A bit about my spirituality...

Some people face a crisis of faith.  I have less of a crisis and more of a mystery.  As a young Catholic, I grew up in the church, with devout, faith driven parents that were both pious and scholarly.  My mother, related to priests, brothers and nuns, is one of the most well read people I know.  My father, after spending two years in the seminary, as well as growing up in a family with ten siblings, several of whom took vows, or darn close to it, was a treasure trove of wisdom, church doctrine, Aquinian logic, apologetics and wit.  The two of them were a passionate force to be reckoned with.  So with that as a basis, I grew in the church, learning the stories of our faith, taking upon myself to read first a children's book of Bible stories, followed by the "Good Book" itself.  In fact, I had absconded with a copy of perhaps one of the technically worst translated versions of the Bible, The Good News Bible from my school.  I had whited out the cover and changed the words "The Good News Bible" to read "The Odd Jew's Bible"  I felt that it was less sacrilege than appropriate.  Needless to say, I protected my father from the knowledge of my sin and read the book by torch light in my room after the rest of the house was asleep.  Genesis was all familiar to me of course, a well disseminated narrative, the stories I knew intimately, but was able to delve a little more deeply into, in an unabridged text, none of the fat trimmed so to speak.  Through Exodus and to the crux of the Torah, the law.  I admit I was surprised.  First by the somewhat titillating and at times scandalous laws concerning sexuality and sins of the flesh as laid out in Leviticus.  I was engrossed by the law, as well as the ease with which the Hebrew Scriptures' narrative flowed.  At this point, studying Scripture in school with a young priest that dealt with the subject matter in a rather aloof and at times sardonic tone made the entire experience a little confusing.  I was transitioning from a child's understanding of the scriptural narrative to an adult's, with in the contextual model.  I was confronted with facts, facts about how the Bible depicts the universe and how the universe truly is.  I was taught that the Bible is a story of a people's relationship to their God, a divinely inspired text, but unlike some Christians, we understood that the Scriptures were meant to be understood contextually rather than literally.  The truth of the message is what is important rather than the accuracy of the historical data.  This was something I struggled to wrap my mind around.  In fact, as I progressed in my studies, I became more and more aware of a nagging suspicion in my mind and my heart.  I wanted so much for the promise of Jesus, the promise of salvation, redemption and justice to be true.  I wanted resurrection and I wanted to exist in paradise after I died, to be reunited with all my loved ones after I met death.  However, the more I studied, the more I prayed, the more I learned about life outside the cloistered walls of a church, the more I recognized something, it was there, at first it had no name, then I realized what it was : Contrivance.  I studied faiths, from around the world.  Every people no matter how advanced or "barbaric" had a spirituality, a story, a relationship to the sacred and an explanation for the unknown.  What made everybody else's stories lies and the story of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Paul true?  Circumstance I guess.  Some believers would call it providence that the Romans adopted a small Jewish cult, a sect of messianic pacifists that refused to worship the emperor god or serve in the army, took their symbol, a cross and placed it on their shield, rewrote their message of love and redemption to one of conquest and conversion, minimized the person of Jesus and maximized the person of Paul, a Roman, a pissed off Roman that believed the ends justified the means, demanded that salvation was universal and included the Gentiles, spoke with authority because (according to him) God broke a fundamental promise to all humanity and took Paul up to heaven, showed Paul his visage and allowed him to live so as to convert the world to Christianity.  Paul, the great "Apostle," a man that never met Jesus, became the most powerful voice in the church, arguing and vying for position against Peter (and winning,) against the rock, the foundation of the church as Jesus himself put it.  To some, Paul is a prophet.  The Epistles of Paul (and the epistles that either are or are not written by Paul depending on which Pauline scholar you discuss it with) are held in as high, if not higher esteem by many Protestants.  When the New Testament is quoted to lambast homosexuality, or socialism, or just about anything the "moral right" hates, they inevitably quote Romans, Galatians, Ephesians... Paul had a lot to say about what God doesn't like and what Jesus didn't like, and how we are to live our lives, but didn't Jesus have important things to say?  He had a ministry, according to the four (teen?) gospels written about him.  He had a message of love, not fire and brimstone.  Where Paul has his rap about sins of the flesh and sins of the soul, and blah blah blah, Christ's message was simple, Love people, love God, love yourself.  Jesus made we want to believe, but Paul killed my faith.  I could not ( and not for lack of trying) reconcile the two messages, not only their tone, but their content.  It was as if, Jesus had a message and Paul ignored everything that he said and looked at the resurrection as the onlything of importance and ignored Jesus' lessons and made up his (Paul's) own set of rules of how to earn? win? receive? resurrection.  I started to wander.  My devout Christian friends were appalled that I would even "listen to those lies" the ones told in the sacred texts of other people, the Upanishads or the Qu'ran.  When confronted with inconsistencies between the Bible and say, the fossil record or other clear evidence that the world is not merely 7,000 years old, they wold tell me that it was just God testing us, or we had to rely on faith and accept the Bible as the literal and true word of God...well that was it.  I went off, trying my hand at acting and drinking and whatever else I could find to occupy my time and fancy.  It wasn't until I met Lisette and had my true crisis of faith, the crisis of faith in myself that I sought out a second chance for Biblical enlightenment.  I figured if faith was that important, it would be silly to dismiss it out of hand.  I was not making it in the theater, and I made a hundred excuses for why, but in the end, I moved on.  Lacking a direction, I did what I knew.  I became a theology major, though I had no clue what I was going to do with it.  I took it as a personal vendetta, against myself and my marked lack of faith.  I was determined to get an answer, even if I wasted away my single greatest career opportunity in life.  I was determined to find God.  I studied (most of the time)  I became conversant in all of the jargon, studying epistemology, Biblical hermeneutics and church history.  I was going to church, playing church music and participating.  I was feeling it, I wanted to feel it, I was floating, but after a while, in the space where I knew God should be...well, I found a lot of space, some filler and a presence.  That presence was not an entity, that presence was an emptiness.  I struggled because I was in love with a woman of faith that believed me to be a man of faith.  We had married in a church, in front of our families and friends professing faith in each other and God.  I found myself feeling terrible guilt (go figure Catholic boy) every time we recited the Nicene Creed in church, realizing I did not believe the words I was stating that I DID believe.  After a while, I stopped reciting the creed.  We were busy and I worked weekends, so I had a great excuse not to go to ( as I was typing right now, I was thinking the word church, but I typed the word work.  That's what church became for me work)  By the time Liam was born, I was pretty sure that I had the answer I had been searching for.  I was pretty sure that I was an atheist.  I vacillated between agnostic and atheist, because I was afraid of the stigma that atheist held.  An atheist to some is a person who has given up.  An atheist is someone who is too weak to have faith.  An atheist to some is someone who is unwilling to live the law that Christ or Allah or Moses or the Great Spirit has given us all.  An atheist to some is just one of the damned, with no hope for grace or salvation.  I was less concerned with the status of my soul than I was with my role in the world.  My entire life I identified myself by my faith.  The people around me were mostly Catholic.  I went to a Catholic school, I went to a Catholic church, I lived in the Catholic Worker community.  It was the fundamental kernel of my identity and now I was throwing it away?  That scared the hell out of me (almost literally...I mean hell was actually gone.  I was able to disprove the existence of hell with basic logic and relative ease)  So I was a new father, sitting up in my bed in the middle of the night, senseless with fatigue writing a (for a lack of any more appropriate term ) manifesto.  I had to have it down somewhere, in some form, that I was something new, something different.  I was an atheist.  I rejected the idea of the supernatural.  I rejected the idea that spells, esp, prayers, magic, novinas, etc exist. I developed my world view over time and became more comfortable every day.  I felt no hatred or disdain for the church.  I loved it, and the traditions.  My separation was not a wistful one, damaged by a priest or a dogmatic difference (other than perhaps the divinity of Jesus) and so I lived my life, going to church on Christmas and Easter to make the wife happy, refusing to take communion in respect for the church which I held in high esteem due to my state of sin.  So it was that one day, I was faced with a true crisis of faith, and not a crisis of faith in myself, it was a crisis of faith in my faith.  May 9th, 2008 and Liam was diagnosed.  Now,I had been told by every believer that I had met that "There are no atheists in a foxhole."  I was told that when I met my greatest challenges, I would turn to God and he would be there for me.  Well, here it was, my greatest challenge, the bleakest moment...what did I do?  Did I pray?  Did I bow before God and beg forgiveness and mercy?  Would that have done the trick?  Well, I wrote this :

