Episode 18: Something Like Love

Not everyone has an amazing relationship with their parents. Not every parent is a person we feel proud to be related to, to be "of". In some cases, we are simply just different people. Or maybe the problems run deeper, into past actions or beliefs. Janice Northerns faces her conflicted feelings head-on in the essay Something Like Love, first published in Yellow Arrow, where she describes being at her father's deathbed, struggling to define their relationship.

Transcript

Christine Junge  0:13  
Hi, I'm Tavi Black. And I'm Christine Junge.

Tavi Black  0:17  
And this is The Personal Element, 

Christine Junge 
where we listen to an essay we love, and then discuss what makes it so good. This month we're discussing Janice Northerns's essay "Something Like Love," which was published in Yellow Arrow Journal

  0:31  
Janice Norherns: Something like love.

Daddy sat in the kitchen, waking enough from his brains oxygen starved dose to tell me a joke. A groaner. I'd heard before from his collection of cliched and sometimes politically incorrect stories. Did you hear that the Pope has bird flu? He asked. He caught it from one of his Cardinals.

A few days before my brother had called. He's going downhill fast. He said, Should I come?

I don't know. I can't tell you but I don't think he's going to make it till Thanksgiving.

My father's trips to the hospital had suddenly become a weekly event. Each time the doctor administered heavy doses of lasix to drain the fluids daddy's heart could no longer pump.

He'd then come home for a few days, the fluid would build up again, and the cycle would repeat.

After my brother's call, I made the six hour drive from Kansas to our farm in Texas. Daddy was out of the hospital for the moment, and I watched what had become his morning ritual. He'd step on the scale and weigh himself the number of creeping up a pound or two each day, feet so swollen that the skin stretched paper thin, like balloons ready to burst.

The blood pressure cuff came out next. Daddy recorded that day's measures in a spiral notebook. In handwriting so shaky. It was barely legible. Handwriting that someone wants told me looked like mine. But it was the other way around. My handwriting looked like his.

That weekend. The man I watched was not the invincible father. I remembered the man who had fractured his back but survived when he rolled a tractor. The man who nearly severed his foot with a pick axe while splitting a stop, but locked without a limb. The man who sought her back to the house like nothing was wrong. The day he'd fallen out of backcountry and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. That father kept telling jokes, bluffing his way through mishaps, and telling doctors that he beat his wife up every day, meaning he got up before she did in the morning.

That Saturday in October though he was not yet awake. When I tiptoed into the kitchen before dawn to start the coffee. I flipped on the light and my breath caught.

Mama had laid everything out for daddy's breakfast on the table, anticipating his beating her up bowl and spoon packet of maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal. The cheaper storebrand a buying habit ingrained by years of living from bank loan to bank loan on our small farm. There was also a box of prunes a cinnamon sugar shaker, generic  vitamins, and a plastic container of shelled pecans because he had picked from his own trees earlier that Autumn. His tumble from one of those trees years ago had not dissuaded him from climbing ladders.

This seen breakfast laid out from my father down to the tiniest detail. Something I'd never known mama to do is what broke my heart that first weekend I was home. How tenderly she is his way with acts like this. He who now stumbled sleepwalking through the last weeks of his life.

I'd once thought my father's death wouldn't bother me much. He was 91 he had lived a long time. And more to the point the parent I was closer to was my mother.

I regarded my father as an egotist, a shallow man whose conversation consisted mostly of corny one liners and biblical expectations. He and I disagreed about religion and politics and most everything else. But now I found watching my father disappear before my eyes that it did bother me. But why? I've been gone from home for 30 years. I visited several times a year, but in between my mother was the one who had stayed in touch with frequent letters. In them she wrote news from home, sent birthday checks, asked questions and made comments about the grandkids and my life.

I've In contrast, the letters from my father were rare and consisted solely of Bible verses and admonitions to get right with the Lord.

Over the next six weeks, I came home each weekend and watched stunned as my father became slack jawed and sunken eyes, his skin yellowing because of his failing liver and kidneys.

His hospital gown gaped open as he sat on the bedside toilet. When he asked me to help him back to bed, I saw my father's sagging backside for the first time.

