Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (18 page)

T
he day after Gracie was released from the hospital, Crystal came over to help me organize the chaos that had taken over my house. We cleaned out the fridge in the kitchen and the extra one in the laundry room. Half-eaten casseroles that had been dropped off two weeks earlier by new baby well-wishers were tossed. I pulled back the silver foil covering a few and decided I wanted them all gone. I wanted a fresh start.

The house phone rang, and I stepped away from the fridge to answer it.

“Hello?”

A long pause.

“Uh, hello?” I heard the woman’s accent on the other end. This was either that frustrating respiratory therapist from the hospital—the one who couldn’t explain how to use Gracie’s inhaler—or Europe calling. “Is this Alexandra?” she asked.

“Yes.” I was annoyed, remembering what a poor communicator the respiratory therapist was. I didn’t have time or energy to deal with her. I was done with the hospital.

“Uh, Alexandra Kuykendall?” she asked.

“Yes.”
Let’s get on with it
, I thought.
I have a lot of lost time to make up for, and Crystal is only here for half an hour more.

“Uh, I’m calling to tell you . . .” Another pause. I was starting to think this wasn’t the respiratory therapist. This was Europe calling.

“Uh, your father . . . died.”

I glanced over at Crystal washing the crisper drawer in the sink.

Really?
I thought.
Now? This week?
I pressed the phone to my ear.

“He died this afternoon.”

With the time difference, I knew that was probably seven hours earlier. I was surprised that she, the mother of my younger sisters, was calling. And so soon after it happened. I was more surprised by the prompt call than I was by the message.

What was I supposed to say? I hadn’t known if he was still alive, so I wasn’t really shocked by the news he was dead.
I should say something
, I thought.

“Was he sick?” I asked.

“I’m sorry. My English is not very good.” Her accent was heavier than I remembered. “He was sick for . . . uh . . . ten years. . . . He could not say many words. . . . But he said your name. . . . Over and over he said, ‘Alexandra. Alexandra.’”

I could hear the grief in her voice. And maybe some nervousness about calling me to break this news. I wanted to be sensitive to her sorrow, but I couldn’t mirror it. I didn’t want to offend her, but I was completely numb. I had nothing to give back. Nothing to say.

“We will have a funeral here . . . in France . . . in two days. Maybe someday you can come to visit.”

I pictured the church in the center of their town and wondered if that’s where he’d be buried. I couldn’t remember if there was a cemetery there.

“Here is your brother,” she continued. “His English is better.”

I glanced over at Crystal again. She’d abandoned her post at the sink to soothe squabbling kids in the living room. Their little voices had transitioned from playing to arguing, and she was trying to
mediate. I walked out of the kitchen and into the laundry room, shutting the door behind me. Shutting out my current life to step into my past for a brief minute.
Really? Today, God? This is all happening today?

“Hello?” I heard a man’s voice. My brother. We hadn’t spoken since Derek and I were in Barcelona twelve years earlier.

“Hello.” I looked around the laundry room, thinking,
Now what?
Moving from one room to the other hadn’t helped. It was still awkward, and I still didn’t know how I was supposed to respond.

“Our father . . . he has died.”

It sounded dramatic. Maybe it was the accent. Maybe it was getting a phone call from France telling me my long-lost artist father had died. It sounded like something you’d read in a novel. The mountain of laundry on the floor next to the dryer felt more tangible, more real, than anything having to do with this conversation.

“He had a heart attack . . . but not of the heart . . . of the brain,” he explained.

Oh, a stroke.

We spent the next few minutes catching up on the past twelve years. He has a daughter. I have four. Our conversation was brief. He asked if Facebook was the best way to reach me. I said it was.

They’d thought of me. The most shocking part of all was they’d thought of me.

I walked back into the kitchen to find Crystal back at the sink, scrubbing the crisper drawer.

“My dad died.” I knew how dramatic it sounded, but after the week I’d had, it felt good to say something dramatic.

Crystal stood frozen, her body half turned from the sink, the dish brush in her hand. Without taking her eyes off me, she reached over and turned off the water. “Are you okay?”

“I am.” I couldn’t believe how okay I was. I knew coming off the last week, I was as empty as I’d ever been. But shouldn’t I be feeling something? “Maybe I’m just numb.”

“Okay, well, sit down.” I could tell she was searching for the appropriate response. I was too.

