Harvest Ceremonies, Return of the Light, Holy Days…
“Just a moment ago we were children… Just a moment from now we awaken as elders…” **
Dear Brave Souls
I am sitting here on a snowy night in the Rockies; there’s a fire in the fireplace, it is darkest night out with a big yellow half-bellied moon hanging over the little lake we live on.
I am thinking about all of you… and about thankfulness in these times we live in…
One of the things I have been thankful for in years past are the old ones in my family, in all families really, yours too, those cantankerous, odd, strange, loving, horrible, on most days loveable, “last of their kind” elders that belong to each of us.
Yet, I have been having this strange reaction now every holiday for the last decade-plus, this strange reaction… when I go to a restaurant or to church and I see people with their old ones— it makes me weep.
I see people wheeling their very old folks around in wheelchairs. I see them helping them with their walkers. I see them being mostly patient and laughing with each other, toasting each other. I see the old one’s eyeglasses sparkling.
I see the elderly ladies wearing corsages. Some of the elder woman are dapper and stylish. Others have bad wigs on sideways and are in great humor. I hear the wisecracks only the truly elderly can make… and get away with.
Some old guys are dressed to the nines with cufflinks and patterned hose. I see other elderly men, having shrunk over the years, are wearing clothes that sometimes fit too large in the collar, too long in the cuffs, or that fit lopsided now. But they are in good spirits, for the most part, for they are with their families and are taking in the often much deserved help and regard their family members have stored up for them
…including all the little children getting and giving hugs, sometimes acting up, but overall, just being children, lovely children, or sullen teenagers, or intense souls, including ‘brand new with the owner’s manual’ young adults… or brides and grooms, and everyone pretty much just as they are, in this ‘non-father-knows-best’ world.
The Family Thrall/ Brawl
In my family it’s not been so Norman Rockwell though. More like Rube Goldberg under siege… every holiday, wedding and funeral has to last at least three days otherwise our family would have been destroyed long ago…
–-the first day everyone so happy to see each other;
–-the second day WWIII breaks out, often on several fronts… in the kitchen, at the card table, out back;
–-the third day is for making up and meaning it. Mostly. At least until provoked again. But the heart of family members remains warm from hard work sometimes, and from wisdom alone, others.
Some of us who hosted these triathlon holidays ran around like zombie-maniacs with food and drink constantly appearing from our hands.
–We tried to not let Uncle Luis bring up ‘that subject’ again in the presences of his brother
– tried to quarantine Aunt Izzy so she and her ex wouldn’t be in the same room together
– kept count of the liquor bottles to make sure the young cousins weren’t sneaking a magnum out into the woods and coming back with ‘the smile of Zendo-khan’ on their mugs
– took the role of caterer and cop, shrink for the troubled, schmata for the weeping.
Thus, we kitchen slaves always thought holidays and celebrations really needed a fourth and fifth day too… for us to recover from our 13th nervous breakdown… that came from that deeply ingrained ethnic tradition of trying to keep everyone happy– not only because we try to be gracious, but because if they fight, it’s your fault.
“Remember Thanksgiving 1977 when we were at Rose’s and she let Skinny and Sal tear each other apart?”
Sobriety Ain’t for Sissies
Several years ago when my adoptive mother passed away, my elderly adoptive father came to live with us. He was 86 at the time. An immigrant from the old country, he brought his village life and values to America, including the idea that women were to serve men, and that men were supposed to demand that as proud headsmen of their own families.
My dad wouldn’t think of disturbing a man at his work, but it was alright to disturb a woman at hers. He would never phone my husband or sons-in-loves at work. But, my father would think nothing of calling my youngest daughter and myself ‘many times’ during the day at work, to say, Come home right now and help me do [some trivial thing,] come entertain me, live your life at my wish.
I loved my father and tried very hard to meet his needs, and with good grace and humor.
But, finally one day, when my father had called for the second time in two hours not to ask, but to tell me what I would be making for his dinner, he also demanded that I come home ‘right now’ to pick up a postage stamp he had dropped on the floor.
I finally was able to put down some boundaries. I said, “Dad, I am sorry, I cannot come home right now. I will come home tonight and pick up the stamp for you then.”
My dad was mad and pouty for three days.
He was used to being a proud man who still wore the suits he made in his life as a tailor. He had come to America all by himself in the 1930s, and had made his way. He could not read or write. He spoke broken English, but he tried hard to ‘speak Ah-mer-ee-kan.’
He went to work every day and said when asked what he did for a living: “I brink home de bacon.” He gambled and drank and caroused and I never knew him… until he came to live with us.
