me, Megan, my parents somewhere in the Southwest
Today, my dad would have been 102. He was born in 1913, in an obscure town in Illinois, the son of immigrants from what was once Yugoslavia. He had two sisters and two brothers. The younger brother, Glen, died young, in WWII. Joe, the older brother, joined my dad in Venezuela in 1937, escaping the depression in Oklahoma, where they were living at the time.
He traveled to Venezuela on a seaplane, a trip that took thirty plus hours in those days. He landed in Lagunillas, a booming oil town on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, where he went to work for Creole, a subsidiary of Standard Oil/Exxon. He was a single guy, there were a lot of single women – mostly nurses – from the U.S. And for a while, he dated an American nurse.
When the war broke out, he returned to the U.S. and enlisted. On one of his breaks in 1945, he met my mother in Tulsa. She, too, was from a large family – the next to youngest among five siblings. Within six months, they were married and he ferreted her away to a continent which, in those days, was a wilderness of oil fields, a wild west to the Midwestern mindset.
My dad was an eccentric, a chess whiz, a math whiz, a member of Mensa, a loner whose universe was his family and his explorations of the unknown, the undiscovered. In time, he and my mother settled in Caracas, where I was born, and then later in Maracaibo, in an oil camp where my sister was born. When I was ten, we moved back to Caracas, where we lived until I was nearly 17. By then he was an accountant for Creole.
There’s much about my father that remains a mystery to me. He never went to college, his family couldn’t afford it, but he made sure that my sister and I were both educated through graduate school. He and my mother were both joggers, who pounded out their miles every week, six days a week without fail for years. As they got older and their knees began to hurt, they turned to swimming. All this physical exercise is probably why his heart rate and blood pressure were always low and why he was so rarely ill. He and my mother were health-conscious.
I recall that when he got bursitis in his elbow, he went to traditional doctors, who didn’t help, and finally wrote to nutritionist Adele Davis, whose bestselling book, Let’s Get Well had impressed him. Davis, for a modest $50 fee, recommended a certain nutritional program that included Brewer’s Yeast and within three days, his elbow had returned to normal and never bothered him again. That experience convinced him that traditional medicine wasn’t where the answers lay.
In 1963, as the political situation in Venezuela worsened, he took early retirement from Creole and we moved to the U.S., a major shock for me. We settled in Boca Raton, Florida – Rat’s Mouth is the literal translation. I hated life in the U.S. The cultural shock was so extreme that I started looking for answers about why I was where I was and what it meant in the bigger scheme of things. That’s when I discovered astrology.
I used to sit in my room at night, after I’d done my homework, calculating the complicated math for erecting charts – and then would take it to him to check my math. He didn’t have a clue about astrology but confided that his mother, a woman who had died before I was born, was an astrologer.
I also used to sit in that room and write and when I told him that was what I was going to be, what I was going to do, I never heard the usual line that unpublished writers hear: C’mon, no one makes a living as a writer. Instead, he said, Go for it. So I did. And when my first novel was published in 1985, he started a scrapbook. He used to check the royalty statements that Rob and I received – and found errors.
Because of him, Megan learned to play chess at a young age. By then she called him Buddy – the name he’d chosen for himself as a grandfather.
Somewhere in the mid-1990s, my mother developed Alzheimer’s and my dad struggled to care for her. Rob, Megan and I lived nearby and helped as often as we could. But by late 1999, my mother’s condition was so dire that we had to place her in an Alzheimer’s unit. My dad moved in with us, and Megan gave up her bedroom and lived in our living room. Not long afterward, we moved to our present home, where everyone had a bedroom. My mother passed shortly after we moved and every night for the next year Rob and my dad played chess in the evenings.
It’s difficult to have a parent living with you at this point in your life. But Buddy was so easy to live with, so unobtrusive, that our situation persisted to August 2001, when I walked into his room one morning and found him pulling a plastic bag over his head. I freaked. I completely lost it. Even though I understood his desire to die, I couldn’t imagine my daughter walking into his room and finding him a suicide. We later realized he had forgotten to take his Parkinson’s meds that day.
Not long afterward, we moved him to an assisted living facility in Georgia, where my sister was the head nurse. It felt like a good compromise. He was 90, Parkinson’s had robbed him of his ability to walk and care for himself, but my sister was a nurse who specialized in the elderly. Every few months for the next two years, I flew to Georgia to visit him.
On one of those trips, I took a CD that Carol Bowman had sent me, about a 20/20 piece that had been filmed on James Leiniger, a little kid who recalled a life as a WWII pilot, a case Carol has investigated, the best case for reincarnation in the western world. At the end of it, my dad turned to me, tears streaming down his sunken cheeks, and said, “That’s the best evidence I’ve ever seen for the continuation of the soul.” Up until he had watched that CD, he had been a skeptic that anything anything survived death.
Four months later, he released his tenacious hold on life and died. I’m convinced that the Leiniger case facilitated his death, that it convinced him he would not be annihilated, that it erased his fear of death.
So on this day, Buddy, on what would have been your 102nd birthday, I want to thank you for all that you brought to my life, for everything I learned from you. And most of all, I thank you for never discouraging me to follow my heart, my dreams, my soul. That is the ultimate tribute from a parent to a child.