Pops...

August has always been a pretty big month for my family.  There are a lot of birthdays, my sister Sarah’s birthday is the 11^th, my brother Dan is the 24^th, my son Liam is the 27^th and my father Patrick was born on the 29^th of August 1946.  My wedding anniversary is August 5^th, the day after my parents’.  We have many friends and other family that celebrate birthdays and wedding anniversaries and whatnot during this month as well.  August is great for this, the waning days of summer, the closing bookend to vacation from school and an opportunity to finally say goodbye to the last afterglow of life and fruitfulness, preparing the way for autumn, and the seeds of next year.  I think it is appropriate the school year starts in autumn.  I know it has more to do with the cycles of an agrarian society than with existential symbolism, but the idea that the start of the school year begins as the seeds from the maple trees and the walnut and the peach drop to the ground and take root seems to coincide well with our hopes for our children.  The seeds, once planted, face a protracted stasis with the end result; blossoming and life.  August seems the end of life and the beginning of a new one. 

   As I muse on this, I remember my father.  I think of when Liam was born and I remember, my father, sick but hale, dying but living.  He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer three years before, but we were lucky to have five good years with him after that point, plenty of time to work through our crap, pack up the baggage and throw it out the window into the wind.  As Liam was taking his first breaths, the cancer that was eating my father was getting the upper hand.  It was August of 2004 and little did we know but the battle against my father’s dragon was more than half over.  His grandson’s birth was important to my dad.  They were able to know one another.  Liam visited him, played with him, jumped on grandpa’s bed when my Dad was to ill to stand.  It was a stark reminder of the cycles of creation and destruction, death and life. 

  I may have pointed this out before, but my father was 30 when I was born, just as his father, John was 30 when my father was born.  At 30, I had just lost a father and fathered a little girl, Sophia.  The two of them passed as strangers in a fog, one exiting as the other was making ready to arrive.  Though he never had the chance to hold her, or to call her by name, my father loved her, just as he loved me and his entire family.  He loved life, despite its many disappointments and right crosses.  He bore his burden with a hand to his forehead like a visor and a squinty grin, sometimes mistaken for a grimace that has been inherited by myself and my youngest child.  

I take a breath, as we all are about to step into a new school year, even we who do not go to school anymore.  I take a step forward and whisper a few words, hoping that my father can somehow hear and nod his head in assent.  I ask for strength and courage.  I find myself asking others for courage quite a lot.  I have never really considered myself a courageous man.  I don’t claim to be one.  I see the value in it and I strive to stand up for the ideas and people I love.  I think perhaps I just love life a little too much sometimes, life and comfort.  The truth, one my father showed me, is that comfort, instant gratification is fleeting and pointless if tomorrow you are a slave or dead.  I try to take the long view of things but it is difficult when faced with the amount of work it takes to change oneself.  I guess that illustrates yet another obstacle I face to self-actualization, my work ethic, but that is probably fit for a different post.  (See how I did that? I procrastinated until the next post that will never be written.)  This digression is almost painful, so I will skip along… Let me continue…no there is too much, let me sum up, August had been a time of beginning and now as I have gotten older, I see it has become a time of endings as well.  The great thing is that endings are rarely the last word on a subject, but a footnote.  I miss having my dad around to tell me how to do things in the most efficient, simple way (he was the self-described “King of Low-Tech”.)  I miss having him around to feed my love of all things Irish and Bob Dylan.  I even miss his latter-day rants about everything that Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck told him to be angry.  I miss him and that doesn’t go away just because his body has.  But even through his passing, new life continues to spill forth.  And as long as I breathe, I will stand my children up in a row and promise them a shiny penny if they promise to die for Ireland.

Three Ladies, Two Stars and One Little Angel...

