The Worst New Normal
In which I try to adjust to the recent death of my beloved stepdad, Jerry Miller (1953-2026)
Last December, I came back to my parents' house for several months. I was - I still am - trying to re-center a life that already felt out of control when I got here, and which has only kept spinning ever since.
This house, my parents' home for 28 years, has changed in many ways since last I lived here! There are gorgeous French doors that connect two rooms once separated by a wall. Smart plantation blinds guard every window, there's an enormous series of gardens and patios where there used to be a pool, and a sharp new black electric piano stands in the place of my ancient yellow-stained Wurlitzer.
But the biggest change is who lives here.
There's almost no sign of my two stepbrothers. The elder passed away two years ago at just 40, having long since moved out. The younger lives out of state, and his footprint is here in the form of the bedroom set aside for visits from his daughter, my parents’ only grandchild.
My brothers live together in a house nearby, and I, of course, have been living in California.
So it's been just my mom and dad - that is, my stepdad - for many years, along with their sweet miniature Bernerdoodle, Eliza.
Except that Dad died two months ago.
It was unexpected. It was in the middle of an already unusually hard time. He was only 72, and while he had recently been in the hospital, he was not thought to be in any danger.
In fact, Dad was expecting to take his granddaughter on spring break to the Sea Islands of South Carolina later the same week.
Instead, this happened. It's been awful.
My mother, widowed at 66? I'd never have thought it. I didn't expect this. I didn't understand that this might happen - even two months later, I barely understand that it did happen.
Mom and Dad were active! They were constantly traveling, constantly exploring, constantly on some new kick. Over the years, they visited some 30 different countries together, along with an incalculable number of overseas territories. And if there's a state they didn't travel to or through, I don't know about it.
The past sixty days have been a slog. We have had a number of bright spots with friends and family checking in on us, but mostly, my brothers and I have been trying to help our mom with triage.
You see, when something like this happens unexpectedly, there's an almost inconceivable amount of work to do:
Accounts must be closed or put into the surviving spouse's name. Policies must be examined; investments must be rounded up and managed or transferred to other managers.
Vehicles must be re-titled and re-insured.
Obscure recurring charges must be hunted down.
Subscriptions the surviving spouse doesn't use must be cancelled.
Rental properties must suddenly be managed - often by a spouse who barely knows where to start.
The deceased person's phone must be mined for clues about all sorts of things. Even an appointment with the dog groomer may require an intense session with the records stored in this phone - never mind how disconcerting it is to hear it ring.
Grocery shopping, once considered a basic task, changes utterly. It must be re-learned from the ground up.
Then there are all his things. They belong in categories: Keep, Donate, Gift, Sell. And there's so much! Whether it was charging cables, jars of change, blue plaid shirts, tools, or larger items, even Dad himself didn't know how much he had.
The rest of us certainly didn't know.
And because Dad took it upon himself to manage literally everything for nearly 30 years; because Dad was as reliable and as strong as waves pummeling a shoreline, with the same indomitable inevitability, all we knew was that things were being taken care of ...
... until they weren't.
Suddenly, it was up to us.
It's been two months of this. And now that the tide of calls to make and forms to sign has tapered off a little, we have some time to reflect. That's where it gets dangerous.
For all of the effort we've expended on what's here, we're also sorely missing everything Dad brought to our lives that seem not to be here anymore, or at least, not right now.
He brought fun. He brought possibility. He was a master at turning a pie-in-the-sky idea into a real thing we would then go and do: an event, a project, a remodel, a trip.
Dad brought brownies. He brought flowers. When it became biting cold, he brought the car to the gas station early in the morning and filled it up before Mom needed to leave for work, or when the snow flew, he warmed it up and cleared it off.
He brought us out to lunch or to hole-in-the-wall bakeries, parks, ice cream parlors, theatres, and museums.
He brought me back from college in Canada and back from California last Christmas.
Most of all, though, he brought us stability.
So losing him has made us feel even more unstable than another loss might. For instance, I don't remember the world utterly falling off its axis the same way when my father died 15 years ago.
And the busy work of his death has kept our family tired, frustrated, and plagued by an irrational, but persistent sense that perhaps nothing will ever be fun again.
But that's not true. It can't be.
To let the spark go out of life would be to fail to honor Dad. And we can't bear that.
I can't bear that, anyway.
So we go out to eat. We have celebrated a birthday and a sobriety anniversary since April 8. We have some trips scheduled, and surely there will be retreats again. Classes, museum visits, hikes and bike rides - all of that will come.
We will plan adventures again; we will explore new places again. We will wake up excited again. We'll practice putting our own wild ideas into action.
We will slowly lose our sense that something's wrong: Instead, we will know that something is merely different.
And we will be as OK with that as we ever can be.
We'll get there.
Yes, this is it.