Hello again. Friday was the 1-year anniversary of my dad’s stroke, and I kept thinking: I need to mark this. I need to write something, so this whole mess doesn’t quite yet melt into people’s memory of having been a pity, such-a-pity, but-such-are-the-trials-of-life.

I almost wrote on CaringBridge many, many times since Dad’s death, but I no longer had updates on him, and I knew it was just going to be about  . . . well, not him. The rest of us. Mostly me, if I’m being honest. I write in first-person, after all. And that seemed far too self-indulgent for an Opp.

So. One year since the stroke, 6 months since Dad’s death. How have we coped? Mums spent a month over Thanksgiving and Christmas in Redmond, WA, with Tyler and his family. She came out to Maryland in February and attended about 14 of my girls’ basketball games (I exaggerate, but not by much). And she has put immense work into the auction that will occur next month. Yes, all my dad’s tools, vehicles, equipment, machinery, guns, and—if we’re lucky—TAXIDERMY will get auctioned off. More on that later. (Shudder.)

I’m asked all the time, “How’s your mom?” Many times by people who don’t even know her but still care, which I find so touching. My stock answer: “She’s up and down.” Today at church, I told a kind woman, “She just didn’t see herself here at age 68. She thought there’d be more time.” Beyond that, I encourage you to reach out to Mums. I’m not comfy putting words to her grief, so I'd rather let her do it. Same for Tyler or Aunt Jane or any of Dad’s friends or relatives. It’s such a personal thing. And it has sucked.

As for me, well. We dealt with the holidays, which were both a great distraction and incredibly intense. Christmas was both beautiful and painful. I cried through the entire Christmas Eve service yet had the most wonderful evening with my wee family. (Both Chris and I are of German descent, so we do ALL the Christmas things on Christmas Eve.) I leaned deep into a dark Lenten season. I’m pretty attracted to brooding darkness to begin with, so 40 days devoted to contemplating death and mortality was super appealing. I then took my little family to Scotland and celebrated Easter not at home, because that's how spring break goes.

A couple days shy of Easter, on the Isle of Skye, my kids and spouse camped around the TV for a movie, and I left our tiny rented house to walk to a wide stream. I climbed down its wooded banks, and not a soul was in sight. Not a building or plane or car. Across the stream was—literally—an ancient burial ground. Because this was SCOTLAND. As dusk edged in, I could see the outlines of Celtic crosses and stones. I’d been thinking of Dad all damn week, as had Chris of his dad, who died at age 87 in 2017. Neither of us could figure out quite why these menfolk of ours were floating so high on our consciousness, but here they were. Anyway, I was down at the stream. And I possibly had a wee dram of something strong in a glass with me. Something about the silhouettes of the graveyard, the moving moving movement of the stream, the coming on of dusk, that in-between time between day and night where everything is muddled . . . out of nowhere, I had myself one hell of a big, loud, ugly cry. This was the way of it, death, which you feel in such an old country, and time keeps moving along, which the river forces you to recognize, next to gravestones hundreds and hundred and hundreds years old. Death, and moving along. 

It was cathartic, really. I let something go that night, which was good. 

Now, let's back up: In mid-January, I went down to the beach house on the North Carolina coast. My cousin, Liesl, was there with me for a bit. As we sat on the deck one glorious but chilly morning, gazing at the ocean (her looking like a cool blonde ski bum in a puffy coat, winter hat, and sunglasses, while I looked like a cancer patient, pale-faced in an old gray fleece robe and pink stocking cap and blanket), Liesl asked me, “Have you dreamed of your dad?”

Yes. At that point, I’d had exactly one dream. I told her, and I’ll share it with you. I dreamed that I was in Mirrormont, the mountainside neighborhood of the house my dad had built and in which Tyler and I were raised. It was night. The cedar branches were low, the outside stairs exactly as I remember them, and easy to fly down. Dry, not wet and slippery (not a given in the Pacific Northwest). Entering the house, I felt aware that I was not in reality. I didn’t think I was in a dream (even though I was), but a different plane of . . . something. Our house was a split level, so the entryway gave me a choice. Where would I find Dad? Upstairs or down? I opted for downstairs, running down to his office. The lights were all brightly on, and his desk chair was swiveled open toward me—but empty. His office was a total mess, so it was quite realistic. But no Dad.

“Shit,” I thought. Then I heard the crinkle of his newspaper and knew exactly where I’d find him. I bolted from the basement, up the stairs, through the living room and past the piano, turning left—and there he was, just as he was a thousand times before: at his spot at the dining room table, turned toward the living room windows. Facing me. With a newspaper held up, blocking his face.

