Healthy Living 123 (Since 2007) 健康生活123: Life and Death: What my father’s death taught me about living 2022-10-30

What my father’s death taught me about living

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/what-my-father-s-death-taught-me-about-living

2022-10-30

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What my father’s death taught me about living

We live in a time dominated by pessimism and cynicism. How do you navigate that?

Lydia Polgreen

Normalise feelings. Minimise regret. Know that people have the capacity to change and connect, right up to the end. PHOTO: PEXELS

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We buried my dad on Friday. He asked to be interred in a pine box. He had long ago lost his once ardent interest in organised religion, but he remained committed right up to the end to the idea that burial helps the soul escape the body.

He endured a long sojourn in the twilight of dementia. Obituary-ese would call it a struggle or a battle, but that wasn’t John Polgreen’s style. He accepted his diagnosis with equanimity and bore it with no self-pity. He died a few days short of his 73rd birthday.

Like many families around the world, mine has seen a lot of loss in the past couple of years. It started with my paternal grandmother, Beth, who died early in the pandemic, though not of Covid-19, at the age of 92. She lived a long life filled with adventure, surrounded by a loving family and friends.

Next came the shocking, sudden death of my father’s younger brother Bob. He died of a heart attack last year, three months before his 70th birthday. He was building, with his own hands, as was his habit, a dream house on the shores of Lake Superior for him and my aunt to retire to and enjoy their growing passel of grandchildren. And then, just like that, he was gone.

And now it was my dad’s turn. For the first time since these deaths, my family gathered to mourn. We all missed so many celebrations during the pandemic – graduations, weddings, bar mitzvahs. But there is something especially cruel about not being able to gather in the aftermath of a loved one’s death.

Picking up the pieces

Saul Bellow, one of my dad’s favourite writers, wrote in a letter to Martin Amis that “losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces – down to the last glassy splinter”.

So much of who I am came from my father. He grew up in a conservative white Midwestern family. He was seized early on by a curiosity about the world that would ultimately carry him across the globe, helping farmers in poor countries improve their lives. He would marry an Ethiopian woman, my mother Rahel, and dedicate much of his life to helping the rural poor in the Global South, especially farmers, improve their lives.

When I was a kid, my father and I were close. We spent most of my childhood living in Kenya and in Ghana. He impressed upon me a love of discovery and of books. He was a white man with an African wife, raising black American children outside of the United States, and took it as his responsibility to educate us about what life would be like when we eventually moved back. He pressed a copy of Malcolm X’s autobiography into my hands as a pre-teenager.

But he was also a footloose dreamer, often distant or even absent. He travelled a lot when he had a job, though he went through long periods of not working. He was forever short of money: My mother’s cherished gold jewellery was in and out of pawnshops throughout my childhood. We were always struggling to stay one step ahead of an eviction notice. Not long after I graduated from college, he persuaded me to co-sign a mortgage so that he and my mum could buy a house, then proceeded to ruin my credit by being constantly late on the payments.

As so often happens in families, my parents’ bitter divorce after decades of marriage strained our relationship. I was busy with my exciting career as a foreign correspondent; he quickly remarried. We grew apart.

A few years ago, he started having little strokes. His memory had never been great, but he started forgetting things that had just happened. He grew unsteady on his feet, making the march from cane to walker to wheelchair. His wife Pam lovingly cared for him through it all.

We reconciled. The shortcomings that seemed so glaring when I was young suddenly faded because I could see how the story worked out. The things he failed to provide were nothing compared with what he had given me: the raw materials for a life filled with adventure, connection and meaning.

A belief in the fundamental goodness of people across all kinds of difference. A commitment to trying to understand the world and make it understandable to others.

Healthy Living 123 (Since 2007) 健康生活123

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Life and Death: What my father’s death taught me about living 2022-10-30

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