May His Memory Be a Blessing: A Year of Memories, Integration and Beehives

One year ago today, my phone rang at 5 a.m., and I knew before picking it up that my brother was calling to tell me that my father had died.

It had been an eventful couple of years leading up to this day, as it is for many of us as we navigate alongside our aging parents.

But a week or so before he passed, a friend and I had gone to have lunch with him. He was an extensive and adventurous traveler for most of his life, and she was inquiring about a particularly unusual trip he made along the Silk Road, a historic route that connected trade routes from China to the West.

My friend asked great questions, and my dad was enjoying the attention and the recollections. Even though I’d heard him talk about this adventure before, I was learning new things. Then, there was a pause in the conversation for him take a sip of tea – and also, maybe it was a dramatic pause.

“I traveled the entire way by camel,” he said, looking up at us.

We suspected my father had dementia, but it was hard to say for sure, as part of his self-claimed rights of aging was to refuse to see doctors. But dementia or no, my friend and I both adhered to the rule of not correcting someone when there was no reason to. We both knew no camels had been involved in his trip.

“Wow,” my friend chimed in, totally engaged in this unexpected twist. “I hear camels are very uncomfortable.”

My father didn’t miss a beat: “You don’t have to tell me!”

And then we all had a great belly laugh.

So many gifts in that moment: that his dementia was more random than scary for him. That so close to his passing, he was still capable of laughter, was still making us wonder if he was really suffering from dementia … or just messing with us all.

And another gift: that this memory, one of my last with him, was so sweet.

I am incredibly grateful to have made peace with my father in those final years, to have felt clean, to have forgiven and released that hurt and anger back into the earth to hold.

Because my relationship with him was not always simple. In my eulogy at his memorial, I shared that our relationship was complicated. But a few weeks later, a better word emerged: confusing.

I never knew what to expect. I never knew who to expect. And the possibilities were many.

I recall things I’ve heard or read about grief, including my favorite, that our grief is the tears that make the river flow, the river that escorts our person out of this life. But the one that has resonated most this past year is this: grief is the process of transitioning a loved one from a body to a memory.

When someone dies and no new memories will be made, then we have all the stories and all the words and all the wounds we are ever going to get. How do we assemble them into how we will remember our person?

None of us is just one thing. My father was many things. And so, this past year I began my own integration process around a complicated, confusing relationship.

At first, I tried to meld the parts into some coherent shape. I tried to take all my father’s qualities—the generous and vivacious, and also the unkindness and sometimes lacerating punishment—and, like clay, I tred to form them a single thing…some form or statuette.

I tried to combine the ingredients of him into a broth with one primary flavor because I craved something simpler than the truth.

And when that proved impossible, I wondered: Do we have to integrate our memories and feelings, the many edges and facets of a complicated human, into just one shape?

And so, for this past year, as I have intentionally worked to make his memory a blessing, I have sat with the possibility of that.

And what came to mind then was more nuanced: the energy of an atom, with its spinning and opposing forces that are separate from each other. I considered a planet with moons and a sun. I imagined a hive full of buzzing bees.

Hmmm, my dad as that hive: a vessel full of life, full of productivity and loud buzzing, full of energy and warning and irrefutable gravitational forces, but also full of sweetness and density…surrounded by a queen and a whole other village of supporting players and workers and protectors.

My father: one container, filled with both honey and stingers.

I miss you, Dad.