I drove home to Texas on the last day of his life, and set by his hospital bed with my mother.

My brothers were on their way.

His breath came in ragged gas now with long pauses in between. The doctor told us gently this sound, this death rattle meant it was almost time.

He waited for you to get here, Janice, my mother whispered.

My mother held him and cried on one side, while I held him and cried on the other side. As daddy gurgled, gasping for a breath, until finally, he was gone.

Most of those last weekends are a blur now. But what has never faded is the piercing grief, I felt that first visit, when I stumbled into the kitchen, in the pre Dawn dark, and discovered the bowl, the spoon, the oatmeal, that simple morning is still alive, my mother had laid out for my father, and with it, my realization that he was dying.

Today, I think about that man whom truth be told, I didn't like very much. As the years have passed since his death, I find myself examining his life by writing about it. I write about his hardships growing up poor with a stern father, who made him cut his own switches for whippings, who made him work on Christmas Day. And to whom words of love did not come easily. Just as they did not come easily to my father,

writing about him has freed me from resentment, and has opened a space in my heart for understanding.

I recognize now, what I felt for him in that surge of grief that overwhelmed me that October morning. To my surprise, it was something a lot like love.

Tavi Black  7:36  
So Christine, this was a sweet and sad essay that you found for us to talk about. 

Christine Junge  7:44  
Yeah, it is, you know, I think I was particularly drawn to it. Because my father passed away two years ago, right at the beginning of the pandemic, not from COVID from cancer. Yeah, so I was definitely drawn to the subject matter. And then I also really liked the her writing and the the way that she kind of drew pictures with her words, which we could talk, you know more about the specifics. 

Tavi Black  8:10  
Yeah, that's one of the things I really liked about this essay as well. It's just going back to the subject matter. And it's interesting how we choose our essays, our process, sometimes it is about the subject matter, or we don't take one because we've done something in a similar subject. So much of what we read, and what we talk about in our lives, really has to do with, you know, what's going on in our lives, right, on the on the podcast, and in our lives. And I think about you know, the charities I give to well, it's something that's touched my life, you know, and so for this the essay, my parents are still alive. And so for you this was something that was more not more touching, because it's a touching essay, no matter who reads it, but it was just more, I guess, maybe poignant and important to you to talk about this subject. 

Christine Junge  9:05  
Yeah, you're totally right. And it also makes me think then about, like the process for other venues, like journals, and even agents and things like that, like, even whether, obviously, part of it is your talent as a writer, but I wonder if part of it, too, is like an agent might take something because they've been touched by that topic that you're writing about. 

Tavi Black  9:27  
It's so subjective. Yeah. 

Christine Junge  9:29  
And being on this end of the process in terms of like, were the gatekeepers for this podcast. It does make me think more about when I'm submitting and getting rejected.

Right. It wasn't, it wasn't me it was them. Exactly. Oh, well, back to the essay. I don't mean to hijack this conversation about something like love. It really was a beautiful essay. Yeah, I think we should talk about the language because it's really strong here. 

Yeah, my kind of overarching theme of my comments are just the specifics that she, she gives throughout the essay. And the way that she draws the scenes is, it's really, I'd say it's like more fiction like in that it. You know, a lot of times essays are more kind of the person's thoughts and then struggling through a concept. And this is more like, she gives us these little vignettes of what was happening at different times, and then discusses what it means to her. But she really draws the pictures very well. 

Tavi Black  10:31  
She does I love in particular, for me, I think it's the fourth paragraph where she talks about "his feet so swollen that the skin stretched paper thin, like balloons ready to burst."

Christine Junge  10:45  
 Yep. Yeah, I had that whole paragraph highlighted to it really, you know, we know that her dad is sick at this point. But that really kind of explains to us what what she was seeing in the moment, which is so hard to see something, even if you have a complicated relationship, someone that's been such a important figure in your life, to you know, be getting something like these pounds of water that are accumulating in his body and you know, that can't be comfortable. And also, it's such a sign that you know, something's going wrong. 

