Whenever I needed my Dad, he was always there for me. Even at those times when I didn’t think I needed him, he managed to be the unexpected supplier of reassurance and unspoken love, and somehow I still feel that even though he is gone. The other morning I was realizing how much I still missed him, when this cardinal appeared in the front yard. I think there’s a family of them nesting in our front hedge, so this isn’t out of the ordinary, but I’m taking it as a reassuring reminder that Dad is still here, still guiding me, still a source of support even when I might think I don’t need it.
The next day, during a meditation, the cardinal returned to perch in the one section of the Japanese maple that was visible from my vantage point, as if peering in through the front door to make sure I had seen him.
Watching Jaxon interact with Andy is one of the greatest joys of life these days. On a rainy Saturday night at the tail-end of winter, we had a family dinner celebrating belated birthdays of January and February, and when it was done we had some time with my Godson.
Jaxon is growing in leaps and bounds, and just a few weeks reveal numerous changes and developments. It feels like only yesterday when he was still crawling carefully about – now he wants you to run and hide, then chase you and bring you back to where you began.
Andy was playing with him for a while, and when he tried to go back to a chair to join in the adult conversation, Jaxon walked over and pulled him back to play some more. Each time Andy returns to the chair, Jaxon would go back and grab at his hand, pulling him along to join him with his plastics cars and trucks. Andy got his exercise that night, until I played a quick bit of chase with Jaxon, which tuckered me out just as quickly. I’m not sure how many years of active engagement we might offer, but we’ll go until we can’t go anymore.
My Dad has been on my mind this past week. Maybe some recent time spent in Amsterdam rekindled a few memories. Maybe it’s that I’m finally realizing how much I miss him. Some small part of me is still expecting him to be there at an undefined point in the future. When he was well I would only see him about once a month or so, and in a way I’ve reverted back to that time, or the years when I was in college and saw him even less. It’s easier to think of him being away for some indeterminable length of time rather than gone from this earth forever; my head makes sense of it, but my heart holds out.
On a recent lunch break, I walked up the hill to the church I used to sit in during his last days here. It offered a small bit of solace in that sad summer, but on this visit, as on my last, the doors remained locked. The day was splendid, though – one of the first sunny and warm ones we’ve had this year – so I made the most of my time outside. Later, after I’d arrived home, I sat down to my meditation and invited Dad to join me there. (Not out loud – I haven’t gone that crazy yet.) It is a comfort to think of him sitting silently beside me – it’s something that would never have happened quite in this way in real life (my father was not the meditative type) but there were many times when I would find him at a gathering or dinner, alone in the family room watching television, or sitting off to the side at a wedding, and I’d stop to sit next to him. We didn’t talk much, simply sat there together in the unease of a crowd, or the welcome semi-solitude of his favored family room. In that shared silence, we understood one another in a way that no one else could.
The next morning I felt that familiar emptiness which has been part of our lives since last summer – duller and less pointed now, but still there – and as I looked out the front window I saw a quartet of cardinals going about their daily business – a few of their chirps cutting through the glass as they flitted away. It was the happy sound of spring on the way, the sound of hope, and maybe the sound of a lost loved one reminding me that he was still near.
This Bro-Dazzler is the first and probably last of its kind, as my brother is not at all about being seen outside of his own carefully curated appearances in the world, and as such will likely be annoyed that I featured him here, but a birthday is a special event. After all that our family has been through this past year, I’m honoring my baby brother with this Dazzler of the Day because in so many ways he dazzles me and the world more than he will ever know. The older we get, the more important it is to share the gratitude and appreciation we have for our family while we are all still here. He’s been a great father, son, and brother – and in the end that’s what matters. Today is his birthday, so if you see him about, wish him a happy one.
At the bottom of the hill where my Dad’s ashes are interred, I always stop to get whatever bearings I might locate. It is the pause before the visit. Here is where I will get out of the car and walk to the edge of where the manicured grass meets the barbed wire fence where a more wild and untamed section of land begins. It is a wet space, damp enough year-round for cattails to grow and flourish. On this gray day in early February, I walk through a muddy mess just barely speckled with snow. The ground is uncharacteristically soft, the grass gives way beneath my feet and there are mounds of spongy moss lending a gentleness to my steps. Seeking some sign of my Dad, I wait and listen, then hear the running water.
