Among The Missing

A Facebook friend recently posted about how they miss their parents, and think about things related to them, good and bad, every day.

Rather than muck up their heartfelt post with my response, I’ll put mine here.

I don’t miss my parents, at least not in any painful sense of longing.

They were wonderful to me when I was growing up, they went out of their way to look after and support and encourage myself and my brothers.

I loved them dearly.

But they got old and died.

I’m not being cold and callous about this; I think I know why I am this way and I’ll go into that in a bit, but right now I feel this:  

• There is no sense of unfinished business.  

• There is no sense I failed them.

• There is no sense they ever failed me.

I can look back and fondly remember the good times, smile at the ridiculous times, even feel a bit wistful for them that all of their dreams didn’t come true.

But it’s not something that preys on my mind every day.

My father died of Alzheimer’s.  In a very real sense he was gone long before we put him in a nursing home (and he lasted less than a year there).  Three years before that, while talking to him on the phone, I realized he had absolutely no idea who I was, that the disease had ravaged his brain and memory to the point where to him as a son I no longer existed.

So be it.

I wept then, and I wept later when I went to help my mother get him into a nursing home.

I also had a moment during that visit where I genuinely thought I might be a sociopath, completely lacking in any emotions.

In the middle of all that turmoil, all that anxiety, I felt nothing.

Since then I’m come to realize it’s how I respond to extreme stress:  I simply shut down emotionally and work through the problem.

It happened a few years later when my aunt died while Soon-ok and I were traveling in Europe.  Once we got the call that we had to come back, all emotion left me; it just became a matter of arranging schedules, getting to the airport, making new plans.

I didn’t cry for her until three or four days after we came home.

When my mother died, my reaction was similar.  

She stayed in the home she’d lived in with dad when he was alive, looking after my middle brother who lived with them.

But she was old and tired and worn out and legally blind; the stairs down to the washing machine in the basement were a death trap just waiting to catch her, her blindness let all sorts of messes pile up because she couldn’t see them.

My younger brother finally persuaded her to move in with him and his family, and they had a few happy months together but then her health started deteriorating.

The doctors were sure she’d rally and enjoy several more years of life, but she didn’t, and deep down inside I knew she wouldn’t.

She didn’t have anything left to live for.

My younger brother absolutely did the right and best thing by persuading her to come live with him and his family.

If she stayed at her old home she might have died under terrible circumstances.

But when my father died, when she moved out, when she no longer had my middle brother to look after…

…her sense of purpose died, too.

I’m glad she died in a safe, clean environment with people who loved her nearby.

But she was ready to go.

. . .

I’m fond of telling people my father worked in women’s garments.

Let me explain.

My father was a time study engineer for garment manufacturers.

You could say that was a variant on being an efficiency expert.

His job was to study how workers made the various garments, figure out what was the most economical way of doing so, and have them to all make it that way when assembling them (for example, one style of garment might go faster if the collar was put on before the sleeves, another vice versa, etc.).

He had a way of working himself out of a job, because as soon as he got a factory working at peak efficiency, they only person they didn’t need was…

…him.

Why he picked this career is a longer story, but suffice it to say in the early 1950s, when he had a wife and a baby boy and needed to find a way to support them all, he rationally looked for a career that

1. would enable him to stay in the South

2. not just the South in general but specifically North Carolina

3. was part of a booming industry and

4. put no extra stress or responsibility on him.

In 1953, time studies looked like the perfect career choice.

Southern textile and garment factories were churning out product at a prodigious rate, job openings were popping up everywhere.

Had the business stayed at its 1953 settings, you might not be reading this, because so many things that would affect my life would never have happened.

We lived in 20 different houses before I graduated high school.

Until junior high, I never spent more than a year and a half in any school system.

My father would work himself out of a job with clockwork regularity.

More than once he’d be offered a promotion to a managerial position and he’d turn it down, not wanting the added responsibility.

So they’d fire him and hire a younger, hungrier guy they could groom for management.

I got used to things ending. 

I got used to there being no permanence to anything.  Ever.

This life is here and now, and while we all fondly hope and pray for a life yet to come, I think I can safely say whatever will follow this existence won’t be like anything we expect, and those hoping Heaven is just Earth 2.0 with cleaner streets and a little more glitter are in for a rude awakening.  (Not necessarily a bad awakening, just one they’re not expecting.)

This ability to accept endings helps me keep my sanity after leaving a project.

I get asked time and again what I think about what other creative teams did on shows after I left.

I always tell people that when I’m done with a project, I put it down, and I walk away.

No sense frustrating myself over things I no longer have any input to.

I’m fully capable of nostalgia; I can wallow in it with the best of ‘em.

But for me nostalgia is always a conscious remembrance of things past, not an effort to actually relive them.

Do I miss my mom and dad and aunt and grandmother and mother-in-law?

Yeah, I do, but not every day, not achingly.

Their endings arrived, and that is that.

I still love them, and writing this piece certainly dredged up some bittersweet sadness.

But I’m still here.

And life goes on.

© Buzz Dixon