Who I’m Missing Challenge Responses

Prompts from Kevin Buddaeus and Sherry McGuinn

Nothing like a twofer to feel the surge of righteous productivity coursing through the veins, eh?

A writing brother and writing sister both tagged me at the end of this week to offer my thoughts on how this pandemic has impacted me because of the isolation and separation.

Who am I missing right now?

Well, it’s complicated. I suppose to be true to all who read me, and to myself, this is probably going to be similar to one of those pieces I produced in the past about writing from a place of vulnerability.

Big breath in, hold it, now let it out. Here we go.

I’m already missing the people I miss. I’ve been missing them for years. The old man walking down a road with a tombstone on one side and the stone crosses on the other?

Well, that’s me.

I’m going to take my wife, daughters, and grandkids out of the equation for just a minute. But, I’ll get back to them. This piece is about missing my father, my mother, my uncle, my grandfather, my grandmother, and my brother.

I’m probably not the only Human in the world experiencing this situation, but I have outlived them all. It’s interesting how at sixty-seven, there is simply nothing left of my core family, my immediate non-cousin family.

Sure, on my wife’s side, she has her sisters (who she really doesn’t miss — yes, there’s a story there, but I doubt she’ll let me tell it) still living and close by. For me, all of my immediate family has already left the building, so to speak.

Do I miss my father, a stoic, aloof man who treated his two sons with a chilled heart and a healthy attitude toward corporal punishment? I can’t really say that I do. I’ve tried, oh God, I’ve wanted to relive a precious moment, a moment of joy and happiness I spent with my father.

And to this day, sixty-seven years later, I can’t think of a single time.

In the last fifteen years of my father’s life, I didn’t even know where he lived, who he was married to, and really how he died. My father and I weren’t just apart from each other, we were estranged. He didn’t care if I reached out to him, and it finally got to the point where I didn’t care if he did or not.

I know. I’m going to hell.

I never had but a few moments to miss my uncle. There were some enjoyable conversations I had with the man where he told me about prototype airplanes he flew as an Air Force test pilot.

Back then, I wanted to be an Air Force fighter pilot, so he certainly had my attention. I mean, what kid didn’t want to be an ace fighter pilot?

And then my uncle was gone, hanged himself from a cross beam in his garage, discovered by his wife and his two young daughters. My cousins, who grew up fast because they had to, and never bothered to look behind.

Oh, and my mother? Well, because of my brother’s situation, which happened when he was twenty months old, she couldn’t handle the pressure of constant vitriol and mental abuse my grandmother doled out. My mother left when I was eight.

I saw her once when I was twenty, and then again two years later. She’d remarried, and that husband developed a brain tumor and passed away, leaving her a whole lot better than well to do.

Somehow word got back to me she’d died in a car accident in Greece with her new husband almost forty years her junior.

And then grandma, dear grandma. Evidently, I reminded her of her son Paul Wayne. Well, I was named Paul, so in her mind, the transfer of attention from a dead Paul to a live Paul was pretty easy for her.

My brother and I spent a lot of time living with my grandparents while my dear old dad was “finding” himself and a suitable replacement for my mother. Anecdotally, he never did.

Grandma was never the same after a car accident that pulverized her backbones in five or six places. Only with three rods in her back was she able to stand and walk.

So who would rather deal with the pain of now when memories of a past life were much simpler and less painful? For my grandma, it was so much easier to spend the rest of her life in the past.

The rest of her life spent suffering dementia and advanced Alzheimers to the point she didn’t even know when her husband, my grandpa, lost first one leg then another to diabetes and later succumbed and died.

I went many times (but never enough times) to see my grandmother and it was always the same. I would have a thirty-minute conversation with her and be forced to re-introduce myself every five minutes.

On the last couple of trips, before she died, I quit introducing myself. I would simply tell her I saw her sitting in her wheelchair and thought she might like to have someone to talk to.

She always did.

I loved my grandfather. He was more of a father to me than his son ever was. We went fishing together, hunting together, read books together, wrote stories together. We laughed at the same silly stuff, and the man taught me how to make the most beautiful tasting biscuits and pancakes from scratch.

Even now, my heart aches when I think about his last days. High on morphine because of the amputations of his legs, his body ravaged by diabetes.

When he died, a whole lot of me died with him.

The last of my family to disappear was my brother. I’ve written about him before, and about the last time I saw him alive was in the living room of my house after I’d rescued him from a life of squalor of my grandparent’s house with no running water or electricity.

My wife and I took the kids to school and daycare, went to work, and when we returned home, he was gone. He’d taken his belongings and left.

I never saw my brother again.

We received word from one of his four ex-wives of his demise and internment somewhere in Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, or Nebraska.

Now, one might believe after all this, it would be a coin toss with how successful I would be as a parent. I mean, the apple doesn’t far too far from the dysfunctional tree does it?

In all transparency, I could have been a much better father. I could have been a much better husband. I made a h*ll of a lot of mistakes, and I’ve paid the d*mn price for them every d*mn day.

But I love my wife with all my soul. I love all my kids with every square inch of my heart and all six (soon to be seven) of my grandkids with every cent of my pocketbook I spend to buy them noisy toys that irritate the h*ll out of my daughters and their significant others.

And I miss talking to them face to face, laughing with them, hearing them tell me to bite them after I make a wisecrack about their rapidly vanishing waistline.

I miss being able to hug them when they walk into my home, and hold them in my arms tightly as I send them back out in the world, their world, their lives.

I miss that so much. Okay, I think I’ll put a sock in it. I’m done.

Peace Out My Sister And Brother Writers,

Paul Gene Barnett

Thanks So Much For Reading

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