A Farewell Album for My Parents

Table of Contents

Introduction
Table of Contents
Prelude
The Family Album Photos	20
Final Editing (2001) Poem	25
Chapter 1: Farewell, Dad
A Song for Dad (1994) Song Lyric	29
The Taste of My Father’s Ashes (1995-1996) Memoir	31
Nurturing the Newborn (1997) Journal Entry	43
Words at the Briss (1997) Brief Talk	45
Lullaby Blues (1997-2001) Song Lyric	46
Establish Serenity in Craft (1998) Journal Entry	48
Therapy: Broken Song (1999) A Session	50
Searching for Connection (1991-2000) Song Lyric	56
Little Broken Song (1999) Song Lyric	57
Daddy’s Shadow (2000) and Mark’s Song (1941) Song Lyrics	58
Chapter 2: Farewell, Mom
Peonies For My Mother (1995) Poem	67
My Mother Almost Died (1998) Journal Entry	69
Mommy Without Memory (1999) Poem	72
Blackberries (1999) Journal Entry	75
Memory Loss (1999) Poem	77
A Quiet Crescendo (2000) Journal Entry	79
The River of Hidden Music (2001) Poem	82
My Mother, My Bride and I (2001) Poem	84
Tears of Joy (2001) Poem	86
Near-The-End-Days (2001) Poem	89
Last Words (2001) Eulogy	92
Chapter 3: Letters and Baby Album, 1941-1944
In Their Own Words: Selections from the Letters of Norman and Julia Seiden, 1943-1944; with brief editorial notes by Mark Seiden
The Language of the Family (1943)	100
The Prime of Their Passion (1943)	104
The Wartime Food Factory (1944)	111
The Broken Wase (1944)	114
Baby Album (1941-1942)	117
Acknowledgments

A Farewell Album for My Parents

Introduction

     I invite you to share this farewell album for my parents. In it you may find sustenance for your own hours of loss, when your parents or loved ones move on. I believe that years of grieving and sadness may be sweetened if we allow ourselves to process death and loss creatively.

     My particular version of this universal family story began in 1995 when my father was diagnosed with bone cancer and he and my mother moved north to Framingham, Massachusetts, where I live, so I could be closer to them in his dying time. The prognosis suggested he might have six months to three years to live, but Norman died a month after the move, in December 1995.

     Dad’s death was a hard one. As fine a man and father as he had been, he had always been impatient and controlling too, and his dying time was absolutely in character. Once he believed his usefulness was through, he was ready to leave. He wanted pills but we didn’t have them, so he stopped eating and drinking, dehydrated, and approached death; but his body just wouldn’t die soon enough for him, and his needs and demands were incessant. We couldn’t care adequately for him and mom at home at the same time, so we took him to the nearby hospital/hospice; he got very angry, possibly from pain, more probably because he felt cast off and alone in his time of need – and blew up at me, his eldest son and primary caretaker, on his deathbed. I lost my temper, too. Though we worked it through and made up with each other, he died, alone, that night.

     I cared for my mother, Julia, lived with her, and coordinated caregiving for her at home from December 1995 until August 1998; visited her almost every day at a local nursing home until February 2000; then took her to a nursing home in Washington, D.C., closer to other family members, and saw her there every month or so until April 2001, when she died. Mom’s last years involved arduous, often stressful work for me and other caregivers and family members, but overall her dying time was gentle and enlightening, even though she experienced severe memory loss and disorientation from dementia, and gradually lost the ability to walk and to control her bowels. She died in our arms – seven family members around her bedside singing her the lullabies she sang to us when we were children.

     You never know what to expect when people you love move on, but you’ve got to cope with it, whatever it is. A gutsy commitment and a love that just won’t quit is what end-oflife caregiving must ultimately come down to for all of us, I’ve come to believe. And caregivers must learn to process unexpected experiences and their own powerful reactions by using any and all available creative resources.

