mot juste

I got a twitter account for one reason--no, i don't intend to post anything. I'm following someone else's account.

It brings cheer and warmth to my day.

It's https://twitter.com/shitmydadsays and if you want to know what i'll be like as an old man, there it is.

I've been planning to be an old man since I was around 6 years old.

Here are some shining examples of Justin's 73-year-old father's pearls of wisdom from the blog:

"The dog don't like you planting stuff there. It's his backyard. If you're the only one who shits in something, you own it. Remember that."

. . .

"I'm having a Makers Mark, you want one? What? 7up? I ain't mixing fucking Makers with 7up. Might as well put a lil' fucking umbrella in it."

. . .

"Tennessee is nice. The first time I vomited was in Tennessee. I think."

. . .

"The worst thing you can be is a liar....Okay fine, yes, the worst thing you can be is a Nazi, but THEN, number two is liar. Nazi 1, Liar 2"

. . .

"A scar ain't 13 god damned stitches. I'll introduce you to men with REAL scars, then we'll all laugh at your fucking 13 stitches together."

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Sunday, 8-2-09, we sent our father off. Mike describes it here, along with pictures and a Paul McCartney concert.

oldsmobile-mike.livejournal.com/269716.html

    I worried a great deal following the service that our memorial might have upset some people, or made them angry or uncomfortable. I almost felt a panic attack thinking that I'd alienated and offended them. I was so drained from all of this that I could barely remember what had been said by me, by Brandi, or how it had all happened.

    We arrived early. We tied black and some white balloons to the mailbox, and then to posts at every turn leading up to the house. O'Doyle Clan had set up flower arrangements, laid out food, and took what we'd brought and set it all up beautifully. I made my dad's barbecue pot roast. We had his favorite snack, popcorn with chocolate covered peanuts. There was cornbread. also wine. I'd almost never seen my dad drink, but he'd claimed a couple times that Cabernet Sauvignon was his preference, so we got that. He also had been incredulous at my fondness for bourbon and said he liked smooth Canadian whiskey. So we got some and had a pre-toast with O'Doyle... which we all coughed down and chased with cornbread or anything we could find to get the taste out. Danny mused that the Canadian whiskey might have been a final gag on his part.

    We set up a table with photographs and various memorabilia, shown in Mike's photo. We had a coffee table full of scrapbooks. A small stand with a memories book in which we had written several small tidbits and asides, and posted a note encouraging others to say something. Immediately upon entering the front door, there was a bench with flowers, small speakers, and my laptop, on which we displayed a chronological slideshow of my dad's life that Brandi and Cynthia had put together with some of his favorite songs that I'd found.

    People mingled, talked to strangers. Ate and drank. I felt like things were going better than I had imagined they would, over the years. I was proud to have these friends who stood by me in what has been one of the two most difficult times in my life.

    I was near the front door when Jimmy and Michaela showed up. She's been scared of Jimmy dying for a long time now, so I figured of anyone there who hadn't lost their father, she'd get what I was feeling. And we talked for a bit. She asked me what had happened, and I told her.
... American Sign is a visual language. And that's easy to say and easy to think you understand, but if you don't know it, you don't get it. I re-lived the experience of walking into the hospital room and seeing my father's corpse. And even writing about it is making me cry again. Michaela told me to stop talking. She said it was ok.

    I saw one couple from the neighborhood. The next door neighbors had left word on facebook they couldn't attend. Cynthia's parents came to support her. I had been leaning on her so heavily over the last few days, and she had welcomed my sister into our home. She needed her mom and dad for a little support, and they came.

    We had sent to the FMC, the place he had spent most of the last 41 years, a flier and text version of the memorial information which we were told was distributed to employees and former employees on record. We heard from a handful of them, and one of them, Jerry, even showed up. We talked to him and asked him questions, and listened to what he had to say. There was very little, but enough to show that the man we knew had been a very different man to the people he spent most of his life working with.

    I had just given up on the original plan of eulogizing him, when my sister picked up one of the scrap books, a book of newspaper clippings my grandma must have saved, and started showing them to someone, Jerry, I think. A small group started to form around her. Conversations began to quiet. The attention of the room shifted. And I realized just moments after we had started that we were giving his eulogy. It happened so naturally, so unrehearsed, despite all of our efforts from the preceding days to collect our thoughts. I hardly knew what I was saying, and I remember hoping that I got the important part across--a sense of the man I knew him to be, the man he saw himself to be, and the man he wanted to be. No frills, no manners, no fakeness. Respect without generalizations or lies. Above all, no bullshit.

