Of Children and Parents

I love David Sedaris.  I've seen him read three times, and have read most of his books.  There's a good interview with him in Tricycle.  His father died in 2021.  Mine in 2022.  David and I are six months apart in age.  We both had fathers who were assholes, and devotees of Fox so-called News.  The programming on that channel taped into and amplified their natural tendency to rage against the world.  When David's father became ill with Alzheimers, he didn't watch t.v. anymore.  He also became a sweet, chipper old dude.  Alzheimers can really change a person's personality (either good or bad).  My mother had Parkinson's dementia, which changed her into a very sweet and demonstrative person.  She had never been that way to her children before.  I know she was with various friends, but never with us.

David's father wrote him out of his will.  What a rotten thing to do.  My grandparents wrote my mother out of their will and left her a small token amount so that the will could not be contested.  She never cashed the check.  She signed it over to my sister and asked that it be donated to charity.  Not one of her four siblings stepped forward to make it right.  God knows David needs no additional money; he's plenty rich.  But I hope his siblings made things right.  

My parents were generous and even-handed in their will.  Split three ways between their three children.  Easy peasy.  Those of us who had loans with my parents had the balance deducted from our share.  My mother was a genius at penny pinching, saving money and investments.  Left to his own devices, my father would have bought a new sports car every year.  Thank you, mom.  You left your children well taken care of.  Financially.

I wonder if the hurts we held onto during their lives will ever leave us?  Dad's narcissism  and mom's coldness.  None of us felt the love and support that we craved.  We had food in our bellies and shoes o our feet, and always a nice home to live in.  Never, however, parental involvement in the things we did and wanted to do.  Self-involved, they were.  There are worse things, of course.  But these were the deficits we lived with and still sometimes grapple with.

With the interment of their ashes last month, we completed the circle of their lives and of our duty to them.  Now it's onward to figure out how we want the rest of our years to be.  I find this whole business of living to be very strange.