Tavi Black  11:17  
Right. It's it's a shaky handwriting to for me, it reminded me of my great grandmother when she got older and I'd get these notes from her. And there is something about shaky handwriting that just tells you so much. It's one little image we see, the handwriting so shaky, it was barely legible. But oh, we know everything so much about that person in just that line. 

Christine Junge  11:43  
But yeah, and I loved the, the what she was kind of struggling with at the end of that paragraph, the somebody's saying that his handwriting looked like hers. And she's like, No, it's the other way around. I'm the one who came from him. I love that. You know, just that thought about? Are you like your parents or your parents like you. 

Tavi Black  12:02  
She does a lot of nice, subtle work like that throughout this essay. In the next paragraph, she really just tells us so much about her dad, and just in such great sentences about "I remember the man had fractured his back or survived when he rolled a tractor." I mean, just this whole list of things, he severed his foot with a pick axe, 

Christine Junge  12:29  
and walk without a limp. Like she really uses those specifics really well to draw a picture of like the super Hardy kind of stoic man.

Tavi Black  12:39  
And she could have used each of those as a separate image. But she didn't she crammed them all together into one paragraph, a couple of sentences that like, boom, here's who this man was. Now you know him.

Christine Junge  12:55  
Yeah, and I just have to say at the end of the paragraph, that joke about beating his wife, I was like, Oh, my God. But I was so glad that in the very beginning of the essay, she warns us that like her dad made these inappropriate jokes. So then when an inappropriate joke comes up, at least you're like, Okay, she knows this is not like, it was it. 

Tavi Black  13:13  
That was an interesting line for me, coming from the background of I used to work in anti domestic violence. And you just nobody there laughed about beating your wife jokes, right? It's not funny. And, and so I knew what she felt like here. I was like, oh, yeah, here's somebody close to you, who you love, you know, in a really complicated way.And, and we all have those people in their lives, our lives, right? And you're like, do I make them happy by chuckling at his really bad joke, or not? 

Christine Junge  13:52  
I yeah, it reminds me when my father was in the hospital right before he died. He was born 80 years ago, it's a totally different time. And so he was like, flirting with the nurses. And I was like, I was like, they're just trying to do their job. Like, you know, don't don't make them uncomfortable. Like, and I'm sure they're, you know, I'm sure they're totally used to this, but like, but it was so cringy for me as a woman to be like, you know, they just want to they just want to take care of you. And they don't want to hear how you love the way they look or whatever it is like. So I totally related to this because Yeah, and again, like, you know, I was I didn't say anything because I was like, you know, he's really sick. I'm not gonna start picking apart. You know, ethos, but, but it was really hard for me as a woman as a feminist to not, you know, to not be like, please, please stop.

Tavi Black  14:46  
 Right. And so that brings to this. Here's the dilemma. And this is the kind of great stuff to put in literature, right? Like, here's a moment where you're like, you know that you should never let somebody get away with bad jokes and laugh and go along with it. But what about if your father is on his deathbed? Like, is that the place to say, "you can't say that kind of thing" and pick a fight? Right? Oh, I think Christine now you know that that moment has to go into some kind of writing. But yeah, but Janice has done that for us here in this essay. Yes, yeah. And she did it. So well.

Christine Junge  15:24  
 Yeah, sticking with the idea of the details and the scenes that she creates the one about the her mom laying out the table for her dad was so sweet. And again, the specifics there, like she could have just said, he laid out everything on for daddy's breakfast on  the table and left it at that. But instead, she draws out the specifics to really kind of make it clear how important this was like the bone spoon, the packet of maple and brown sugar oatmeal. 

Tavi Black  15:52  
Yeah, I love that stuff, by the way that Maple and Brown Sugar. It's so bad for you probably, but it's really good. But it really did, you know, make me see that packet. I know what that looks like, and a box of prunes, the pecans. You know, pecans he picked from his own tree. 

Christine Junge  15:53  
I also highlighted that paragraph. So in the next paragraph, then she kind of explains to us why it's so important. And part of me was like, did she need to explain that to us? I think it just really kind of underlines why all those details were so important. 

Tavi Black  16:27  
What I did like is that she brought this back home at the end as well about this table. I think she did need to tell us that that wasn't normal. Because otherwise we would have thought, Oh, well, that's something that she does. 

