Thirty-Three

The number of years since my father left this plane of existence

Quick notes: One, I started a draft about where and how I am currently, but I think I’m going to dump it and start fresh. In the meantime, in the best “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” tradition, here are some words about my dad, to follow the ones about my mom. Two, an advisory for the Sensitive - I touch upon divorce (briefly) and death here, nothing too explicit, but I don’t want to ambush anyone.

If you know me in real life, you know I talk about my mom on and off - more on than off, probably - but I rarely mention my dad. Where my relationship with my mom is pretty well straightforward, not so much with my dad. Part of that is because of the divorce, and what happened after it, and partly because, well, he’s no longer on this side of the equation. He died August 3rd, 1990, my personal Date of Infamy.

(here he is)

Mom and Dad were both born in the same year, she in March, he in May. For those playing along at home, they are/were Aries and Taurus Horses, respectively. (Now you can see one of the reasons I was born a Libra.) She was born in Missouri and he was born in Texas. Combine that with my husband being born in Georgia, I almost had to be born in California to balance everything out. ;)

I would say a recurring theme in my dad’s life was Searching for Belonging. From what I have discovered, his parents never got legally married. He was taken in and raised on his mothers’s side of the family, but not formally adopted until he was an adult. He met my mother at Biola University, in the east end of the LA County Sprawl, near the LA/Orange County border. He taught English and she taught French. They got married in 1970, he joined the Navy, and I came along the next year.

(One of my most precious possessions: the copy of 1984 he used to teach his students, his handwritten notes scribbled in the margins.)

We briefly lived in New Mexico while dad went to Nursing school, then returned to California in 1977. He went to both Miramar and Camp Pendleton, and the life he had known unraveled with a pair of traumatic events that happened one right after the other: First, he was a first responder to a bad car accident on his way to Pendleton, and the only thing he could do was watch the driver of the other car die. Second, while on duty as a nurse in the Psych ward on base, one of the patients who was detoxing snapped, broke free of his restraints, and went on a murderous rampage before being brought down by Marine soldiers. Dad survived, but two of his colleagues did not - resulting in some major PTSD and an honorable discharge.

After all of that, he climbed into the bottle, my parents divorced, he climbed out of the bottle into Recovery…and oh by the way, also came out of the closet. After all of that, he could no longer live in the lie his strict upbringing had demanded. Following his brushes with death, he had to live in his truth, regardless of the price to be paid. Pay a price he did, as he was ostracized by his family and my mom’s (side of the) family.

My parents initially had a joint custody agreement. While I was still a child, he doted upon me. As I grew into a woman, though, we became rather estranged. He granted my mom sole custody and moved briefly to Cleveland before returning to the west coast and settling in San Francisco as a bank teller. He threw caution to the wind in his search for belonging and paid the ultimate price, as he died from AIDS, not even reaching 50. His last words of advice to me: “Don’t do anything stupid.” Those words would cast a huge shadow over my life, but I’ll save that story for another time.

This story, however, is not yet finished, because here’s the thing: discovering metaphysics and becoming a Wiccan priestess allowed me to repair the relationship with my dad after he had died. I saw him the first time in the spirit about two years after, when I had my wisdom teeth extracted. I felt his presence intensely - my knees almost buckled and it was all I could do not to start bawling - during a public Samhain (Halloween) ceremony in 2001. For Samhain 2002, the coven I belonged to held a seance, and dad came though, and was freaked out. Daddy’s little girl is a Witch? WTAF! I assured him repeatedly that I was okay.

The more adept I became, the more I could do…20 years or so after his death, I visited him in a guided mediatation while he was in hospice and was able to say a proper goodbye. Shortly after that began a series of dreams where I visited him in the “San Francisco next door to ours” and was able to enjoy his company as he aged into a venerable elder. The last dream of those that I can recall, I was on the phone with him while house-sitting at his apartment until he could get out of (post-surgical) rehab; I was gushing about the view of the bay that I could see out of his window. I became closer to him after his death than I was during his life. Funny how that works…

As I have written this, I have felt a lot of feels, and I acknowledge: I need to be more forthcoming in sharing about my dad. As I wrote recently in a Note, I am not a product of parthenogenesis, and his story is just as deserving to be shared as my mom’s is. This is an excellent start.