A little stream, hidden at other times of the year by foliage and brush, gurgles ever so quietly, the running water like a set of barely-audible chimes carried on the wind. A sign of spring. A sign of hope. Water and land – movable and immovable – constant and inconstant. I hadn’t noticed it before. Maybe the water wasn’t running the previous times I’ve been here. Maybe I wasn’t ready to hear it. On this day, I am listening, and the sound of the water is soothing.
Dad had been on my mind the last few days, and it dawned on me that today marks six months since he physically departed our world. These pictures are from a memory on FaceBook which popped up from ten years ago, when St. Marys Hospital was honoring Dad for his years of service. I remember that winter evening well – it was a night of nasty weather, yet somehow we all made it to the dinner. Looking back, and seeing my Dad in this photo, I realize that the start of his Alzheimer’s was just beginning to slightly show itself that night. All I sensed at the time was a slight difference in the way he was engaging – something that felt like a softer focus, and something I just attributed to an extra glass of wine to help ease his nerves for the evening. Hindsight may not quite be 20/20, but it is clearer than what was seen at the moment.
He accepted his award and made a few of his typical jokes, and everything that everyone else could so would have appeared normal. Only I (and likely Mom) could sense the smallest difference. Some part of me understood then that things were shifting, (something I would see more clearly in later years) and I hurriedly buried the thought away at the bottom of my mind, covering it with the smiles and camaraderie of the rest of the night. That was ten years ago – and ten years is a long time, especially when it means the progression of a disease that slowly robs a person of who they are. Luckily, most of Dad’s worst changes came in the last few years, and even during that time there were still glimpses of the man we knew and loved so well.
This is the first winter we are experiencing without him. I thought it would be the holidays that were the most difficult, but Dad was never big on holidays, so they weren’t as sad as expected. Instead, the sorrow stings more on uneventful days like this, days when I might have spent a few hours with him in quiet and still companionship.
The last few years have been difficult ones for my family, and the one person guiding and getting us through them intact has been my Mom. Today is her birthday, so this little post goes to honor her. Celebrating such love is one of the best things about this blog, and sharing it seems to be largely missing on the rest of the wretched internet. And so we offer gratitude and appreciation on this day for the woman who keeps our family together.
She moved into her new home last year, letting go of the house where so many childhood memories took place, and so many adult memories as well. I thought at first that I would miss the old house – it seemed such an indelible part of all those memories. I was thankful when my brother and his family simply switched homes and moved in, keeping it in the family. When we had Christmas Day dinner in the old house, however, I understood that things had changed, and it wasn’t a bad thing. I thought I might be sad, that pangs of our former lives there would come back up in ways that only served to remind us that such a time was over. I thought our connection to that house would only be painful now that so much had changed. My Mom knew better.
She said many months ago that she didn’t miss the old house. She missed the life she had there, and the memories she made during that time, but she didn’t miss the house. I wasn’t so sure until we returned there for Christmas, and I realized she was right. It wasn’t the house that had made those moments and years matter, it was Mom. And Dad. And my brother. And me. Our family is what made those memories mean so much, and it would have happened wherever we happened to be.
I feel that in Mom’s new home. There is a warmth and comfort and love that comes through, not because she has made it her own with key pieces of furniture and objects from our old house, but because she is there.
According to my Mom, my Grandma’s favorite waltz was the ‘Blue Danube’. That makes sense, as she was always one to be thrilled by what thrilled others. For me, though, my grandmother’s waltz will always be the lesser-known and lesser-celebrated ‘Viennese Blood Waltz’, also by Johann Strauss, but not nearly as played as much as its blue cousin.
This was the song that sounded on my Grandmother’s music box clock; as a child I never realized how lovely it would have been to be awakened by a music box. I don’t know if Gram ever used it to wake up – she was always simply up in the morning, and when we were growing up I never, ever saw her sleep. She stayed up reading well beyond our bedtime, and was up early to say her prayers in the morning, often worrying her rosary beads before there was light in the sky, and always before me and my brother were awake.
In this waltz, I hear my grandmother, and am reminded of the happiest moments of my childhood ~ nights spent playing cards in her little room when she would visit our house, and weekends spent in Hoosick Falls when Mom would bring us for a visit.
