Love to My Dad, XO

I am sitting with the power of the heart:
That a thing and its opposite can both be true.
The heart, metaphor, relationship:
felt,
unpacked by reflection,
and given back to the heart,
which is where magic happens—
that from valuing it all,
even what is hard and painful,
resting into it with kindness and curiosity,
out of that courageous and scary opening—
something new can arise.

I’ve put this on my altar on a black velvet cloth:
A photo of my Dad
in his WWII soldier’s uniform—
you can see the barrel of his rifle
sticking up over his shoulder.
Another photo,
of Mom in a wow-hat
as a young wife out at a club.
Underneath his picture
are my Dad’s dog tags
and his triangular black and yellow insignia patch
for the 83rd “Thunderbolt” Infantry Division
—I finally figured out
that the insignia says
“Ohio” in the shape of a gun’s sites.
Dad’s sergeant’s stripes are there of course.
A tiny clear bowl holds their engagement ring
with the small sparkling diamond
that he gave my Mom
(he sold a little boat he had to buy it)—
I was born out of the sacred circle of that ring,
fraught as it was with their loud and endless fights.
I also learned from both of them the strength to persist.
As people said of my Dad at work,
“He did it his way.” People, I am proud to admit,
say the same thing of me.
They built a house in Ohio in a beautiful woods,
argued constantly,
loved the woods and gardens,
seriously mistreated their kids
(to the point where we had suicidal bouts!)
and in some weird way they loved us.
And we lived there,
in Ohio, in the woods, in the house
that they built together with their own hands as young people
(fighting the entire time and also enjoying it, both being true).
And it is high time,
as my father wished for me in his last letter,
to “pluck a star from the sky.”

Hi Gawain,

I’m not sure exactly why I’m sending this to you—but probably because you have been so significant in helping my singing endeavors. Please say a prayer for my dad. I’m thinking of him for some family lineage healing work I am about to do. No doubt I will put this letter in a Blog once I have some day turned it into a piece of literature. “:-D

Right now I am just raw.

My dad, and our family, were really shaped by WWII. He was in the front center lines of five major battles, and one battle alone lasted from September through February. I can’t even imagine this. That was the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest—the men spent the winter huddled in bitter cold in foxholes in the midst of terrible fighting. My dad was a sergeant, and a Reconnaissance NCO, going into enemy territory and running between the advanced rifleman and the artillery. Some of the soldiers came from homes that had no running water, and they hadn’t even been to school. At first he taught the men under him to read if they couldn’t, but after a while he stopped because he was so sad if they got killed. I have a poem he wrote during the war, my tough dad, about giving a flower to a little girl—then there was shelling. She was too young to know to “hit the dirt” when there was incoming fire, and she was killed right in front of him. He was a really hard guy to have as a dad, yelled a lot, was threatening, and I just found a letter I saved from him when I was in Wales in college just before he died at age 64, and I was 21—in his letter I can see that he loves me and misses me—he was trying to communicate, he wanted me to finish college, he recognized and valued my ability to write and that I’d gone beyond him in that regard, and told me that he wanted me “to pluck a star from the sky.” He couldn’t ever say any of these things, just mostly holler. I read this and sobbed for three days. I am honored to work with a lot of men clients in my therapy practice and really appreciate the courage it takes in this world for a man to be vulnerable—the strength of that. I feel for my dad that he came from a time when that was not available to him. I put this photo of him (and mom) on my altar which is also in my office for clients. The human heart is so complex, and relationships so messy, and if we can just tolerate that, something eases. Love and prayers for all beings touched by war.

Dad rarely talked about his war experience with Mom and I, but on Thanksgivings he spoke of the Hürtgen Forest. A city boy, he always loved forests of every kind, and loved our house in the country. When he told this story of the long battle, he always said that the forest was very beautiful. He could hold that at the same time as being in hell. During that battle, a German artillery shell landed a few feet away from his foxhole and he would have been killed except for some reason the shell did not explode. I can only imagine him bracing in the frozen hole in the earth, hearing the shell whining in, too close . . . and then, nothing. He was still alive. He was fighting there during Thanksgiving, so now that I think about it that’s why he probably was talking about it on our Thanksgivings, and feeling thankful he was still here.

