***Self Discovery journal: The Senior Orphan

Written By: Dave Hager

DAVE’S CORNER
16 APRIL 2010
SELF DISCOVERY journal:
THE SENIOR ORPHAN

I don’t know if I can write this but I’ll try.

We began work on the new investment property in Winston-Salem yesterday. I went up today to follow through and consult with Phillip Watson, my contractor, and had dinner with my son and his family after.

On the way home, I called my daughter and caught her home so I swung by to see her and her intended. It was nearly dark when I left there.

The reaso
I even thought to call her was that I didn’t have to hurry home. I had gotten in the habit last year of meeting with the contractor when we did the first two properties and then hurry back to Charlotte to relieve the housekeeper so she could go home and I could take over tending Dad.

Last year the trip provided me a respite from the daily routine. But now, I don’t have to rush back. In the darkened car driving home I realized all that.

I learned in my professional career [and I’m talking the hospitality management days long before acting] to separate and shelve my personal feelings while I had a duty to perform. I never realized how completely I had learned that ‘skill’.

I never really shed a tear over either of my parents. When Mom died, there was Dad to be cared for. When Dad died, there was the business related items associated with his death that had to be coordinated.

But tonight in the darkness, driving home when I should have already been there according to my instincts, I was suddenly consumed with the loss.

My mother was a self made strong woman, a feminist before the word ever existed. She dropped out of school to get married after Pearl Harbor when my Dad went off to war.

She had been top of her class. She was poor, but polished. She shone like a new penny according to the one teacher we had in common who was still teaching high school when I got there.

She went back to school after I got to be a teenager. She was tops in her class again and was recruited right out of business college before she could finish.

She broke the equivalent of the glass ceiling with a national home construction company and traveled eight states as an administrative supervisor for four years before the company went belly up in an economic slowdown.

I was in high school then getting ready for my senior year so she took an administrative posting with a textile company for two years while I graduated and went off to college.

We kept an exchange student from England my senior year and she always made a home for us all despite working a full time job.

Once in college, I was pleased to see her branch out and open a chain of photography studios of her own. Finally she was the CEO she had always wanted to be. Life was full of Cadillac’s and travel and she enjoyed it all.

Then I got married and had a baby girl and her world changed in an instant. She adored that baby and spent tons of time and money on her. She finally had the daughter I think she always wanted but never had the opportunity to have. I screwed up her plumbing being born and she couldn’t have any more children.

She gave up the studios and retired … for about a month. It just didn’t sit well with her. She went into real estate for another ten years and then retired … again… for another month. Still didn’t sit well with her so she went into hospitality work part time. She always thought she’d enjoy it.

She did too, even when she told then candidate Clinton to ‘hold his horses, she was swamped and couldn’t get him a riper banana right that second’. He had called down a room service order which she had taken. He was tickled and insisted on meeting her before leaving the hotel. She adored him and voted for him twice.

I was very glad she lasted long enough to see my film career find some success. She was enormously proud and insisted we go see the first screening of DOUBLE JEOPARDY at the hotel theater in Laughlin, Nevada.

She couldn’t have been happier if she’d made the film herself.

Finally the years took their ultimate toll and she took the effort to mask her true condition from me so that I’d return to LA after Christmas 2002, but it wasn’t to last.

I got word in April that she was serious and I shipped everything home and hurried back. I had spoken to her on the phone before she went into the hospital. I couldn’t get her on the phone as I drove across country but was reassured by everyone, including Dad, that she was doing reasonably well.

When I got to the hospital there were tubes in and out of every possible body opening and it was obvious that the only thing keeping her alive was the half dozen machines she was connected to. There was a look of horror in her eyes and I knew she didn’t want that.

Dad either didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand. I signed the DNR so that he wouldn’t have to. He had gone all weekend believing she would get up and somehow come home again. I even had the weekend relief doctor tell him the truth which the others had been shielding him from. He still didn’t want to believe it.

Only after I implored the head of the department to explain the situation fully did he finally release the false hope.

She remained in hospice for two weeks without the tubes. She recovered one morning long enough for my daughter to drive down and visit with her one last time. Then she faded away and back to sleep. The next day, she was very tired. My Uncle and cousin were there and I could tell it was close. I asked Uncle Bill to take Dad down the hall and I stayed in the room alone as she took my hand one last time and said ‘I always loved you’ and I replied the same. Then she passed on.

It was seven years later that Dad passed. In those seven years, I saved his life twice and watched as the father I loved and cherished turned into something I didn’t recognize and seemed to become an insult to the man I idolized.

Who he became crowded out all the wonderful memories I held of him and I at times hated him for that.

Tonight they all came back and I was consumed by the warm and wonderful days when I was their son. All the adventures and travels we shared and all the worlds they opened for me were omnipresent and I cried like the child I felt I was again.

I am an orphan now…a sixty six year old orphan. But it is raw and I finally feel it and feel it all. I haven’t cried in years but now the tears flow and I’m not ashamed of it. I hope they’re both happy in the great beyond. I will try to make them proud. For now, I need to finally grieve.

This is the true self discovery.

You may leave a message for Dave below or email him at dhager@boomer-living.com

Tags: grieve, orphan, personal feelings, self discovery