“No, I’m okay. Really.” I couldn’t shift gears. I was focused on cleaning out the fridge.
We should keep working
, I thought. Like my friend Erica, whose water broke when she was making a coffee cake for a brunch that morning. She couldn’t adjust her day’s plan; she just kept making the coffee cake.

“Are you sure? Tell me what happened.” She was searching my expression, trying to read where I was, but my poker face wasn’t offering any clues.

“I haven’t talked to him in years. I didn’t even know if he was still alive.”

“Well, do you want to go? To . . . where did he live?” She crinkled her brow. I knew she was trying to remember.

“France. No. I have no reason to go. And after the week we’ve just had, I’m not going anywhere. They don’t need me there. I just can’t believe they called. And so soon.”

I bent my legs to sit in the chair overlooking the front porch. I didn’t want to sit but felt tired. Breathing was still difficult.

“I can’t believe it happened this week.”

Gracie ran into the room, followed by Crystal’s son. Despite the oxygen cannulas taped to her cheeks, she was laughing. The tubing for the oxygen tank connection dragged behind her, disconnected from the tank, not needed until sleep time. Numb and exhausted, I looked at Gracie and I smiled.

W
hen are you coming home?
I texted Derek. Crystal had just pulled out of the driveway, late to pick her older kids up from school.

Why?

I have to talk to you.

What?

I’ll wait until you get home.

My phone rang. I didn’t have to look to know it was him.

“What is it?” He sounded both worried and annoyed. We’d just had ten days of accumulating bad news. Neither of us was comfortable with speculation.

“I really need to tell you in person,” I answered. I knew he was irritated, but this would take more processing than he could squeeze in between work appointments.

“I’m really behind. I don’t know when I’ll be home. Just tell me.”

“I’m okay. The girls are fine. I just want to see your face when I talk to you.”

I knew he’d understand when he found out what it was. A few hours later, sitting on our back patio, I could tell he did.

“How are you feeling?” His voice softened.

“Nothing. I’m feeling nothing. I didn’t even know he was alive, so I don’t know, I guess I’m okay.”

He nodded. He knew better than anyone that I’d already grieved. I’d spent my life working through this loss. This just meant any chance at a relationship was over. But I’d made that decision the last time I’d said good-bye, when Derek and I pulled out of my father’s gravel turnaround driveway.

“I think it’s significant that he kept saying your name over and over.”

“I know,” I said, “it probably is.” But I didn’t know how. Guilt? Regret? Hope for final words? Someone could have called me, held the phone up to his ear, but they didn’t. If there was something more he’d wanted to say, I would never know.

“Maybe I’m just exhausted. Maybe I have nothing left to feel right now. Maybe it will come out in ways I don’t expect.”

I spent the days that followed trying to put order back in our family life after ten days of crisis. I took Gracie to doctor’s appointments, threw a fortieth birthday party for Derek, helped a kindergartner with her separation anxiety, and attended to my month-old baby. But physically, I wasn’t getting better. I still felt like all life had been sucked from me, and I would sit down often. Even standing to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches was exhausting.
So much for an empty schedule
, I thought. But I was grateful I’d built that time margin into those first few months. I went back to the doctor and got another round of antibiotics.

Then one day I sat on my sofa and googled his name. I wondered if there’d been any press on his death, so I went looking for it. Following trails, I attempted to decipher newspaper articles in Spanish and Catalan. They all focused on his work. None mentioned any family.

I felt as though I’d found some treasures, and I wanted to call someone. Someone who would understand their significance. But I had no one to call, at least nobody who understood the journey
I’d been on, who’d experienced it with me. My mom had been there, but she saw things from her perspective.
Normally someone would call a sibling
, I thought. I could call Derek, and he would love me through it, but not really understand. Understand what it’s like to read my father’s obituaries in foreign languages, with no mention of my existence. I felt alone.

But God knew. He’d been there at every point. From my conception forward, he was my traveling companion. He knew my backstory as well as I did, but beyond that, he knew the joy that would come. Much of my life I felt I was walking on unsteady ground, hoping that where I chose to place my feet would somehow make me more secure. And yet here I was with the husband, the children, the job, the church I’d dreamed of, and nothing about the last few weeks hinted at security. Things that made no sense to me, things that caused me to call out to God in fear, still happened. My only stability was Jesus.

