This post is coming from a sicky brain. See, even that sentence right there
didn’t make sense. I have called
work saying I’m sick, is what I’m trying to say. Which is also why this post is coming to you a day
late. With frequent breaks to
stretch on the bed and feel the fluid in my ears slosh to and fro. It’s lovely.
A college friend’s mother passed away this week. It occurs to me that my peer group is
now hitting the age range where our parents are passing on (dying seems like
such a rude word) to higher grounds more frequently. Or not.
Additionally, Mother’s Day is coming up on Sunday. I have other friends who are passing
around links to articles about why you should stop hassling women who don’t
want to have kids. I rarely get
hassled about why I don’t want kids.
I think all the righteous indignation I would get to spew would be
fun. Which is probably why God has
mostly kept all those hasslers away from me.
I do hate it when I hear pastors in the pulpit talk about
how you don’t understand God’s love for us until you become a parent yourself.
And it’s insulting, not just to people like me who don’t want kids, but to the
people who have been desperately trying to have kids and not been
successful. To generalize that
there’s a dimension to God’s love that parents can access and non-parents
can’t, well, shame on you for characterizing God’s love like that. You don’t know how many dimensions of
love God has. Nobody does.
But while not everyone wants to be a parent, everyone HAS a
parent, or a loved one, or even a liked one, and that means most everyone will
have to experience the death of that person.
And that is something I rarely hear about from the pulpit.
“Grief waits” said my friend Tricia a long time ago, and
while I am not fetal and sobbing on the floor yet (and I wonder if I ever will
be), there are more times where that searing pricking behind the eyeballs
sensation hits, and I’m on the verge of tears in odd places.
For example, I’ve been binge watching Mad Men, as I’ve heard
it’s an example of great writing on TV and Netflix has the first five seasons
on instant streaming, and I’m already caught up on Breaking Bad.
I remember Dad saying he liked watching it, and I said I
didn’t watch it because I didn’t have time, and that was the end of that
conversation. But then again, we
both watched Amazing Race and didn’t talk about that much either, so it’s not
as though bonding through shared interests worked with us.
Having made it through season 3 so far, I can see why Dad
liked the show. That was his era,
being a company man in the 1960’s.
Dad wasn’t an ad man, but he did spend time in the sales department of
his company.
One the nicest emails we received in the aftermath of Dad’s
passing was from a former co-worker of his who was one of the only women hired
in his department. “Your Dad was
the kindest, most professional, smartest, honest person I have ever worked
with… he always treated me with the greatest respect and was a true gentleman.”
I’d like to think that Dad would’ve been similarly nice to
Peggy in the Mad Men world.
And as I watch the lovingly re-created world of the 1960s,
with its smoking and drinking and fashion (and lamps. For some reason, I always look at the lamps in the set
design), every now and then I whisper up to Dad, “You were right, Dad. It’s a good show.”
And I hear the smile in his voice as he says back in my
brain, “Yep. I told ya so.”
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