This entry is very intensely emotional and personal and I’ll understand if you choose to give it a miss!
I do promise that there is a happy ending which was a lovely surprise but we have to make the full journey together to truly understand just why it was such a blessing and a lifeline back to the relatively more pleasant chaos that’s is called “normal” round here.
But like the episode of “Xena: Warrior Princess” that this story roughly parallels, it starts out harrowing and then gets much worse before coming to the revelation of the path forward to a place of love and relative peace.
To do what’s going on inside justice, that’s the way the journey must proceed and I’ll totally understand if you’d rather read about me reacting to the latest stupidity du jour in a world seemingly full of it or passing commentary on the latest subversive set of tunes I’m spinning before the puck drops in the Ironclad beer hockey league.
The time to decide is now upon you…
The past few years, it’s been a real struggle to find the inspiration for the story that I would tell today.
Let me assure you from the off that this isn’t one of those years.
Suffice it to say that I knew exactly what I was going to write before Thanksgiving and that it going was going to depart wildly from the usual tone I’ve tried to strike in this annual post these past few years to find at least one thing to laugh about in a time of year where laughing is often the furthest thing from my mind in a hope that you’d understand a side of my father that most of the world never got the opportunity to see.
Today you get the insider’s view of the internal turmoil for this particular anniversary that is why that it’s often difficult for me to even find a smile or the strength to want to speak and of the many words I can think of describing a psychological experience that’s often mentally and emotionally harrowing at best and “fun” is certainly one word that would never come to mind.
Ten years later kind of does that to you.
Torment.
That’s the word right there!
Today is the annual torment where the memory of that phone call from the Port Orange Police Department ten years ago today and all of the memories of the months immediately following come flooding back from the archives in my mind and threaten to become so overwhelming that I wonder if I’ll find my way out again to what passes for sanity and lucidity.
Finding that memory or story about Dad that I’m reasonably sure very few if any people in the world know and working through the process of bringing that story to life and sharing it with my dear readers is often the illumination of that path back from a land of despair with a certain Battling Bard from Poteideia looking down upon this spot in the Nerdery with her subtle smile to give gentle encouragement to tell the story that needs telling no matter what may come.
I do promise you that there is a happy ending to this tale but to get to it we’re going to take a little side quest through a place called Illusia.
Chop-socky and campy…and I love it!
In a time of ancient gods, warlords and kings. A land in turmoil cried out for a hero. She was Xena, a mighty princess forged in the heat of battle. The power, the passion, the danger. Her courage will change the world.
“Xena: Warrior Princess” voiceover
I remember the first time I saw Xena and Gabrielle in action was actually in a crossover episode involving characters from “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” from which “Xena: Warrior Princess” was spun off. Xena and Gabrielle team up with Hercules and Iolaus in a story involving the freeing of Prometheus from his torment and restoring the gift of fire to the people of Earth.
The producers took some enormous liberties with the Greek myths and legends (and later the Romans and early Christianity) but they did so in such an over-the-top and campy way most of the time that you could be forgiven for missing what was happening right in front of you.
I always loved the Greek myths and the stories of Hercules but we’ve seen the “buddy bros kicking heiney” story millions of times. Think “Lethal Weapon” only set in ancient Greece and way more campy humour and acting.
But what do we have here…a supernaturally talented warrior woman trying to redeem herself from a violent and tortured evil past and her innocent aspiring bard traveling companion traveling all over the place fighting evil on behalf of the citizenry of the land?
Enter “The Bitter Suite”…
Their close relationship and chemistry was plainly evident even at that early stage of the series and two strong female leads ensured that I was absolutely hooked and quickly caught up on the episodes I’d missed (thank goodness “Prometheus” was episode 8 in series 1!).
Strong female characters in television and film are so hard to find but it’s often worth it because their stories are usually far more compelling and emotionally rich. Their story and the relationship through the years was what kept me tuning in and then watching the DVDs after the series ended.
That relationship between Xena the warrior-mentor and Gabrielle who would quickly shed much of her innocence and become a fearsome warrior bard in her own right would be tested through the years almost to the breaking point which leads us to “The Bitter Suite” which is arguably one of my favourite episodes in the entire series even though the lead up to it is absolutely harrowing…and then the episode takes you on an even worse journey.
They’ve come to a crossroads where they’ve both lost a child…Xena’s son Solan that she never really knew as she’d left him in the care of the centaurs to spare him the violent life of a warrior trying to redeem herself from her evil past and Gabrielle’s daughter Hope who was the result of the bard losing her blood innocence and then being impregnated by an evil god.