In this waltz, I hear something else now that I am almost into my fifties, now that I understand a bit more of the world and the way time has its way with all of us. These days, this waltz reminds me that the grandmother I knew and adored was but a small part of the woman who raised my Mom, lost her husband to a heart attack, and then settled into a quiet life that led into the section that I inhabited with her. This waltz goes back years, long before I was born, long before my mother was born, to a time when Gram was a young woman, one of five children, and making her way into the world.
My Mom would often say that Gram always seemed old to her, even when she was young, but I had glimpses and hints of the life that Gram had, and I remember seeing a picture of her and her husband out on the town – Gram glammed up and smiling broadly at a cocktail table, sitting across from my Grandfather whom I would never meet, looking like some starlet that she used to describe to me and my brother as we drifted off to sleep in her care.
We know so little of each other, I think, even of those who matter the most to us. Every human carries such infinite mystery, such unknowable history. It’s a wonder we ever get over ourselves long enough to love someone else – and a marvelous and happy wonder at that.
It wouldn’t be 2023 without another loss, and this time our family lost my Dad’s older brother – the oldest of the Ilagan brothers – my Uncle Ding (a shortened version of Narding, which is a Filipino nickname for Leonardo). That leaves just one last Ilagan brother – my Uncle Pablo – who just visited this fall.
Uncle Ding had had similar medical afflictions as my Dad, but for years longer. In many ways, it is yet another erosion of the people who have been in my life since I was born, and an echo of the loss of Dad this past summer.
Uncle Ding and his wife, my Aunt Sally, formed part of our favorite family visits in our childhood. They lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey with their three children – our cousins Greg, Lee Marie and Mark. They were only a few years older, but as kids they might as well have been adults, as they wanted little to do with us, with the occasional exception of Mark, who took us around the block on his motorcycle once.
Our visits were centered around the NJ anesthesiology conference that Dad would attend with his brother. Mom would take us around to see the sights, usually in nearby Philadelphia, but we were more interested in hanging out in our Uncle’s cellar, where a pool table and air hockey and a foosball table provided the dreams for two boys whose own cellar was then only a holding place for the washer and dryer.
My brother and I would sneak out of bed at night and creep down into the basement, fire up the air hockey engine, clicking around the pool balls and somehow avoiding getting yelled at for keeping the house awake. My Aunt and Uncle seemed less strict with their kids than our Mom and Dad were with us, but everyone thinks that about their parents I suppose.
I remember one night we had already changed into our pajamas and were in the family room waiting for bedtime. I’d crossed my arms in front of me and must have looked cold, as my Uncle came over and asked if I wanted him to turn up the heat. It was the simplest and kindest thing to offer a kid like me, and something my own parents would have never bothered to do. I told him I was fine, but that little act endeared him to me for life.
He and Aunt Sally were a foil to my own parents in many ways, and they were there for all the weddings and funerals and formative family events in our lives. In later years, Andy got to to meet them, and he was as amused by them as they were by him. Now, another light has gone out, adding to the darkness that 2023 will forever embody for us.
My father was never big on Christmas. He was always present, but we all understood it wasn’t his thing, and as his first Christmases with me would be happening at the same age that I am now, I can finally understand the lack of engagement and excitement about the season. For someone who’d lived through the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, then immigrated to this country to seek a better life for himself and his family, Christmas must have seemed like a silly exercise in gaudiness. He seemed most at home during the solemn moments at Christmas mass, when he would bow his head and I would wonder at what he might be thinking or ruminating.
That didn’t mean that Dad was not on my mind as we readied to prepare our first Christmas without him, and after dropping off gifts at my Mom’s new house, I found myself doing a U-turn to head back to the cemetery, just to visit his resting place before the holiday. Like my last visit to the cemetery, I hadn’t planned it, I simply went. Out of respect, out of loyalty, out of obligation, and mostly out of love, and missing him.
The day was cold – overcast in dismal shades of gray, and cut with a biting wind. I paused at the bottom of the cemetery and got out to walk beside the stand of cattails and wildflowers that were in bloom only a few months ago. They were brown and dead now, and still somehow beautiful. I’d picked a make-shift bouquet last time I was there, but no such trifles would be procured today. Dad was never one for such decoration, even if it was Christmas.