We had an open secret in our family: my father had been an alcoholic since early childhood, starting with his “eye-opener” every morning (a shot glass full of whiskey), extending to schnapps in midmorning, then lunch beer, then mid-afternoon whiskey, followed by the before-dinner Manhattans, then dinner beer and wine, and after that came orange juice and vodka, more beer, more wine for small stakes poker playing, pinochle and euchre.
As a child, in my mind, alcohol and joke telling and general hell raising and raucous laughter, all went together.
When my father came to live with us, I was deeply anxious. I’d be in sobriety for 13 years at the time, currently still standing at 27 years now, but back then, only the week before when I went to clear mom’s things after she died, I had found at their house, wine bottles behind the curtains in Dad’s bedroom, and empty whiskey bottles under his bed.
Now he was embraced in our household. I knew I had to ask him to please stop drinking… that for the sake of his fragile health, and since he was in my house now, which was a ‘one day at a time ‘ house, and also as an example to the rest of my family (all of our blood carry half to full Native blood and alcohol is utterly devastating to us), to please stop …
The Miracle
The story is far longer than I can say here, but in the end result, I do not know what fabulous Angel descended over our house in that moment of my speaking to my father candidly in the most loving and gentle way I could, but my father miraculously (and I do not use the word miracle lightly) agreed to stop drinking… IF, he could keep two liquor bottles in the kitchen cupboard; one of Hungarian wine, and the other a small airline-sized bottle of whiskey.
(I have ever after questioned that if it took so seeming little kindly threatening and loving reasoning to bring him this far out of his alcoholism, why didn’t I ask him to quit drinking a thousand years ago… for his sake, and the sake of our family? Yet, the facts about why/why not, were multiple. ‘Now’ was different than ‘then’…
Now, he’d ‘hit bottom’; all his old drinking buddies were dead or now 2000 miles away; the often difficult wife was gone; his body ravaged by years of drinking had developed a bone marrow disorder amongst other things. And there was a many years’ long history of pleading with my father to quit drinking when I was a child. But he never heard, or could not hear. Until now.
How this came to pass I am not certain, but am purely grateful… for him, to him, for all of us. Miracle. That’s the word I ever return to.)
Each hero and heroine Has Their Own Way of Marking the Return to Sanity.
Dad’s ‘out clause’ in his agreement with me however— was that those two bottles of what had made him so unknowable to us for so very long… would be given a place of honor.
I understood. In ancient Greek mythos, Laertes puts his sword up and fights war no more. But, Laertes also puts the sword that has slain so many and brought such sorrow to him and others, in the pride of place, over the mantle. I got it.
And, even though it made me pray I wasn’t one more time being seduced into a secondary buzz off my dad’s alcoholic haze, I agreed, hoping/ praying for the best.
I put the two bottles of liquor in full sight, up high on the shelf in the cupboard we most used, oddly remembering in that moment the many times as a child I’d so carefully carried a glass of whiskey to my father at his behest, trying not to spill a drop… and later, once trying to water his whiskey, to somehow keep him with me in his real form instead of that boozy one.
Exchanging One Demon for Another Demon, for a Time
What happened next ought not have surprised me, but the ferocity of it did. Deep alcoholism disturbs sleep. People who suffer with chronic alcoholism have such disturbed REM sleep cycles, they no longer dream. But as the alcohol receded from every receptor in my elderly father, dreams returned to him. And with a vengeance.
‘My brave strong father,’ is how I have always thought of dad, even when he was sometimes not brave, not strong. But still, it tore me up when Dad stopped drinking and instead began having horrible, uncontrollable nightmares.
He would cry out in his sleep.. bellowing, whining, weeping. I would awaken on the run, my entire body on extreme alert as though I was hearing one of my own children crying. I’d go to him, sit on the edge of his bed. I’d soothe him, unkink his limbs drawn up in a cringe. I reassured him I was there and everything would be alright.
I remember how thin his shoulders were under the blanket, how all his ribs were like a little boy’s. I remember how shocking it was, but in a good way, almost an unexplainable way, to find that my father, 40 years older than me and strictly proprietous in many ways, would allow me to touch him in this tender way.
A Nightmare Can Carry The Secret Story, the Very One Needed for Healing
Slowly over those nights of nightmares, my father’s lifelong secret story came tumbling out, something I had never known about my dad before… how mysterious fathers are, how hidden sometimes…
His nightmares were of being chased by his own father, a monstrous behemoth from which he could not escape. In reality, his father had died before my dad came to the new world. I’d never known my father’s father and no one spoke of him other than to say he was dead, that he died in the old country.
My dad’s real-life secret was that his father had beaten him so badly and so often that his mother sent my father away from the village when he was only 8 years old, to apprentice as a tailor far away. She sent him away to save his life. His father had broken this young child and harmed him physically time and again. Dad’s dad was also, deeply alcoholic, never ever, as dad put it, “without his loolie.”