That it would be Hope who Gabrielle had told Xena that she had killed when her evil nature was revealed but instead had sent her in a raft down a river that would directly lead to Solan’s death is pretty much the final straw that sees an incandescently angry Xena keelhaul Gabrielle behind a horse to near the point of death at the top of a cliff overlooking the sea.
Gabrielle recovers enough from the dragging to tackle Xena and they both plunge toward the rocks and the sea below…and end up in a fantastic realm called Illusia.
Illusia Isn’t Hades But It’s Close!
Xena be warned, Xena beware!
By closing your eyes you’ll see what isn’t there
Xena be calm, open your eyes
Lies may be truth, and truth may be liesFate is a wheel, it will reveal
All you’ve become, all that you feelDestiny knows what has to be
And you’ll pay the price, nothing is freeI’ll be your guide, take the hand of your muse
You just might lose your way in the land of Illusia!Illusia is music, a world built on rhyme
Callisto in “The Bitter Suite”
It’s carved out of space in the absence of time
You’ve tasted how evil and good coexist
The bitter and sweet of it
Xena and Gabrielle’s separate journey through Illusia starts out bright and happy and it doesn’t take long for things to take a really dark turn that really comes to a head when the two of them meet…Xena in full warlord mode at the head of an army facing off against Gabrielle leading a mob of villagers ready to fight for their survival.
They end up in a chamber of echoes where the echoes of painful words rooted in past grievances gets louder and louder with each word spoken in hatred and anger to the point where they can’t hear what each other is saying much less put right what went horribly wrong.
Tell me how you feel! [feel… feel… feel…] Right now! Nothing about the past! [past… past… past…] Right now!
Xena in “The Bitter Suite”
I hurt inside! (quietly after a long pause) Don’t you?
Gabrielle in “The Bitter Suite”
That last line right there is the best description of what I’m feeling every time the 23rd of December comes round.
It’s all of the memories that I have of my father come crashing down upon me like a tidal wave…the memories of the good times and memories of those tough times where he was trying desperately to do his best in the single worst MOS in the military of being a single parent (which as an officer is treated even more harshly) and a son who reminded him on a daily basis of his own harrowing journey through married life until that ended quite dramatically in the mid 1970s.
All of those memories come flooding back and it’s hard not getting completely overwhelmed by them.
Then there’s the regrets from all of the times where I’d wished I’d taken the better road when we’d have a disagreement if not an outright fight and knowing that ten years ago, any chance I’d had of ever atoning for whatever mistakes I’d made along the way with him was gone forever.
It doesn’t mean we weren’t in a good place at the time of his passing.
Indeed, with only a few bumps in the road every now and then, we’d actually been in a much better place when I had told him that he was relieved of his command over me at the age of 23 with the hardest words I’ve ever spoken in my entire life:
“I relieve you sir. You stand relieved!”
To a recently retired officer formerly of the United States Army, that statement had absolutely no ambiguity and it was understood instantly.
You have no idea how scary and tough it was to tell him that after he’d finally pushed me one step farther than I wanted to go and that I was going to make it clear that I loved and appreciated him in ways I still can’t express properly but that now was the time I was going to put the lessons I’d learned from him and others into play and chart my own course for my life.
It didn’t help matters that I was telling him that from North Carolina, a place that brings back all sorts of memories for him and most of them not particularly pleasant. I’d gotten my diploma from UCF in December of 1992 and before midnight the following night, I was back in North Carolina with my household goods halfway through South Carolina.
I know that hurt him deeply and frankly how could it not? No amount of trying to point out to him that the Research Triangle was where I needed to be to put my degree to best use would erase the hurt of such a quick departure even though he knew the truth of it just as well as I did.
My destiny was always going to be in the Old North State where I was born and that I love so dearly and it was the only state that had my brother and sister amongst the citizenry as I was determined to get on properly with the job of being a big brother to them.
I honestly expected the worst to come of finally declaring my independence but if anything, he seemed to have far more respect for a bitter truth told honestly than sweeter sounding prevarication.
That doesn’t mean that in the following years he didn’t pass along his “suggestions” (often orders in another disguise) and his takes on many issues of the day, political or otherwise, whether I wanted them or not.
He most certainly did.
Being a father now for over 20 years, I do believe I can understand that motivation perfectly… 😉
It was quite liberating that I could take those suggestions or leave them and whatever accountability and responsibility that would come of it would be mine to shoulder alone.