Atheism

5/12/2008

I wish I could pray for you

I would if I could

The believer says that when the heathen is at death's door

He'll fall to his knees and repent

What the believer fails to realize

Is that some heathens are of stronger faith

Than for what they have been credited

Some unbelievers have absolute faith

And are more likely to go fishing

Than to start praying

Some unbelievers are more likely to act

Than to pray

If no action will help then no action will help

Powerlessness is the birthright of man

This fact is accepted by all

The believer accepts this in grace

The unbeliever accepts this in truth

Still, I wish I could pray for you

Humble myself, lay prostrate and pious

Flagellated, purified, void of offense or contempt or pride

I would petition God for your life, your legs, 

Your blood, your hair

I would offer my honour, my reverence, my fidelity

My service, my life and my soul and I would mean it.

But, I cannot pray

I cannot believe

The only acts I can perform are to wait and to trust

So I wait for you with love and I trust

I recounted my experience of dealing with Liam's illness and later his loss to a friend.  He asked if Liam's death had hurt my faith.  i explained that it reaffirmed my faith.  I was glad for my atheism.  For the first time I was glad I didn't believe in a god, an omnipotent god that would allow this to happen, that could will this to happen.  People around me, people of faith tried to tell me there was a reason, a rationale unknown to us of why God would allow this to happen, will this to happen.  Perhaps God was saving Liam from a worse fate? I demanded to know what worse fate a man can know than to be robbed of a life before it can start, after being slowly tortured and daily killed piece by piece for a year and a half, spending a third of your life battling  hell to survive and ultimately being told by this God that it doesn't matter what you want, or what you deserve, or what you were promised, you lose.  I told my friend, I was happy I didn't believe in God, because if I did believe in a god, I would be so overwhelmed with hatred and rage for that god that it would consume me.  I have found peace and liberation in the understanding that the world is a place that has a certain order.  Wonderful things happen and terrible things happen.  People are born and people die.  It comes to all of us.  Some good people die before their time and some evil people don't die soon enough.  Once you remove the malicious intent from the rules of the universe and realize that we are, so do what you can to contribute to the world and enjoy life, the answers come a lot easier.  Despite the darkness I felt after losing Lim piece by piece, followed by oblivion, I did feel an emptiness.  I did feel a want for some comfort, even if that comfort came with a price.  I felt if I took comfort in the church I would be cheating, like smoking a cigarette or going back on the bottle after working hard to become sober (don't worry, I haven't done anything stupid like that)  Anyway, I had this emptiness.  There was a point at which I felt I wanted to kill the pain and thought about drowning it with booze or numbing it with drugs, and though it was tempting, I was luckily faced with the needs of a young daughter that was reeling and even more confused than I.  So eventually, I had to move forward, work again, brush off some of the dust and decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life.  I had been laid off as a carpenter just as Liam was getting seriously ill and I had no real desire to try to hustle work with the construction racket being in shambles due to the crappy economy.  I needed a job and I found one.  I started working at the Christi School (Christie Care, then called Youth Villages /Christie Care, then called Youth Villages of Oregon)  but at that time, working in a residential mental heath facility for youth, I was personally working through some prtty deep emotional trauma.  This was the perfect place.  I found a refuge in the Cedar Bough program, a program designed to meet the needs of Native American youth through re-ed behavioral counseling with a strong spiritual and cultural component.  The staff and the clients were there for their reasons, but what I found amidt these broken kids, these children that had endured horrific experiences, as well as their cultures history of collective trauma, what I discovered was something so profound, something so moving that I eventually found something that I thought was dead and gone.  I found spirituality.  I found a spirituality that transcends race or title or pretense.  I found a rudimentary connection to something sacred within myself and withing the people I met that brought me greater understanding of the world around me.  I was allowed a small peek into a world that has been glorified and sanitized and hyperbolized by Disney and Hollywood and countless hippies that insist their great-grandmother on their mother's side was a Cherokee princess.  I got just a glimpse, while sitting in a dark sweat lodge, listening to a Lakota medicine man tell me that his words, his truth, the words of the spirits are for all men.  The Lakota are the keepers of the story, but not to keep it from the rest of the world, but to share it with them.  So there I was, a stranger, in a foreign environment, being accepted without judgement, being allowed to experience the creation of the universe as experienced by the Lakota.  And as I saw the red ember, the only light in the lodge, glowing hot, I felt a spark ignite in me.  Perhaps it will go out, perhaps it will rage. I don't know.  All I know is that where there was nothing, now something exists.  I cannot put a name to it, but I don't feel the need to right now.  For now, like the Dude, I will abide.

