I got an email from the folks where I put a granite slab vertical in memorium to my parents. Maybe one day my name and my wife's name might be on the other side of the vertical slab 2 or 3 feet high and 5 inches thick. They emailed me a picture of the memorial. It's still pretty fresh that Mom has gone now almost 1 1/2 years now. And I couldn't believe when I thought of it that Dad has been gone now since 1985 when I was 37 years old. Mom's ashes are where John Denver crashed his plane in the ocean and Dad's ashes have been in the Mt. Shasta area since he passed away.
I didn't really appreciate my parents very much until I went away to a private boarding school my last year of High School to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was 17 at the time and I took the El Capitan Train the 18 hours or so from Los Angeles to Santa Fe and back several times that year. Then when I graduated in May my parents drove out for the graduation and took two other girls at the school to their homes, one in Sedona, Arizona and one back to Los Angeles County in California where we lived too.
Anyway,I finally realized when I went away to school how very sane my parents were compared to most people. I found most people pretty nuts in comparison, especially people my parents age. So, when I returned to Los Angeles I valued my parents a whole lot more than before. This made our family bond much stronger. I was much more there for them and they for me after that. I'm afraid my life experience up through my early 20s really tested that bond but still it held true for all of us. We were always there for each other in emergencies. There was only one emergency that this was not true of. It was my father's last year of life. As he approached the end of life I wanted to spend the last few weeks and months with my Dad. But my now ex-wife broke a clipboard over my head and demanded I not do that. I think that moment was the end of our marriage even though my ex and I were stubborn and held on because of the kids for 9 more years. However, for me, being denied those last days and weeks with my Dad and Mom emotionally ended my marriage at that point and it became only a mental discipline after that in reality.
However, the other side of that is that I probably couldn't have handled being there watching my father slowly waste away with bone cancer. Especially after he was given codeine as a pain killer and he hallucinated from it and was no longer rational a lot of the time toward the end.
One time I had to drive to Yucca Valley where my parents retired to to the house my Dad and I and Mom had built on weekends ourselves from 1968 until 1980 when they retired there.(I was there for the big stuff mostly like pouring the concrete and setting the roof Joice's in place and stuff like that and quarrying white dolomite and gold ore for the fireplace over the years. Until 1980 they lived in San Diego County where Dad worked Building the Encina Power plant near Carlsbad among other things there in the County.
When Dad died in 1985 Mom was like a ship without a rudder, she just kept moving and moving every year or two until she moved near us in 1994 to the Northern Coast of California and stayed near us until she passed on in 2008. But between 1985 and 1994 she lived in Palm Springs,Ashland in Oregon, Seattle in Washington, Hana in Maui, Hawaii, San Marcos(where Dad and Mom had owned a house) In California etc. Mom and Dad were married two years before I was born in 1946 for a total of 39 years and a few months. So Dad was married first at age 21 and then divorced and married my mother at age 30 when she was 27. This was her first and only marriage. So Mom was sort of an innocent person compared to most people I've met in my life. Since Dad had lived all over the western coastal states and Texas and Arizona growing up and had chartered a Yacht to Tahiti with his brother and first wife, Dad was always very worldly in a sense. But there was an innocence to my father as well in some ways that I can't really explain. He was very intelligent and I don't think his generation understood women as well as people tend to more now. So even though my parents were best friends and loved each other dearly and were always loyal and faithful to each other there relationship isn't like other relationships I have seen in my adult life. Maybe it was just the era. And it is like all relationships that actually work. You just have to say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" Their relationship was like that.
Because the were in charge of a church from the time I was 6 to 12 years old they were mostly celibate during this time. I don't think this bothered my Dad but I know this did my Mom a lot because she told me it was very hard for her to be celibate and married to Dad at the same time.
What I took from this was that being celibate makes most people crazy as an adult. However, now as a 61 year old I don't know anymore for sure. However, I do still think of sex as like food or air and if one doesn't get enough for any reason it tends to make people bat shit crazy. This is just what I have observed.
Yes. People can stifle their emotions through will power. But if it isn't a real emergency like a war or someone chasing after you with a knife or a gun then I feel people just kind of get delusional trying to stay celibate and sort of nuts.
I kind of feel about celibacy like I do about people who try to become fruitarians. Most people who are disciplined enough to be fruitarians that are men usually die in the process. And one young woman I knew who was eating only fruit in Hawaii for several months got skinny as a rail and lost her period after the first month. So, I guess I think of celibacy a lot like that. Both tend to make people crazy in the long run. In the short run one might survive both but in the long run people might just not be around anymore or be nuts.
Luckily, my parents were only celibate for a relatively short time so it sort of worked for them during my ages 6 to 12 until my mother's father died and she had a nervous breakdown in 1960. They gave up the church then and I had my real parents back through my teens. Also, I had developed Childhood epilepsy at age 10 and I sort of needed them to be more present and not off running a church and never being around while my grandmother raised me mostly. By age 15 I grew out of Childhood epilepsy but became permenently psychically gifted in amazing ways through the process. I believe it happened because I wasn't allowed any medicine at all for my illness so I had to use mind over matter techniques to survive it. Because of this I became so mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually so self aware I tended to be about 10 years ahead of my peers in spiritual maturity just trying to survive what I had been through. Though it made me very serious I always had a girlfriend after I was 15 years old. So always having a girlfriend seemed to be one of many benefits to becoming so intuitively gifted after I grew out of the childhood epilepsy at age 15.
Though I was trying to make this some kind of memorial for my parents I don't think I succeeded. This is probably because my wife and daughter and I are missing our two other children ages 20 and 35 who were here at one point or other during Christmas vacation but are no longer within several hundred miles of us now. So we are all dealing with that now. So, anyway, my parents were really great people and I'm very grateful that they raised me and put up with me until they passed away. God Bless you Folks.The world seems very empty without you here physically in it.
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