The funny thing about it is that I understand him far better now even though he’s been gone for these past ten years than I ever did before. I even find myself occasionally catching myself having similar conversations with my own children from time to time and now finally getting what he was trying to tell me all along.
Five years after that liberation day, we would be brought together on a more sombre occasion when his mother passed away and her funeral would be in Marion, IL. He drove up to my house in Clayton and then we set off together for southern Illinois and we had quite a lot of time to talk about this and that.
One of the more surprising conversations was pretty early on in the journey where we talked about some of those disagreements and disappointments in the past and then he did something that to this day still shocks the heck out of me.
He apologised for “not being a very good father” to me. He really didn’t have a roadmap for being a single parent so he did the best he could to find his own way with Andy Taylor and Bill Cosby (yeah, I know but back in the early 1970s and especially in the “Bill Cosby: Himself” stand-up routine, he did have a cogent view on parenting that should be required viewing for anyone mad enough to want to voluntarily be a father) as his guide.
Except that in a lot of ways he was not only the best father to me that he could be, his way was probably the only way that he and I could survive going it alone through the years.
We’d hurt each other many times through the years because we were both in such anguish but really didn’t have any way to address it in a productive way that it festered and lingered and eventually became such a burden that we carried with us.
It’s just not how “men” are supposed to handle such matters…especially one that for most of that time was still serving in the Army. Oh no…you sure as hell don’t show tears or any sign of weakness (especially in the units he served!)…you just suck it up and stick the complaining where the sun doesn’t shine.
I mention regrets above and I still feel them even though I told him that I thought he did the best he could with what he had to work with and that I was sorry for occasionally being difficult and disobedient with occasional forays into insubordinate and disrespectful.
By the time we rolled into Nashville (with me at the controls because we were not going to make multiple loops round that city!), we were in about as good a place as we’d ever been in the 28 years we’d had to that point.
Like I said, every now and then we’d have a bit of a bump in the relationship but by and large it held together until the very end.
There would be times where we’d stray close to those red lines that would bring out the red mist of anger and I do regret those times because the early years were harrowing enough without adding more regrets upon them.
But we’d never truly cross those red lines ever again but it probably would have been nice to have atoned for my part in even the occasional close approach to them whilst he was still alive.
Why Was That Word In The Title In Quotes?
I’m sure you’ve been wondering why the word super was highlighted so with single-quote marks in the title.
If you live long enough with someone, you do get a feel for when they’re wanting to talk about what’s vexing them and when they don’t.
His professional life was one where he was not encouraged to admit to any sort of weakness or anything as sordid as having feelings and so from a very early age when it was clear that he was not feeling at his best either physically or emotionally, we had worked out a code word between us that meant things were far worse in reality than was being admitted.
That word was super.
If he was not having a really great day and you asked him about it, he’d tell you that he was doing super.
That was a pretty strong hint to do whatever it took to suppress that natural tendency for curiosity and leave it be.
If we’d had an unpleasant argument prior to a command performance amongst the three other enclaves of our family within two square miles of our house in Port Orange, if anyone asked either of us how we were…we were super, that was our story, and we were going to stick to it.
If anyone else other than Grandpa and Dad’s dearest friend Carol ever picked up on the loaded meaning of that word, I truly have no idea. Certainly no one else seemed to visibly react any different even when I’m thinking it had to be plainly obvious that we were putting on a good front to keep our bit of strife affecting the peace amongst the others.
The reason why I mention this is that generally around this time of the year especially after his passing that if I’m really honest about it, I feel super.
I’ve found through trial-and-error and many years of fraught introspection a formula that works for me when I’m feeling particularly super and that is to have the space and the time to allow the tsunami to wash over me and then pass through me and then find the light and the inspiration to write.
If I can find a tale of Dad that has a humourous angle, so much the better as it helps me get to where I need to be so that I can carry on with great vigour.
Most of the time round Christmas Day, the kids are off for a Christmas adventure with their mother and grandmother and I truly wish for them to have a happy and enjoyable holiday as I wish for everyone to have a happy, safe, and joyous holiday season with the people they cherish.
Even when the holiday is a poignant reminder of a sadness and a heartache that I feel compelled to work through in the only way I know how with the time and space I need to meditate, find some measure of peace and solace, and let happen what needs to happen so I can find the next story to tell.
Gabrielle would understand. She and Xena have both had their days when they felt super, too.