My father fought very bravely in WWII, and it changed his, and all our lives. Understandably, he was never the same afterwards. Treatment for PTSD in those days was allowing him to yell at work (he was a general foreman) because they understood he had to have an outlet as a vet. A new guy’s initiation into the factory was not complete until Dunbar had yelled at you! At home he wondered out loud, “How come I can boss 300 men and not you two women?” He was born in 1916 and held some pretty Victorian era views: he didn’t think women should vote or wear pants. Mom did both, and never told him who she voted for. My parents had me quite late in their lives, a “miracle”—I think I was holding out for some more reasonable social era to be born in to counterbalance my father’s antique views.

My dad’s WWII experience was piled on top of the horrifying battles of his growing up: his own father beat him and his mom and sisters—not just the era’s disciplinary hits to a kid—but beatings, bruises, terror of when the old man got drunk and used his fists. This went on for years, until at the age of sixteen my dad was physically strong enough to step in front of his mother to protect her. He faced down and stopped his father. Whatever helped him live through that must have helped him live through the war. He kept questioning how to find an expansive view of life—I know this not because of anything he told me, but through writing of his I found decades after his death, kept carefully by my mother in a desk. He yelled like a son of a bitch, but enough of his heart survived terror and grief that he never gave up. When I found some of his writing explorations, I had more tears—who was this man with an almost secret life? He had beautiful angular handwriting softened by loops and swirls. I pieced together from his outlines on yellowed paper and a few remembered comments, that he gave speeches in the Masons (the Toastmasters of the day). He actually wrote about being lonely as a boy, and having to find a way to reach past that, and later past the horrors of war, for meaning. I can honestly say he was a pretty dreadful writer, but I am deeply touched by his questioning and searching.

So, his father “went on the wagon” after my dad stood up to his violence. At sixteen, he was still a kid. I can only imagine the adrenalin, the love and hate and anger that pushed him to trust his young man’s muscles enough to think he could take on his father, a tall adult fueled by drink and rage. That pivotal day changed his family. His father never again beat anyone. He went to AA and stopped drinking. But he never forgave my father for confronting him. My dad went to see his father as he lay on his deathbed in the hospital, and his father cursed him. Somewhere inside my tough dad there was a son who wanted to be loved by his father. He remained as connected as he could to his father, and from what I know always took the high road with him. I can only guess what torments my grandfather felt as he faced death, and out of his fear and loss lashed out at his son in the most cutting way he could, with a curse.

Today I’m looking at my father in a different way. My dad didn’t get bitter, he didn’t turn to drink, he stayed married to my crazy mom because in their crazy way they loved one another. He found peace and beauty in our woods—he could whistle in a way that the birds followed him on his walks deep into the heart of the forest. In his later years my mom once found him asleep, curled up with the dog he professed to hate, resting his heart from the exertion it took to walk. He loved Westerns. He’d watch WWII combat shows and pop nitros when his heart got to beating too violently with the action. Every time we had people over for Sunday dinner he yelled at full pitch in the kitchen rather than admit he didn’t know how to properly carve a roast, yet he made banana bread and learned to cook after he retired. He was always active, swimming, going to the gym, punching a bag in the depths of the garage, or riding an ancient exercise bicycle that he set up in the yard. He—and my mom—were very physical people. He was never happier than when he was snow blowing, sawing up trees, or planting flowers. Bound to the house for a period of time after one of his heart attacks and looking for an outlet for his active nature, and ever the tough guy, he actually made a huge quilt embroidered with, what else—the American eagle! He proudly wore the trendy Cancer the Crab neckchain I gave him for a 1970s Christmas. And he liked red-headed nurses, always a joy to find one if you are in the hospital with another heart attack. And, did I mentioned, he and mom hollered?

When I was about six, too young to try to get them to stop fighting, he’d blown it big time and my mom piled all her clothes in the car and was going to take me to Florida and her mom’s house. I think this must have been when it “sorta” came out that he had an affair with a nurse at the plant where he worked nights. Somehow my mom could perform the feat of simultaneously knowing and not knowing of his affair in the same split second, a thing I still wonder at. The fight got bad this time, however, and she was leaving. To my great surprise I saw my father actually get down on his knees out on the stone walkway they’d built together, and while the birds called back and forth to one another in the summer evening, my father on his knees begged my mother to please not leave. This was so wildly unlike anything my father had done before (or since), and such a window into the strange intensity of their relationship, that I still don’t know what to make of it. I was I more shocked by this strange action than the fight. I’d stopped eating my plain wiener and watching Top Cat, pretty freaked out. Things went back to the Dunbar family’s kind of normal. Mom didn’t leave. She had lots of ideas about camping and traveling, per usual my dad pitched a fit, went anyway, and pretty soon he was serving coffee to an entire campground saying it was his idea, and somehow mom was happy. Go figure.