Epilogue

I was having a discussion with my brother Gabe.  We were discussing faith and our religion.  Gabe was not a  very church-y person.  He, well I guess that is his story to tell.  While I was dealing with Liam, and the fallout from his loss, Gabe was suffering from that, but he was in a deep cycle of grief over the loss of our father.  He had been working hard on processing that loss (a loss I am only now really dealing with)  We were discussing our connection to our father and Gabe told me (in not so many words) that his experience of Catholicism was his communion with our father.  His participation in the church is his keeping the commandment and honouring his father.  In respecting the traditions of our father, he is communing with him and keeping him alive.  His faith was his expression of the eternal spark of our father's soul.  I took that concept and let it steep for a while.  Sophia started at Pius X Catholic School this past fall.  We have technically been parishioners there since 2000, but nobody there knew us, aside from a few people that knew us as Don Boss's daughter and son-in-law.  Don's kind of a legend there, as he was the custodian for quite a few years before he retired.  Ah, the gifts of the father.  So, we returned to the church.  At the same time, the parish got a new pastor, a young and (I must say) passionate preacher.  Fr Weeks discussed scripture in a way I always longed for in pastors, much the way Jim Coleman or well, no other great orators come to mind, though I have known many...did.  So, accepting that my presence in church is a good example for my daughter, with no wishes to poison her faith and a new opportunity to rejoin the community of faith from which I was born, I have found peace in the church once again.  I have a different sensibility about it all.  I feel no particular allegiance to the pope, in fact I think this one is kind of a jerk.  In all fairness, it's kind of hard to follow up after JP2 right?  I focus less on the intransigent dogma than the intent.  And, if my training has taught me anything, I have learned that the law may be important, but nothing trumps the conscience.  So, unfortunately for all those ultra-conservative, Knights-of Columbus-ring-wearing soldiers for Christ out there, you've got ME to deal with, a loud mouthed, sermon-on-the-mount-loving, turn-the-other-cheek Catholic who wont take no hate nonsense from anyone.  Beware.  And peace be with you.

Verse for The Dragonslayer

Liam was diagnosed with ALL, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia on Friday, May 9^th, 2008. Before the journey we took as a family truly began, in that haze of the first few days in the hospital, our minds swimming with the overwhelming reams of data, I panicked. I wrote down anything that came to mind, usually in verse. Not one of my calculated, metered and true form ballads or sonnets. I was fiercely searching for something, a tether with which to strap myself to that mast of the ship that was circling the drain. I tell you this as a preface, to beg your patience and pardon for the severe lack of polish on these scripts herein. That being said, I would like to share a few lines I wrote within the first two or three days of learning of Liam's leukemia, while we were in the hospital, in the wee hours, waiting for his dangerously high fever to subside:

Panic

5/11/2008

Panic

temperature rising

fraction of a degree

by fraction of a degree

toward the boiling point

his fragile mind bends

buckling below the weight of the Kelvin scale

prayer, meditation, wishes, spells...worthless

time heals all...or not

time is a healer

time is a killer

time is something in precious short demand

soon we'll have all the time we can handle

so simmer down

and stew a while

whilst my life blood fades away

and my little prince slides slowly down the precipice

caught only by the fancy of my heart

No cosmic net

No Jedi force field

No deific buffer

No magical parachute

No justice

bend time for me

split space and atoms

minimize me and inject me into his cells

so I may do battle and face his disease

let cancer feel my sting

let me conquer it for you

We were so certain, initially that Liam's battle was simple, we would complete his treatment and he would be alright. This was of course before his fish test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence_in_situ_hybridization after which we learned that Liam's cancer had a rare chromosomal anomaly (hypodiploidi) that greatly reduced his chances of remaining in remission. We had hope and that, in the midst of everything else I was experiencing exhibited as both mania and impatience. Very helpful.

Little Big Man

5/11/2008

My eyes were the first you saw

like Caesar did you issue forth

My little big man with broken blood

You don't know yet what you're worth

You're living proof of your mother's love

And love I've for my wife

When I'm gone and my body's cold

You prove the worth of my life

We chose you, we made you in love

you grow each day, one by one

and now each day brings you closer

to when your treatment is done

Our plans, our dreams are on hold

But I have faith in you Liam

I know we'll make it together boy

And my golden years you'll see them.