I got back in the car and drove to the site. Atop a stark hill, it sat near a road along which the occasional car would travel, reminding me that we were never truly alone. That didn’t stop the loneliness.
Looking up at the boughs of a nearby evergreen, I saw the pendulous future hanging in the pinecones, dangling like ornaments and decorating the cemetery in the only manner fitting to such sacred space. A multitude of future trees held their promise and possibility within – so much hidden life among so much quiet death.
I couldn’t feel my father lingering there, and I didn’t blame him. He would have hurried out of the cold, even if he’d made it his home far from the warmth of the Philippines, even if he was the one to snow-blow the driveway after every storm.
Later that day we would find out that Dad’s next-to-last surviving brother, who’d had similar struggles to Dad, and for years longer, had died. A sad and somber year takes another beloved soul. Perhaps he will join Dad wherever they might be, and have a Christmas reunion.
A few years ago we had a big fight on the night we went to get the tree, and haven’t been able to pick up the tradition again. It was, like so many fights among brothers, something that started off in silly and trivia fashion, then quickly blew up into something that must have triggered both of us, bringing up all 40 years of being brothers. There’s a lot of misunderstanding and hurt that happens over such a long span of time. A lot of love and familial history too. Somehow, we’re still ok, as ok as any brothers can be I suppose. I wish we could be closer, but I understand why we may not be – at least, I think I’m starting to understand.
I texted him a few weeks ago to see if he wanted to go our for a dinner at the Cock & Bull with the twins again, as a way of reigniting our Christmas tradition. I never heard back, and I assume his calendar is booked with other events and obligations. Nobody texts back these days, and it’s simply something we can’t take personally.
Our history came up at my last therapy session, and my therapist had asked whether we had been compared to each other while we were growing up. My memory on this was that my brother was often compared to me, particularly regarding grades and performance in school. It was a regular thing, and when you are on the ‘good’ side of such a comparison, you don’t take much stock in it. It didn’t feel bad on that side of it, but I never gave much thought to my brother’s reception of such comparisons. I do know it happened a lot, and looking back it makes sense that it might have left a mark.
My therapist then asked if we had the same circle of friends, to which I replied we did not and never have. She said that might explain some things, as people who have been compared unfavorably with others tend to move away from those to whom the comparison has been made, finding their own circles and their own life away from the origin of such discomfort.
A greater understanding and perspective clicked for me then. All these years of feeling like I had to instigate every get-together or engagement with my brother may not have been in my imagination, and while I still don’t believe it was overtly intentional on his part, perhaps this is part of an underlying reason why he seems less than interested in hanging out with me. After thinking of it that way, I can’t blame him.
This isn’t the time of year for blame anyway, especially among families, and especially after losing our Dad. I don’t feel resentment for my brother’s apparent disinterest, and I can’t feel badly now for how we were raised. In many ways, neither of us had control over any of it, then or now. All I can do is be there if and when he needs his brother, and keep trying to be a better brother than I was the day before.
While I’ve been outwardly going through the motions at work, on this blog, and at most social events I’ve attended of late, underneath it all I’m not feeling the seasonal happiness that Christmas, at its best, often affords. Given that this is our first Christmas without Dad, I’m not forcing myself to find mirth and glee in anything right now, nor am I shutting myself off from any happiness and good-will that might present itself. I’ve been in a state of blah, seeking out cozy moments of quiet, and more often than not of solitude, or spending time with Andy watching silly Christmas movies (he’s the one who introduced me to the wonder of ‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’ and ‘It Happened on Fifth Avenue’). I’ve also done my best to put a seasonally appropriate spin on these blog posts, sprinkling some added sparkle and pizzazz to whatever I’m recounting in an effort to conjure cheer and enchantment.
Andy has been helpful to that end, indulging in holiday traditions as they come up, but not pushing us toward things we don’t want or need to do. I like to remember our first Christmas together, in which we hung stockings I’d made with our names on them over the fireplace that Andy had at his old house. We were still new to each other, and finding our own Christmas traditions would take years – years the I happily took to make our way together. That first Christmas was also the Christmas I met his parents for the first time, which resulted in this never-to-be-forgotten introduction to his Mom’s highball.
