What I Learned About Vulnerability from Charles H. Gager

     When my father passed, two and a half years ago, I posted his obituary, edited into the bottom of a blog I'd written three days before he would die. That post was about how it sucked getting old and how bad the "system" treated elders.  Emotionally, posting the obituary was all I could get out. 

    Now, it is time. 

     My father was a brilliant man, a genius, who didn't have a wide skillset to display emotion. I learned to keep a lot of things inside, only allowing the extrovert in me to throw most everything out into the wind, especially humor. Dad was an engineer who worked on radar systems, the early ones, that could detect missiles, where upon detection, they could be intercepted. Layman's terms it was the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the Star Wars Defense System. He is the inventor for a patent filed in 1959 for: 

COHERENT VlDEO INPUT-W REACTANCE TUBE UENCY MODULATOR CARRIEROSCILLATOR NORMAL VIDEO INPUT- AND LIMITER FREQUENCY DISCRIMINATOR DELAYED COHERENT VIDEO OUTPUT AMPLITUDE DETECTOR DELAYED NORMAL VIDEO OUTPUT 

          ---INVENTORS, CHARLES A. FOWLER CHARLES H. GAGER. (see,  Method and apparatus for multiplexing and delaying normal and coherent video on one delay line)

   Because of the classified nature of his job, I never knew exactly what he did for work when I was growing up. I learned, upon clearing out his condo I found the documentation, the completion of his security clearance with an inked signature from Donald Rumsfeld. From this, I learned that we don't always know what others do, what they are going through, and how some secrets need to be held because they can change lives.  

   Perhaps biggest thing I learned from my father was forgiveness. As an adult, I had to forgive my father. Some things are more difficult that others, and this was a big one, but he had proven to me that I could forgive him. It  was one of my biggest life lessons. Forgiveness and kindness need to be as important as food and oxygen for us to survive as the best people we can be. 

                                                                     * * * * * * * *

 Now, the kicker.

  

   I spoke to someone recently who had lost their father about at the same time, in the same way as I lost mine. It was the first time I'd really spoken about my father, and the loss. The funeral was about who he was but there wasn't any closure---and that's a word I don't agree with, but it had been two and a half years. Two and a half...stuffed into a locker, no key, no combination. 

  Here and Now: The blackhole reappearing, the locker flung open---after I so successfully closed it at the beginning of 2023. After a year of bad things happened. 

  After his death in 2022, things came out sideways. They say there is no correct way to grieve, but I know I didn't do a very good job. My behavior was erratic, unpredictable, from being disengaged to displaying irrationality and wrath around something as trivial as how to score a spare while bowling. I chased away important people in my life, people I loved. Other things happened, other loses and I went to a very dark place. Things got progressively better after, but the locker grew bigger.

     Since his death, I've not formed many meaningful relationships; not the ones I used to form. My ability to function in a non-work, non-creative environment disappoints me, to say the least. Often I say too much---words come out strangely in all kinds of ways: too many jokes...too much misunderstanding...saying way too much to people I don't know....too many folks who are going North to my South. I'm subtlety chasing people away I open up to. The blackhole kept pulling, and I was sad, wanting people, places, and things to make me feel better. They couldn't. 

   It popped into my fiction and poetry. There are poems about my father, and about 2022. But there is also my to be released novel, The Shadows of the Seen, where one of the characters loses their father, has a breakup, suffers the death of a friend, and the death of a pet....and things came out sideways. It was the hardest most difficult character I've ever written, myself, in all of my failing. It left me exhausted and vulnerable---after each session in my writing room, alone.  

  My outlook today is that I'm pretty lucky. Things did get better, although the bumps in the road still happen. I'm grateful I can identify what is going on, and throw it out in the universe. It's like the Star Wars Defense System, intercepting the bad things or trying to minimized the damage. Today I'm throwing it out in the universe, and I don't know in what form, but I know something will come back. 

Now. It is time.