Saying goodbye to Jerry

My life has not exactly been traditional, even by non-traditional standards. My parents got married when I was five, just a few months before I turned six. My dad adopted me. I was even sealed to him in the temple. Four brothers and a sister soon followed, and that was my family. But it wasn't all hunky-dory, and by the time I was fourteen (and my youngest brother was still an infant) my dad was no longer living at home. When I was fifteen, my parents got divorced, and I admit I didn't really like spending time with him anymore (Their divorce was actually a relief). In short, he scared the liver out of me. The details aren't the issue at the moment, but unfortunately they do put me in a rather unpleasant, but not nearly uncommon enough, boat with too many other people. When I was nineteen and away at college, I got a card from my dad. He signed it, "Your Stepdad." It was the first time I ever remember him being referred to as my stepdad, and I was devastated. I cried and cried. It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, and it was the first time I had missed a class all year. When I was twenty-one, I told him I didn't want anything to do with him anymore.

When I was twenty-two, my grandma told my my biological father's first name was Frank. It wasn't too long before this that I had found out he had curly hair. I have curly hair, I'm the only one in my family who does. However, my mom's dad had curly hair too, so I had always told everyone I got it from him. My aunt and cousin have curly hair like mine, and another aunt has really wavy hair, though it's not exactly curly. My mom's hair is straight, along with all my siblings. I had always told myself that the curls had skipped them the way they had skipped my mom, but down deep inside I had wondered if my curly hair really came from my dad. Finding out that it did, then finding out his first name, was more than I had ever known about him, and actually more than I really wanted to know. I am certain my mom would have told me about him if I asked, but I never did, and I never wanted to. Before she got married, my family was me and her. After she got married, I had a dad. Why would I be thinking about another one? Even after everything went to hell, it never occurred to me what 'my' other dad might be like. I was in the same boat with my brothers and sister. We had a dad, and he was a jerk. End of story.

Then I got married. And then I got pregnant. All of a sudden I found myself a little bit stressed. My husband had lost an older and a younger brother to heart defects. We knew to tell the doctor about that. But what was I bringing to the mix? My mom's side of things I knew about (hips), but there was this whole other part of me that was an unknown, a mystery. And though I knew there are people having babies all the time without knowing their full medical history and everything turns out just fine, I couldn't help worrying. So my mom asked my husband to look for my biological father. In a matter of a few short weeks, I went from knowing his name was Frank and he had curly hair, to actually talking to him on the phone. And less than a month after my son was born, two months before I turned twenty-nine, I met my biological father for the first time.

Frank is from Oregon (obviously--how else would he have met my mom?) but had moved to Texas before I was born. He had gotten married and had a son, but had been divorced fifteen/twenty years when I met him. Long enough to have become a bachelor again. As far as I can tell he has been to Oregon at least once a year since he left it, but he has a strong Texan accent. And attitude. (Though he told me once that when he first moved out to Texas people there called him a Yankee because Oregon is north. He shut them up by replying that where he's from, Yankees are from the east, and Texas is east. I'm not certain how he survived that little encounter, but I don't anyone could accuse him of being a Yankee now.)

The first several years of our relationship were difficult for me. Frank is a good man, a kind man, and a generous man. And he is a man from a different place and time than anything I could easily relate to. He is several years older than my mother and grew up on a dairy farm. Many dairy farms, in fact. He is possibly the hardest worker I have ever met (including my stepdad, which is saying something). He was raised in a no-nonsense time by no-nonsense people and has a bit of a no-nonsense attitude about things. He's not LDS, or very religious at all. He's a wood carver and comes from a long line of artists and poets. There were many things about me that he could relate to, which should have been a good thing, I suppose. But every time he found another thing about me that was like him, he would claim it, as though all of my talents and interests had been inherited through that one sperm. I felt like he was taking away pieces of me with each new discovery, as though I hadn't chosen or developed any of these things on my own. Or that my mother had been a major influence in my life, and since she was somebody he had liked enough to have a relationship with, it was possible she shared these things with him and had passed them along to me. In any case, his annual visits were a source of stress for me, even though it was apparent that he loved me and was so very happy to have a relationship with me now (to this day not a visit goes by that he doesn't cry at least once over all the years he lost with me).

Eleven years ago, on my thirty-third birthday, when my second son was four months old, he married Jerry. She is as short as he is tall, a little plump, older than Frank, and an absolute sweetheart. She's a widow with two grown sons, a gazillion grandkids and a goodly amount of great-grandkids. I adore her. Their courtship was extremely short (they had seen each other at dances before, but Frank asked her out for the first time in September and they got married in November). Frank told me that he married her because there was something about her that reminded him of my mom. Knowing both my mom and Jerry, I can say that they are really not similar. Their personalities are nothing alike. But the thing that they have in common, and the thing I think Frank was drawn to, was that they are both LDS. I couldn't believe it when he told me Jerry was Mormon. Of course, she started coming out with him on his annual trips to Oregon, stopping to see us either on the way out or the way back (or sometimes both). We fell in love with her. She loved Frank, there was no question of that, and she knew about me and that whole situation and it didn't seem to phase her. I think she also realized that I was having a hard time keeping up with his exuberance. She didn't condemn me for it, but encouraged me to be close to him without pushing and she acted as a buffer along the way. She came to church with us while my dad stayed home and mowed our lawn and I didn't really know how to introduce her. I wanted to just say, "This is Jerry, and I love her." One time in Relief Society she introduced herself as my stepmother before I could say anything else. I remember sitting there thinking, "Those of you who don't know me think you know what this means. You think my parents got divorced (which they did, but not from each other) and my dad remarried and I have issues because she's the 'other woman' or she's trying to take the place of my mom, or any of a dozen other cliches. But you're all wrong, because really, I only even met my dad a few years ago and this woman right here is bridging gaps I don't even think he knows about because she's LDS and she's a mom and she's not a confirmed old bachelor." And she's loving and kind, but she's got spunk, too, and it wasn't too long after the two of them got married that I started calling Frank Dad and I was able to tell him that I love him (something I don't say unless I mean it). I'm certain that would have happened even without Jerry, but having her around sure made the process easier, faster, and more fun.

They came and visited us last spring. They've been trying to get out to see us more often, but both of them are getting older and they have to plan their trips between doctors' appointments, so lately it's just been once a year. Jerry had been having stomach pains and had to be careful what she ate so it wouldn't hurt too much. They left Utah and went on to Oregon, but her stomach bothered her the whole time. She saw the doctor when she got back to Texas, but it wasn't until July that she was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. She did chemo for a while, but just a couple of weeks ago she decided to quit. My dad called me this morning. Jerry passed away last night.

I am going to miss the twinkle in her eye when we bring up the prospect of a bowl of ice cream after the kids go to bed. I'm going to miss seeing her sit at the table, shelling pecans with Kaes. I'm going to miss the flash of jealousy at the mere mention of my dad carving a heart for any other woman but her (though she conceded that he could carve one for me and Kaes if he wanted to). I'm going to miss her trying to teach me how to crochet. I'm going to miss her pulling out her sketch pad and watching her draw (we have a Jerry Turner original framed and hanging on the wall in the family room). I'm going to miss her soft, southern drawl, and the crooked smile with the tears when it's time to say good-bye.

My stepmother died yesterday, and my family isn't going to be complete without her.