My dad married my mom when he was 26 and she had just turned 21. Soon after their honeymoon he went off to war. He entered in in D-Day Plus 12 (the next wave twelve days after the D-Day invasion). The ships were delayed from landing because of bad weather and they were “sitting ducks” out on the sea, the men not knowing if they’d be sunk in the cold water, helpless to do anything about it. His Division, the 83rd, were sent not only into the front of the battles, but into the front center, taking the brunt of fighting. They lived—my father lived—with the daily fact that a lot of them would die. When I was a child I wanted him to teach me how to tie knots. He sat next to me and sighed. It was one of the few times he ever apologized to me, “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t have the patience.” I was hurt when he left me alone, yet again. And he must have been hurting, too, his heart and thoughts still crowded with all the time he spent waiting for a death that after all, amazingly, didn’t come till much later.

If only he could have shown me his inner world! I was touched to tears by the effort I saw he made in the writings I found, which he shared with the men in the Masons, but not with his daughter. Digging deeper into the desk after my mother’s death, I found an ancient stack of paper—comments he’d saved that his fellow Masons made about one of his speeches. There were many comments about the power of his speaking, his dedication to his family, his search for what was moral. I was in tears—he died just as I was becoming old enough for him to feel comfortable expressing these things to me in his letters.

At the end of the war my father said that a lot of the German soldiers were just sixteen year old kids, but they had to fight anyway and kill them or be killed themselves—he got the impossible awfulness of the situation, and that moved me. Even as a child I saw his complexity, and longed for it to spill over into connection with me. Once in a blue moon it happened. He was an early bird to my night owl. But sometimes he woke not for the dawn, but for the horror of what he’d gone through in the war, from dreadful nightmares. He confided this to me once. He said it was terrible, but that his mom told him to get out of bed and look out the window, to know it was just a dream. I imagine it was not so much looking out the window that helped, but that his mother had listened to him, loved him, and was there in that complicated heart of his.

My father never missed seeing the Fourth of July fireworks, except the time when my mother’s brother showed up drunk. He was never forgiven for this by either of them. I think that night my dad managed to drive out into the countryside and pull off on a road to watch the lights and hear the dim explosions in the distance. I didn’t really understand until I went through some notes I’d taken from one of my mom’s annoyingly complex and histrionic stories—there had been a big offensive he fought in on July 4th and seeing the fireworks was his way to mark it. I had to figure a lot of this out myself from the few sentences he ever told me, or what my mom passed on. The 83rd’s actions also helped liberate one of the death camps. The soldiers were given the opportunity to go see it, but he refused to go—he had done his duty to help free the prisoners. He had enough terrible images of death and suffering crowding inside his heart. When he first came home he would jump on the ground, “hitting the dirt,” if he heard a car backfire, or if a neighborhood kid set off a firecracker, so deeply was his reflex for self-preservation a part of his muscle responses. But that wasn’t what you did in peacetime society, so he found a way to stop himself. No one went to a therapist back then—that was a big stigma that meant you were nuts. You held it in and went on with life. It helped him to spend time with other men who had been through the experience—now I understand more deeply the importance of him giving speeches to the Masons and bossing tough guys at the factory. He told me once about having dinner with a man who had been a prisoner of war. The man had been so hungry for so long that he couldn’t understand he’d never have to suffer that again. He started to furtively put dinner rolls in his pocket and people got embarrassed. My father simply looked at him and said in the tone of the tough and loyal sergeant to one of his men, “You don’t do that anymore,” and I got the idea that it eased something for this man.

My dad had heart problems but was not diagnosed properly. He had open heart surgery in the early days of bypass surgery, when he was 54 (I was ten years old). My coming of age coincided with his dying, and nobody talked about it. It sure was one major elephant in our house! He lived nine more years after the surgery and a number of heart attacks, and he died after mowing the lawn one spring day. His heart likely was a complex of problems: diphtheria and other childhood illnesses, plus he smoked three packs of Pall Malls a day, and he’d been around the impact of a lot of heavy artillery being fired during WWII. I found a birthday card I crayoned for him when I was a tiny girl—I am a little blue box running happily towards him—a big red box of Pall Mall cigarettes!

