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May 26, 2011

What now?

What do you do after the loss of your parents? It's like floating in the air under a parachute, wondering where you will touch down.
I'm trying to keep busy - going paddling as much as possible, because that is my great stress release. Everyone at work has been very kind to me and my sister. I find myself thinking strange thoughts, like, "Well, mom outlived Bin Laden".
I've also been watching PATTON for the first time; it's on Netflix online. Wow what a great movie. It also strikes me as being a movie about my parents' generation, the best of us I think. My father and my uncles on both sides of my family were all in WWII. My mom was born in 1930, so during the events in the movie she would have been a young teenager. My father was in his 20's, as he was born in 1920.
I took a playboating class last weekend (my penchant for non-sequiturs has remained solid) and it was hard for me to get into at first. We stayed for a couple of hours at the Slow Joe wave at the NOC, then went up to the top and played down to the Ledges. I even thought, as we drove to the put-in, that I might just bow out for the rest of the class. Details of my mother's suffering in the hospital kept popping into my head. But I decided to keep with the class, I went anyway and I am glad I did. I rolled a lot and that cold Nanty water got my mind out of its funk, at least for awhile. This was during the Boaterchik festival, and that night we all had barbeque and beers at the festival and I and my group of friends slept in this crazy bunkhouse, in sleeping bags because it got pretty nippy at night. The next day we had the second part of the playboating class and again, at first I wasn't really into it. We put on at Ferebee and went down to the stern squirt spot behind the flat rock, and that cold water slapped me upside the head over and over and it was the best thing. We paddled to the takeout and I had a good line at the falls.
Crossfit has been helping too - it is such a ridiculously hard class, every time, that it drives any bad thoughts out of my head and replaces them with sweat and gasping for air. I have had great improvements in my paddling from it, both in terms of strength of strokes and in terms of stamina (metcon aerobic endurance). Most of my classmates are much younger than me and run rings around me, but I soldier on. It is a positive and encouraging environment.
This is a rambling mess but I'll post it anyway.

3 comments:

Jean said...

My parents were WWII Army veterans also, and have left for another realm. Yes, it's very hard, they were such strong, dependable people. They would want you to be happy, so keep on paddln'! It's my solution to the same problem and it works.

Mike Smith said...

I have experienced many such losses and drastic changes in my life, one of which was within the last month--a sudden breakup with a girlfriend of several years, who I had been making plans to build a house with, to live together and retire together. I had been thinking of taking up kayaking for the last several months, and after the breakup jumped right into it. Maybe it is something about the continuity of motion when paddling, and the fluidity of momentum, that is soothing and healing.

SYED MUHAMMAD ALI said...

The parents have to go back but what they left is their memories, this ordeal experience you can not explain but the universal truth is that you have to survive.