I could not, would never, be able to control my circumstances. The one thing I could count on was God. He created me. He loved me—the plain-old-housewife, mother-of-four me. I know in many ways I’m ordinary. Not too different from millions of other women. And in just as many ways I’m extraordinary, woven together by my unique biology, circumstances, and choices. A unique reflection of my Creator.

After the initial shock and “I’m okays” I offered concerned friends, I wondered if I really was. Was I really okay with this most recent turn of events—that my father was gone? And I decided I was. I’d closed that door many years ago. I’d peeked behind it a few times to make sure it was all good. And it was. But more, it was knowing that when stripped to my core—when I had to lay my head on my minivan steering wheel, not sure I could make it home—I called to God for help. When I had nothing left. No energy. No words. Not even prayers. God was there. He was my only real security and the definer of my soul.

My Inheritance

S
crolling through the email inbox on my phone, I froze: an email with my father’s name as the subject. It had been two months since the phone call with news of his death, and I’d heard nothing. This isolated conversation echoed of the girl who found a letter in the mailbox with familiar handwriting and foreign stamps. The possibility of what could be, but never was, written inside. Words that indicated potential for a relationship, for a father’s love, and then—nothing. Silence, forgotten again.

I pressed my finger on the phone’s screen and found a letter written in French. Like with the handwritten letters of years past, I skimmed through the words searching for the significant, but quickly realized my Spanish wasn’t going to help me with French as much as I thought it should. I did make out enough to know it was from a lawyer and had to do with my father’s estate. Normally emails like this are spam: a long-lost relative in a foreign country has died. But my unconventional life led me to know this was for real.

In the days that followed, I worked at translating the letter, using a conglomerate of Google translate, my boss who had just returned from vacation in Paris, and Kristi’s high school exchange student. What I pieced together were words that sounded cold, distant, impersonal. The opposite of personal, of a person—me. Did I want to assert my position as his daughter? That’s what it appeared to be asking. Really? After all these years, I was the one with the burden of proof? This brought more grief than the news of his death. This question once again of where I fit. Where I belong.

Was it the translation that made it sound so cold? The legal language? The nuance was impossible to discern. No voice inflection. No body language to read. Just words on a screen, asking, “Are you his daughter or not?”

Days later, more emails arrived, but now with attachments. I opened them, and my heart skipped as I found my father’s familiar handwriting. Longhand letters that took me back to my girlhood. I reviewed them over and over, trying to make out both the handwriting and the language, searching for something. Something that said he loved me.

They were makeshift versions of his will with different dates, all from years earlier—one in Spanish, one in French, and one in Catalan—but only one of the three mentioned me. Did this mean he thought of me a third of the time? Or I had a third of the value of his other children? Why did I even care after all these years? I’d moved on. Hadn’t I?

References to God’s inheritance in the Bible flashed to my mind. I’d never really paid attention to them; the language seemed antiquated and irrelevant. Now I had new clarity. God mentions inheritance for a reason. Inheritance, what we get when our father dies, speaks to our value in his eyes. I knew I’d read it in the Bible somewhere, but where? I found Ephesians 1:11 (NLT), where God says, “Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have
received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan.”

We are united with Christ.
I’d felt his sacrifice. With every burden I carried, every grief lived, I felt closer to Jesus, who took on the burdens of the world. Every moment I loved my children, my husband, my mother, I better understood his love, united with him more closely with each passage.

We have received an inheritance from God.
His promise not of an easy life but of a life everlasting. Lasting ever. Forever. Together with him.

He chose us in advance.
It’s true I’d felt chosen by God. Picked out of the crowd and known. Ever since I’d felt found, I knew I was no accident to him.

He makes everything work out according to his plan.
Not that he planned it all, but he uses it all, he makes it all work for his purpose. Not mine. Not ours. Not the thief in the night’s. But his.

Days later, I received another email in my inbox. It was from my older sister. A surprise, but something I’d been hoping for, something less formal, more personal, without lawyers. She had typed and translated our father’s handwritten, makeshift wills into Spanish so I could better understand them. She wanted to know if I was okay with fulfilling his wishes. I could now see with certainty that I was mentioned in only one of the wills. The other two, not at all. That my siblings could choose what artwork I received, if any. The sting burned more intensely than I expected that they had so much power in determining my value. I wanted my father to see me as his, and this felt like I was an afterthought. Like a secondary citizen.

