JOR-EL: Once, when you were small, I died, while giving you a chance for life.
It was a shock when I saw him. He was wandering around aimlessly, obviously not in his body. He was NOT supposed to be here.
“What are you doing here? You need to go back, and be my father, just as we planned!”
“I’m tired. I hurt. I don’t want to go back to a broken body.”
“But you need to go back! We agreed!”
My father first got really sick in 1992, when I was hundreds of miles away going to college in Rexburg, Idaho. When I crashed out of school and took the rebound to community college, I came home one day to see him carried out on a stretcher into an ambulance.
Almost two decades passed and he got really, really sick again. As in deathly ill. He could barely move and he grew a beard because he didn’t feel well enough to even shave. “Not now,” I thought. “I still need you.” But I talked with my youngest sister about it, and we made peace with it; we were ready to bury him if that was really to be.
I sent him pictures of me and my son to try to cheer him up. He was in really bad shape.
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A Boy and His Dad |
It was obvious that I was not going to persuade him by plans of the future. I would have to appeal to his here and now.
“What about your family now? Won’t they miss you?”
That seemed to be more persuasive. He softened a bit and looked more ready to turn back.
Dad found a specialist in Walla Walla that seemed to know what was going on, finally, and he recovered.
JOR-EL: And now, even though it will exhaust the final energy left within me…
CLARK
(turns frightened)
Father, no!
JOR-EL
Look at me, Kal-El!
“Wait, before you go. I have to do something. I… I will carry a part of that pain for you.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes… yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do. I promise, I will help you.”
“Very well.”
My back was thrashed– not too long after my son was born, I found out that some of the discs in my spine were wearing out, and one was being crushed like a pancake, pinching the nerve (sciatic) in my right leg. In the first week of October in 2009, I had a fusion surgery, but the nerve damage was done.
I found myself comparing notes with my father on pain.
JOR-EL: The Kryptonian prophecy will be at last fulfilled. The son becomes the father – the father becomes the son.
My father later apologized to Cimmorene, and to me, for his mistreatment of me in the past. He got it. Things would never be the same again.
January 3, 2014 at 10:58
It’s terrible that you both had to go through that to reconcile your past, but maybe it wouldn’t have happened otherwise…
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January 3, 2014 at 11:27
It’s very likely that things would have been very different otherwise, yes.
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January 3, 2014 at 17:32
jak asked me to read this before he published it. Knowing what I do about his past, I couldn’t help myself. I cried.
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May 15, 2014 at 20:52
Reblogged this on the tao of jaklumen and commented:
44 years ago today, my father died. He did not remain dead, but I needed to remind him of the reasons to live. He told me today he returned to the scene after waking up at 04:00, when I did. Maybe that explains my waking, and an ominous feeling..
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May 16, 2014 at 18:18
The stories I describe happened at two different times. I don’t think most people would believe such a story because the relatively young age that he experienced a near-death experience would mean that I…
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May 20, 2014 at 17:41
Such a powerful post, Jak! The things we go through to become whole… Sorry you both suffer from such pain. 😦
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December 23, 2014 at 03:12
it’s so strange how the cycle of life continually repeats itself and how hard it is to break that cycle. Every day that I get older, I see more of each of my parents inside myself, which delights me sometimes and disgusts me other times. It’s strange how we try to be nothing like our parents and we end up exceedingly similar.
Great post, Jak!
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December 25, 2014 at 08:04
Did you know that you replied on my father’s birthday? Yep, he’s got a near-Christmas birthday. I think he did all right this year; we joked a lot about him reaching the official retirement age and I got him a hilarious talking e-card (and showed him the another one I wanted to send, but couldn’t, hehe).
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