Too Much of Nothing

My Dad had a girlfriend when he died.  My Dad was 85, he had been married twice, and twice widowed.

His first marriage, to the mother of all five of us, his children, lasted 26 years.  It ended in her death from the colon cancer that consumed most of the last five of her 47 years.  She was a good and fun loving young woman, with a laugh that filled our home. She was one of those baby boom Moms. As the oldest child, I remember that she was sometimes overwhelmed by the care and concerns made by that quick succession of four babies in five years. She was a fairly calm woman, some would say a very calm woman, with two perfect little girls and two rambunctious little boys! She gave us the gift of a little golden-haired baby sister ten years after the rest of us. That made all five of us.

My Dad's second marriage came on the heels of the death of our mother, a little over a year after.  Our stepmother was 39 when she married our 50 something Dad.  I think that because he married so soon after our mother's death, and we (his children, maybe because of our religion or because of the times we lived in) had not grieved, or been allowed our grief, and we never fully bonded with his second wife.  She was a good grandmother to all of the nine grandchildren.  She died too - too young - at age 64, from brain cancer.  She and my Dad had been married for 25 years at the time of her death.

To understand my Dad you must know this, he loved his work in research engineering, he loved the life of a family man and husband, but most of all, he loved church work. It was more, but it included, his escape from the family on a regular basis.  And who could argue against church work as opposed to golf rounds all day on Saturday or rounds of drinks in a bar.  During the Vietnam War era he wrote a few conscientious objector letters for young men in the church. It was church work that came into the living room in the evenings in the last few years of the 1960s and stayed until late at night.  It was church work mixed with politics and Peter, Paul, and Mary.  The only time I can ever remember when we, his children, were more front and center than church work was the year we lived in Brussels, Belgium. The American church that we attended there was so socioeconomically wealthy, extremely educated, and non-evangelical, that it didn't have any work for the laity to do.

Our mother was a Southern Baptist pastor's daughter from Tidewater Virginia. She was raised somewhat liberal and democratic, and "high" Baptist, and there was plenty of church work. She was born and raised on church work, mostly of the appropriate women's missionary union ilk and Sunday School teaching to young children. His second wife was a church worker, like he was, and had never been married. She was a professional banker in high standing with the community, she had an invalid mother, and she did church work to get herself out of the house at night and on the weekends. He courted this lady friend while they were doing church work on the same committees. They did so much church work during their twenty five years together that you could say church work defined their marriage.

After his second wife died at the beginning of 2006, our Dad was 78 years old.  He was long retired and all the children and grandchildren were grown, and busy, and lived in Atlanta, or California, or Hawaii.  Away, we were away. He was painfully lonely and alone in his little country community. It was the 'too much of nothing' that would make a man sleep all day, and "sleep on nails."

After his retirement, my Dad and his second wife built a log home in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, in South Carolina. They joined a little country church filled with good country people and they got very involved in church work, like I said. At about this time my Dad began to be concerned with the state of his own precarious heart health and the fact that he had brought this wife far from the city life she loved to the country life she had embraced, for him.  He was worried that he would die suddenly and leave her all alone.  He was worried about her, because, we, his five children, had never truly bonded with her, our stepmother. Now, I am going somewhere with this so bear with me.

It was not a surprise, really, that within one year after our stepmother's death my Dad developed a crush on a woman just barely older than me. I am not one to judge another's spirituality - it is probably why I became my Dad's confidant - yet how this girlfriend and my Dad connected was a puzzle and a concern to me.  It certainly had nothing to do with church work.

This girlfriend did not have great physical beauty, but she had a charisma and an inner strength stitched and bound through a lifetime of female hardships and struggles.  According to the stories she told my Dad, she had endured brutal abuse as a child.  As an adult, she had been in one relationship after another, none worth the working out or the holding on to. She had survived one horrible Frida Kahlo type accident, survived because of her philosophy of never giving in and never giving up.  She had stitched and bound these struggles together in a story she told and sold.  She ascribed to a spiritual concoction that allowed her to accept the universe and her survival on her terms. Her many philosophies were nothing like the sure 'faith of our fathers' that had sustained my Dad all of his life.  My Dad bought her stories of hardship and, I think, began to let his faith become a little frayed as he built his life more and more around this new woman.  It was so unlike him, and she pulled at him to stay away in the country for her just as we were trying to get him to come back to the City to be closer to us, to be closer to his doctors.  I still do not know if this woman's heart toward my Dad was sincere.  In my heart of hearts, I feared it was not.  He was very true to their friendship and his intentions towards her were very pure.

We siblings had to make many hard choices for our Dad as he lay dying.  He had never been a man to let others make his choices. One choice decision we had to make for him pertained to who should visit him in the hospice and who should be there when he had visitors.  We stipulated, because the tumors in his brain were rapidly increasing and growing, and because his physical condition was rapidly deteriorating, that he could only have visitors if one of his children or his close family were present.  There were really no visitor hours, or even off-hours, when one of his children or a close family member was not present.  These were not the terms that his girlfriend could understand or accept.  At the end, Daddy needed to see her and be with her, and I called to ask her to please come.  They had their time together, with one of his children and a couple of her children present. It was just hours after this time together that he died.

I told one of the teachers in a school where I teach art that my Dad had just died and that was why I had been away all month.  She told me the story of how her Dad had died, and that he and her Mom had been married for 59 years.  She said that she and her siblings had not been enough for their Mom after her Dad's death and that her mother died a few months thereafter, of a broken heart.