We have many holiday memories of my parents and family as well, and most are happy ones, which I will rekindle whenever I feel myself losing the way of the season. Those come loaded with bittersweet accents now, as the group we once were dwindles with each passing year.
My father left us during a full moon – the Sturgeon Moon – and as a full moon appears now, Mom says she feels Dad’s presence then. There is comfort in that, and when our last full moon – a Beaver Moon – ascended, I stepped outside to see what I could feel.
It was cold out, and a threat of snow was only a couple of hours away. There were stars out too, and the sky was lit a gorgeous shade of blue – the kind of blue you don’t often see at such a gray time of the year. It felt like a glimpse into the winter ahead of us.
This Thanksgiving post is about gathering the emotional and mental fortitude to find gratitude, as that is what will be more trying this year. Of course there is always something, often many things, to which we should offer gratitude and appreciation, and I’ve always been relatively decent about expressing that. This year, however, things feel a little off, as it’s our first holiday season without Dad, and out of our old home, and all the change is proving difficult. The holidays have, up until now, provided the one moment we usually managed to come together.
And so, a different sort of gratitude – and mostly this Thanksgiving is about giving thanks to all the years our family had in more or less intact form. It doesn’t end, it only changes and evolves. When I think about the upcoming holiday season, I expect it to be different, and sadder, and maybe all the other changes will do us some good. In many ways, I didn’t anticipate being bothered or upset by the holidays, because in truth my Dad didn’t play a big role in the mayhem of this most wonderful time of the year. I think he was sometimes more comfortable going to work or OTB than being home without those outlets being open for a few hours. Not that he didn’t enjoy his family, he simply didn’t know what to do with himself other than watch television or peruse his racing forms. In the last four or five years, his health was such that he didn’t participate much at all, which was just an exacerbated extension of the slight disengagement we all knew and accepted, and which I understand more and more the older I get.
For me, Thanksgiving hasn’t been the same since 1990, which is when our family and the Ko family spent the last holiday season with all of us still alive; Suzie’s Dad died the following spring, shifting our lives irrevocably.
In 2001, Andy’s Mom died on this day, adding another layer of loss to the holiday, and changing our lives again. The holidays grew a little sadder, a little lonelier then, especially for Andy.
But on Thanksgiving, we’d still get together, and my Dad would still carve the turkey, and it was the one thing that seemed to stay the same until a couple of years ago.
I will miss that, I will miss his perfectly-carved turkey, and I will be thankful for all those years we had, while looking for the ways our family might move forward.
Here’s wishing a Happy Thanksgiving to you – embrace your loved ones who are here, and hold tight to the memories of those who are no longer with us.
The parade that my Dad took me to see when I was a little boy was a parade of ducks that made its way around a tiny pond near the place at which we used to have Sunday breakfast. Faded, faint, and vague, the memory of those Sunday mornings is shrouded in the mist of time – and well over forty years have passed since those days – yet remnants of it remain. Whether from my mother’s retelling of how much I loved to see the cleaning supplies in the back kitchen of what used to be the Windsor Restaurant, or my own indelible mental imprint of Dad bringing me to see the ducks, just the two of us – it remains a vital memory.
When I was a young boy My father took me into the city To see a marching band He said, “Son, when you grow up Would you be the savior of the broken The beaten and the damned?” He said, “Will you defeat them? Your demons, and all the non-believers The plans that they have made? Because one day, I’ll leave you a phantom To lead you in the summer To join the black parade”
Watching the ducks waddle from their wooden house to the water, I am entranced by their feathers, especially those on the ducklings, which look so much fluffier and softer. It must have been spring, lending the morning a haze that a summer sun had not quite started to burn away. Such a haze adds to the clouded aspect of the memory, cocooned in the gauze of weather and atmosphere and the love a boy felt for his father. To my side, Dad watched the parade of ducks, as gleefully enrapt as me. Catching the gleeful side of my Dad wasn’t always easy, but it was such a joy to behold that we all chased after it.