As dreams will do, this dream began to eff with me. I could not move forward. Could not. “Dad!” I yelled, incapable of moving from the 80s brown carpet of the living room to the hardwood of the dining area. He held the newspaper in front of him, but I could see the white fluff of his hair above it, and his hands holding the paper—plump hands, not the emaciated yellowish fingers of his final 6 months, but normal, fully fleshed fingers, a gold wedding band on one of them. “Dad!” I yelled. Again and again and again. "Dad!" If I can just get him to look up, I thought. Then—then we could talk. We could fix All The Things. “Dad!”

Still that newspaper did not lower. “Dad!” And I woke myself up, and Chris, yelling for my dad.

So, obviously, OBVIOUSLY, I have this latent wish to CLEAR SOME THINGS UP with my dear deceased father. One of the very difficult things these past 6 months has been coming to terms with the lack of closure and unfinished business that we had. The lack of speech from the stroke created the cruelest of barriers. Six months of pain and torture, and little else.

Immediately after Dad’s death, I stopped running because I genuinely feared that I might get too strong and thus survive a stroke that I would very, very much prefer to have kill me. (Three hemorrhagic strokes on my Dad’s side—I have genetics that are no joke.) I’m not kidding. For a period of time, my only health goal was to not survive a stroke. Twisted, yes, but if you saw what I saw, you’d maybe do the same thing. Dad survived a stroke that statistically should’ve killed him outright, and I wish it had. There. I SAID IT.

I only recently resumed running.

So, April 28. The stroke. April 29, the early-morning or red-eye flights to Sioux Falls. The not knowing, the trying to understand. The misguided hope. April 30, Aunt Jane arriving and taking control. 

The past couple days have been a blur of flashback details that have poked through the more dominant “narrative” of whole thing. Those smaller memories that don’t mean a lot on their own—hospital name tags, the Sioux Falls Target, Dad’s shivering in the Neuro ICU as they tried to lower his temperature and I argued with the nurse and Aunt Jane reeled me in. Switching hotels, the music we played for Dad, the type of beer Tyler and I drank, the smell of hospital masks straight out of the box. Whiteboards with brain diagrams and the gray wet cold against the Minnesota border that would not loosen.

And really, all of that is better than the 6 months that followed. The words for that segment? Nope, not there yet.

I am not yet reconciled to what happened and where we are now. I get it, cognitively, but Dad’s demise was a special brand of horrific. Wordless, painful, drawn-out, and BAD. To the very goddamn end. Is it less raw now than in October? Or November? Yes, it hurts less and less, which I’m told is the “normal” way to feel, so . . . yay. Clearly, we're on the "correct" trajectory, but part of me feels like accepting everything is some form of giving in to what was wrong, and not natural and in large part mismanaged by the overall health care system.

There’s an injustice to this whole ugly thing that I still struggle to reconcile. Mostly for Dad—his heartbreak at how it would all end was . . . the worst. He couldn’t speak, but he could grieve, and he could do so in a very primal, soul-wrenching, and—and this is almost a gift, for the wordless: loud way. But oof, that’s a tough thing to observe. Helplessly.

And then there were all the other pre-stroke frustrations. What about my laundry list of grievances? What about the stuff I regret? We never got a chance to clear the air. 

I think I’ll eventually be okay on that score, but it’s a slow process. On Friday night—the official 1-year anniversary of the damn stroke—I was awake for hours and hours, re-living every awful thing. At the point of despair, I felt the swoop of God talking. Now, I don’t have a mystic bone in my body, which is a bummer, because I’d like to, but I am far too often lodged in my head, dedicated to constructing Correct Thoughts from a safely Presbyterian distance of logic. But here is what I heard, more clearly than I’ve ever heard any other voice in my head before (and I realize this is not the strongest argument for lucidity): “GIRL. I took care of it. I have him. It’s OKAY. Go to sleep.” Over and over again, in case I missed it: “I took care of it. I have him. I. Took. Care. Of. It.”

Could’ve been my overtired head, but it passed my BS detector, and I felt a warm blanket of okayyyyyyy and immediately fell asleep.

The big auction I mentioned earlier will occur at my parents' homestead in South Dakota on May 20, and I will travel to be there, along with my first-born girl, Charlotte. Tyler will come from Washington, and Aunt Jane and Jim, and . . . well, we’ll all be miserable together! Or it will be healing. Who knows? Probably a mix. Charlotte is genuinely excited, which is why I’m bringing her. And how Mums/Nana adores her only brown-eyed grandkid.

So . . .  this was a lot of text to talk about not a lot, but it felt important to write something. And, well, me being me, I put too many words to it all. But it has been a long time. I don't know the right thing to do or say. I've never done this before.