you never know when they’ll be gone for good.

 hi-dee-ho. been a while again. in a way, i have a shit-ton i could say about this segment of the song. and in a way, i don’t. let’s see how well i do; maybe it’ll weigh in at closer to a metric tonne (cuz, you know, that’s less than a ton-ton, and certainly less than a shit-ton, right? right??). okay, so:

my dad died eleven years ago next month. or yesterday, depending on if you’re asking my head or my heart. anyway, in the fucked up way that fate handles these things, we knew he was certainly going to die several months before it actually happened, which made it possible for me to spend one last week with him while he was still (relatively) healthy and in good spirits. in that week, i rarely left his side, and probably didn’t let him get enough rest. after all, he was dying. they say that’s exhausting. point is, in all that time, we talked. and talked and talked. we laughed, we cried. we got things off our chests. we shared secrets. dad and i were close all of my life, but in those last days, i never felt closer and yet so far from him. he finally opened up to me about his experiences in the war – something he avoided in all my growing up years, when the information would have been a huge help in history essays. he regaled me with tales of his fast cars and racing down the pacific coast highway. he told me more about where his mom and his dad came from. we watched movies together. talked politics. talked religion. i probably thanked him several dozen times for all the lessons he taught me over the years. he let me know about all the times he knew i’d been up to no good, but managed to not “get caught.” and in that time, i made myself be strong, and not cry, and smile and be happy to be with him. because the pain of knowing i was going to lose him soon was only slightly less than the pain i could see in his eyes, knowing he was going to lose all of us.

my mom, on the other hand… for as much as she can talk about herself, never really shared a whole lot of intimate things with me up to that point. here i was, entering the second quarter-century of my life, having already lived half of her lifetime, and we just didn’t really know each other very well. but then, something happened. when dad died, after the funeral, after all the arrangements had been made, after all the unpleasantries had been dispensed and a cold, dark winter had passed – a dam seemed to break in her. suddenly, she wanted me to know everything about her.

every.

thing.

i now know things about my mom that cannot be unknown. there is no amount of professional therapy or shock treatments that can dislodge the mental images of what she shared with me. not just about her childhood (which was almost entirely unpleasant), but about the deepest, darkest intimacies of my parents marriage of more than a quarter century. mom told me things that completely shattered and utterly destroyed what, up to that point, had been the happiest of my memories. i can no longer look back on my parents marriage – on my entire childhood – without a near total sense of disillusionment. it’s all so fucked up in my mind, it’s pissing me off again just writing this. to know that so many of the years of their marriage was a sham. to know how much pain my dad lived with for so many years. to think back on all the times i was on the receiving end of lectures and spankings and punishments for lying – all the while being lied to on a daily basis. the hypocrisy of it all. and what makes it all worse (or maybe, just a tiny bit, in a weird sort of way – better) was knowing that my kid brother had at least some knowledge (or at least some pretty good theories) about some, if not all of the things mom confessed to for many years (seeing as how he lived at home for almost a decade after i left) and chose to not tell me. i think he wanted to spare me somehow. ironic how badly that went awry. but i know he did it out of love. and i know his not sharing that pain with me probably made it that much harder for him to bear. especially having to live through it as it happened, not just have it revealed after the fact in a vomitous mass of story-telling and requests for absolution.

so the moral of the story, kids, is this: get to know your parents – but be careful what you wish for.

be nice to your siblings, they’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

edited to add: apparently, a tonne (or metric ton) is in fact heavier than a ton, not lighter. but for what it’s worth, i’m sticking with a shit-ton weighing more than both of those. and i don’t want to fathom where a fuck-ton compares to all of those. you’re welcome. -twb