Sometimes I get the feelin’ She’s watchin’ over me And other times I feel like I should go And through it all, the rise and fall The bodies in the streets And when you’re gone, we want you all to know
We’ll carry on, we’ll carry on And though you’re dead and gone, believe me Your memory will carry on
We’ll carry on And in my heart, I can’t contain it The anthem won’t explain it
Tracing the line from that little boy to the man that types this today is not easy. It is not even particularly linear – there have been fits and stops and stalls along the way, restarts and rebirths and re-dos that make it impossible to easily track the journey of a life. Death seemed to be the ultimate halt to that journey, or so I used to think, but maybe life isn’t a line as much as it is a circle, or some infinite, undulating curve. My geometry skills were never stellar, especially when the graphing went off the page with an arrow. I needed some control to the chaos, some finite sense of completion, but that’s not how it works.
On my last visit home, those ducks were still there at that little pond. Well, different ducks, but ducks nonetheless, still marching in their little parade. There is even a duck crossing sign near the road that runs dangerously nearby. If I didn’t know better, I might believe that those ducks never left. And in some way, aren’t they still there? If I were to bring my godson Jaxon to see them, his memory of them would be the same one I had, and forty years from now he would look back with the same experience. Maybe the ducks never truly leave. Maybe death doesn’t halt life.
A world that sends you reelin’ From decimated dreams Your misery and hate will kill us all So paint it black and take it back Let’s shout it loud and clear Defiant to the end, we hear the call
To carry on, we’ll carry on And though you’re dead and gone, believe me Your memory will carry on
We’ll carry on And though you’re broken and defeated Your weary widow marches
On and on, we carry through the fears Disappointed faces of your peers Take a look at me, ’cause I could not care at all
Ducks are a far cry from my Dad. They may be imperceptibly reincarnated to the effect that I cannot tell they’re missing, but my Dad has physically departed from this world. The first three months are done, and the holidays are coming up, so this will likely be a tricky time. There are days when the struggle is barely perceptible, mostly because other things take over – the cadence of work, home maintenance, and friend obligations. I try to immerse myself in the daily meditation and exercises in mindfulness, the writing of this blog, the attempt at a new recipe, or the simple sustaining of any meal. The motions of making a cup of tea on a rainy day can, when done carefully and mindfully, be enough to see you through to the next moment.
Then there are days when I feel agitated and annoyed by everything, when the slightest inconvenience or ordeal takes on a magnified feeling of being absolutely unbearable. At those times I feel like one more setback or mishap will have me pick up and leave town without a trace, disappearing with nothing but cash and an untraceable burn phone. My social media accounts would dangle there untended, this blog would be stuck on its last programmed post, and my whole ridiculous online existence would slowly be buried by all the nonsense piling up on the internet. Part of me quite likes that idea of being buried that way by technology, slowly ticking down on some search engine ranking, gradually disappearing until all the links are broken, until the trail has gone completely cold. No one asks ‘whatever happened to…’ when they never knew you in the first place.
Do or die, you’ll never make me, because the world will never take my heart Go and try, you’ll never break me, We want it all, we wanna play this part
I won’t explain or say I’m sorry, I’m unashamed, I’m gonna show my scars Give a cheer for all the broken, Listen here, because it’s who we are
Just a man, I’m not a hero Just a boy, who had to sing this song Just a man, I’m not a hero I don’t care
We’ll carry on, we’ll carry on And though you’re dead and gone, believe me Your memory will carry on
You’ll carry on And though you’re broken and defeated Your weary widow marches…
When the struggle bears down, and the world turns dark and cold – as it’s doing with the onslaught of proper fall – I seek out more than the making of a cup of tea to get me through it – and I cannot say that I’ve been very successful thus far. Some part of me knows that the mere questioning of this – the very acknowledgement of not knowing what to do or where to go or how to make sense of it – is the main key that will unlock wherever I’m supposed to be going. A larger part wants the answers yesterday, and finds frustration so great it brings me to tears. The smallest part, one that I hear in the quietest whispering voice, believes it is enough to simply carry on.
Do or die, you’ll never make me Because the world will never take my heart Go and try, you’ll never break me We want it all, we wanna play this part (we’ll carry on) Do or die, you’ll never make me (we’ll carry on) Because the world will never take my heart (we’ll carry on) Go and try, you’ll never break me (we’ll carry on) We want it all, we wanna play this part (we’ll carry on!)
