Siblings In Grief - July 6th, 2021
A family of perfectionists, trying to grieve a profoundly imperfect situation.
My dad’s funeral will be Friday, July 16th, at 11 AM. It will take place at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Corvallis, Oregon. All are welcome.
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My dad had nicknames for everyone. In classrooms, he used them as a means of control — they were funny, disarming, and intimacy-building. They also established something: Every person talking to my dad was being observed by him. And they knew it. When he dubbed you with a nickname, it meant that he’d observed you enough to attach meaning to your identity. It was some serious stuff, as goofy as it seemed.
My sister was “Bubbs!” Every voicemail he left for her started with “Bubbs!” Every time he walked in a room and she was there he said “Bubbs!” Every time she entered the house: “Bubbs!” He really loved saying “Bubbs!”
When he said “Bubbs!” he would curl his lips in briefly, push the “B” out with gusto, and quickly inflect his voice upwards from that “B” through the rest of the word.
“Bubbs!” Quick, punchy, loud, loving.
The origin of that nickname is fairly straightforward: I’m three years younger than my sister, and I couldn’t say “Bridget” in my early days. So instead, I said “Bubba.” I said it a lot — she was my older sister, after all. And it stuck. She was “Bubba” or “Bubbs’ to all three of us. Forever.
And my dad cherished “Bubbs” — the nickname, and the person. Their relationship was much different than my relationship with him. And even though this characterization might fit our relationship, too, my dad and my sister were in an (almost) constant state of mutual reverence; he couldn’t believe he could have a daughter like her, and she couldn’t believe she could have a dad like him — and that he held her in such high regard.
When my dad would talk to his students about his children, this is what he would say:
“My degenerate son…[fill in the blank — sometimes he’d tell the truth about what I was up to, other times he’d just tell people that I was in prison or something]...”
“And did you know my daughter is a genius? My daughter IS a genius.”
My dad was in awe of my sister. She was daddy’s little girl, of course, but she was so much more than that — her intelligence, and her areas of expertise, totally bewildered him. I was all about the humanities and team sports (my dad’s bag), and she was all about math, physics, horseback riding, and running (not that he wasn’t a runner, but he wasn’t religious about checking in on track stars the same way he was NBA box scores).
For him, my sister’s math/science brilliance was daunting. And enchanting. It made sense to him, maybe, that he had a son who was good at reading and writing. But to have a daughter who was a math/science wiz? That was shocking. He couldn’t believe it. He fucking loved it.
And he loved her grittiness, too. When I have to describe my sister to people — which I have to do often, because she’s not exactly forthcoming — I tell them that she graduated from Grinnell College with a near-perfect GPA in physics, and I tell them that she’s run an ultramarathon before. (That’s when you run a marathon...and then you run a lot farther. Psycho shit.)
This is one of the many ironies, perhaps, of my family: I was the jock growing up, bouncing from baseball to basketball and back, obsessed with everything that had a ball in it — and yet it was my sister who became the college athlete. She ran cross country and track, and was, of course, very good at both. (Here, my ego tells me that I should mention that I won 13 intramural championships in college. Sure, it was a college where the median height of a dude was 5’6”, but it counts for something.)
Just yesterday, when I ventured into the weight room at the gym my dad went to for decades, a family friend told me about how his son still remembered trembling when my sister substitute taught for a high school class of his. My sister stands all of 5’2”, but the moment this family friend said his son was terrified of my sister, I knew just what he meant. She is fierce — a commanding presence, in spite of her diminutive stature; the sort of person that you say “I just wouldn’t want to mess with her” about.
I always got a kick out of this, in particular: People would often joke that any guy who dated my sister was going to have his work cut out for him when he met my dad (and rest assured, as I was just reminded by a lovely ex-girlfriend of mine, my dad could be…difficult). But when I’d joke with my dad about it, he’d say something to the effect of: “You think they’re going to be scared of me? Have you met Bridget?”
He was right.
And the same edge that makes anyone who knows my sister slightly terrified of her is the same edge that would lead someone to, say, puke on herself in the middle of a long-distance run and just...keep running.
And it is the same edge that she’s now turned on herself.
Therein lies a tragic theme: We are a family of perfectionists, trying to grieve a profoundly imperfect situation.
Perhaps oddly — even though my sister hasn’t been able to keep food down for five days; even though she currently sits in her bed all day trying to slump herself into some depth beneath her bed where my dad isn’t dead; even though she can hardly stomach a conversation about his final days, hours, and minutes — I’m not worried about her. I’ve spent my entire life watching my sister grit her teeth, lower her forehead, and grind. She’s grieving now, yes, but she’s not going to get knocked out. She’s always been the tougher one.