Liam was, for those of you who never met him, a brave yet mild child. He was tall and thin and smiled in a way that reassured people. I wanted so madly to do something, to save this child for myself, yes, but mostly for the world. It is tragic when you hear about a child dying, or when you witness death and its aftermath. But when a truly majestic soul is snuffed out, well before its time, that injustice is impossible to reckon.

When we were in the hospital for our extended stays with Liam, Sophia stayed with Lisette's parents. They were great at bringing her by frequently, but even in the beginning, I felt a pang at the prospect of losing the elder child, while at the same time losing the experience of living, breathing and experiencing those precious moments with the junior. When Sophia was born, Liam, only two, called her Fifi.

FiFi

5/11/2008

Little one, Fifi

you are not forgotten

lost in the shuffle

slipped through a crack in our hearts

Your sweet silence

Your sweet smile

Your desire for love and affection apparent

You are not forgotten

Overshadowed by a cancerous cloud

But not blotted out or concealed from our love

The needs of your brother are many

Your needs are many

Balance will be struck

And life is not fair

But I have two hands

One to hold each of you

And as I live and breath

You will be loved and shown love

Little one, Fifi,

You are not forgotten

lost in the shuffle

Slipped through a crack in our hearts

You are loved.

Thank you for indulging me. I have not been able to look through a lot of my writings from the early days. This blog and those that have spoken with me about it have inspired me to try and reconnect with that person I was, the man that wrote these lines. Sometimes he seems like a stranger and at other times, I feel I am still writing them, Liam in the room with me, an IV in his arm, sweat on his brow and the long curly locks still pasted to his forehead. I try not to dwell in that room too much, for fear I will never leave.  Much love and bless you all.

Gifts of the son...