     As a teacher for many years who had just published his first book of poems and song lyrics at age 54 earlier that same year my parents came to live with me, I found myself continuing to write regularly during their dying time. This book is comprised of journal entries, poems and song lyrics in which I confronted, and gradually transcended, the raw emotions I experienced during those years between 1995 and 2001.

     Writing through times of stress and confusion is helpful, I believe, and one certainly doesn’t have to be a great writer to avail oneself of the therapeutic benefits of transforming emotions into honest, heartfelt words. Organizing such writings with family photos and other family memorabilia – creating or updating a family album – is really what I’ve wound up doing here; and though of course I hope readers will appreciate my style and my family story, I really believe the process of creating or updating a family album can be helpful to any of us involved in caretaking, grieving, and moving on.

     Two surprises which our family discovered while clearing out dad and mom’s home were a baby album my dad created for me during my first two years, 1941-1942, and their letters to each other from 1943 and 1944 – two letters a day, for two weeks, each of those summers. Selections from that baby album and from their World War 2-era correspondence presented themselves as the idea for this book: their writings and photos from my earliest years as a counter-balance to my own writings and photos from their dying time. Cradle to Grave was my first idea for a title: here I was caring for them and chronicling the last six years of their lives – and there they were, in my baby album and in their letters, caring for me and chronicling my earliest years!

***

     One of the central paradoxes of this book and of my grieving time is why my father and I, having lived through years and years of a powerful but certainly wonderful relationship, needed one regressive blow up before his death. The arc or thread or theme connecting all the writings about my father in Chapter 1, Farewell, Dad, is my struggle to come to a full and heartfelt peace with my father’s memory. Clearly, the grieving process takes its own time, has its own rhythms, and 10 does not always make steady emotional progress.

     Farewell, Dad begins with The Taste of My Father’s Ashes, a gritty, detailed memoir of Norman’s dying time in December 1995. Then, two years to the month after dad’s death, my first grandchild was born in December 1997, and the first letter of Norman’s name was echoed in the name of the child, Noah, who would have been his first great grandson.

     Another of the mysteries about which this book testifies is the power of new births to heal losses within the family structure. My interactions with Noah have had a surprisingly powerful role in helping me understand the cyclical nature of grief and recovery. Lullaby Blues, a song lyric which came to me one long, wakeful night as I tried to rock an inconsolable infant Noah to sleep, appears in full toward the end of Chapter 1 and cuts to the core themes of Farewell, Dad, evoking and soothing generational family wounds as perhaps only music can.

Daddy, daddy,
Should’ve rocked you through the finish line,
But you went out cold and lonesome,
Such a hurtful dying time.

Grave to cradle,
Connecting with this lullaby song,
So sorry, in your dying,
We couldn’t keep you safe from harm.

Noah, Noah,
Noah feel the end of fear,
Flood waters may be rising,
Your ark must sail above your tears.

     Other healing moments in the arc of grief and recovery explored in Chapter 1 include a half-awake, half-asleep reverie in which I actually heard my father’s voice, like the ghost of King Hamlet, urging me to “establish serenity in craft”; a session with a therapist in which I explore the breakdown of spirituality and music in my family’s history; an “epiphany” at the ocean, five years after Norman’s death, when I saw my father’s shadow and mine as indistinguishable and finally felt complete unity with his spirit; and a look at the baby album in which I rediscovered my dad’s love, tenderly expressed in songs he invented as he bathed me as an infant. It’s no wonder, I realize now, that so many of the writings about my father in Farewell, Dad emerged as songs for him.

***

     Caring for mom at home from December 1995 to August 1998 certainly had its exhausting, extremely stressful moments; and the time spent coordinating her care and visiting her while she was in nursing homes, though in some ways easier, was also frequently crushing. I certainly could have included more journal entries about what it was like to be with her in those years at home as she lost the ability to walk and to control her bowels. More important, somehow, and therefore the theme or thread for Chapter 2, Farewell, Mom, is how we as a family learned to cope, quite wonderfully most of the time, with mom’s memory loss and disorientation due to the condition diagnosed broadly as dementia. As my writings about interactions with mom show, there are many ways to communicate with people who can sometimes no longer tell you what day it is, or where they are, or even who you are.

     For Julia, the path of peace in old age was the path of forgetfulness; gentle confusions and then disappearances; but feeling, in the present, and vision and music and speech never left her. Responsiveness never left her. She blew kisses to show appreciation and love. She conducted music, her arms and hands flowing wavelike through air to accompany or encourage a tune. The surest communication route was song lyrics; we’d sing and pause and let her complete the last word. And sometimes her visual appreciation of the world around her was so strong that she’d stagger us with simple profundities like, “I think we should apologize to the trees for not honoring them enough.” In fact, Julia’s gentle acceptance of her plight and her grateful, empathetic interactions with everyone with whom she had contact made her last years inspirational. She taught us how to live and she taught us how to die.

***

     Chapter 3, Letters and Baby Album, 1941-1944, includes my selections, with brief comments, from Norman and Julia’s correspondence from the summers of 1943 and 1944, when I was a toddler. For me, the half-century flashback brings my parents back to life vivdly, in ways I can only remember through old photographs and deep, inarticulate feelings. And, of course, both the 1943 and 1944 letters are set against the backdrop of World War 2 on the homefront.

     There’s a youthful passion in the 1943 letters that went out of their relationship before any times I can remember consciously, so after the pains of the years 1995-2001 it was tremendously rewarding and heartwarming to discover that I had been part of their earliest love, that I was the child of an ardent dream. It’s also clear in these letters how articulate they were, how much the written word meant to them, and how young I was when they impressed the importance of words on me.

     What strikes me about the 1944 letters is how the passion and optimism of 1943 seem to have been replaced – for Norman, by real wartime issues and a work life increasingly his own; and for my mother, with the strains and stresses of caring for two small children. Julia’s mother had died during the spring of 1944, and baby Mike had been born; clearly, my status as an adored first child has ended and I have become a confused three-year-old groping with unclear social expectations.

     But their letters are not ultimately the key to a psychological case study of how events of 1943-1944 explain my life, or my father’s, or our interactions in 1995, or my relationship with my mother from 1995 to 2001. There are places in the letters where I see glimpses of behavior patterns which seem to cast long shadows ahead, but overall this is a family album, a riddle of puzzle pieces, a mosaic, a collage. In fact, I love reading Norman and Julia’s own words without the lenses and prisms through which I always thought I knew them, and after brief comments on the 1943 letters, I let the 1944 excerpts conclude the text on their own.

     So, finally, this is not really a book about the entirety of Norman and Julia’s powerful life together: fifty-five years of marriage, four children, twelve grandchildren, four greatgrandchildren. Nor does it deal with all aspects of my personal or professional life. It’s about my interactions with my parents at the beginning and at the end: how they cared for me when I was little and how I cared for them in their time of dying and death.

     Recreating the family album has been a wonderfully therapeutic ritual of reconciliation for me. It has been my way of grieving and letting go. My experiences, as a caregiver and in the grieving process, might just be helpful to you when you find yourself coping with the loss of parents. I do know this: writing about the experiences as they occur, then balancing those writings with old photographs and other memorabilia is one way of maintaining and advancing a family’s history, its “book of life.” Ultimately, there’s even something quite sacred and quite religious about it: “Honor thy Father and Mother….”

     A final note: this is a tender book about a tender subject – to be felt by the reader, hopefully, as a unified emotional experience. Photos have captions only when the text doesn’t reveal a subject’s identity. Journal entries, photographs, poems and song lyrics all tell one interwoven story.

     Without further ado, and with genuine hopes that this salute to my parents will spark creative possibilities for others in their times of loss and grief: A Farewell Album for My Parents.