    The next weekend we drove 22 hours nonstop to Iowa. On the drive I decided, well, we were on our way to give dad a proper Christian burial. That was for my Grandma. The memorial Sunday was to commemorate the man that we knew. It was about our memories of him. And fuck anyone who didn't get the joke.

    Friday night, weary and road-crazed, we stopped in to Rosewood Manor in the tiny town of Estherville to see our Grandma before collapsing in the hotel across the street. The next morning, we had a meeting with one of God's homeboys.

    Now, the First Christian pastor was on vacation with his family, but he had his friend, the (GASP!) Lutheran minister fill in. We met in his office Saturday morning, managed to convince him unintentionally that my sister is a lesbian, and promised to pray for our mom for 14 nights in a row. Talking with him for maybe a couple hours, I felt that he was the right man for the job. I think dad would have had some long and interesting discussions (and arguments) with him. He'd asked us before we came out to write out for him some points about my father. One of the things we tried to say was that he believed that divisions among Christians were bullshit and that, so long as you believed Jesus was God's son and asked him for forgiveness and welcomed him into your heart then you were a good person. The minister disagreed that our father would express that sentiment. He said that not one of us was a good person, that we were all broken people and that by making the decision to turn our lives over to God, we were saved by his grace and not by any goodness of our own.

And God damn it, I think that is just about exactly the fine point that my dad would have put on it if he'd proof-read our little missive.

    That insight and a few others, combined with his knack for teasing and insulting my sister and questioning her sexuality gave me peace in my heart that he was the man dad would have approved for the job.

    We spent the bulk of the trip with dad's mother. We went out there in the first place for her. We had a traditional Christian funeral service for her. Cynthia handed the grave digger his pay right at the end of the service, rented the hotel room, took time off work, drove a solid day nonstop like lunatics, for her. She seemed to process and respect and acknowledge that he chose to be cremated, though the thought is ghastly to her. One of the nurses, Heather, volunteered her day off to come to the funeral to be by her side. All of the nurses chipped in and bought her a pretty blouse and slacks for the funeral. We told her about that several times when she said she had nothing to wear, and each time she broke down and cried, because she didn't think she deserved such kindness. Believe you me, I know that feeling like a jackhammer to my gut.

    And after all of this, the next day she seemed to have forgotten that it had even happened. Time, grief, expense, and humbling myself to a religion that has done me more harm than good... for nothing.  If I sound frustrated, then well, it was very frustrating for me. Marguerite Sheppard is a warm and wonderful woman who's lived the last 36 years in a tiny little midwest town with no family at all and the last few years in a nursing home in a wheelchair. She has a voice like Granny from the Beverley Hillbillies and when she's running on all cylinders, she's got a wit that will catch you off your guard and knock you on your ass laughing. She remembered stories about her childhood with her brothers crystal clear, even if I had to prime the pump, so to speak, feeding her the start of the stories. But all she could think to say about my dad as a boy was that he was "a good little guy" and that  her husband Jean was very close with him, often coming home for lunch to scoop him up in one hand and a sandwich in the other. She could rattle off her brothers, the Humphreys, in chronological order: Ellis Samuel (Sam), Raymond (Ray), Charles (Toot, or Whiskers), Howard (Tom), and Delmer (Del). But was maddeningly vague when she'd talk about dad. Sometimes, she thought I was him. And sometimes she politely apologized for forgetting, but what was my last name again?

    Now it seemed to me that all of this foolishness was a big terrible waste, trying to honor in her son's death the wishes of a woman not long for the grave herself, and all blown to shit whenever we had to hurt her again by reminding her that he was gone. And comfort her for the hundredth time, stabbing our own damned hearts when we lied and told her he went in his sleep, he didn't feel any pain, he'd led a happy life...

    But one thing I left out. The day before the funeral, Brandi had a long private talk with Marge. And Marge told her how much she missed her wedding rings. And how they'd been taken from her when she shrunk and they started slipping off her fingers. And Brandi made a promise that come Hell or high water, she would get her rings back. Standing on my father's grave, just after the funeral, Brandi had a talk with the couple who have been the custodians of Marge's finances for the last 36 years. She refused to settle for anything less than a meeting to take those rings back. After much side-stepping and wiggling from them, the meet was arranged.

