Good Morning Key West

The letter to the editor I submitted about litter maybe two weeks ago ran today in Key West Citizen. Meanwhile . . .
 
Feedback continues about my and my daughters’ estrangement. Most of it is pretty much what I have heard before: it’s up to me to get the ball rolling, and I need to keep after it. However this email, from a married man and father of a still pretty young daughter, a church-goer, hit me right where I live:
 
Sloan, the spirit world is way more real that the physical. Heaven was before earth, TMC 

Besides being a husband and father, Tim is a talented musician, sculptor and artist, and a pretty fair fishing guide, who goes by the name of “Capt. Hawk.” He sometimes tells me about dreams that show me God is working on him. For a number of years Tim was the director of Lighthouse Ministries in Key West, which offered street kids and runaways a place to hang out, play music, do art, rap, try to get their heads screwed on straight. Yet he does not tell me to attempt to do what I know not what to do.
 
I tell you truly, I have no clue what to do about my daughters. Were I to write to them, I don’t know what I would write. Were I to call them, I don’t know what I would say. Nor do I know how to call them. I googled the Internet and Yahoo “personal search” day before yesterday, and found nothing showing a mailing address or phone number. I know the cities where they live. I know where one of them works as a teaching physician in a university hospital, and I know the other’s husband is a head coach at an SEC college. I learned this googling the Internet. All previous correspondence has gone unanswered, including a present I sent to my younger daughter last year, after I stumbled on the Internet into an announcement of the birth of her first child. The present was for the baby.
 
When I saw my daughters at my father’s memorial service in 2005, at a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the first time I had seen either or heard from either of them in six years, I asked for a little time with them while they were still in Alabama. I said I would come down to Tuscaloosa where they were staying with their mother, maybe for lunch. Not long. Just a short visit. While they hemmed, I waited. Then their mother said they were too busy, too many things scheduled for them to see me (for an hour or less).
 
Soon thereafter, my father started coming to me in dreams, asking me to try to straighten out the mess he’d left in his quite large estate. He had left his grandchildren nothing under his Will. He wanted me to try to get his widow, who was the life beneficiary under two huge trusts, to give up the $14,000,000 direct cash bequest he had left her under a codicil to his will dated less than a year before his death. I asked her to give that $14,000,000 to her deceased husband’s grandchildren, and to his first child by another woman, who had received nothing under the Will, nor under any trusts I knew about. When his widow declined (I’m being nice), I was told by the Spirit to renounce my interest in the trust under which I and my siblings were the remainder beneficiaries after his widow died. I did this, which made my daughters the beneficiaries of my part of that trust. I wrote to them and their mother about this, and received no response.
 
My daughters were in their thirties when they cut me out of their lives without any explanation. They know I don’t know why, because I have made that clear in correspondence. They were not little girls when they did that, but were grown women. As such, this is not just all on me. In fact, maybe none of it is on me anymore, for maybe there is nothing else I can do.
 
Many times have I confessed what a bad father was. Other things I did later, after the Spirit grabbed me, I did because it was given to me to do. No doubt it upset them, but I’m to apologize for what I still believe God told me to do? I’m to make up some sort of nice apology, which I was told by a friend to do, and tell them that even though it’s not true?
 
A Key West adviser said yesterday that he has often wanted to try to do something on his own, to try to reach my daughters, and he apparently is considering it again. I can’t condone it. If God tells him to try, then he should do it. But God has not told me that he should try. If he does try, he should know my daughters and their mother are joined at the hip and are convinced I’m insane and dangerous.
 
My adviser should know that when I hugged and spoke briefly with my daughters at my father’s memorial service, and watched and listened to them talk with other people, as if I wasn’t even standing there, I felt nothing inside of them. It was as if their souls had left. It was devastating for me.
 
My adviser should know that my friend Hawkman, about whom I wrote a few days ago, lives in the same city as my daughters’ mother. He has had dealings with her in late 2003 that freaked him out and gave him a taste of what I’m up against, which he did not mention in his email telling me to keep trying to reach my daughters, and to keep trying and never stop trying.
 
My adviser should know my daughters and their mother know I was told in dreams that she killed our first child, which was diagnosed as crib death, now called sudden infant death syndrome.
 
My adviser should know I took to heart what Jesus said about blood relations being divided against each other, some choosing the kingdom of God, others choosing this world. It is very important to distinguish between carrying out a spiritual assignment and doing something thoughtless or mean-spirited against someone close to you. 
 
Lonely it has been at times, many close relationships have I lost, wives, friends, and yes, my daughters and my own father, nothing in me wants to go the way I saw them go.
 
Twice I went to Alabama from Key West, for extended periods of time, to try to get an audience with my father. Once I stayed with Hawkman in Tuscaloosa, late 2003. (That was when Hawkman had the dealings with my daugthers’ mother that freaked him out.)
 
Two months that futile attempt to see my father lasted. The other attempt was in Birmingham, eight months, in 2001-2002. I heard from my father only through his lawyers, with whom I had gone to law school.
  
Even so, I never stopped believing God would get my father and me back together before one of us left this world, and I was stunned when he died without that happening. Stunned. It cured me of expecting any estranged relationship to mend in this life. It caused me to do my best to focus on what’s right in front of me, and do the best I can with God’s help.
 
So far, God has not told me to do anything about my daughters, which means I’m to wait until I’m told to do something.
 
Sloan Bashinsky

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under Today's Cock-A-Doodle-Doo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.