Gifts of the Son…
 The true secret of parenthood, the truth that is laid out in front of your face before you become a father, explained in detail as you await the birth of your first born, but never truly understood until it is experienced for oneself is that children are more than a gift.  They are Santa Claus.  They constantly and without fail grant you gifts, sometimes ones that were not on your list, but greater than anything you could even concoct after months of introspection and wishing.  
 I think of the gifts of my children, the gifts they have given to me.  I will work in reverse birth order since the last born usually gets the shaft when the issue of first experiences is discussed.  Mario, well he has taught me that some people become grandmasters of funk, and some people are born to it.  Given a choice between Vivaldi, Cat Stevens and Bootsy Collins, Mario will take the latter most without fail.  He has a little toy van that has a button that plays music.  His favorite is (as Lisette puts it) “the pimp music,” a sweet funk riff with wah-wah and classic drum rolls.  I can see him bumping along as he feels the flow.  Mario is an anomaly in our home, with his blond hair, his crinkly nose, fair features and penchant for the Mexican game tope (basically shouting "tope!" and then headbutting someone.  I always felt I could easily read my kids, their wants, their needs.  I don’t think it is the changes in me so much as that Mario is just hard to get.  He teaches me constantly that you cannot take anything for granted, even the needs and will of your children.  He has also given me the gift of laughter, an ability that I lived without for a long time.  When dealing with the death of a child and relatively soon afterward deciding to have another child, there is the worry in your heart that others (or secretly you as well) will perceive this new child as a replacement or a substitute.  You argue in your heart (sometimes unconvincingly) against this idea and you reassure yourself and your family vociferously that this is not an attempt to fill a void or erase the pain of your past.  However, somewhere in the quiet, you tell yourself in a small voice, “he is here because Liam is not.”  But, I will get back to that later.  Now, after we made the decision to create a new life, to bring hope and genesis (not Phil Collins) into our home, I inevitably came to peace with the decision.  As soon as my conflicted thoughts and guilt were resolved, I realized that the worst thing I could do was to every let Mario think that he was a second-string son, or a fill-in-the-blank.  I committed to not only refrain from comparing Mario to Liam in my mind, but to remind myself daily that Liam will forever be a small child in my mind.  He never had the opportunity to go through puberty and curse in my face and tell me he hates me or that I just don’t understand him.  Liam died in a state of grace and innocence that is untenable for anyone that makes it past their 5th birthday.  Mario’s last and greatest gift to me was the gift of letting go, not of my love or anguish over Liam, but of the guilt associated with his death.  Witnessing the (for lack of a more succinct or appropriate term) miracle of Mario’s conception and safe birth, I was reminded after so many years of suffering and loss that great things, powerful and positive things do happen.  They happen to all of us if we are aware enough to bear witness to them.  Mario brought me  a new perspective on my life, a refreshed and renewed opportunity to start looking at the glass as being half full again.  And he reminds me daily of the reasons I labor and endure.  His love, his smile, his excitement at seeing me and his need of my love is a gift.
 Sophia…she instructs me daily in the power of resilience. Sophia struggled through every bit of the loss of Liam and the compassion that one faces while witnessing someone you love slowly dying. She did not always understand the changes that were occurring, but she knew her best friend in the whole world was sick and then one day he was gone. She was young enough that we could have explained a lot away, tried to wash her brother from her memory to save her grief and confusion and horrific dreams of loss and death. Instead, we decided the greatest gift we could give her was to strengthen her connection to her brother, despite his absence. We have Sophia pray to Liam every night, asking for his aide in protecting our friends and family that are sick or worried. Sophia asks Liam to welcome the souls of our friends and family members that go to heaven and she believes he takes them by the hand and leads them to paradise. Sophia shows me daily that there is so much more living to do and that moving forward from tragedy is not the same as denying it or forgetting the past. Sophia grants me the gift of reassurance. I am constantly reassured that though life is fragile and our lives tenuous, not every child is destined to die and not every life will be snuffed out before it has a chance to reach its apex. Sophia reaffirms the assumption every parent that has not lost a child holds that the parent will protect the child and the child will outlive the parent. As she ages and she passes through her regular pediatric checkups without any sign of devastating disease or life-threatening illness, we are brought closer and closer to the blissful peace that allows a parent to enjoy parenthood and not simply be paralyzed with fear because our child hasn't been diagnosed "yet." Sophia brings us so many gifts, the gifts of humor and music and zaniness. She gives us the opportunity to offer advice on friends and relationships. She allows us the opportunity to assist as she navigates the minefield of social interactions that is school. Sophia also allows us to keep Liam "alive" in the fact that she speaks of him constantly and openly with her family and friends. Now she is older than Liam was when he passed away. She has taken the role of the older sibling and had to cede her position of "baby" sibling and all the comfort that entails. She has done a remarkable job and continues to amaze us in her ability and willingness to be a leader and take on the role of #1 helper. Sophia gives us the gifts of hugs as well.
Liam...Liam's gifts were always many. I dote on my little angel, and sometimes pine for the man he never had the opportunity to become. It can be maddening, thinking of all the experiences and accomplishments that we missed out on together. To stay on point, I recount the many gifts that Liam gave us. He shared with us his charisma, a charming child that had an infectious personality. He had an ability, of which these days I can only envy, to be able to disarm people with his smile and innocence, provide the perfect comment and inspire people with his greatness. Liam's second great gift to me was his courage. He was so small when he got sick. he hated the many many medical procedures, frequent spinal taps, surgeries, chemotherapy treatments, full body irradiation and a bone marrow transplant that required a long time in the hospital and a constant tax on his body. Throughout it all, Liam remained positive. Through nausea and roid-rage and neutropenia, he prevailed. When I would have laid down in my bed and cried, he got up, strapped on a surgical mask, wheeled his iv tree behind him and played dinosaur hunt in the hallway, his sword in hand. That kind of bravery is not something that one can readily ignore or forget. Liam gave me and Lisette so many lessons, the gift of knowledge, the gift of understanding that our love for one another was so powerful that it could overcome complete desolation. The knowledge that injustice occurs and sometimes there is nothing one can do other than pick up your tattered self and trudge onward with the hope of finding sunrise again, hope of finding solace. Liam taught us strength and his absence taught us the importance of that lesson. Finally, Liam gave us one last gift, perhaps a greater gift than any of us could repay, were we given the chance. After Sophia was born, I had a vasectomy. We were done. we had a life, a family, a plan; we were ready to start working toward building a strong and successful future for ourselves and our children. When Liam became ill, we put the plan on hold...we were in stasis. When he died, we were falling, in darkness. We made a decision that we were going to provide Sophia with a brother. We were going to do for her what Liam would want, a companion, a tether to happiness and the world. We would bring a new life into this world, with Liam's tacit assent, to bring wholeness back to our lives. So we sought the best medical help we could find and I underwent a reversal operation for my vasectomy. Now, I had heard that the operation was pretty iffy as far as success rates. The doctor assure me that since the vasectomy was less than 3 years old, I was under 35 years old and since we had successfully procreated in the past, the odds were actually pretty good, maybe 80%. So we went ahead with it. Almost immediately, Lisette got pregnant. She had a harrowing pregnancy with a subchorionic hemorrhage, and was bedridden for a large part of the pregnancy. At the end of the day, our little Mario was born, ten fingers, ten toes. He is a prince, so funny and so passionate. I have a thousand reasons to miss Liam and a thousand more to thank him, but in perhaps the most Christ-like act of his life, in his death, a passing from this world that he loved and cherished, he gave the gift of life to a brother he never met. I know that if the two of them had ever met, the first thing that Liam would have done would be to hand Mario a toy dinosaur to hide, and the first thing Mario would have done would be to run toward Liam and gleefully shout, "Tope!!!"

Sins of the father, sins of the son...