    We picked up the wedding rings and several of my father's guns. Guns he'd been planning for years to bring back from an imagined road trip with me he never arranged. Just after the funeral, we drove out to Spirit Lake to sprinkle some of his ashes off a dock where we saw a black lab in an orange collar playing in the water (just like Tanya, the black lab we grew up with) and I met a Deaf woman and her husband and her hearing father as we were grilling meat at a picnic site. Then we picked up the guns and rings. And after these things we paid Marguerite, youngest of ten (or 11, depending on your count), a late night visit. Brandi, Cynthia and I walked into Grandma's dark little room and gently woke her.

    And Brandi says, "Grandma, we have a surprise for you. Do you remember how I said I'd get you your rings back? Well here they are."
The glow in her face lit the room. It was like a fucking fairy tale and all four of us felt it. "Can I try them on?" she asked, and that broke my heart, to hear someone ask permission to put on her own wedding rings. She did and giddily told us how proud she'd been to first wear them. We told her we were taking them home to get them re-sized for her so they wouldn't slip off and no one could take them away again.  "Oh, but is it expensive? I don't have any money..." We lied and told her we had a jeweler friend who wouldn't charge us anything at all. We took them to Five Star Jewelers in Burke, to the couple that helped me with Cynthia's engagement ring.

    I think this is why parents lie to their children. Because the truth of things would be more than they could handle. The difference as I see it, is that those children need the truth, because their lives are ahead of them; while the old timers might want just a bit of comfort, in their last few years. I struggle as I wonder which I'd prefer, knowing the truth or feeling satisfied at the end that things worked out. I'd like to think I'd want the truth every time, but I've seen so much hurt and disappointment and pain that sometimes I can't be sure.

Today we mailed her rings back home to her.

And on the trip back, Cynthia and I got to talking. "John Ellis Sheppard. That's not a bad name. J. Ellis Sheppard sounds like a writer. We could call him Jack."

"Madelynn Jane Sheppard... Maddie... Mad Jane. I like it."

I like it, too.

.

http://www.tmkeepsake.com/

Sifting through his ashes, filling bracelets with bits of gritty sand and bone. I read somewhere they sift through and remove any metal, like teeth fillings or metal plates or hip pins. But I found a piece of metal that I'm almost positive has to be one of the titanium stitches they used to hold his sternum back together after fixing his heart.

I stuck it in my bracelet.

This doesn't mean anything.

None of this is symbolic of anything.

This is just an account of some of the things that are happening right now.

The things that don't involve legal matters and endless checklists. lists and lists.

and lists.

Oh yes indeed. Cynthia found this for me.

mondegreen

--...the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony, in a way that yields a new meaning to the phrase...

--
..

Off to Estherville, Iowa. Be back Tuesday.

Behave yourself, internet.

If he were a gangsta rapper, his name would have been C-Dick.

Fuck a deus ex machina.

Also, this has been lodged in my head since the service.




Also, we are leaving Thursday night for Estherville, Iowa to bury my father's ashes.

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

—The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

- - -

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
wipes off the shit.
                                   —John Sheppard

"

to be yourself, in a world that tries, night

and day, to make you just like everybody

else - is to fight the greatest battle there

ever is to fight, and never stop fighting.

"

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My father's memorial will be this Sunday, August 2nd @ 3pm in Leesburg.
We're encouraging people to share stories about him, memories of him and their thoughts on his life in an informal gathering.
For more information, please contact us at sheppardarts@gmail.com

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JOHN L SHEPPARD
June 5 1940 - July 27 2009

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From Sarah Palin's Farewell Speech:

"...now I will be able to fight even harder for you, for what is right and for the truth. "

From Ben Kenobi's Farewell Speech:

"...If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine. "


I don't know exactly what this means, but I think it's safe to be afraid.

Luke: I'm not afraid.
Yoda: You will be. You will be...

Spent today with my mom, moving my dad from Fairfax to Mt. Vernon in-patient.