Christine Junge  16:44  
That's a really good point. For me this, this next part was what really drew me to the essay and what deepend did so much for me, where she kind of draws out her complicated relationship with her dad. And she's so honest about it. And I found that really refreshing, I don't think I would have been drawn to the essay, if it was just about an uncomplicated father daughter relationship where the father dies. Like, I feel like that's been done a million times. But this was like, it was so honest. And it really told us a lot about how even in these complicated relationships, you do still grieve in a really deep way. Again, it reminded me of I was at a friend's parents funeral. And he gave the eulogy for his mom, and he didn't sugarcoat things, he really went into, like, you know, these were things that we had trouble with. And, and it was just so different than any eulogy I'd ever heard that, you know, where you're really just singing the praises of the person. And it did make it feel a lot more meaningful. Because you know, even in the best of relationships, things are complicated. So like, just calling that out. And not, I don't want to say lying, but not kind of brushing over those difficulties. I felt like was really felt so proud of him for being able to do that. 

Tavi Black  18:02  
Yes, interesting. Alice Bloch who did one of the essays a couple of episodes ago, Lenny, she actually was thinking about writing these essays about called Honest Obituaries. 

Christine Junge  18:15  
Oh, I love that. 

Tavi Black  18:17  
Yeah, about what what people were really like, because those obituaries rarely ever talk about how people actually are people are complex, they're layered. They're not always nice. They're not always, you know, everybody loves them. And I think that she does a little bit of this here in this essay, the line for me, "I'd once thought my father's death wouldn't bother me much." I mean, that's what you're talking about the honesty there. Like, I bet a lot of people have had that feeling about people in their lives that haven't really been the best relationships. So yeah, I mean, I've been there with other people's deaths. That was complicated. And that's what makes us a really nice essay. 

Christine Junge  19:03  
Another really poignant detail that she gives us when she sees her father sagging backside. I'm like, Oh, it kind of reminds me of what you did the beginning. What would what would she talked about the swollen skin, stretched paper thin, in the same way like that sagging backside? Really? You know, you're like, Oh, he's old. Like that paints the picture. So yeah, so well. Yeah. Just says his advancing age. 

Yeah, the hospital gown gaping open as he sat on the bedside toilet. I mean, she does. She really paints these kind of graphic pictures that are maybe a little hard to see. Mm hmm. Yeah. And you're right, the bedside toilet too, that, like, obviously, a sign that somebody is really sick if they can't make it to the, you know, to the regular bathroom. 

Tavi Black  19:50  
Yeah. The other thing that I liked that she did is that she talked about him with the Bible verses and the admonitions to get right with the Lord. And I like that she didn't put a real judgment on that. I like that she she might have gone off and said, "I don't believe in that. I don't think that's the way you should talk to somebody." But she didn't. She just left it for us to go like, Oh, wow. That's why he talked to her. All right. 

Christine Junge  20:14  
Yeah. And that's, you're right. And it's interesting, because I wonder, you know, neither of us are particularly religious people.So I wonder how a more religious reader would take that, like, maybe they would take that as like, "yeah, your father should have been saying that to you." You know, if you weren't living according to the Bible, or whatever. Yeah, it's interesting, what we kind of bring as readers to an essay. 

Tavi Black  20:37  
Hmm, so one of the things that I wanted to mention, too, is that my first knee jerk reaction to this when when you first asked me to read it, for consideration, Christine was when she called him daddy. I mean, I really had like, I don't know, a grown woman calling her father, daddy, or just even daddy, the word itself, you know, brings so many connotations in this culture. And I was like, why she's still calling him, daddy? But I have to say, after reading it, it does lend itself to us understanding this Texas family. I mean, because that's not unusual. I lived in Texas briefly. And that's not unusual for people to call their father Daddy, I did when I was a kid, you know: I call him dad now. But I think it was important for this essay with the Texas theme, you know, for me.

