Scratches on paper...

"It's hard to remember what life feels like," he said.  

"Why don't you write those feelings down?" she gently replied.

- anonymous

“I’ll probably take a job that is not optimal until she finishes her residency,” he said.

The reality finally hit home…the seasons had changed…she was gone.

Gone is really too strong a term, for she really hasn’t ‘gone’ anywhere.  It’s just that the world in which she lives is less inclusive of me.

Stage one...
When Mariah was a little girl, she was full of life and unfocused energy…easily distracted with all the new things around her.  It was a miraculous gift to see this child, sired by another, born and growing in our home.  My niece, as Renée Zellweger’s character in the film Jerry McGuire said, “(she) had me at hello…”  In truth, it was long before hello.  It was as if it had always been.

Stage two…

In the late teens and twenties, she found focus, and like a young racehorse, explored her capacities…her abilities…her sense of the developing world in her mind.  She had the greatest of mentors…a mother, a single parent who dedicated her life to share the things she knew with the daughter she so deeply loved.  Like a connoisseur of fine wine, she seemed to have the knack to provide the appropriate things at just the right times - what to put into the receptacle of this young girl’s mind…to keep her full, yet not overwhelmed.

That influence and infusion of curiosity, intellect, passion, ‘peripheral vision,’ compassion and a keen sense of justice oozed from the pores of her mother and were absorbed by this child…this extension of her…this brilliant light to whom she was passing the torch.

I’m not sure my sister consciously knew she would not see this young woman emerge into adulthood.  I’m not sure she had any idea of the gathering metabolic storm that was brewing somewhere deep within the recesses of her mind, BUT she did have an urgency…a palpable sense of the need to download what she knew about life to this youngster as quickly and digestibly as possible.  I am not sure she knew she would not enter the ‘promised land’ of grandchildren and the satisfaction that she had been a good and faithful mother, for her journey took a different path into the lethal currents and deadly waterfalls of Alzheimer’s….suddenly she was gone.

Stage three…

The thirties have now arrived and the young woman is pursuing her passion to be a servant to others.  She didn’t take the easiest of paths, but through medicine she felt she could have the greatest impact.  So, she left her work, entered school once again after several years of absence and tenaciously took hold of the process necessary to fulfill her calling – there was no looking back.  In a year, she will have a ticket permitting her residency, and the beat goes on…

Yesterday, she was my niece, full of life…sometimes conflicted…enormously talented with a world in front of her…and she was mine.  While not her biologic father, I filled that role in her life – the male to whom she could come when there was a little too much lightening in the sky.

This is now…

Today, she is still my niece, still full of life…much less conflicted (or maybe more so by life’s greater complexity)…enormously talented and creating a world in front of her, but she is no longer mine.  Well, in truth, she still is mine in my heart, for I have had no other that has reached so deeply into all that I have to give. 

Now, however, there is another man in her life…the natural order…someone to whom she will come when there is a little too much lightening in the sky.  There have been others…this is different.  You know, different in the way you recognize someone has gone through a fundamental change…the voice…the look…the sensibility of life.  Maturity…yeah, that’s the word I was looking for…a new level of maturity…the chrysalis has burst…the adventure of flight ahead!

I saw her in a different light when she came home this time.  It was not that she loves me less – there is certainty in that.  It is that a new bonding has developed as it should, and in spite of my natural inclination to be protective…it is the process of life; one I embrace.  It is just different…

Nothing new under the sun…

I know this situation has been experienced many times as fathers (surrogate or otherwise) have watched their daughters shift focus, and slip into the arms of another.  Having said that…it's awkward...it is my first time!

Life is always moving and growing or it is dying, isn't it?  There is no middle ground…no place to find comfort from the storm.  As it is impossible for something to come from nothing, one can never reclaim departed time – accept the reality of life and change, or suffer the unwinnable frustration of attempting to regain the “…once was…” Look forward, or suffer the death of a thousand cuts called ‘yesterday.’  No change?  No life!  It’s just that simple!

As this began...
“I’ll probably take a job that is not optimal until she finishes her residency…”

Yes indeed….

- ted