A loolie is a sugar tit given to comfort a crying baby and put the child to sleep. In the old country a person drinking straight from the bottle was said to be ‘sucking on his loolie.’
Says it all for many a person suffering from alcoholism: Pain, crying, need, alcohol… fast uptake receptors, comfort, forgetting, drunk, without full mind, asleep.
But, also this very young boy in exile, my father, had lost the warmth and shelter of his mother and his 12 brothers and sisters then. Such a little child to be essentially turned away from home, the only home ever known, and thus taken away in a wagon to become a resentfully fed and poorly housed, slave to a cold master tailor.
Somehow, when my father revealed this to me, so much fell into place about my father… his great drive to live so big, his desire to not feel pain. I understood. I did. I understood so much, at last.
“And They Seem Too Soon, To So Suddenly Fly Off The Turntable of Earth…”
My horrible, beautiful, impossible, beloved father passed away now 13 years ago at the age of 88, and I still grieve, for he truly was one of a kind… the man who carried the same old issue of the Chicago Tribune under his arm for months to make people think he could read… when that newspaper wore out, he bought a new one.
The young man who came across an ocean filled with hope for a new life. The man who could make a suit that would make any man who had one shoulder higher than the other and one leg shorter than the other, look like a million bucks.
The man who could drink harder, play cards longer, and drive his car ‘with elbows unbent’… a car that he hand-waxed and chamoised every Sunday, like a self-appointed king. The man who had a deep heart, deeper than most in our family would ever know.
The man who although he was my father, and I hope you can understand this… he became, at the end of his life, like my little boy. While still remaining my brave strong father.
In my house, at last or maybe at least, through a daughter who loved him truly and cared for him deeply, he received a portion of the motherly love he had missed as a child.
And the two bottles of liquor, the day he died, which was two years after vowing not to drink… they were still in the cupboard— full soldiers, still loaded and locked, their seals not broken.
And so, it is now, when I see people at church and at restaurants on holidays with their loved ones, their elders, their dragons and gargoyle elders, their beautiful one-of-a-kind old folks, I tear up. I would honestly crawl home on my knees to pick up that dropped postage stamp on the floor from long ago… if it meant I could see and embrace my spectacular, ‘last of his kind’ father, one more time.
Stepping Into Shoes… Too Big
All the elders of my immediate family are gone now. I am ‘the elder’ now. There is no one older than I in the family. And I am feeling too young and too inexperienced, and not “last of her kind” enough, to do the job right.
But I am trying to be just the right amount fake-grumpy and authentically wise when I can, loving and kind, to do it up well. I have much to learn still. Yet, I have a loneliness for old people at my holiday table, for I miss the tender, funny, touch of those who have lived long and who still have their hearts fully lit.
One of the Best Feasts That Could Ever Be Had
Thus, I wish more than anything tonight on this night nearing Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas and the return of the Light, that you, my dear brave souls, who have elders; that you might recall how lucky you are to still have them, even if some of them are cantankerous and ill-behaved sometimes… (In which case, you can also adopt someone else’s if they will be kind and allow you to, as we have over the years) even if they are frail and cause your heart sadness, even if they are far away but ever with you in spirit.
If you have loving elders that inhabit your wonderful and strange family, I say you are special blessed, and blessed twice
–-for the more loving elders one has, the more those younger have chances to grow many forms of love too…
–- and the more strange your family, the more unique stories you will have to tell– which, in the end, is truly priceless.
I wish for you this holiday season that you fully take in every blessing like it is life’s blood… and that you reach out beyond yourself to bless others too, that you give life to them…
and that every snowy evening across time, despite whatever swirls nearby in the world, I wish for you a fire in your heart, in the light of which you will be able to remember, see and hear
a wedding dress just being put on,
the sound of children running and laughing,
the warm body of a woman well loved,
a piece of incomparable music,
a beautiful sight from a high hill,
a loyal animal who knows your soul,
the heat of a newborn fresh from the womb,
and the roar of men laughing over every important and unimportant thing…
the small word, the sweet touch that can mean so much to all souls,
all this and more….
Peace on earth, may it come early and stay late.
This comes with much love,
dr.e
——————-
Excerpted from book ms Giving Birth to My Father, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, ©1999, 2004, 2007 C.P. Estés, all rights reserved.
**From book ms The Dangerous Old Woman, by same, ©1970, 2007, C.P. Estés, all rights reserved.
CODA
reprise from Nov 21, 2007 by dr. clarissa pinkola estés
The image, I think of as: The Guardian of the Family… by Gustav Vigeland, the incomparable Norwegian sculptor; all his works in one huge park in Oslo Norway.