As Normal As Anything

My father died somewhere over Utah, or at least I was convinced as much for an amount of time. I was at the airport in Denver, something like half way between Detroit and Ontario (the California city with the airport, not the Canadian province with all the Canadians), working a four-hour layover between budget airline flight legs, when I started getting the texts that he'd taken The Turn. Not "a" turn, the one, the definite article, the singularity we only experience before expiring. Vents off, all drips out save the palliative. So on takeoff, at last, with no new news beyond that newsiest of new things, I was sure by the time we skidded to a stop in Pacific Standard Time, I'd un-airplane my phone to beckon the time-shifted revelation that I was, a year short of age 50, half orphaned. But he'd hung on for at least that long, I think specifically because he wanted this paragraph to be more explanatory than poetic. Typical.

* * *

If you've never been to southeastern Michigan, it isn't specifically that I don't recommend it. I'm neither a native nor a convert, exposed but not infected with its specific charms. But not entirely inoculated either. I'm California-born, if just (my little sister, 17 months behind, cannot say the same) and mostly California raised, so I take in a stand of living, be-leaved trees the way a dog considers a marble statue: a form I mostly recognize, but can't quite figure out how to interact with. Sniffing seems as reasonable as anything.

For me personally, the Detroit Metro area is just a place where bad news originates. It's always a hospitalization or a death if the phone rings from 313 or 734. I'm sure it has its merits, but too much of it smells like institutional disinfectant for my preference.

* * *

My kids were all born almost exactly two years apart, fairly rapid succession when you minus out the gestation time of nine-months each. They came squalling and squirming, one after another: boy child, boy child, boy child. A girl I would have had at least a chance to fake it. I'd seen girls raised, by women entirely, but boys raised by men, as an idea, was a conception beyond imagining. I won't tell you I didn't panic, because that's the right response when your specific gravity shifts. Your density fluctuates with the introduction of an offspring; that tether between living and dying you've participated in now, in a way you only had previously at the point at your own birth, which evolution and (one imagines) mercy purge from your memory. As a new-minted parent now, you're anchored not just the most helpless of born animals, the human one--who hovers immediately just hours away from death if not for your constant vigilance and intervention--but to the core of the world itself and all of the people who ever added their weight to it. Not to be dramatic.

* * *

There's a sweet spot between "healthy relationship" and "estrangement" but a lot of moons have to line up. On the outside of either of those points are things like "co-dependence" and "murder grudge" but those options tend to loop around and tie together around the back, like a blindfold. It takes a certain amount of distance (outside of comfortable driving range, say 700 miles) and the right amount of parental absence/indifference in the formative years (enough for ignorance of potential generational baggage, but not so much you get that sting of active rejection), but casually knowing this older guy who kind of looks and sounds like you, who seems interested in how your kids are doing, who feels at least the right amount of bad about the things missed along the way, that's not so bad. We're talking four to six phone calls per year, that's the whole obligation. And the people who know you will call you a hero for it. What growth. What magnanimity. If you can put a few states in between, sometimes the boundaries are literal.

* * *

Dead parents and born children, though meta-opposites experientially for the protagonists, for the middle-players (children of the parents dying/parents of the children born) they become X and Y axes. Had I opted not to have children or predeceased my poor dead father, I'd have been fairly happy, I think, to live unaware I was an unplotted dot, tethered to no determining line or its limits. Instead, befitting my rigidity and compulsion for definition, a straggling, bounded line zagging for however long, but always toward an inevitable zero, either spent or emptied, but either way expired. My children will have to experience what I did this past week, and then they'll know too, or at least something of it. But I wish it for them a good longish way off, selfishly ultimately, but also for them. Why not wait to know what I know now? As long as your parents are both alive, the lid is on, a hierarchy exists where you can be your own main character but the Great Singular Burning Eye stays off you as it's busy burning away the slightly more desiccated, less dewily youthful ones who had the existentially bad idea to be born before you. But there's only [an amount of time] before there's nothing between you and It but slow-descending ash and you feel the first bits flake off in the heat both unfamiliar and obvious, like a memory of the womb.

* * *

I know the above is a lot, but in my defense, it took Joan Didion at least a whole year to get it together.