That’s why she’s watching over me along with Xena and Hercules whenever I’m sitting in The Nerdery.
I know Dad hated the decor of my office with a passion the couple of times he’d come to visit my current home before his health got to the point where it really didn’t permit him to make the trip.
He told me once that he watched a couple of episodes of “Xena: Warrior Princess” but for the life of him he couldn’t fathom why I enjoyed the show so much.
I was always kind of amused by that as I thought it was patently obvious…I’ve always been drawn to stories of strong female protagonists as I find them far more interesting and nuanced particularly when it comes to relationships. That these particular characters could also kick butt and go toe-to-toe with the various gods and other villains in the series was just a happy bonus…
We’re not talking quantum physics here!
It’s my Nerdery and I’ll have whoever I please guarding it. 🙂
Where’s The Happy Ending You Promised?
Thank you for your patience dear reader for having gone through the bitter journey, you have at least gotten the promised reward.
As I said above, even though the anniversary of that date is often one that brings on intense feelings of hurt and anguish, you’ll notice that the one emotion that was missing in it all is sadness.
I’m not at all sad during this time…if anything, there’s a part of me that feels strongly that he had an instinct when it was time he felt he could let go and know that those he loved and cared for deeply would be OK…eventually.
How else do you explain him making sure Carol’s gifts were arranged on the couch near the door and that she knew they were there waiting for her? The timing ascribed to his passing was that it was a few hours before she arrived at his house after work at a nearby retirement home so he hadn’t been down long before the Port Orange Police were ringing me up to set the wheels in motion as it were.
I think he knew his time was at hand and left us in the way he’d lived his life…in the service of the needs of others.
With the many health problems that were plaguing him and more than a few answers to pointed questions along those lines being a one word response I’ve detailed above, his passing was more an act of mercy than anything else.
Even though he’d fought the Veterans Administration for years and only a short time before his passing did he finally get them to admit a 70% service connected disability (and that likely grudgingly) that would have qualified him for long-term care on the government’s dime, I genuinely could never have imagined him willingly going into assisted living and certainly not staying there long enough given how much he despised such facilities.
After seeing the treatment (and from what I read between the lines I think it’s better described as “abuse”) his mother had at their hands, who could really blame him? It’s a miracle that he didn’t *OWN* that facility after the stunts they pulled but he had an even more intense dislike for lawyers than evil care home administrators that would have been mates with the guy running the retirement home in “Waiting For God”) and besides which, he had enough on his plate with Grandma’s transfer to hospice who treated her with respect and care until her passing.
If I’m truly honest, I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to see just how far from the rule of law and fidelity to the Constitution we’ve strayed in the intervening years since he left us. His heart would have been broken that so many were brazenly defiling their oaths to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution in the pursuit of money and political power and abject failure to serve the needs of the people they were supposed to protect.
So no…I miss him terribly and feel the anguish and the flood of memories and regrets at this time of the year but I’m not at all sad. As long as I get a hug from the kids and they have a wonderful Christmas a bit down the road, that is all I need or want and the time and space to get back to the right frame of mind is so appreciated.
That’s why it’s often hard to get me out of this house unless I absolutely have a need to be somewhere else and why those that understand allowing me that space to get on an even keel again is the only gift I really need or desire.
Dear friends that I consider to be as much family to me as those born to it know that very well but things were in motion where a command performance was required of me up the hill at their place in Wendell on Christmas Eve along with a certain Nikon camera.
Their oldest son Aries was planning on proposing to Miss Heaven, his girlfriend of the past couple of years.
I ended up missing the actual proposal as her family had arrived earlier than expected and they couldn’t be expected to just sit out in their cars until I got there but did see the video on one of their phones and it was a truly joyous moment.
It also had a few laughs along the way including Heaven coming out the back door and then joining the queue of people on the patio before someone had the presence of mind to suggest that she might want to keep walking to where she’d be the star of the show that evening… 🙂
It was so adorable and so her to not want to cut the queue and it’s something that will bring a smile to this fan of British humour and mannerisms to my dying day.
So even though there were times during the evening where I could feel the familiar pangs threatening to break through, I’d already done most of the heavy lifting psychologically the day before on the actual 10th anniversary of his passing and was already at least much closer to where I needed to be so I could finally write this entry for you.
There it is…a story that took ten years to get to the point of being able to write…years that felt like an eternity to live through.
Thanks for coming along on the journey even if there are empty places where I must necessarily walk through alone. 🙂