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Well, as you can probably imagine, Father’s Day yesterday was a little rough. My father had been dead (yesterday) 16 days. Two weeks and two measly days. That is not a long time. It still feels very much like a good/bad dream/nightmare that maybe never actually happened at all…except he’s gone. That’s what makes it real: The gritty realism of his permanent absence.
Britney and I had to work three people in: My mom, her biological father, and her step-dad and mom. (Her step-dad was really the “father” who raised her.) Ergo, Saturday late morning we drove the 50 minutes south from Lompoc to Santa Barbara to stay the day and night with my mom.
Mom seemed OK. I’ve been stopping by a little and seeing her, and we’ve been texting. To a fairly large degree she’s still in psychological shock, much like a man after being tased by the police. She lost the man she’s been with for nearly half a century and it still hasn’t fully sunk in. She’s had friends stay here and there with her, overnight, and, miraculously, though she won’t even return my texts, my older half-sister came over alone (which never happens) and spent five hours with my mom last weekend, reorganizing cabinets, moving stuff, and dialoguing about deep shit. (Mom didn’t elaborate on specifics.)
I have a feeling my brother-in-law told my sister about my “betrayal” comment to him that final day they saw Dad before he died. Thursday, June 1st it would have been. We all wept and hugged. I’d told my brother-in-law (only because he asked and insisted on knowing; I thought it was terrible timing to get into it) that my mom and I’d felt “betrayed” by he and my sister’s lack of involvement the preceding two years re my father’s terminal cancer. He’d admitted that they “hadn’t thought it was real until just the week before.” Yeah. Denial. Easy when you let other people do the hard work. Shut your eyes and pretend it isn’t happening. Some people are just emotionally weak.
But anyway: That’s neither here not there. It doesn’t really matter. My sister and I have never been close, never been loving, never been friends.
Britney and I got down to my mom’s in S.B around noon. We’d taken the long way due to terrible work construction which seems never-ending on Highway One ten minutes south of Lompoc. We listened to music and talked and stopped for coffee, tea and bagels. Sometimes I watch her as she drives, admiring the beauty of her taut face, feeling the depth of my love for her. After all these years, all these women, all this running away from death and myself and love: Here is this woman, my woman, the one I choose for forever, and who chooses me back. I am a very lucky man.
We sat with my mom and chatted for a while, sitting in the big white cushioned chairs by the deck, gazing out beyond, as always, at the ocean and city and islands. It was foggy and hard to see much that afternoon. Then we started the real work: Mom wanted us to turn the former master bedroom—aka Dad’s former Death Chamber—into her new office. This meant we had to change the old office downstairs (where my father once used to work) into the new one upstairs. This in turn meant we had to carry, in pieces, two gigantic bookshelves and cabinets and their shelves up the steep stone stairs at the side of the house and place them into the new office.