It Feels So Good Feeling Good Again

It Feels So Good Feeling Good Again

 While there are the occasional genetic miracles, for the most part, those of us on the north side of fifty have come to grips with our aches, our pains and most significantly, our mortality and the mortality of others.  I remember as a young person as my father prepared for his 30 year high school reunion.  In what must have been an anomaly, the class of 1946 reached 1976 with 100% of its membership alive and well.  Some years later when the class of 1979 attended its 10 year reunion, we had already lost three members and ten later had lost four more.  It wasn’t in me to attend my own 30^th.  I hoped that if I wasn’t present, death would pass us by.  It didn’t.

Those of us in our early 50’s tend to have parents in their late 70’s to late 80’s.  It is somewhere about this point on the time continuum that a subtle shift begins to occur.  Over a period of years we become our parents’ parents.  Subtle, almost imperceptible; but, with absolute grinding certainty it happens.  For some this is a labor of love.  For others it is just a labor.  Some remember Christmas carols and family game night.  Our existence looked nothing at all like the Norman Rockwell paintings my friends seemed to live.  But it really doesn’t matter.  We become our parents’ parents.  We handle the medical issues, the decisions, the angry recriminations from the parent cum child.  We just do it.

Dad recently passed.  It fell my lot to manage the last few months of his life and those issues that accompany death.  The man of whom I was afraid all of my young life.  The man who spent most of his life, and all of mine, disappointed in me.  The man who insisted I leave his home when I was 16.  That man needed me to manage his medical visits, pay his bills, arrange his living arrangements and at the end, who asked that I intervene with the medical staff on his behalf and let him go quietly.  That man needed me.  There was no comfort, no satisfaction, no victory.  He was a fall down drunk that beat his kids.  Then he got old and died.  But at the end of his life he needed help and it fell my lot to help him.   For those of you yet to live through the slow death of a family member, it is a draining, gut wrenching process.  And, then, its over.  But, you can’t stop.  You find yourself wound up, unable to breathe or step away from the warp speed pace of completely managing the affairs, every minute of every day of another person’s life.  A person that really didn’t care for you in the first place.

 It took an extra two weeks to decompress; but, I think I’m there.  Hence the title for this post borrowed from one of my favorite crying in a dark bar kind of songs.  “It Feels So Good Feeling Good Again.”   

Matthew.  Someday you will manage my final days.  You will handle my affairs and you will handle my funeral.  But, you will do it with fewer burdens.  I hope there has never been any doubt; but, just in case:

I love you.  I always have.

I am proud of you.  I always have been.

I have never been ashamed of you. Never.  Not one second.

You are great human being, a great son.

 

During my last days, smile, laugh, be happy.  For when that time comes, we will have had a good run.  “It Feels So Good Feeling Good Again”.

 See you next time, God willing.