Christine Junge  21:37  
 I didn't have the same visceral reaction to Daddy that you did. But it did, like you said, make me think of the South. Because as somebody who grew up in the Northeast, and now lives in California, like I don't know, anybody who would call their parents daddy or mommy as an adult. So it did, it did kind of set it in a place for me. And then as we're getting to the end of the essay, I feel like, she's so stark in when she says, "Today, I think about that man whom truth be told, I didn't like very much." And I'm like, Whoa, that is so honest. Yeah, I was just really impressed with what the honesty there. 

Tavi Black  22:10  
Yeah, she's not glossing it over in any way. You know, he honestly sounds a bit hard to like, with this picture she's painted of him, you know, that he wasn't very loving. But I really, really liked that she tried to understand him in this. I mean, and then you read that about him. And we all have a bit of empathy for him suddenly, knowing how he grew up with his father made him cutting his own switches for whipping. I mean, okay, you can understand, I think we all try to do that, as we write with our characters and fiction, you know, to even your worst characters, you try to give them some love, give them some reason why they are that way so that your readers can try somehow to relate. 

Christine Junge  23:02  
Yeah, I really loved that, too. And it did round him out as a character. And, you know, because nobody's all good or all bad. And everybody comes to the way they are, you know, based on their own backgrounds. Yeah. And I think about this a lot with parenting. Like, I feel like the goal is that like, each generation is doing a little bit better than the one before. But I don't know that you could make like, a huge leap from, you know, like, I'm sure. What if he thought about parenting in the way that I think about parenting, like, you know, he might have thought like, Well, I'm not hitting my kids. So that's, you know, that's huge. And that is a huge leap. Yeah. But that's, that doesn't necessarily mean that's enough. 

Tavi Black  23:44  
Yes. And I liked that she came to, you know, this ending, as the title suggests, to her surprise, it was something a lot like love. It is really interesting how we love our family, no matter what I mean, even if they were awful. There's there is some love in there. It's the attachments. 

Christine Junge  24:08  
Yeah, and I think what's been interesting to me with grieving my dad is, so we lived. I live in California, my dad was in New Jersey, it wasn't like we saw each other all that often. It wasn't like he was, you know, coming over every week. And so I was like, missing him there. But there's just this weird knowing of that, like, your parents are somewhere in the world. And then when they're not, it's just, it's just a strange thing, like so then when I think about him, I think about the fact that he's not here versus, you know, kind of picturing him in his living room in New Jersey. And I feel like I wonder if she went through that as well. Because I feel like the end paragraph kind of gets to that more complicated grief when you either have a complicated relationship with the person and/or they're not like everyday presence in your life. 

Tavi Black  24:57  
Yeah, I thought of that. Not a lot. I lost a really close friend a few years ago, and we didn't live near each other. And I thought about that, like, what's the difference between her being on this earth or not in our relationship? I mean, I didn't talk to her that often. I didn't see her that often. It's interesting. I find myself thinking, Oh, I should tell her this next time we talk. Still years later, right. But I see what you're saying, Christine, about like thinking about someone who has passed is different. It's different. There's a finality to it, there's a moment we realize, oh, I can't ever tell them that. So you just sort of tell them anyway, and wonder if they can hear you know. 

Christine Junge  25:43  
yeah, there's, I'm forgetting the name of the movie. But it was, I think it was a Pixar movie about the Day of the Dead Mexican tradition. And I didn't know this about the tradition, but at least according to this movie, they were saying that the remembrance of a person is what keeps them alive. Right. And I love that as a concept. You know, like you said, like, even as a non religious person, you do kind of think like, you know, are they? Do they somehow know that I'm thinking of them? Yeah. I just love that idea. Your memories of a person keeps them alive in some way? 

Tavi Black  26:15  
I think I think it probably does. It's a beautiful concept. So Janice, thank you so much for sharing your essay with us this really touching reflection on your relationship with your father. 

Christine Junge  26:29  
Yeah. And I hope you know, she talks about the idea that she's kind of working through the relationship through her writing. I hope that we see many more essays about this. Great. Well, thanks, everybody. See you next time. Next time.

Tavi Black  26:41  
To learn more about this podcast, visit us online. At personal element podcast.com. There you'll find links to the essays we discussed information on how to follow us on social media, and more.

Christine Junge  26:56  
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai