But, in the meantime, my beloved step-father Tom's memoir was published and is now available on Amazon, so I want to give you the link here: Seeking Adventure, Finding Home. If you are interested in how someone combined a deep spiritual and social justice sensibility with tackling real-world problems (in places as far flung as Columbia, South Africa and Bangladesh - and as strange as the Providence, RI & D.C.), then this is the memoir for you. If you are also interested in how someone can hurl themselves around the world in the first part of life but then find an even deeper happiness as he got older by 'retiring' to renovating a farmhouse in Maine, and finally - after physical disabilities became too much for even that - becoming witness-in-chief of a pond outside his condominium in Brunswick, Maine (along with working at a soup-kitchen, taking classes at local colleges and being part of a very active James Joyce study group), then this is also the book for you.
Here's the promo postcard designed by my very own Canadian:
One of the astonishing things about Tom's death was that it was clear he was transcending the wheel of suffering, because he had lived a good life in all the possible meanings of the phrase. I wrote here about the waves of love I felt from him as he took his last breath, holding his feet, with his beloved Ganesh statue behind me in the ICU.
He was not perfect, nor did he aspire to be, but he was a loving and vital human being who used every one of his many talents to make the world a better place. Now, that, is a life worth celebrating.
I am lucky in that he was my stepfather long enough for me to appreciate this about him and that before he died we had worked through residual issues (not unsurprising for a teenager and her fourth father...). His generosity to me from the beginning of his relationship with my mother in 1980 was kind of breathtaking. The need my mother had for that kind of love, a man who would be her champion in every way, was palpable, and I - as the daughter who had attempted to carry that weight for a long time - was mightily relieved when he came along to take it off my back.
My mother in turn offered him a kind of love and nurture he so desperately needed and so they accomplished what they both happily referred to as a "successful mutual rescue project." This is the kind of happy ending one wishes to see in the real world. I feel so grateful I had a front row seat. It took me many years to take on board the life lesson staring at me for over 30 years, but eventually I, too, found the love of my life, and so the (happy) story continues.
My mother and I, with the help of men like Tom and John (and our own ceaseless work on ourselves in various ways too numerous and in some cases embarrassing - I'm talking about me here - to mention), have slowly but surely turned the direction of the enormous toxin-filled ship of - no exaggeration - hundred of years of generational alcoholism and dysfunction away from the inevitable grounding on the proverbial shoals of self-destruction (in which many innocents also drown for the sin of just being near the cyclonic force - to mix the 5th metaphor), to a more gentle shore. A place where the toxins can be unloaded, perhaps stored somewhere safe even, in hopes they won't hurt anyone else, ourselves included.
My beloved cousin Darcy and her amazing husband James in the way they are with each other and how they are raising their two wonderful children Simon & Leo are also charting a different course out of the dangerous fog within which our inheritance wants us to get lost.
I am so lucky to be alive and so is my mother, but more than that - in this life - this very life - without anything given to us to start - except arguably in a weird sideways cosmic pincer move, one loud, angry, raucous, politically astute, feminist, hell-bent-active alcoholic-but-loving-in-her-own-crazy-ass-way woman (my grandmother, her mother, Jani, who fought and clawed to gasp air even when she didn't even know what it was to breathe) - we have found a way out of the predetermined path of self-destruct on which we had been set.
Tom was a huge part of this healing project and I celebrate him here. I miss him so much I can barely let myself feel it most of the time, but I am equally grateful he was in my life.
One person's love can make that much difference. Know that. Act on that. With that power you can really change the world - not just the wallpaper. For realz.
