Just Becoming...Better

Earlier this month, my brother-from-another-mother Glenn posted in his blog some thoughts on the fifth anniversary of his dad's passing, in which he concluded that he's become a better dad in these last five years due to that loss.  It led me to wonder: has there been a similar effect on me in the three years nine months since my own dad's passing?

My inclination is, no, I haven't become a better dad.  I may have become a better son, though.

I don't mean to suggest I'm some paragon of dad-liness, or--heaven forbid--that I outshine Glenn in that department, and therefore have or had no room to grow.  But if I'm honest with myself, I don't see a dramatic difference between how I parented before, and after, Dad's death.  Since David's birth 14 years ago, I have always tried to be engaged and present with both the kids.  It was at Little League practices that Glenn and I first struck up a conversation about the (dis)Astros; I always made every effort to be at practices and/or games from T-ball through now for David, and have started taking him up on his offer to let me come camp with the Scout troop.  Similarly, I'm the one who's hacked through a total of 25km of races with Sarah--five 5Ks, one at a time--and brought her to Girl Scouts most weeks.  Losing Dad didn't mean I started doing more activities with the kids, or somehow changing who I was for them.  At least, I don't think I have.

But I do think I've become more attuned to my role vis-a-vis my older generation, though.  On a November Tuesday, as part of what would be my last time seeing him alive, I told Dad we'd be OK, and if he had something he had to go do, that we'd take care of each other, don't worry about us.  And so ever since returning home from his funeral, I've had a pretty good record of calling Patty to check on her about every week and a half or so, and stopping in to visit when up north.  I never used to call for her before; now I do.

I've also had the opportunity to become much more a caregiver to my Mom, of course, since her move to Virginia just over a year ago.  We joke about her doctor's appointments being sufficient to qualify as our "third kid," running her here and there, but in point of fact I'm what she's got locally available, and the progression of her Parkinson's has afforded me other opportunities to serve.  I always used to h-a-t-e going to "old-folks homes," such as when my Mom's dad was in one twenty years ago.  Now it's my Mom who's there herself, and the change of the last few years has allowed me to go into one without cringing.

I'm also enjoying an opportunity to be a better "son" to Mary's folks.  Over the last few years we've been able to be of some small service to them now and then, taking care of projects around the house that are harder for Dad T. to do anymore: last year it was digging post-holes, this year it was replacing the trim on the garage.  I can't do these kinds of things for my own dad anymore; but it does give me a warmth to be able to help out Mary's.

In re-reading the above, I recognize it can come off as incredibly self-congratulatory.  That's not what I'm trying for.  Instead--and here's where Glenn and I actually see eye to eye, I think--it's about the personal growth that a crisis such as losing one's first parent can inspire.  It is an ending, to be sure, and in the depths of the pain of that time it's all that seems present.  But in hindsight, it's also an opportunity to become more of what we're called to be in the first place.  Perhaps that makes some of us better fathers; perhaps some become better sons.  (And I do not even want to contemplate what sort of tragedy makes me become a better husband, thank you very much.)  Perhaps it is what C. S. Lewis described, in Sheldon Vanauken's excellent book of the same name, as "a severe mercy"--one that brings us to a point of grace through a most horrific ordeal, one which we might never have reached on our own, and one which leaves us better than the people we were at the start.