handmade leather belts, his single bookshelf home to Celtic mythology, 7 bibles, Native American history, the geology of the West and a cedar chest full of wool blankets took only a few days. But I’m disoriented with exhaustion. It feels like I’ve just set down a pack twice my weight. My eye lids get weary by 4 in the afternoon and I crawl out of bed after 12 hours of sleep.
When my dad’s precipitous decline first announced itself last fall, he called one night and said he needed to tell me some things. He said he was reeling from regret, about us and about his life. He said he had not fulfilled the responsibilities he had to me as a father and to the world as a man. He shared these things in a torrent, and with a kind of honesty he’d never shared with me, before or since. His words traced directly into my wounded core. They burned hot and fierce through all my ‘dry tinder’ like a suppressed wildfire. The moment was surprisingly painful though apparently essential for breaking open those many protected seeds to generate new life.
Fast forward a year later, and here I remain, my dad now physically gone. Pictures of us, long tucked away in boxes, now sit on my dresser and hang on my walls. “Leese...(long pause)...it’s your dad” from many voicemails plays like an old ballad inside my head.
In spite of the exhaustion, and amidst a fog of grief, there’s been a tectonic shift and I am seeing the world with new eyes.
The story of my father’s neglect molded a self-belief called ‘inadequacy.’ Neglect, the cause. Inadequacy, the effect. But with these new eyes, cause and effect have disappeared. My story of inadequacy, the one I continued to tell long into adulthood, was a story I narrated. If I wanted my power back, if I wanted the personal power that comes from feeling whole and worthy, a new story was always mine to tell, just waiting for the storyteller to take the reins.
Truer still, my father never took anything from me that I didn’t give to him. I was the ‘creative agent’ and I had chosen the ancient, blinding and disempowering story of me as victim and he as villain. In fact, the reverse was true. In this great odyssey we took together, me walking alongside him holding all the pieces together, he’d given me, and I’d earned, my ‘daughter’ wings. I had become the daughter I always wanted to be without him needing to become the father I always wanted him to be.
If this is wisdom, I’ll take it. Even more, I’ll share it.
Consider, as you’re reading this, who or what you tend to point a blaming finger towards.
One worthy ‘villain’ story is the one about the massive disparities and harm faced by billions of us, of any species, resulting from ‘villainous’ people and institutions maintaining extractive capitalism at all costs.
Or the one about the ‘villain’ in the white house. Many of us have been so tightly wrapped around the Trump axle that the man’s become an exquisite parody.
Or the one about the ‘villain’ virus and the many ‘villain’ people who may be carrying it. The one where we give all our power and attention to a single virus, and to authorities who promise they can control it, while paying scant attention to what’s undermining the only real protection we have, that of our personal health, our indigenous biome and our regenerative immune systems.
Or the ones all of us can tell about individuals in our lives who frustrate us, who’ve disappointed, hurt or abused us, that we still allow to shape the story we tell about ourselves.
I’m not saying these stories aren’t true. The facts tell a compelling story. But they are only partially true. By accepting these villain stories, we’re giving said villains a lot of power, especially the power to choose who we are going to be in spite of who they are or what they are doing.
My question to us is why wait for others to offer us a healing narrative? Why depend on anyone or anything outside us to authorize us to live fully into who we want to be?
I’ll never know my dad’s soul story--the story of his suffering, the walls he put around his heart, his estrangement from the world--because he never found the courage while he was alive to share it with me, to simply share more deeply from his heart. What a troubling human ailment. So much goes unsaid between people who purport to love each other. But here we are, working with what is.
What’s clear as day from this new view is this: I don’t want to spend any more time wishing my father, my friends, Trump, the virus, or anything outside me was different than they are. Here on the heels of my father’s death, I see that pursuit as a kind of folly. It’s not that I don’t care, or that I won’t make every choice to affirm more life and beauty. What I do want is to spend my last few decades relinquishing the boring, disempowering villain stories and becoming who I want to be. I want to trust that is enough to have a real and sustained impact on the world. I already feel myself more whole, more at home, which is empowering my work and my relationships at every turn.
It seems, by now, that “Remember Your Ruby Slippers” should require no further explanation. Even for those few generations today not shaped by the Wizard of Oz and its myriad metaphors, I find myself wanting to leave it well enough alone. If you don’t know the story, take it as a mystery to unpack. I will say it’s humbling, and not just a little painful, to realize I’ve been wearing those ruby slippers--no heels thank you--the whole damn time. No wicked witch or flying monkeys ever tried to steal them from me (even though it made for a great story) and no one ever could.
Grant me this one favor: over the next few days, stop reading the endless villain stories in most forms of media and notice instead those beautiful ruby slippers you’re wearing, whether they be size 5 or 15. Tell some new stories that enliven you and your children about who we are and what we’re capable of. Use that elegant power of imagination that is innate and indelible in all of us to shape new stories about our wholeness. And trust it long enough to see what happens.