And my dad knew that. And he was terrified of how much he admired her.
I was always trying to make myself in my dad’s image, but my sister pulled the pieces of him that she liked most — where I grabbed my dad’s thirst for social approval, she grabbed his obsessive focus; where I grabbed my dad’s gregarious social persona, she grabbed his self-flagellating commitment to excellence. Perhaps because of the gender dynamics that my dad happily reinforced, she had the distance necessary to pick up and put down the more subtle parts of his identity. She took his brilliance, his work ethic, and his curiosity. She left his temper, his constantly-externalized social anxiety, and his love of professional sports. (She also left his height.)
I was “Mike Two” growing up. And Bubbs was always a step or two away, watching it all unfold, pulling the threads from the yarn he was spinning and drawing them into her own little world.
Above anything, what she inherited from him was his maniacal drive. She does not do balance — she either runs like hyenas are nipping at her heels, or she doesn’t; she either locks herself in the basement of a library for 13 hours straight, or she doesn’t; and, hopefully, she either grieves like her entire world has come crashing down, or she doesn’t.
At some point, my sister won’t be grieving anymore. At some point, she’ll be able to move on...just a little bit. At some point, she’ll be able to once again train her brilliance and discipline on the very things that my dad was so perplexed and awed by.
But she doesn’t know that. And right now, that means that she’s punishing herself for every single thing.
My sister has been wrong about a lot of things the past five days. And because I respect her as much as I do, I’ve told her as much. She couldn’t have saved him; it wasn’t her fault; if we could change the factors that led to anyone’s death, then nobody would ever die.
But one thing she’s been right about is that my dad listened to her more than he listened to anyone else in his life. She’s wrong to think that if she’d just spoken up more forcefully about his health, he would’ve gotten help. But she’s right to think that her words always carried more weight than mine and my mom’s.
She was the enigma he could never quite crack (I guess that’s what an enigma is…but whatever) — because he didn’t think he was capable of cracking her. In that way, she was unique. She was the one person he didn’t think he could understand, outwork, outfox.
He loved my mom, she was his everything. But he also felt like he knew her every movement and quirk. That was the nature of their love.
He loved me, I was his best friend. But he also felt like he could understand my every decision and where it was coming from. That was the nature of our love.
But with my sister, he was always looking up. He felt like she was capable of thinking and accomplishing things he could never think of or accomplish. That was the nature of their love.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen my dad as excited for anything as he was that my sister was coming home to Oregon this year. She’d taken a job at Lebanon High School, and was moving back onto Princess Street until she could settle into a new ‘stead. He beamed every time we talked about it. He beamed to a point that I sometimes felt the need to talk him down — “Dad, she’s going to have to develop her own life here, too, you know…”
This was daddy’s little girl — the girl who’d decided that being a physicist wasn’t right, that being a doctor wasn’t right, that being a teacher was right. And she was coming home. For my dad, it was the ultimate marker of parental success. He’d never asked either of us to go into teaching, and he’d never tried guiding my sister towards education. The fact that she would choose, on her own volition, to come back to the Willamette Valley to become a public school teacher was the highest possible praise. It was his great achievement: The daughter he so marveled at, approving of his entire career.
And they were going to be able to share it together.
And then it got stripped from all of us.
I know that there are moments where my sister now questions her intimacy with my dad: They butted heads, often over his playful (dare I say lovable) sexism, and they never had the effortless brotherly love that my dad and I had. But in the same way that she envies the effortlessness with which my dad and I could spend infinite hours together, I envied the pedestal he put her on. For him, there was nothing cooler than having a daughter who was so smart, so driven, and so approving of his life’s work.
I hope she can start to cherish that love. As a third party in their mutual reverence, I know I do.
Emmett, I'm so sorry for your loss. I had a few classes with your dad at South Albany. Hands down the best teacher I've ever had. It took me a minute to remember that I had a nickname and what it was, but I can hear him say it now, "Old Friend Jennifer Oswald." The whole thing, "Old Friend Jennifer Oswald," every time I said something in class, which was a lot. I didn't think much of the name at 16, but now at 40, about the age your dad must have been when I took his class, the name "Old Friend" means something to me. Old Friends are some of the most precious things in life. Old Friend means you are known.
I only saw your dad once or twice in the last 20 years, but I'd think of him occasionally while reading a book or listening to the news. I'd transport back to my seat in AP US History (second from the front, third from the left) and think of how he invested in us. In me. He left a powerful imprint on so many lives.