When was the last time you took a good long look at yourself? We all have those defining moments in our lives when we feel the need to reflect and reconsider. My life has had several of those defining moments. Most of them seem to have been in the past couple of years. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not so shallow as to say I never looked back until recently. When I graduated from high school it was a time to consider the highs and lows of those four years. As I received a bachelor’s degree I looked at my single life to that point. Shortly after that I got married and looked forward to a lifelong future. When I got a master’s degree I realized how much I had not yet mastered. But lately things have been a little more chaotic and more and more I have looked inward at things that have happened.
The past two years have seen the unwanted disintegration of that marriage that I had looked forward to being a lifelong love affair. The career I had chosen and worked so hard to earn the master’s degree to follow also went the way of the dodo. Financial crises and struggles with depression have also made me wonder who I really am. But this latest occurrence would make anyone look around and wonder: “Who am I?” My dad is dying of emphysema.
My dad, John Romig, is a man I love. He wanted so many things for me that he never had. We have had major differences and disagreements over the years and have had even greater joys and jocularities since then. I gave him grief over smoking for years and nearly blew his nose off when I put three cigarette loads in one of his Salem’s. He gave me grief over putting explosives in his smokes. When I say “grief” I mean a grounding for a month. When I told him that I was not going to be a doctor and not going to go in the army to pay for it he thought I was making biggest mistake of my life. We didn’t speak for months after that. With some work on both our parts we overcame that major meltdown and rebuilt a new relationship. What we have now I would not trade for anything. Our adult relationship is still a father-son relationship but it has also matured into a kind of friendship like no other. It is the relationship I wanted with him as a child and young adult but neither of us could find it. It is the kind of relationship I am trying to build with my sons. It took a tearing down of the old to build something new with my dad and me.
As I look inward, that is a great way to describe what my life is becoming. The old has been and is still being torn down to build something new. Change is part of life. I think mine has been stagnant for quite some time. It has taken nearly all the structures of my life to be torn down to the foundations for something new to be built. And I have even done some excavating on those foundations, too! It is my hope that the upcoming passing of my father will be the last of the major tearing down for now. But as I look at myself it is a major revelation that the tearing down and building up is an unending process. Every day in sometimes tiny and sometimes large ways something is torn down in our lives and every day something new is built. I never really looked at it that way. Change seems to be the only thing that doesn’t change. Every day we see something new rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of something old. To me this is something new to ponder. I hope that I’m not the only one who didn’t look at the world like this.
