Whole People
I’ve often talked about how I loved and respected my father, for being a teacher, for being a scientist, for being a leader, for being a man of God. But I have not talked much about him being a friend, which is strange, because my dad befriended others, first and foremost. Many people are involved in their community, and certainly my dad was as well. Every service, Bible study, Awana meeting, family fun night, park day. But he wasn’t just an attendee, he was a friend. Old people, young people, students—they loved my dad and he loved them. We were always the last to leave events because he would get to catching up with someone (even if he saw them the day before) and just as we were finally all packed up and ready to go, he’d find someone else. Asking questions, cracking jokes, always ready to listen and pray for them, because he was their friend.
I didn’t really understand it. To me, he was Dad—I loved and admired him, but he was still just Dad. What was so special about him that the grocery clerk and the mailman and the hundreds of students who told us he ‘touched their lives’ (How do you touch a life? Do you poke it gently? Or sometimes grab it by the collar and give it a light shake?) and even the nurses constantly dressing the bandages on his oozing amputated legs actually considered him their friend, listening and chatting for what seemed like hours on end? Good ol’ Doug had such a way with people that we were always being delayed at Ralphs and the swimming pool and the gas station as Dad met yet another pal (or made a new one), and, more often than not, shared his love for God with them. Exasperating to me as a kid, yes, since we definitely had the reputation for being the “Late Snyders.” Little did people know how often this was because he was stopping to share the Gospel with a 7-11 clerk or the banker or the policeman pulling us over for having a goofy-faced child grinning backwards from the car trunk (since our ancient GMC only fit 5 people, my dad had to add a perfectly legal, though unusual, seat annex in the back of the car). Yet now, looking back, I can only admire my dad, generous to a fault, an everyday hero ready to lend a hand for anyone going through a rough time.
But for all this, my father was never my friend. I think we would have gotten there eventually. But I was 19 when he died, too selfish to really see his personality, his identity, his whole history, outside his role of “dad”. I loved him, I admired him—do you know just how much, now that I’ve said it three times?—but I didn’t know him for himself. That chance was stolen, snatched away, along with his legs, by a rare blood cancer. I only got to glimpse him through the lens of retrospect, trying desperately to still imagine his flashing hazel eyes under bushy brows, his long-jaw smile lines, his rough hands and nails that you would never imagine won him a piano scholarship to perform internationally when he was only 14. On this 9th anniversary of his death, gathering these colorful, broken memory fragments, I regret that he died before I could become a whole person, meaning a person who could possibly love other whole people outside of myself. He died before I could begin to wriggle my own toes in the shoes of roles I’m still trying to fill—teacher, poet, wife. And I think if he had lived, he would not only have been proud of me and I of him, but as Relient K says, “I wish I knew you, way back when. I think we would have been friends.” Yet in dying, a few hours before her birthday, my dad ironically gave me the gift of my mom. And I cannot thank him enough.
Please understand that I always loved my mom. But she definitely got the hard end of the stick. Like many traditional fathers in traditional jobs, my dad worked long, arduous hours. He got up at five, went to school to teach hormonal, entitled high schoolers, battled through bureaucracy and management politics, and spent many long monotonous hours marking the same exams, homework, and tests. But for all the exhaustion and frustration, I know he loved his students and he loved teaching and he loved making discoveries with his colleagues. He could be himself in his job, and no principal ever managed to quell the spirit and creativity of the belligerent, independent Snyder. And when he got home, there were always four excited little Snyders to bounce around him—even as teenagers, we knew the sound of Dad’s car all the way down the mountain, and would come running—and he somehow managed to match our excitement with colorful history lessons and lab dissections on the kitchen table and completely unfair basketball matches versus all four kids and stargazing excursions and nightly read-alouds. Dad was fun.
Yet my mom, the young homeschooling parent who was lesson planning, and teaching, and cooking, and cleaning, and chauffeuring four arguing brats by the time she was my age—well, the most appreciation she got was some homemade dried “potpourri” on Mother's Day that I would pluck from the garden, and some coupons for a “free massage” or “no fighting for a week”. (To my credit, I always claimed these gifts were from all of my siblings, and not just me. Less to my credit—none of us ever followed through on these “coupons”). Oh. Also a card. A card that said something like, “We love you mom, thank you for cooking. Also thank you for cleaning for us. Also thank you for loving us even when we’re bad.”
Because, like young self-centered children usually are, we loved Mom not for who she was but for what she did for us. Never mind the fact that she halted her university career, her work as an artist, her dreams of nursing or tutoring. We never bothered to ask about her life, never knew that between the years 13-15 she had to attend fourteen different schools across the States as my grandma desperately looked for jobs, never heard about her fishing out cockroaches from soup and laughing it off, never knew about the single lightbulb closet, the swap meet, the bridge, and countless stories of three immigrant Korean women—a grandma, a single mother, a little girl forced to grow up too early—I can’t squeeze in here because I won’t do justice to them.
My mom had been swallowed whole by us kids (and eventually my dad’s cancer, as she took care of his every need). She never regretted giving up her life for us, though I somewhat regret it now for her. She is the bravest, most beautiful, and most determined person I know, and not even the toll of Dad’s hospital bills, bicycle crash injuries, and competition from much younger students could prevent her from returning to school to become a nurse. But I’m not just proud of my mom—she’s become my friend. People still mistake her for my sister, which used to embarrass me, but now it makes me realize that the gap between two women is decreasing. Little by little I can see more of Juny, a woman who is not defined by either her hardships as an immigrant or her suffering as a young widow or even the beloved but limited title, “Mom.” I don’t think I know her enough yet, because twenty-something years of childish narcissism is a lot to catch up on. But now that my dad is rejoicing in glory, I’ve been able to start seeing the person who was always faithfully serving in the shadows of his legacy, the woman who has a fierce fire of her own. Happy Birthday, Mom. Thank you for you, the whole, brilliant you.
