All of my papers are graded, and I have just one more faculty meeting on Thursday. This summer one of my goals is to get published (and paid) for some of my non-fiction writing. Occasionally, I’ll be posting articles and snippets of what I am writing here.
This piece is about my parents; eventually I want to write a book about their lives. I’m hoping to get this shorter piece about them published soon. I’m sending it to numerous publications, so wish me luck! Let me know if you think there are any changes you think I should make. Feedback on my works in progress is always appreciated.
TCJ
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I feel lucky to the second youngest of eight children in my Irish-Catholic family. My parents were a widow and widower that married, giving me six half-siblings and two nephews and a niece on the day I was born. I was blessed three years later with a full sister. My parents had almost 20 years in age difference, and while many people didn’t initially agree with the match, my parents have shown how true their love for each actually is. While life was never simple for the Clancys, my parents taught me three key lessons: never doubt God, life isn’t fair and love should be unconditional.
Attending Mass every Sunday was a given in my family. As a young child, I can distinctly remember that on the right side of the first row of Ascension Church in Chesterfield was vacant, the second row was taken by a number of friendly Loretto nuns, and my family sat in the third row.
In many ways, I feel like my parents lived and lost the American dream. After getting married in 1976, they had a large two-story, four-bedroom house in the newest suburb of St. Louis. My dad owned his own successful grocery store in South St. Louis and had plans on the horizon to open a new store in the budding new suburbs of the city. They were active in the Catholic Church. They had a second house, a small farmhouse, where the family spent weekend after weekend bonding, barbequing and riding their horses. They were well respected by dad’s customers and their many friends and acquaintances. As a small child in this family, it seemed as if we had everything.
Life isn’t fair though, and people get thrown curve balls. In 1986, my dad began to lose his grocery business, and by the end of 1987, both of his stores were gone and he was working for his competition. My parents had to give up the large house and move into St. Louis City. We lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment above an insurance company. My sister and I shared the master bedroom, while the dining room became the home of my parents’ large, king-size bed. I remember many nights where my younger sister and I listened as the rain seeped in through the roof and fell into the pot my mom usually used for bean soup. Life wasn’t easy. I was in only third grade, but when my mom warned me that we were to have a simple Christmas, I knew money was tight. I never once heard them blame God, and we still went to Church every Sunday. They never doubted God.
One day, while living at this apartment, the doorbell rang. I answered, and an older lady that I did not recognize asked to see my mother. I found my mom, and when she came back upstairs, tears trickled down her face and she carried a large envelope, oozing with money. My dad’s grocery store was located a block from a Catholic church, and the customers of his store, many of whom were members of this parish, put matters into their own hands. Somehow they raised thousands of dollars to help my family get by.
As I became older, I realized how serious my parents’ financial situation really had become. They had to declare personal bankruptcy, and their credit was destroyed. When I was in fourth grade, we moved again, to a small town about an hour outside of St. Louis. Housing was cheaper, schools were good and my parents could try to start a new life.
As an adult who was recently married, I can only imagine how strenuous these financial problems were on my parents’ marriage; however, if there were any problems, my sister and I never saw them. I know that my parents turned to God to help them bear their problems, and I think that the strength in their faith life gave them an amazing strength to overcome problems that would destroy many marriages. Their love for each other was unconditional, and they worked hard and waited for the opportunity to crawl out of the deep hole that they had found themselves in.
Living a life post bankruptcy became mundane. My parents lived paycheck to paycheck. My sister and I were limited in our involvement in extra-curricular activities; we only had one car, and my parents could not afford activities that had a price tag on them. My mom managed the bills and amazingly made the money stretch to meet everything. My dad was in his sixties, a time where many of his peers were getting ready to retire, and he was embarking on a job at Wal-Mart that would last for 19 years.
My parents made it through obstacle after obstacle in those 19 years. They wanted my sister and me to attend a Catholic grade school and high school; they made that a reality even though money was limited. They even helped us as much as they could when we both decided to attend Saint Louis University for our undergraduate studies.
My parents are two people who have given so much love to their God, to each other and to their family. My siblings and I waited anxiously for them to have a time where they could finally retire and just relax and enjoy their lives together. We thought that was going to happen in 2008, as it would have marked my dad’s twentieth year with Wal-Mart, allowing him to retire. However, on February 27, 2007, my dad was admitted to the emergency room. He had been tired that weekend, and my mother noticed that he was beginning to forget things, but dad didn’t want to go to the hospital. He was born in 1925; people only went to doctors and hospitals for two things: to bring a new life into the world or to take a life out of the world. By the time my mother was able to get my dad to the hospital, he couldn’t remember who he was.
It turns out that my dad had hit his head somewhere (possibly multiple times), and he had a subdermil hemotoma, which is more or less a collection of blood on the layer above his brain. It was putting pressure on his brain, causing the brain to compact, and consequently, my dad was suffering from memory loss. Doctors had to drill into my dad’s skull to release some of the fluid that was putting pressure on his brain. Because my father is very susceptible to medication, he slept for weeks after the surgery, in a coma-like state.
He has spent the last two years in a wheelchair and lived for months in the hospital, in three nursing homes and his home. My mother quit her job, trying to take care of my father; she knew it was a risk, but God had always taken care of them in the past. Today, my dad is still recovering. His brain doesn’t seem to connect. He knows who we are, but he doesn’t want to talk much. It’s as if his brain is still in a temporary cloudy state and doesn’t communicate well with the rest of his body. My mom is a saint for trying to take care of him, as my siblings quickly learned in November of 2007. In November of 2007 my mom was hospitalized, needing a colonoscopy, and we had to place dad back into a nursing home; no one could afford to take off work and take care of dad. Since my mother had no income, she was eventually forced to sell their house and move into an apartment after her emergency surgery. Now she rents the house I own in St. Louis City.
I look at my parents’ life, and I wonder how they can think that life is beautiful and that God is good. Even in my dad’s cloudy state, he talks incessantly about my mom and how much he wants to be with her. My mom risked their financial security to try and take care of my dad, even when her health was poor. I know so many people who would look at everything that my parents had to go through and who would have a hard time even believing there was a God. But that’s not how my parents work. When my dad was losing his store, he played the song “Don’t worry be happy” over and over again. After Mass, he would watch Robert Schueller and was confident that there really was power in positive thinking. I watch my parents and realize no, life is not fair, but I should not blame God. They don’t; they have always accepted every challenge that life has brought them. They haven’t become angry, bitter people. They haven’t stopped going to Church. They have always given as much as they could to their family, friends, neighbors and Church. They have always listened and let God guide them in their decisions.
As an adult, I can only hope to live my life, following their example. As a Christian, I am called to see where the good has been in the negative situations that I encounter. I am called to put my trust in God and to love others, especially my spouse, unconditionally. And just maybe, when I am at my wit’s end and need a miracle, someone will ring my doorbell, waiting attired with God’s help.
