Ten Years Later

Family is chosen, not given

Do you sometimes open your mouth and hear the words your parents used to say to you coming out instead of your own? Who in your life showed up for you when they didn't have to?

I’ll go first…

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Dear friend,

I’ve never met my biological father. He and my mother divorced the summer before I was born, and she and I moved from California to Minnesota well before I have any memories of our living on the west coast. Somewhere after we’d gotten settled, a friend set her up on a blind date with a former Catholic priest, the man who I would come to call my father.

This month marks ten years since he passed away.

I was too young to remember meeting him the first time, but, as he once reminded me from the depths of his Lewy body dementia, that was the day we started to become a family. That formalized when I was three years old and we went to city hall. I was wearing a white sweater that my mother turned around backwards after I spilled ketchup down the front at the restaurant beforehand. Not deterred, I proudly marched up to the counter and asked where to go to get adopted.

My dad was an incredible person, and I still consider myself lucky to have been held so closely in his heart. He was an early adopter of the internet (we had an Apple IIe), went back to school in his forties to get a doctorate in psychology, and loved the Beach Boys probably as much as he loved ice cream. He wore his white tube socks pulled all the way up, rocked a mustache, and could literally build a whole house with his bare hands.

A lot of people wonder if things about our personalities are the result of our nature or the way we’re nurtured. From my experience, I got the body hair through biology, but I see more and more of the man who raised me in myself the older I get. I got his rationality, which irritates William the same way it did a teenage me.

Somehow, I also picked up my dad’s shellfish allergy. His was so severe, my mother couldn’t even kiss him without his lips swelling up. I was in my early teens when I had an allergic reaction to a shrimp dinner, and he was the one who took me to the allergist to confirm everything. After the skin prick test, the doctor said it must be a genetic thing. Dad and I just turned to each other and laughed.

Fortunately, I didn’t pick up his cat allergy.

When I was younger, he did everything he could to help me understand the limits of what I could actually control. I’ve said before I was a rigid child, and no one knows that better than he did. Growing up in our house, you learned early on that you couldn’t get away with the excuse that someone else “made you angry.” Dad was always there to tell you that it was your choice to react that way, that our feelings weren’t someone else’s fault.

If anything, he was preparing me for the famed “Dutch directness” years before I ever set foot in this country. Here in the Netherlands, if you get hot under the collar with a civil servant, you’re more than likely to hear something along the lines of, “You can get emotional about it or I can help you, but not both.”

Just before his diagnosis, my dad and I took a trip to Greece together. Yes, that same one where I fell down the volcano. Funny as it sounds, I don’t regret that I suffered that fall on the vacation we were meant to share. Because of anyone in the world, I was so glad to have my dad there to help me get back up. The whole of the ferry ride back to Athens, he let me cry about how stupid I felt and told me it was okay if I fall down sometimes.

A couple of years after Greece as the disease began to advance, I moved home to spend time living with my parents. I am so thankful for those moments, because I got to spend evenings just watching television with him. Simple things like dinners, making up for the ones I missed over the years I’d lived elsewhere. Of course, somewhere in that time, I met William and Dad was never happier than to know I’d found someone.

Dad was less and less verbal by the time the wedding came around, but he pulled himself out of the fog at the rehearsal dinner and gave a toast that still brings tears to my eyes.

The last time I saw my dad was in June of 2016, when I flew from our then-home in Manchester, New Hampshire back to Minnesota for his birthday. After spending a few years in a private nursing home, he’d been moved into a hospice. We ate cake together in the dining room of what looked like a family home. I went back the day before my return flight, and he was asleep.

It didn’t stop me from taking his hand and talking to him. I told him then that I wasn’t ready for him to go, but I understood if he needed to. It was actually the same advice he’d given me when I was newly married and William and I were debating leaving Minnesota together. Because what he wanted for me was to live, to be happy, and not to let things hold me back.

A few weeks later, I was taking a shower and for some inexplicable reason started humming a church song, the same one my dad sang at my grandmother’s funeral. Even sick, he still could close his eyes and sing. William was waiting for me when I got out of the shower because my mom had called to say he was gone. I sat on the edge of the bed and felt guilty that the first feeling I had was relief. After watching him descend into the illness, his suffering was over. My pain was just beginning, and that night, I didn’t want anything except to crawl in bed and watch an entire season of 30 Rock.

When I think about my father a decade later, I don’t start with all the bad stuff. The memories of wiping him or ironing his name into all of his clothes aren’t the ones that spring to mind anymore. That’s one of the nice parts of losing him, I guess, you don’t hold onto them as long. Instead of living with the hard parts of his illness, the decade has given me the space and allowed the happy memories to surface.

This isn’t much of a letter about belonging in the Netherlands, but it’s one that strikes to the heart of how I learned to go about feeling at home in my life. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I acted out all my youthful insecurities about being abandoned on him.

And no matter what, my dad showed up for me.

He took that adoption very seriously, and he never once made me feel like I was anything but his son. When we were moving out of the United States and getting our apostilles, I looked at the back of my birth certificate where I found he’d handwritten our return address before he sent it to California to have his name added to it.

That kind of love is an extraordinary gift. I miss it every day, but I know that it still exists. Because he made sure I knew it. There are a hundred moments where I took him for granted while I was a teenager and young adult, ones that I sometimes wish I could have treasured instead of squandered.

I wish I could tell him all the things I’ve done in the last ten years, to hear his opinion on the things I still want to do. I wish I’d asked him to teach me how to hang sheetrock or how to keep a mustache clean when you eat ice cream. I’d love to show him around The Hague, share a biertje and some bitterballen. I wish I could see him with his grandchildren, or that I could hear him sing one more time. I would, however, do my best to avoid politics, since that’s the only thing about the last decade I’m glad he didn’t live to see.

I might even be willing to listen to him complain about how terribly the Vikings or Twins played.

Even though none of those things can happen, I know he’s here with me every step of the way. My dad showed me that love and family aren’t promised, they’re chosen. People can be genetically related and remain strangers, but the ones who do the work are the ones who mean it. They leave a mark on your heart, and they’re who you carry with you long after they’re gone.

XOXO,

G

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