If you want to live a happy life…

Tie it to a goal. —Albert Einstein

I’ve always preferred the nostalgia and festivities of Autumn, but there’s something about Winter. January encourages change, or the beginnings of something wonderful, to be delivered by Spring. My Father passed away in the Winter, about six years ago now. I think I’m a deceptively private person, I don’t talk about him much, or at all, except in a particular context. (Thank you to my friends who have been gracious enough to listen to me and join me as I continue to discover more about who he was before he was sick.) My Dad passed away due to chronic Pancreatitis & Pancreatic cancer in February of 2005, shortly before my 16th birthday. I, as those friends might know, have quite a terrible memory so I spend an inordinate amount of time chronicling my thoughts and activities — I think one of my greatest fears is to forget or not be able to recall the things, experiences and people who have shaped me.

Most of my memory of my Dad was when he was ill, or recovering from chronic pain. Before the feeding tubes, the calls to 911, or the constant looking out the windows during my middle school classes wondering if the ambulance that was passing was for him, I remember constant laughter & learning, and am trying to hold onto those memories of when he was well. He’d take me out to eat, to the park, and to meet his other “retired” friends at meetings to memorials. My favorite were our trips to the library or the ice skating rinks. In was during these times that he let me go, to explore and to trust myself, whether it was in book selection or just mere balance on ice.

The night before he died, I remember asking him if he wanted me to sleep in the room with him that night. I usually don’t and am still not sure what compelled me to ask him that particular night, but he declined. I gave him his Ambien (I administered his Vicodin & Ambien), he kissed me good night and we both went to sleep, one of us in pain and one of us to be awakened with a pain.

I didn’t cry much at his funeral. I think just once.
Then, as Winter break ended, I went back to school and didn’t tell anyone.

This summer in Paris, I picked up Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, kind of on a whim — those serendipitous moments in a bookstore, I suppose. I didn’t touch it until I got to Munich and it rained for nearly a week straight and I opted to read in a coffeeshop than drink beer in a garden. I started and finished the book, trying to fight tears every now and then. The book is about the year when Joan Didion’s husband suddenly died and their only daughter fell seriously ill. My (half-)sister (I know, I am an only child with half-sisters, I’m really lucky) always thought I needed grief counseling and I briefly saw a therapist, but for other reasons. Sometimes though, talking to another person is useless when you don’t know what you’re saying or feeling yourself. It’s in these moments where I am reminded that I am a bit more introverted and introspective; the smiles and constant laughter are misleading sometimes, I know. I never dog-ear my books because I think that’s disrespectful to the craftsmanship of books, no matter how weathered and “loved” it may look. Despite my principles, I dog-earred a section:

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died: my father died a few short of his eighty-fifth birthday and my mother a month short of her ninety-first, both after some years of increasing debility. What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life. After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Marknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodged things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”

My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning.
I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch.
I would still remember to renew my passport.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.” Eric Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940s and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Tightness in the throat.
Choking, need for sighing.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m fine. But it’s that other one percent that creeps up on me, usually triggered by some obscure thing my mind associates with my Dad. Very recently, I realized that this wasn’t grieving, it was getting by. Nearly six years later, I’ve decided to acknowledge the pains, to cry, to be okay with them and keep going.

A few years ago, I found a letter stowed away in a file somewhere (my Dad was rather organized, but more of a creative mess I’d say), dated almost exactly three years before my Dad’s death in February of 2002. In it, he wrote to me about what he called the “Law of Gold” that says we are born, we grow old and sick, then die. He wrote that he was old (68, as he wrote in a parenthetical to remind me) and that he was very lucky to be alive still and that was what the Law of Gold afforded him: Life, even in old age. He continued in his neatly sloppy handwriting (a cursive that I’m beginning to mimic unintentionally) that if he were to die, by the order of the Law, he must follow, that if that time comes, he doesn’t want me to be surprised and for me to be ok. “Don’t be sad because I will always be by your side in the future.” He also reminded me to do my homework before signing off with Love, Kiss, Daddy.

A lot has happened since 2005. I think I’m finally coming into my own and growing up. I’ve also recently learned and began meeting a whole side of my family (Dad’s side) that continue to impress me with their kindness, acceptance, not to mention intelligence, accomplishments, even geographical locations — I think we’re spread out in at least four continents.

In 2009, I half-way arrogantly thought I could run the Los Angeles Marathon solely based on mental agility (the trick is not getting bored really), and minimal physical training… And I did, but by myself. I drove myself (and some others, carpool networks, yeah!) there, ran, and drove myself home. While I was running about 3-5 times a week, the longest run I had done was the Santa Monica Classic 10k a couple of weeks before the marathon. Needless to say, it was an unforgettable experience and perhaps one of my greatest accomplishments to date. Last year, instead of running it for myself, I wanted to do it for someone or something else, anything bigger than myself (and with some friends around!). I decided to research some cancer organizations and more specifically, pancreatic cancer organizations and found the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network to be the best one for me, given their comprehensive approach to battling pancreatic cancer through research, support and advocacy. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to run it last year because I started having knee problems. This year, I think I’m finally ready to run again.

If you’d like, here is the link my fundraising page. The 2011 LA Marathon will be on March 20, about a week before my birthday. I don’t want to be presumptuous either, but if you were planning on getting me a card or anything of the sort, please reconsider and donate instead.

Thank you so much for reading.