I wonder what he would have thought of me—beginning on my fourth CD in your studio! Before the war, my father almost went to Hollywood to try to become a famous actor. He was good looking and he had a beautiful voice. He was a singer in the Cleveland Chorus. The story goes that he had his suitcase packed—this word stressed by my mom in her protection of his dream, even though it would have meant he’d have left Cleveland and never been her husband. The packed suitcase lay upon his bed. His mother was in tears. She didn’t want her favorite child to leave, the son who had stopped her husband’s violence. She couldn’t let him go, and convinced her husband to get him a job in the factory, and that was that as far as Hollywood. In the family photo box there is an old black and white shot of him and his father at the plant. I wonder why he gave such a hurtful message to me that I couldn’t sing—was it that I didn’t sing in a way he related to, or that women he knew shouldn’t be singers, or was it some deep ache he didn’t even recognize was there from the dream he didn’t follow? I amaze myself that I never gave up singing under the weight of his negative messages. And I know somehow, if he’d lived long enough, that he would be proud of my accomplishments as a singer. And also as a kind, intelligent woman who among other things, loves working with guy clients, doing, god forbid, therapy.

For the lineage healing work I am preparing for around my family, I put together my family tree and all the traumas (a long list!) that everyone had. My mom’s side has their serious difficulties, but I find myself especially thinking of my dad. Ah! how life circles! That last letter that he ever wrote to me I received in Wales—I was twenty one, and Gawain you must have been about three years old!—trippy that you and I were in Wales at the same time! And most strange that the photo I put on my altar was also probably taken in Wales, where the 83rd trained before being deployed to France.

That last letter he wrote to me, wishing that I “pluck a star from the sky,” he began exactly thirty three years ago from the day I recently read it, on Good Friday. He finished writing the letter a few days later, the day after he and I had the last, and really wonderful, phone conversation. Earlier in the year we’d been fighting long distance, but on a fluke I called home, and he answered. Overseas calls cost a fortune in those days, but that one time neither of us cared. He was really happy to talk with me—open, joking, heartful—and I was happy to tell him my adventures. I think he must have known that he didn’t have long to live—some sixth sense that he shared with me (but that’s a story for another day). He mentions in the letter how much he enjoyed talking to me, and signed it “Love, Pops XO.” Pops was the sweet name we’d both come up with for him when I was a teen. Pops was the guy who was softening into knowing me as an adult, the guy who wrote me letters, the guy who, if he’d lived, I would have asked to look at me right from his heart.

In many ways his death really allowed me the freedom to come to San Francisco when I graduated college. And so hard to have been twenty one and not get to know him later when I was more adult. It had been so important for me to get away from them. I was still a kid, and I didn’t know the importance of writing back very much. I think he longed for more letters from me, and that breaks my heart. He wrote me a lot during all of those years before he died, after I’d left home. He tried to express his feelings about life in these letters, and one Valentine’s day drew a little cartoon of two fencers, one piercing the other’s heart with a foil. Fencing was something we shared. I’d taken it up at college, just as he had taken it up when he was a young man. But talking was sure not his strong suit, and our relationship was troubled even as we tried to love one another. His spoken words to me were so often angry, and he never told me what was in his heart. There was the daily bread of my parents’ arguments, as well as threats to hit me. He did beat my brother until he had welts, one time, shortly after the war. First he beat him for getting in a fight with a kid in the neighborhood, and then for losing the fight. My father had been a slender child, short for his age until he sprouted up later—he found protection by being in a local gang of boys, so it’s strange that he got upset by this. My brother says he doesn’t remember it happening, but my mother does. As the story goes, she told him if he ever did any hitting again, she would leave, period. I think he was, appropriately, horrified at his own behavior. He never again struck my brother, nor ever struck me. He never threatened to hit my mom. But he sure did threaten to hit me, and knowing what he did to my brother, I spent my growing up waiting for him to give me the welts that I knew he’d given to my brother. His threats were scary and did a lot of damage. I sometimes used to wish he would hit me, because at least I’d have had something real to point to instead of the endless waiting. I lived on the verge, in the crossfire of their emotional warfare and my mom’s craziness. I wonder, if he was so used to waiting for another blow from his father, or another round of shelling, that he didn’t understand the dreadful impact of his threats on his daughter. I ended up feeling weird, bad and lonely! In a classic phrase, probably passed down from his father, he’d yell at me, “I’ll hit you into the middle of next week.” As a young child, I actually thought if he did hit me, that I would fly through time!

