Xmas Letter to Mum and Dad

Dec. 7/19

Dear Mum and Dad,

I really felt the need to write to you both. Christmas makes me think of a lot of things: our weird or fun family Christmases past, and how our younger generation who are growing up now might deal with their own challenges in the future.

Mum, I miss you. A black and white photo of you in beautiful makeup and a piled-up hairdo is what comes to my mind’s eye often when I remember you. It must be my idealized image of you. I’ve dreamt of talking to you so many times. I wish we could have known each other and been close. I wish we could have even been friends. I’d have liked to have experienced your art and your musicianship first-hand, and especially to have heard your singing voice a lot more. I think about your laugh whenever my friends make me laugh. I got my eyes and some part of my voice from you, and some of your artistic abilities. So, maybe that’s an echo of you that’s still in me.

Kim’s eldest daughter is named Christina Angela Strauss. It’s nice that your name Angela is kept alive. You’d love Christina – she’s charming and sometimes gregarious! (You met her as an infant, about 30 years ago.) Christina seems to enjoy change and new challenges, is good in social situations, and has an independent streak.

You might be happy to know that your great-grandson is named Kayden Huntley Leifer. I like that Poppy’s family name has lived on for another generation. His mother Meaghan is Kim’s second daughter. Meaghan has a strong core of resolution and practicality, and always seems organized and responsible to me. While Christina inherited your name, Meaghan seems to have inherited your bipolarism, or some challenges with anxiety and depression. In today’s world, these things are not stigmatized like they used to be. Meaghan got help, and through her strength seems to be managing herself and succeeding as an employed mum. I’m very impressed by that.

Her son Kayden is 12 now, and is such a thoughtful, caring boy. His little brother Zander was born on my birthday, March 1st in 2014. He is the playful, outgoing one. Getting the early morning phone call from Kim about Zander’s birth was such a joyous extra present that day.

Dad, I miss you. I think about you whenever I need to feel strong or show some kind of authority. Your strength and intelligence were your best qualities. I think about you when I deal with technical things or if I need to feel brave and puff out my chest a little.

Dad, in a dream, I’ve visited our townhouse in Park Place and smelled stew cooking on the stove, knowing it had been left there by you. It felt happy to be back home and to stand on welcoming ground. Those are the feelings that I want to hold on to. You worked to earn your home, and as a single parent, to raise your kids alone. In spite of your drinking, your bullying and violence, and the final brutal breakdown of your health, you raised us alone under very difficult circumstances.

As a little boy, I thought you were my hero. As a young man, I eventually learned the truth about your fallibility and over-compensation. If you can see it now, I hope you do.

Christmas brought out the best and the worst in each of you, Mum and Dad. I remember beautiful, warm, winter holidays in Poppy’s house, with pretty boughs on the mantle and elegant glass ornaments tinkling on the tall pine tree. The smell of an old house, in an old city, heated by oil and tradition.

Just a year later after our last Christmas with Poppy, I remember the next Christmas, just the four of us and our new fire-retardant plastic tree – the modern synthetic smell of a new home, earned by Dad’s sweat, without owing anything to anyone’s parents. We were an autonomous family surrounded with harvest gold appliances and green linoleum flooring. Outside was the smell of new, rough-cut lumber and sweet country air, in a mobile home on seventy-seven acres of scrub brush and pasture.

Two years after that, it was a mouldy shithole motel, filled with drunks, a broken Christmas tree, and people in distress. Two years after that, we had a better, more stable home, but some things didn’t improve: one week before Christmas, you guys were passed out, and I set the tree up myself for the first time, trying to be a good, responsible kid. We each learned how to cope in our own little ways, to deal with small moments of sadness or lonliness, and to try our best.

Addiction, depression, and selfishness were really the enemy, working themselves out through you both. It divided us all, and set you parents against each other. But there were good times too, tangled in amongst the rest of it all, like a big knot that I’m still sometimes trying to loosen and smooth out. Each of you had such bitter, painful endings, separated from us, and most of all, from each other.

The fantasy I wish for is for you two to be together and in love, still. You were that way once upon a time.

As humans, we’re each finite and incomplete, with many lessons to get through until we finally move on. I don’t look for answers about life. There’s no end-of-the-trail reward waiting for me – just my permanent loss of ego, dissolution of self, and reintegration into the world as a million little bits that are no longer shaped like “John”.

As people, I can say that my parents were beautiful, successful, tragic, and sometimes terrible people. They remain as mysterious to me now decades after their deaths as they were during my childhood. I can only accept them as they were, but I won’t ever truly understand them.

Dad, I’m still with Grace. Thank you for accepting her so readily back in 1986. The pride that I inherited from you would have made me do what I wanted no matter your opinion, but your approval of her and your pride in me made me feel so happy and strong! You met Grace’s father Honesto at our wedding too. I call him “Pop”, as Grace does. At 91, he’s a lively, happy wonder of a man, and for decades has been such a friendly and supportive father-in-law to me. Pop is a character too – always smiling and laughing! You’d get a kick out of him Dad.

Mum, all the Dinos are musical people, whether for the love of it or to play an instrument or sing. If you could have visited their family home, I bet you’d have probably banged out some boogie-woogie on the family piano and endeared yourself to them.

Nothing is permanent, but sometimes life changes so slowly that we don’t notice it. Friendships drift, people leave and arrive, and neighbourhoods, circumstances, and expectations all gradually get modified. I think that the wise view is in finding ways to adapt to change without having any regrets. It’s not always easy, but I do think there’s really nothing to worry about.

Mum and Dad, If you are anywhere now, I hope you’re enjoying peace and tranquility and a reward for making it to the end of your journey. If you are nowhere, then I won’t worry.

I love you, and miss you all the time.
Yours forever,

John.