Part of me wanted to fight. To stand up and shout, “This is rightfully mine!
This!
This title of
daughter
. I will not be ignored anymore; I will get what I deserve!”

Interesting hearing those words in my ear: “get what I deserve.” Because none of us do. That’s the gift of grace. None of us deserve
God’s love, and yet it’s what he left when he died. An inheritance of forgiveness. Of acceptance. Of love.

Mostly I just wanted the whole situation to disappear. Dealing with it sounded exhausting.

“What should I do?” I asked Derek.

“Do you feel like you need to be recognized as his daughter? Is there something in you that needs that acknowledgment, separate from any money?”

“I don’t think so.” And despite those pangs of hurt, I really didn’t. “But this doesn’t just impact me,” I said. “Should I be fighting for something on behalf of our family? For our kids?” Really I meant, should I be fighting for money? Did I owe it to Derek and the girls to push for something that could help our family?

“You don’t want to fight.” Derek’s look reminded me he knew me better than anyone. “And it’s not like we’ve been counting on any money.”

That was true. I loved my husband. He wanted what was best for my heart and not our checking account.

“What I really want is for them to hear me. To say I’m here. I’ve always been here.”

“Then say it.”

He was right. My sister’s email was asking for a response, giving me a chance to confess my life’s hurts. To say things that had gone unsaid for a lifetime. And maybe I was finally ready to say them. I didn’t need an inheritance of money because I had an inheritance of grace. I hadn’t understood that earlier—as a girl, as a college student, as a newlywed, as a new mom. But I’d grown, matured, in confidence of who I was. Of who defined me. I could say what I needed to without fear of the consequences because my inheritance of grace was permanent. I could and would cash in on that.

I took my laptop into our bedroom, closed the door, and sat on the floor, my back against the wall. From where I was sitting, I could see myself in the full-length mirror. My eyes. So much like
my father’s with their piercing blue and the dark circles underneath. But there was more than genetics staring back at me. I saw in them a life journeyed, with more still to go. These eyes looking back were starting to have creases on the side. Wrinkles? I wasn’t ready, but those hints at wrinkles told a story. My eyes had seen a lot.
What will they look like thirty years from now? What will they have seen?
I wondered.

Looking back at the computer and the empty screen, I slowly inhaled. I was supposed to be good at written communication. But this required a level of crafting I wasn’t used to. Cultural and language differences, family dynamics, and history called for straightforward, concise verbiage, but I wanted those words to echo my desire to love my afar family despite our years and miles apart. To extend grace from my grace-soaked heart.

Despite all of the constraints of language and awkward circumstances, I tried to let the words flow freely. I attached a picture of me and Derek and the girls sitting on our front porch earlier that month. I ended with these words:

Although this is a matter of the estate, please know this is also a matter of the heart for me. I have felt forgotten by my father much of my life. I cannot replace what I longed for so much as a girl—a relationship with my father. I have made no efforts in recent years to contact him. I decided after my last visit it was too painful, and I needed to move forward with the family Derek and I are making.

I ask that you remember me in this process, if nothing else, to symbolize a shift in the legacy left. I ask that you not forget me, but recognize that I am also his child.

I hit the send button and looked up at my reflection in the mirror, thankful. I didn’t have to worry about the response because I was found before I realized how lost I was. Thankful my inheritance was grace everlasting. That I didn’t have to wait for it
or fight for it. It was now. Not because it was rightfully mine, not because I had to prove my position, but because God, the artist of all things true and beautiful, loved me, called me into existence, claimed me as his daughter, and never left.

But me he caught—reached all the way

from sky to sea; he pulled me out

Of that ocean of hate, that enemy chaos,

the void in which I was drowning.

They hit me when I was down,

but G
OD
stuck by me.

He stood me up on a wide-open field;

I stood there saved—surprised to be loved!

G
OD
made my life complete

when I placed all the pieces before him.

When I got my act together,

he gave me a fresh start.

Now I’m alert to G
OD
’s ways;

I don’t take God for granted.

Every day I review the ways he works;

I try not to miss a trick.

I feel put back together,

and I’m watching my step.

G
OD
rewrote the text of my life

when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.
[6]