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When you're a kid, you don't realize you're also watching your mom and dad grow up.
(self.showerthoughts)
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Thank you for telling me. That was beautiful. I’m crying at McDonalds.
I had a Peruvian GF for a while and she spoke with her mother back in Peru every single day.
That inspired me to contact my father a little more. I live in the same city as him. I should reach out so much more. His wife tells me he loves when I’m there.
I did get him an xbox for christmas a few years ago, and we play world of tanks together. He’s nearing 80, and knows the specs and history of like every tank. Like which battles it was deployed it, what engineering challenges they had to design it, etc. He was a mechanic in the army and he’s a geek.
He’s rather inhibited in many ways. Same template as me, but less lucky with the psychedelics, yoga, parties, ceremony, festivals that helped draw me out and teach me to be social.
He’s got social skills of course. He’s wise. He overcomes that introversion, and his wife helps push him out and connect him. He loves to tell stories of technical problems he solved in the forest service. Seems to have an eidetic memory for all things mechanical.
But if he’s not exercising, he starts to fade. Luckily he does exercise. I also have to hold back my own desire to push him on health stuff. What I keep running into is that it’s not really my right to extend his life if he doesn’t want to. I’m conflicted about how selfish I’m being when I’m encouraging him to take care of himself.
He keeps mentioning that his father died around his age. Finally I was like “Dad, Grandpa died in an industrial accident. It wasn’t his natural death”.
I dunno. It’s a weird thing, but he seems a little too resigned to death. Or I’m in denial again. I don’t want to lose him, but I will.
At his age you definitely have came to terms with loss.
One of my closest friends was in a horrible relationship for 24 years. All she wanted was for him to marry her and give her the life he promised over and over again. She was so scared to lose him. He’d cheat, she’d forgive him. He’d do it again, she’d forgive him.
He was the only man she had ever slept with. She never even thought about being with anyone else. She just sat there and suffered. He was 15 years older than her and a very prominent member of the community. He started preaching and he stopped having sex with her to “be right with the lord”.
In less than two years her whole world collapsed. First her baby brother died, then her mother, then her father, then her older brother. Her only other sibling tried to rob her older brother’s daughter of her inheritance. She helped the daughter win in court.
So in less than two years she lost her ENTIRE family.
One day she called me, like she had done a hundred times before, “I’m leaving him.”
I said to her, “You ain’t gonna break it off with him. You’re just upset with him because he’s the same jerk he’s always been.”
She replied, “angryseal, I have lost. I have lost and lost and lost, and you know what? Life goes on. It’ll keep going on until I die too. I have learned that I can survive loss, that I will always be facing loss. It’s just around the corner. I’m not scared to lose him. I’m not scared to die, and you know what? This won’t kill me. I’m going to forget the whole relationship and find someone and just have sex. No strings. I swear to god.”
She’s had a friend with benefits for over a year now. She’s totally flipped into this person who is 100% in control of what she can be in control of.
She’s 51 years old, looks 35, and she’s having the time of her life.
I thought this related somehow but my toddler is crying in my lap and I can’t remember my point. I can’t focus enough to go back and try. Sorry if this don’t connect and sorry for any mistakes. I can’t proofread at the moment. :p