In reflection I try to think of the times I was angry, disappointed, embarrassed, ashamed or otherwise upset by my father's actions.  My dad was a complex person.  He had such a capacity for love and compassion.  His attention to detail and obsessiveness when it came to his work, his craft was both enviable and infuriating.  Pat had a great gift for tempering his criticism with an impulsive impatience that would burn white and hot and go out quickly like magnesium...I have some of this, ok, I own this.  He worked as much as he could.  When he wasn't working, he was finding work.  His projects were varied.  One day he's paint a house, next week he'd be remodeling a basement.  In his spare time (what spare time?) he's hunt and fish and do the obligatory neighborhood possum extermination (he was really good at killing possums.  Don't worry, I have never eaten one, though he was quite an adventurous eater.  I remember he and Jess Wells recalling the time they ate deer brains.  They both had grimaces on their faces, so I didn't press the issue too far.  The truth that many people don't understand is that my father lived two lives, not concurrent lives, but consecutive.  As a child, my parents, members of the Portland Catholic Worker (GO PCW KIDS!!!) lived lives of service and ministry to the poor and homeless.  We and our friends/extended spiritual family opened our homes to people with nowhere to go.  We began the St. Francis Soup Kitchen.  The Wells', Jewett-Baranskis, O'Donnell-Iharas, Barnharts, Adler-Pruntys and the McNassars (along with many others that were active, tangential, integral and/or helpful)  In all of our phases and incarnations as a community of faith and service, we were a family.  We lived on "the block" on Alder Street in SE Portland, a communal background and (as I have stated earlier, I recall few details of my life) all I really remember other than running around the pool with Meaghen, Molly and Margo or a number of fistfights and instances of torture at the hands of my brothers is a complete sense of peace and acceptance, more than the normal bliss of childhood ignorance.  It was the peace that the innocent in the cradle of Utopia possess.  I realize now that much of that perception I held was purely naivete, but my father did nothing to dispel that notion.  He and my mother tried to foster it.  There was great hope behind the mission to serve.  There was great hope in humanity, hope in the future.  They struggled to ensure the world their children would inherit would be safe and filled with love.  They would protest global military aggression and lay their bodies across the tracks of the white train as it progressed across country, laden with nuclear warheads.  We were taught by example the value of every person and the challenge that Jesus gave every one of us to love the unlovable, feed the hungry, forgive the trespasser, accept incarceration as the price of a clean conscience and to be willing to place the needs of others before your own.
  I grew up understanding the value of simple living, with few extras, hand-me-downs in the dresser and government assistance to eat at times.  Through all of this, my dad was faithful to God and to his ideals.  Sometimes his loyalty was feverish, reactionary and a little over the top.  I remember watching the movie Forrest Gump and when Gump went to the Black Panther's HQ and saw Jenny's dickish boyfriend (Wesley) I thought "Hey, it's Dad!"  It wasn't so much the slapping Jenny around as it was the rage that was blamed on that sonofabitch Johnson and led to zeal.  Now I don't mean to impart to anyone, especially those that never met my father that he was in any way an evil or malicious person.  He was very good and his heart was full of love and copassion.  He was very good at showing that during his first life.  I remember him holding me in his arms, the faint smell of beer on his breath, and the bristle of his moustache as he would kiss me.  My dad was free with his love, a little prudish about sexual expression, but he was born in Iowa for Pete's sake.  He loved us each, individually and totally.  He struggled with Sarah at times, though I was never privy to what that whole thing was about.  There is a lot to explain in this short format, but there will be time for that later.  Needless to say, I loved my father and despite the normal Cat Stevens father and son crap that I went through with the man, I always knew he loved me, I never doubted it.  I understood him too, well at least in his first life.
  Like so many other things in this world, the Portland Catholic Worker community came to an end.  I was a kid so I never really got an explanation on that either.  It doesn't really matter other than the fact that as a result, we moved to Northeast Portland at a time in Portland's history when that was not necessarily a good thing for an incorrigibly innocent little honkey to be plopped down in the middle of a booming gang war.  Now, NE PDX is no, and never will be no Compton.  I get that.  Still, in the 80's, there was some shit going down.  It was a great lesson to learn that all people are created equal and that everyone deserves to be treated as a human and shown grace and compassion.  I just had to find out that not everybody else was taught these same lessons at their house.  After getting beaten up at school, beaten up at the park, beaten up on the front porch and chased down the street by two quite rotund girls that were intent on beating me up on the curb, I decided to take a personal inventory and reassess whether or not my world view was really working out for me.  I bring this pattern of violence (all of it unsolicited) as an obvious forshadow to the death of my father as I knew him and the beginning of his second life.  We had moved to our house on 17th and Killingsworth, the third and final house I lived in with my family.  We had been there for probably eight or nine years.  I think I was in seventh or eighth grade.  Things had been pretty good.  I mean my parents worked, my dad was in a good frame of mind.  The neighborhood around us was pretty rough.  We knew most of the families on our block and we were all tight, but our block was an island, an anomaly.  All around us there were gunshots at night and sometimes in midday.  One day he walked up to the corner store for whatever.  He saw three guys, straight thuggin' walking down the street toward him.  He later recounted to me that every bone in his body was telling him "Cross to the other side of the street, these guys are bad news."  He blamed his "liberal b.s." for continuing on his way and giving the guys the benefit of the doubt.  As the three men passed him, one swung a 40 oz bottle and clubbed him in the temple.  He was knocked out cold.  When he woke up, he had a black eye, some pretty extensive damage and he was bed ridden for a few days.  He wore a patch for a little bit, but those things all disappeared and as far as I knew, the incident was over.  Little did I know that my father, the man I had always known, that had bounced me on his knee and had shown me how to accept humanity with an open heart died that day.  Now, not all of his goodness died. Not all of his humor died.  His love for us didn't die.  It was the passionately liberal and accepting person that died that day.
  The first sign that things had changed was when my dad got his concealed handgun permit.  Now, I am fine with the 2nd amendment and all.  I like shooting and I love hunting.  I do not however feel the need to carry a handgun to the grocery store.  I don't want to be responsible for that crap.  So, my dad, Mr. Liberal started listening to this new conservative shock jock named Rush.  He retreated to his office when he wasn't working.  He began reading books about personal wealth and purchasing Tony Robbins tapes.  I mean all of this stuff happened over a span of a few years, but it was all there.  He tried to get out of the house painting/carpentry racket and tried a bunch of different careers.  He sold cars for Ron Tonkin, he was a Killer (exterminator)  he got involved in a pyramid scheme selling water filtration devices (now that one truly was ahead of its time, unfortunately too far ahead of its time).  Eventually he joined the union, but his politics became more and more diametrically opposed to the frame of mind that led him to walk down the wrong side of the street and "get himself killed."  I was young, but I think the first time I truly understood that there was something really wrong was when he voted for Ross Perot.  Things got pretty hot around the house.  I mean he was the only person that was feeling these things and identifying with this crap.  The rest of us were the people he had raised us to be, political, fervently liberal and mystified at what was going on in his head.  My mother must have wondered what the hell the bodysnatchers did with her husband and if he was ever coming back.  So my once happy home, poor but satisfied and happy, continued to be poor, but less satisfied and much less happy.  Sarah was out of the house, off to Tacoma, not to return (not judging,)  Dan was off in "me" land, (not judging), Gabe was the enigma of all enigmas at this point, pissed off at the world,  (a little bit of judging, because he laid into me kinda hard at times, but that is long since behind us)  Conor and Phil got the brunt of this weird Kafkaesque metamorphosis of the man, and I don't know if they even remembered the father they lost.  I was in high school, so oblivious to anything that didn't involve my friends, my wallet or my gonads.  (sorry for that :) )  It just went downhill from there.  There was eight freaking years of "Goddamn Clinton!)  and we stopped talking to one another.  After I left the house and graduated from the University of Portland, I made an effort, and he made an effort.  I got married in 2000 and shortly afterward he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  It was diagnosed late and pretty much shot the chances for a full remission.  Thanks to some experimental treatments and some amazing luck, he lived with it for a long time.  We worked together for a while, first with my Uncle Joe,as he was trying to get his business off the ground. Later, the two of us went out together, Patrick McNassar and Son(s) was born. He helped me figure out that i needed to grow up a bit so I could start and support a family.  We worked on our projects, listening to Glen Beck and actually getting along quite well.  I had to remap my thought processes, my instincts, my preconceptions and guard my reactions to Mike Savage, Lars Larson and the dittohead caca that just spewed forth uncontrollably and unchecked at times.  Now I know a lot of conservative guys and they are all entitled to their points of view and their "truths" but it just wasn't this guy.  So we parted ways after a bit.  He tried to get some union work.  I tried to find something stable.  As it was, my father inspired me to try my hand at building as a career and I applied for and was accepted into the carpenters apprenticeship.  It was great and I felt connected to him in a way that I hadn't experienced in such a long time.
  Slowly, his health declined.  He was excited to meet Liam, his first grandchild.  He held him and knew him. He took great joy in playing with Liam even if he was bound to a wheelchair and eventually a bed.  My dad, who had always been so agile and hearty, like a wiry monkey climbing up on roofs and hiking miles through the forest with a rifle and a pack without getting winded, was shutting down.  There were so many battles going on in his heart and his mind.  There was a battle in my mind between his two identities as well.  I saw in him, when Liam sat on the edge of his bed, that same look of hope and encouragement that he had shared with me when I was small.  It was almost as if the fact that his time here was limited that he could finally let go of the trauma that had turned him on his head and caused him so much continuous grief for so long.  He was slowing down a bit and then his brother John, my godfather was diagnosed with the same cancer.  Within a month or two, John was gone.  It was so shocking, so overwhelming, so tragic.  And as 2005 drew to a close, we knew that our time with our father was growing short.  The boys took him out fishing one last time and we spent as much time with him as we could.  It was really only the last month that he was confined solely to his bed.  It was just the last week, the last few days that he lost the ability to talk.  He lived long enough to know that he was going to be a grandfather again.  It was a Friday, the 13th actually, a little ominous I know.  I knew the time was short.  My mother's washer and dryer crapped out and I offered to drive up to Sarah's to get the spare set in her garage.  He died as I was on the road.  I was a little conflicted about that for a while, sorrowful.  Someone very wise and full of compassion (you know who you are, but I cannot remember, remember?) pointed out that I was doing exactly what my dad would have done had he been able.  So, my absence was excusable.  So it was on the 13th of January, 2006, that my father died for the second time.At the wake (one hell of a party) Otto Wild tugged at my shoulder and asked quietly, "What's the deal with these?"  He was holding a personalized Christmas card from George W Bush to my dad and had a very confused look on his face.