His insurance only approved 5 days of rehab. He has a roommate, a 40-yr-old. Something brain or skull related, because he's got stitches running all the way around his skull and up the side. It looks like maybe his head busted open. His mother spoke pretty fluent English. She took leave of the rest of the family to make our acquaintance and talk with us. She seemed like a very strong woman, and kind hearted. I talked with the other woman, who said her husband was still in Afghanistan. So I was unclear of her relation to the patient. They were a warm family. Having them there helped calm me a little. My parents are difficult people. I think most people can say the same. It could have been worse. All the nurses and doctors we met seemed to be competent and good natured. I hope he doesn't give them too much of a hard time. After the other family left, the nurses got my dad's new roommate into a chair and wheeled him off for some therapy. As he rolled past, I shook his hand and introduced myself, and his voice was clear, his grip was firm. He made eye contact. I take that as a good sign. He didn't seem brain damaged. That's one of the worst things I can imagine. Becoming brain damaged, or being paralyzed and trapped in your body with your mind fully alert.

Filling out the patient enrollment sheets, I was hit by another wave of how sad and empty my dad's life is. One of the questions was, "What are the patient's goals/aspirations?"

It's been four years since his retirement, and I still cannot think of any hobbies to give him a push to become involved in. Ham radio is the only thing he's offered when I asked him the other day what hobbies he thinks he'd enjoy.

What are some good hobbies for older men who aren't internet-savvy?

My mother's always been a very open person. Not just with me and my sister, but she'd tell the world her life story if they stuck around to hear it. I preface with that, because everybody makes judgments. People generally don't hold themselves to the same standards that they hold others to. That is also true with me. I hold myself to standards acquired through my lifetime that answer for me the question, "What is a good person?"

I tend to hold others to the standards that they hold others to.

That is to say, I typically get a good read on people, and I typically treat them according to their natures with the same respect they show me. If you don't get that about me, you have no idea who I am.

So I say these things with the understanding that they represent no breach of confidentiality.

So. Point. After they were married and before I was born, my mother cheated on my father. Also before I was born, she was in some Support-group Anonymous or had a therapist or something who told her to ask the people she'd wronged for forgiveness. She came clean to him. Obviously, they stayed together long enough for me and my sister to be born. They shared a house until I was 9 years old, and they never legally filed for divorce. So in their eyes, they remain married to this day.

As an adult, I found myself in a similar situation to my father. That is the reason I have an ex-wife. She wanted to make things work afterward. I was inconsolable. I told her that I knew myself well enough to know that a breach of trust had taken place, past which I was emotionally incapable of continuing our marriage. I knew that it would be a constant thorn in my side, and that I would throw it back in her face whenever it bubbled to the surface of my attention. That would not have been fair to either of us. So despite her efforts it ended, with no small bit of cruelty on my part, which I regret.

Now, if my father's mind worked like mine in this matter, I would never have been born. My sister would never have been born. The world would be in certain respects a very different place. The world would never have existed for me.

I can only imagine that, if I had had the forgiveness in my heart to salvage my first marriage, I'd probably have a couple of kids of my own right now. In fact, I'd probably be divorced anyways and paying child support for those kids, the same as my dad did for me and my sis. Come to think of it, many many things would have gone very, very differently for at least a few people I can think of.

Every one of us is a private universe that touches and is touched by every one surrounding. We are each a separate little world, constantly affected and affecting. And within the hearts of men exist those small but precious differences, upon which the fates of these worlds rest. My existence is proof of that.

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The point to all of this? Maybe there are a few. But one of them is certainly this.
If you are truly that concerned with my opinions, then ask for them. I've found that most of the time people have been mad at me, it's been because they want my unconditional approval and aren't getting it, because they are failing to live up to the standards that they hold others to.

Also.

If someone is vaguely and publicly passive-aggressive to me, I consider it fair play to respond in kind. Because I try to take people from where they stand, showing them the same respect they show to me.

And I don't presume to demand that people I barely know accommodate my wishes by changing their behavior to suit my little feelings.

They moved him from ICU to the regular beds.
His care management planner is going to make decisions about his in-patient physical rehab.

the plumber never called or showed, so further work on the house is at a stand still.

i estimate maybe $100K in renovation might put it into condition for us to sell it as a "real fixer upper." I have no idea where that money will come from, but i imagine it looks like a second mortgage on our house, once we get a house, if they'll approve a second mortgage. this is planning ahead, i guess.

When my dad leaves the hospital, my mom is taking him to her apt to take care of him. we're not telling him this until it's too late or he'll try to fight it, which would be very bad for him.
they may hate each other, but they take care of each other.

