The Death of a Legacy

My grandfather died at 12:30 am on Saturday the 7th of October. He was 94.

He died with my mother and father at his side. With them, my two sisters. He went peacefully. He went with dignity. He went as we would all want to go. Suddenly and except for that moment, in extraordinarily good health.

Few men deserved it less.

I've never really understood why it was so socially unacceptable to speak ill of the dead. So today I sat with my father, who finally cried over the fact that he would never have the relationship with his father he so desperately craved his entire life and I wondered why none of us felt free to say what we were feeling. I watched my father's eyes well up with tears and his face redden in grief as he spoke words he needed to say. Finally.

He hated his father. He loved his father. He took on a tremendous burden to ensure my grandfather was cared for in his final years. That burden included hearing my grandfather say, every day, that nothing his son did was good enough.

I watched my father this afternoon just as I've watched him the past 41 years in every desperate attempt to please his own father, to make him proud. I watched him just as as I've watched my mother cook exactly the *right* food in exactly the *right* way, 3 meals a day, for a man who spent more than 40 years calling my mother every nasty name in the book.

A father who craved a father's love and never felt it.

And I realized that what I was feeling was not grief. It was not sadness.

It was guilt. It was anger. It was the feeling that only a child who feels keenly the sorrow of a parent can feel.

I hated my grandfather. I hated what he did to my father. I hated what he did to my mother. I hated what he did, directly and indirectly, to his grandchildren.

And yet I smile. Because in my grandfather's final moments my mother stood over his bedside praying for his very soul.

Which would have really ticked him off. And perversely, is exactly what he deserved.

We will travel to Nebraska, where he is to be buried, and we will pay our last respects. We will bury our guilt behind tears we'll call grief and then we will move on. We won't speak ill of him because after all, we are not to speak ill of the dead.

But we can finally move on.

He's God's problem now.

What is a Man Advantaged

if he gain the whole world, but lose himself...

I like to consider myself pretty plugged in. I am, after all, a near native of Washington DC. So I was shocked when the first news I got on the revealing of Deep Throat wasn't until I got home from work. I walked in the door about 7:15 and my husband's first words were "have you heard about Deep Throat?"

Okay, I have to admit that my first thought was "are you KIDDING? I just got HOME? I don't have the energy to watch *a movie* with you."

I was 7 years old when the Watergate scandal broke. My thinking at the time wasn't about the "right or wrong" of the President's acts. In fact, what I most remember is watching my mother as she watched Nixon annouce his resignation - tears running down her face. I was angry at the people who made my mother cry. But the name "Deep Throat" had no staying power with me.

Later in life the term "Deep Throat" would take on a different meaning, one that registered when I confused the name of a character I was playing in a school play. I came home from school and told my mother I was playing the character "Linda Lovelace." In fact, I was playing "Linda Lovely" but she didn't know that and I stood in shocked silence while she strictly informed me that no daughter of hers would play a porn star.

Adolescent curiosity erased any vestige of Nixon's Deep Throat from my memory and planted a different reference altogether.

25 years later Deep Throat is back in my vocabulary, in a way more adult than my 7 year old brain could understand and my 15 year old brain would have cared about.

Today Deep Throat has a name. Mark Felts. Journalists are calling Felts a hero. Those closest to the late-President call him a traitor. I'm looking back at the events of 1972-1973 and thinking about the secrets kept. Mark Felt had nothing to gain and everything to lose by his actions. Except his personal knowledge that he fought back against a corrupt government the only way he could, the way every Washington insider does, through the press. That there was no personal gain could not be clearer. He remained anonymous for more than 30 years.

Linda Tripp could take a lesson from him.

Memorial Day

Well, I just finished watching the first running of A&E's movie "Faith of our Fathers" and once again I'm wondering why I haven't bought stock in Kleenex.

Reality check. I'm caught between admiration for the fact that anyone survives POW status, and John McCain is no exception, and my typical DC cynicism which notes that 2008 is open season and McCain's a player - probably the best one the GOP has to offer up right now.

Mid-movie we noticed a smell wafting up from the pool patio, which is now open because as we all know - swimming pools are directly related to people killed in the line of duty. It was the unmistakeable smell of charcoal and lighter fluid that caught my attention. It's a smell I didn't expect to bump into now that we've moved into the city and live in a cement and balcony paradise. I had to go look.

Apparently, one of our residents bought himself a grill and tried to break in memorial day right. From the looks of things it was his first time. For a while he was much more entertaining than the movie.

Which got me thinking: why is memorial day the time we think more of opening our pools and grilling (outside - not George Foreman style) and not so much about our service men and women who have died for our country. We get a day off, and now we worry more about bridge traffic, interstate traffic, accidents and gas prices. Not so much about cemetary traffic. More of us rushing to get to the beach. Betcha there was plenty of room for visitors at Arlington Cemetary. Not that I know. I was at the pool.

Rolling Through

Rolling Thunder is in town this weekend.

I walked into Rock Bottom Brewery at 9:30 last night with my husband and daughter. Looking for a table we walked bast bikers in full colors. A few in wheelchairs. My husband took one look, screwed up his face, and gave a full on city "sniff."

Huh?

Them of you who don't know - Rolling Thunder is the annual biker fest in DC. Happens on Memorial Day Weekend. Folks roll in from all around the country and the sound of those bikes, coming down highways usually filled with slow moving commuters, sound just like thunder. I love the sound. The shining, painted, cared for bikes. The riders in their denim and leathers, colors proudly displayed on their backs and small black & white POW/MIA flags coupled with the red, white, and blue American flags look, well, patriotic.

I grew up around bikers and I was at the some of the earliest gatherings as these vets and friends of vets rolled into town, my town, to pay homage to their missing and fallen brethern. You watch a biker cry at the Wall and be unaffected. I can't.

His issue, our nine year old and his protective father instincts. Mine? Twenty years from now this annual event will be rolling into town but then they'll be talking about Iraq. At least, I hope so. Because war has a terrible way of making a lot of mothers childless. I look at my nine year old daughter and know that women all over America have kids in Iraq and are waking up to their worst fear. How many have screamed silently into the night "take me instead...," knowing all the while their screams are fruitless. It is too late. It is done.

Frankly, in that bar full of bikers, I never felt safer. People who care enough about the past to roar into town and be heard get what this country is really all about. We need more of 'em. Maybe as President?