Epilogue:

Many people have voices or personality traits that act in concert/conflict within themselves.  Few of us however have such a distinct and externally observable dichotomy.  I could chalk the whole thing up to PTSD or a psychotic break, but the truth is more than that.  My dad was a Catholic, a seminarian, devout and true.  He was passionate.  He chose a path and followed it to its conclusion, twice.  Passionately.

"The change in the weather
is known to be extreme,
But what's the sense of changing
horses in midstream
I'm going out of my mind
with a pain that stops and starts
like a corkscrew in my heart
ever since we've been apart"
             - Bob Dylan "You're A Big Girl Now"
 

I find that I have forgotten so much.  I do not remember much of my life.  What I do retain is fragmented, broken pieces, mostly emotions tied to tragedy or triumph.  Keystone moments of my life, great rejections, first kisses, kiss offs, broken hearts and fulfilled promises.  Some would say these are the things we are meant to remember, but for a guy that can recall Joe Mantegna's 1991 monologue from when he hosted Saturday Night Live, well...fragmented recall is unacceptable.  I know that the much of life is mundane and I in particular have spent much of it in passing time as quickly and painlessly as possible, but I remember enough to know that there are thousands of anecdotes and moments that were so intriguing that if I could just collect them and form them into a basic narrative, they would enthrall the reader to no end.  A house full of boys is never short of chaos or angst.  There was blood, noses and gerbils thrown from a second story window (nice work Conor) and there was an incident where I reenacted a scene from Crocodile Dundee telling my brother that what he held was not a knife, though as I made to pull out a bigger knife, his little pen knife opened my palm, proving both my point moot and the point that the pen may be mightier than the sword, but perhaps the penknife to be mightier still.  
  I guess when it comes down to it, I have to start with the things I remember clearly.  I remember the garage of my condo.  I remember being ankle deep in cedar shavings, planing out the edges of a box.  Daniel had come to my need as I had previously done for him, in the wake of his own tragedy, when his own sweet Rebecca has died after three short days of life.  Daniel brought wood and his help.  We cut a box, at first much too deep, but after calling the cemetery caretaker and affirming the appropriate dimensions, we amended our plan and we were back on track.  I was a little concerned that the stress of a body, even a small one would be too much for the soft wood and it would break, spilling my son's body on the ground, adding insult to catastrophe.  I realized I was exaggerating the stresses placed on the box.
  I took a step back and reassessed.  Of course I had wasted precious time, first planning on purchasing a coffin rather than building one.  Liam was breathing his last and I felt too overwhelmed to move, let alone build something, with everything rent around me.  It was when he was gone, with a known timeline that I understood how important this was.  With Rebecca, Daniel and I needed to have her coffin immediately, before the Sabbath began, a coffin with no metal fasteners, appropriate for an infant.  All the cemetery had available was some flimsy plastic thing that he wouldn't bury a Barbie doll in.  That was necessity.  With Liam, this was necessity as well, but of a different sort.  I needed to know that he would be covered in love for eternity.  We built a box out of cedar, a sacred plant.  I padded the inside and lined it with white satin.  I fastened steamer trunk handles that I had used for my work cart and that had accompanied me through my apprenticeship, a difficult and arduous learning experience.  I oiled the wood with Dark Walnut colored Danish Wood Oil oil and used extra upholstery tacks to make the halo of a celtic cross overlay I had affixed to the cover of the coffin.  The lid bolted down to the bottom of the box.  Looking at it, I thought only of how clumsy and oversized it looked.  I was concerned because the boards had not been jointed and there were a few small gaps that the casual observer would probably ignore or miss.  Our neighbor Kathy came by with a smile on her face earlier in the day.  She saw me starting the project and asked cheerfully what I was working on.  Daniel ran interference and told her what we were doing and why.  She broke down and retreated back to the safety of her home, to lick her wounds.  The sheer number of people that were affected by Liam's death still continues to amaze me.  Not because I doubt his influence or the impact a small child can have on such a large number of people, but because I had almost convinced myself that his charisma and greatness were merely in my mind, a father's love and adoration which magnifies his son's qualities to epic status, Achilles to my mind.  So there I stood, an hour before dawn, alone in the garage, pressing the final golden pins into the lid of my son's coffin.  With each one, I said a prayer, though I was certain there was no one at the other end of my stream of consciousness.  I prayed that I had done right by Liam.  I prayed that I had made an acceptable resting place.  I prayed that despite all of my failings, I had been an adequate father, balancing the gifts of providence with love and devotion.  I hoped Liam knew as he lay there in the dark, in his mothers arms, blinded by the train that had pulled into the station to carry him into oblivion , that he took with him, in a satchel under his arm, the best parts of me, the parts that swallowed life by the gulp and choked on it with mirth, the parts that recognized beauty in simple graces and loved rolling down a hill and collapsing into a heap at the bottom, bereft of breath or shame in the act.  Those things were gone.  I allowed the last vestiges of my art, my desire to perform my craft, my energy to do anything to flow through my hands and fingertips and press those gold upholstery tacks into the soft cedar lid.  I walked up the long flight of stairs to the main floor, expecting Lisette to be asleep.  She was awake of course, her son was dead, there would be no sleep this evening.  I brought her down and showed her my work.  She nodded assent and that was that.
  Later we brought the casket to the funeral home.  They prepared the body.  Since Liam was so small and would be buried immediately, he was not embalmed.  The funeral home took such beautiful care of him, completely gratis.  Lisette and I viewed the body.  Liam was in a beige sweater and khaki slacks, his most prized possessions laid in his coffin with him.  His sword and shield at his feet like a fallen Norse warrior.  His dragons and totems.  In a final feverish attempt at eternal proximity, I cut a silver half dollar into 4ths (please don't tell the treasury department) and placed one of the 4ths with Liam.  One I now wear on a chain around my neck.  Lisette has one around hers as well.  We have a last piece for Sophia when she is old enough to be responsible with it.  I thought Mario may want one as well.  In that eventuality, I think I will take a coirner off mine and inset it in a ring and give the necklace to Mario.  I will wear the ring.  Michelle came into the room as we said our final goodbye to our son.  She took a few pictures.  Lisette asked the funeral director several times if he was sure Liam was dead.  He looked like he was asleep.  We touched his cold skin, kissed his cold lips and placed the lid on the coffin, screwing to top down securely.  We brought him to St. Anthony's where his Great Grandparents, his Great-Great Grandmother, two Great Uncles, a cousin and other family members lay nearby.  As a piper played his favorite tune, Loch Lomond into the wind, a small cedar chest that carried my hope was laid into a hole, covered with dirt and cloaked in black.  This was my worst day.

  In an attempt to collect my thoughts, channel them into a cogent stream of consciousness and hopefully result in helpful reflection (for myself if for none other) I have endeavored to commit to type the musings submitted herein.  For any observers, I apologize from the onset any self-indulgent behavior, for which I am frequently guilty.  To myself, I give you permission to speak freely without threat of shame or recourse.

  Now that is out of the way, I would like to say that the purpose of this journal is to remember the two most influential people in my life to this point:  My father, Patrick Maur McNassar, b. 8/29/1946, d. 1/13/2006 and my son, Liam Patrick McNassar b. 8/27/2004, d. 6/10/2009.  It is through these two people I learned what I should be as a father and as a son.  I learned by example as well as by trial.  I learned as well technique and my goal for spirituality.  In the lives of the two individuals, one that created me and one that I in turn created, both loved well and buried by my own hand, I found a need for understanding and grace.  I have found in their loves, so different, though rooted in the same bonds of blood and element, peace in the knowledge that the gifts I have to share are gifts given to me by them.  I was given two great examples of how to live a life wherein you are true to yourself, honest about your role in the world and above all else, loyal to the ones you love and who rely on you for security, guidance and love.  It is my goal to illustrate the gifts of Patrick and Liam as well as discuss the lasting effects of their presences on my world view as well as my image of myself.  I hope through this Odyssey to eventually understand my role as father and son in a way that I can affect those I love in as positive a way as my father and my son have.