I don't know how other peoples' families work, but that's how mine does.
We don't allow things like utter loathing and blinding rage to influence our loyalty to each other. Personal conflicts aren't an excuse to abnegate familial responsibility.

It would be great if everything we did for each other was out of love, rather than duty. But duty is just as important as love. Maybe more so. Because love is fickle. Duty stays constant.
When love flags, duty forces you to hold the burden until love finds its way back to you.

Self-entitlement looks ugly on anyone. The world doesn't owe you anything.

If you want respect, earn respect. If you want trust, earn trust.

If you are worthy of these things and don't get them anyway, well kid, that's life.
You do things because they are right, not because you expect candy and prizes.

we're like little boxes filled with nasty little surprises.

heart disease, pancreatic cancer, ms, parkinsons, alzheimers... how exciting to find out what's inside.

maybe livejournal is failing because its format requires too intimate a connection to be relevant.

maybe that's why twitter is so appealing to so many.

maybe that's why texting is preferred to speaking on the phone.

i'd like to explore the idea further, but if i'm not posting macros or memes, no one seems to have anything to contribute to a conversation.

is there a site where people actually riff on concepts, brainstorm, share personal experiences, write about how they think and feel?

link, plz?

... i wonder is it's the same motivation that makes people squeamish about hunting, but eager to suck down the McNuggets. We crave human contact, but fear intimacy, so we compartmentalize and package and remove ourselves far enough away that it doesnt make us vulnerable, awkward, uncomfortable...

It's ok if someone else kills it. I'll eat it so long as I can't tell that it used to have a face and a mother.

...

If this was twitter, I think I'd say...

Meh. Wherez REEL LIFE, internetz? *unimpressed*

...

So tell me a memory of your father.

tell me about a vacation you went on. or the time you first realized he wasn't all-knowing. or the best advice he ever gave you. or the worst thing you remember.

anything.

tell me about how you forgave him for beating you, or how he danced with you at your wedding, or taught you some valuable life lesson. or influenced the men you dated, or showed you what it meant to be a man, or how NOT to be a father and husband.

tell me how you felt when he died. tell me why it mattered at all that he was alive.
tell me

No complications.

The surgery went smoothly.

Lefrak says the next 24 hours are the most critical, so I guess it's not over yet, but it looks like it's going to be ok.

The entire team was wonderful to us. They made everything as comfortable as possible and were clear and up front about explaining how everything was going to happen. If you ever need to have major heart surgery, I'd recommend Dr. Lefrak at Inova Fairfax.

So if he makes it through the night, chances are good he'll recover from this.

There's still 6 weeks, maybe 2 months of in-patient physical rehab ahead of him.
There's still his house to deal with. There's all sorts of things that can wait until tomorrow.

Matt made me a mix tape and mailed it to me. a CD, really. 17 tracks.

He says I'm hard to make a mix tape for. He may be right, but I'm digging it.

Finished my final this morning. I think I did about as well as anyone else. Turns out there's going to be a class in the fall or the spring for cued speech. Also an elective on legal, medical and theatrical interpreting. Every day is a reminder of how far I still have to go before I'll think of myself as competent.

Drove to my dad's house to pick him up, take him to the bank, put my name on his account as a secondary. in case. he doesn't have a will. but then again, he doesn't own anything worth writing a will for. no life insurance. no nothing.

Green light on Guinea @ Braddock, just before my dad's. A bike cop blocks the intersection, stops traffic. I watch a funeral procession, count the cars, try to count the people in them. I think to myself, well that's one thing I probably won't have to make arrangements for.

On his street, Emmy Lou Harris on my speakers is belting out "I'll wear something pretty and white, and we'll go dancing tonight..." and past the row of parked cars I see a guy, maybe mid-twenties, loping up the sidewalk on crutches. I think, well he's sure as shit not going dancing tonight.
He passes an empty parking space and I see he's got one leg. It kinda sucks the humor out of the song. It wasn't that funny to begin with I suppose.


Tomorrow's the surgery.

I don't know what else to add to that. I feel things. Whatever happens, I hope I can handle it.

Most advice comes from morons.

The more you circle, the more perspective you gain.

Reserve your judgment until action is urgent, then strike.

Guilt is the strongest teacher. Accept it, learn and move on.

The past is fixed. Your actions can only affect the future.

Act to avoid the pain of guilt and regardless of the opinions of others, you will know yourself to be a good person.