I have taken the ninth anniversary of the birth of my first child to reflect.  I look at who I am, where I find myself and in short, I guess things could be much worse.  It has been another particularly difficult year for the McNassar clan.  In the last 12 months we have lost three members.  My aunt Jeanne (Henningsen) McNassar passed away suddenly last October.  Earlier this year we lost both my aunts Ann (McNassar) Zenner and most recently, Sr. Mary McNassar SNJM with whom Liam shared a birthday.  So this August 27^th was a particularly difficult one.  As a matter of practice, we do not have a ceremony or major function on Liam’s birthday.  When we first lost him, we quickly joined a grief group and leaned heavily on the experiences and advice of our peers.  Everyone agreed that the first birthday as well as the first anniversary of the death of their child was the hardest.  Verily, I remember enough of those days to not want to relive them.  Liam’s (would-be) fifth birthday was 78 days after his death.  I always struggle with explaining that when asked about Liam from the casual acquaintance.  Usually, when first meeting a person, they ask if I am married and if I have a family.  I tell them I have two children at home.  I used to go straight into the story of Liam as it felt deceitful or dishonorable to Liam to ignore his existence to strangers somehow.  Well, now I find some people don’t want to know all of that and they will let my answer lie (the tacit : I have TWO AT HOME, but elsewhere?)  The occasional person pursues the conversation and I am all too happy to open up.  Still, I find myself getting hung up on the question of his age.  Liam was amazing.  He acted wise beyond his years and just had a competency about things that continues to blow me away.  So, to think that he had only experienced 4 birthdays throws me for a bit of a curve.  How old was he when he died?  Well, he was almost five, or he was a couple months short of his fifth birthday…  it all seems cumbersome.  I think somewhere in my heart I worry that people will hear, ‘oh, he was four’ and think, well that must suck, but the kid was practically a baby so they can’t really miss the person that badly, just the idea.  I worry somehow people won’t recognize the value of a four-year-old for the incredible person they are versus the obvious tragedy of the loss of the person they could possibly become.  All these things swirl around in my head and I can at times sit down and rationalize to myself that it is all misperception and neurosis but it doesn’t make it any easier.    I made a promise to myself when Liam died.  I told myself and the entire church full of people that had come to honor him that I was resolved to learn from his strength and resilience, his honesty and bravery and would incorporate those things into my life.  I would live a better life than I had up to that point, one that is happy and joyful, to take delight in the small things, the crickets and the butterflies.  I feel I have done a fair job, though I can’t stop holding myself to a standard that seems at times above my capabilities.  It is funny how so many men, when they are boys, try to hold themselves to a standard dictated by their father.  I wonder at times if I am the only man that tries to be more like his son.  It is reassuring to know those gifts, the gifts of unconditional love, unshakeable optimism and unquenchable curiosity that defined Liam still exist.  In the dark moods that occasionally still appear as background lighting in my mind, II have doubted these things, I have doubted my devotion to myself and to getting up again and dusting myself off and continuing to walk.  But, now I find there are little stars in the night sky.  I see two small shining stars that reach down with their slender arms of light and reach out to me.  The call me by name, ‘Daddy,’ and I don’t end up having much of a decision in the matter anymore, and that is liberating.  When I no longer have the choice as to whether or not I will give up or fail myself, the question morphs from will I get up? To HOW will I get up?  How will I take another step?  I don’t really need strength to decide to wake in the morning, I just need discipline to pace myself and go to sleep at night.  Standing up half the night with Baby Liam in my arms, followed by Baby Sophia and Baby Mario was PT for the big show.  After the darkest part of my life, there was a question as to whether the light would shine again.  Thanks to my little stars, the path seems lit.  I know this all reeks, it reeks of hyperbole and sappy misplaced metaphor, but sometimes you just need saccharined schlock to keep you from tasting the bitterest parts.  I am not ready to have a poster of a cat that tells me to ‘Hang in there’ on my wall or anything, but I will take this one conceit, this exaggeration of reality since it brings me comfort.

   Jeanne, Ann and Mary were all good at that, bringing peace and joy, each in their unique ways.  Jeanne, with her wealth of children and grandchildren, the eternal hostess and matriarch, so beautiful and graceful, I never knew how she could keep it all together like that.  Stunning.  Ann was so thoughtful, sometimes to a fault, about the needs of her family and the desire not to want to impose her grief or disposition on others.  We didn’t see much of her in the last long stretch of time, but I was lucky enough to do a little work for her in her home with my father and reconnect.  Her love and kindness were not something blunted by her separation from the family.  She loved us all and it was apparent through her words and actions.  Mary, it was a shock that she passed so quickly.  I was certain after Liam’s experience with Leukemia that we would have time to say the things that were expressed every time we saw each other, through her faith, love and compassion.  Mary loved each and every one of us without exception, without pause, without any expectation of reciprocity, though it was always there.  Mary could elicit some of the finest behavior from some of the most dour, taciturn characters.  Don’t worry, I shall not name names.  Mary was a nutcracker, one that could break through even the most closed off and jaded individuals.  She was a go to person for the schools where she worked, for the order of The Holy Names and for the McNassar family.  She was our ‘point man’ and she loved it, not for the glory, but for the feeling of usefulness and completeness of spirit.  She was at her happiest and at her best form when helping others which was pretty much every day.  On several occasions Mary would come to my live performances and asked me several times if I knew the tune, The Rose of Tralee.  I always felt like a bum when I had to shrug and say I didn’t.  When I learned that she was ill, I decided to learn the song.  I practiced it a lot as her illness progressed and was tempted to blurt it out when asked at the funeral if anyone else had something to say.  I opted to say a few heartfelt words as I felt both my own words and my own heartbreak were more honest and more celebratory of Mary than of myself.  Still, I find myself humming the Rose of Tralee and thinking of Mary, the beauty that was and is a beautiful blossom of the family McNassar: 

 

“She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer,

Yet 'twas not her beauty alone that won me;

Oh no, 'twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning,

that made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee.”