Oh no, Dad. I never did want to get from Friday to Wednesday that fast, by the back of your hand, from the middle of that crowded hallway. Did you ever stop to think that what you were mad at was your little girl asking you to stop yelling, to stop shaking the floorboards, the windows, our hearts, with your rage? Would we have been able to talk about it, if you’d lived?

My dad told me he wanted a different kind of daughter. I had a lot of years of therapy for that one alone! Among many other studies, I did a two-year in-depth specialized training to become a therapist. One weekend found me in an exercise with eight people “taking over”—or matching—the amount of energy I normally expended to keep back my anger at my father, an habitual holding that lead to a lot of body aches. I was learning that my getting angry with him was a “missing experience”—something I’d never allowed myself. My friend stood behind me, playing my dad, telling me that I shouldn’t vote, I shouldn’t wear pants—worse, that I couldn’t sing. I began to spin, very slowly, taking the eight people with me until I faced him and reached my hand to rip out his heart . . . at last touching “his” chest, sobbing, my own heart breaking open.

My father, the man who “did it his way,” didn’t know how to relate to a girl, a daughter who was just as sensitive and strong willed as him. When I was sixteen, tired of his threats, I told him to go ahead and hit me, because I’d call the police. He knew I would, by the flat out way I said it and because he did recognize my strength. When I finally came out with those words and looked him right in the eye, I saw a kind of horror and sorrow in his face that I’d never seen before. He never said so, but I believe he put together, finally, his own struggle with his father at the same exact age, and at last he stopped his threats. It was about that time that we found him that sweet new name: Pops never threatened to hit me. Pops loved me and was just starting to have himself under control enough to begin wondering who this lovely young woman was who was living in his house . . .

Between my freshman and sophomore years at Tulane I found a job at Burger King. I took orders for burgers in a bright orange and yellow polyester uniform and hat, trying to understand the local patois. I also found a summer sublet and decided to stay in New Orleans—my first time apartment! After a year away from the fights, I just couldn’t bear to go home. I remember comparing college notes with a boyfriend I had a few years later. Both of us came from families who fought. We had the same bizarre experience—for the first three months at college we felt that some essential, “normal,” thing was missing. We both actually spent time wondering what it was that was missing, searching it out. It was good that “it” was missing . . . but what was “it”? Oh my god—it was the fighting that our parents did constantly. Quite simply, at college no one was yelling anymore. Unheard of, relieving, heartbreaking, freeing. So that first summer I made the decision, and I called home to say in the kindest way I could that I was staying in New Orleans. Dad answered the phone. I summoned up my courage and told him with the kind of sweetness that is my nature. His reply floored me, “If I was twenty years younger and you were a man in my factory I would break your neck with both my hands.” Instead of just saying, “Sweetheart, I’m dying, I miss you,” he said the very thing that insured I kept my distance, and handed the phone to my mother, who hung up on me. Later that night she called me back to tell me, “I want you to know, if my husband dies (what a weird way to put it) it’s your fault.” I found some of her writing too, after her death. In a cheap notebook from the Dollar Store she wrote that she and my father never once spoke of his death that they both knew was coming, what it meant to either of them, how to prepare.

I am sobbing now for all of it. A lot of my family life with my dad was hard—so few crumbs that it makes the hurt worse—the peeking through of love underlining the lack. But . . . here were these letters to me . . . my heart is breaking—it still hurts that he died. Ah, what to do with these letters? That’s when I decided to put him and mom on my altar, and I think we all found some peace.

When I cleaned out the house after my mom’s death, I carefully brought home the photos of him taken during the war. There were two really important ones—the one of him smiling, handsome, in his uniform with the barrel of his gun sticking over his shoulder. He’d inscribed it “To My Darling,” for my mom. I know from family stories that this one was taken before he saw combat action—and I can tell this, too, by his eyes, which are clear and smiling. The other photo is of him standing in a war torn street after they liberated Belgium, after the six-months’ battle. His eyes are haunted, his gun, now used so much, is in his hand, he’s gaunt with what he’s lived through. My mom kept this photo in her sewing room, to have near her as she did her sewing the real fact that her husband survived this and came home to her. That he lived. He brought home those sad eyes. They were the ones I knew.

