My mother gave me a bible on Easter when I was around 7 years old. It was 1961, and the war in Vietnam was starting to take on a form of more than just a “conflict,” and within 4 years the US was sending troops there.
I was given the Bible because my mother and step-father were sending us to Sunday School, (I say us, meaning my older and younger brothers and I) for a time. I think there was the idea that our newly formed family would be more “normal” if the kids were attending church.
Granted, neither of the adults went to church, just dropped us off where I remember earning stickers for my bible to show I had studied a certain part. The Bible mostly scared me with all the conflicts between God and those on earth, and while I liked the stickers, the lessons never stayed with me.
I recently gave that bible to my Granddaughter, and my youngest daughter (her mother) are into church and religion. I never felt akin to it or the Bible,but she likes the family connection that is implied with the little note my mother put in the very front, saying something like I was her little princess, and she loved me.
That connection was severed early with my mother when she began dating the step-father, who was younger than her, and only 16 years older than me. It made for awkward all the time, as my mother was entrenched in the relationship and ended up having three more kids with him—another wedge in the already shaky relationship with me.
I left home at the age of 15 and only saw my mother twice after that before she died in her early 50s of lung cancer. She was a hard-core smoker that smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and I can’t remember many times walking into our various homes when I wasn’t overtaken by the haze of thick smoke that always seemed to linger during times when doors and windows could not be left open.
My biological father also died of lung cancer, although he made it to his 60s. He too smoked non-filtered cigarettes and would often claim that they were better, “Because the tobacco was a natural filter.” That didn’t work out so well for him either. I remember when I reconnected with him and visited his apartment in Orange, CA, and how the smell of smoke was overwhelming. Even more disturbing was looking up at the popcorn ceiling and noting that it was a deep, amber orange in color.
Only my father and his 3rd wife lived there, and all of that coloration was from the cigarettes of two people. It was a good visual for what happens in the lungs, but it wasn’t enough to stop me from smoking at the time. That happened after Mike and I were married in the early 80s, and I have been cigarette-free since.
My parents split when I was around 6-7 years old, and they fought in court, not over us as young humans with a lot of emotional needs, but over the amount of money my dad should pay in child support. By the time the ugliness and bargaining of kids was done, I didn’t see my father until I was around 15 years old, about 8 months after I ran away from my, then, Florida home, via New York, Saint Louis, and finally to San Diego after a quick visit to 1969 San Francisco—The Hippy heyday, standing on Height-Asbury just to say I did.
It’s interesting to note that it is a good thing there was no Coronavirus then, because no one was practicing social or physical distancing at that time!
Arriving a few days later, I moved in with my older brother and his wife, who were property managers for a large apartment complex in the San Diego area, and it was there I met my former husband when he and two of his sailor buddies moved into the complex after completing their tours in Vietnam. They all worked on the helicopters used by the Navy and Marines at the time.
All of these thoughts are triggered by having cancer, this day of resurrection, and seeing the AARP magazine sitting near me.
Being 65 years old is okay and most times I just feel like I always have, but it’s also highlighted, far too often, with limitations and that shadowy mortality that lurks and teases around the corner.
None of us are getting out of this alive, and so, I contemplate life and living on this Easter Sunday and look forward to each new day.