Oddly, nothing in the entire house had mold on it but this photo of him on what remained of the Belgian street. When I opened the back it was crawling with green fuzz, which I’m really allergic to. I debated a long time, and left this photo of him in the house, which was soon cleaned and sold. Over a year has gone by since my mother’s death. I’ve arrived at this very potent juncture: mourning not so much my mother’s death, but finally deeply mourning the death of my father. I searched through the family box for his photos, and couldn’t find the Belgian one, until I remembered that I’d left it behind. At first I was really upset with myself, and then I realized something as I set the “To My Darling” photo on my altar. It is a remarkably startling photo of a beautiful young man whom I never knew—he is looking directly out of the photo, right into my mother’s eyes, and through the years out of their bond, crazy as it was—to his daughter, me. Thirty three years after he died I am finally able to look directly in his eyes.

While he was alive, my Dad never “showed me his eyes.” That’s how I thought about it as a young person. Now I know I meant that I longed for him to look directly at me from his heart. But he couldn’t afford to—he had to be a tough guy. It was too vulnerable to show his heart through his eyes—that would have meant him feeling and sharing the ache of all that had happened to him, of all that had come between us, of his wishes for something different that he couldn’t even begin to express. And, as I write this I realize I do have a vivid memory of him looking at me. He is standing next to my mother as I board the plane for Wales. He is looking right at me with his smile, and most importantly with his eyes—a beautiful, heartbreaking, messy, and dear mixture of the sadness of goodbye, of the deep love that he feels for me and cannot say, and his private knowledge that his failing physical heart will come between us seeing one another ever again. How is it that I’ve never realized until this moment as I write that this image of him has been coming through to me for a long time now—the final, and first, real look between us: his love for me that he is brave enough to show me in the moment before I get on the plane. I told the story of the two photos to one of my friends. I said, “I think he would not have wanted me to keep the one of him and his haunted eyes.” My tough guy friend replied, “You did the right thing. He would have wanted you to keep the one of him looking right at you.”

So now I have this photo of him on my altar. I’m thinking of my Dad, Wilson Fred Dunbar, a lot, and ask that you hold him in some special prayers. He was a Technical Sergeant and Reconnaissance NCO in the 83rd Infantry “Thunderbolt” Division (Company H, 330th Inf) in WWII, with an MKM Carbine rifle, for “2 years, 10 months, 9 days” (and thus a lifetime) in five major battles, and got the Bronze Star. Battles: Normandy (D-Day Plus 12), Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, Central Europe.

Hugs, Kathleen

PS:
Family Constellation work is a really fascinating way to work with family systems, started by Bert Hellinger after WWII for the children and grandchildren of death camp survivors, soldiers, and Nazis. However crazy families are, they have a kind of living loyalty, which can keep the energy tormented and the lives of the people snarled and bound. I tell my therapy clients that indigenous peoples believe that when we work to free ourselves, those long gone rest, and those unborn will have an easier time. Hellinger began as a Catholic priest in Africa, where he learned about working with ancestors from the tribal people there. He left the priesthood and returned to postwar Germany where he developed this astonishing, effective way to work with lineages, to help the descendants of the dreadful war.

How it works is this: you show up and there is a group of people and a facilitator who’s gone over with you your family tree and a list of specific questions about traumas and such. You assign people from the group to be the members of your family. The people who stand in for your family know nothing—zip—of your family, only you and the facilitator are aware. They are simply given a part, like Grandma, Father, etc. Then the person whose family it is says aloud, “What I have always wanted that I never could have.” This is a statement of the longing for life beyond the limitations and wounds that have caught the family into a repeating system of hurt. The facilitator tells the “family:” “Let the space inform you,” and the people, amazingly, just go into the family’s energy and talk, act and respond just like the relative they are representing. It is remarkable. What is healing is that in this alchemical mix, secrets are at last spoken, hearts are unburdened, and relationships cleared through the expression of hurts and fears. This has proven over many years to be a really amazing way to clear family energy. I know it is a miracle—for even in the preparing for it I feel that my father knows that the war is over, that I know the war is over, and that it’s okay to show and to receive love, with our words and our eyes, as well as our actions. This, at last, is peace. © Kathleen Dunbar

Photo “On My Altar” by Kathleen Dunbar
Photos within the Photo: Photo of my Dad by an unknown WWII army photographer, Photo of my Mom by the house photographer at Herman Pirchner’s Alpine Village—”Cleveland’s Theatre Restaurant”
Photo of Dad and Kathleen by Helen Dunbar

If you’d like to hear a sweet and trippy song, in a dreamy kind of way kind about being my father’s daughter in the beautiful woods, please listen to The Rainman’s Daughter from my first CD, “Finally Home.” I wrote this song when I was about 26, the same age my father was when he went off to WWII. You can hear it on Bandcamp or find it on my website www.kathleendunbarmusic.com