An Obit for My Dad

George Austin Javins, age 78,—aka my dad and all-around legendary character, a bit of James Dean mixed with Johnny Cash and a dash of MacGyver if he were on Hee Haw—died of an apparent stroke Monday afternoon, at home in a small town on the Allegheny mountains slopes just west of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. He was with his wife and autistic adult son, and my sister was able to arrive shortly thereafter.

I find myself challenged by my own reactions, which are as mixed as George’s hybrid characteristics above. My ambivalence feels incorrect, and yet, here we are. I understand loss, and I wasn’t estranged…but we resided on dissimilar planets. After my parents split when I was on the brink of teen-hood, my dad had several different lives over the next fifty-ish years. I am…not a footnote, exactly. I’m a distant memory, a sentence in an introduction. “My daughter works at Marvel Comics.”

I don’t, of course. But sometimes, you just roll with it.

George had been on death’s door more than once, and kept on trucking. I am both surprised he was finally overcome and unsurprised given two years ago, he wasn’t supposed to survive the night. I grew up on secondhand Kools, and his emphysema and heart disease may be hereditary, but lifestyle and choice played an absolute part in his eventual demise.

I owe George a debt for quirky and stubborn aspects of my personality, and for my approach to problem-solving. I was given a peek into worlds my peers never saw on our trips to the mountains. There are things I don’t do but I can do. Shoot a gun. Gut a fish. Lay a patio. Boil coffee on an open fire. Try to reassemble an engine with bits of chewing gum and fishing line. Part of me assumes I’ll be fine if we have an apocalypse; part of me scoffs at my own hubris and doubts I’d remember how to catch the fish, much less gut it. I’ll probably be the one telling the firing squad…no, no, I’m one of you, don’t let the oat milk fool you. And they’ll ask me if the trashy neighbors used to call us “the dictionary people.” Then they’ll pull the trigger.

“Lost” John Austin was the mountain man who raised my dad after George the Elder left this world when my dad was…12? 14? I think he was in 7th grade. And then he was in no grade at all. His mother had died when he was much younger, maybe 4th grade. His oldest (of 5) sisters married Lost John, but she died of pneumonia shortly thereafter. Lost John lived in a trailer up on the Bull Run Mountain, quarried stone for money, and drank. He was quite the character too.

George was often left to fend for himself, and used those skills to feed us later. He’d shoot deer, turkey, squirrels, rabbits. I was horrified by the dead Bambis in our Alexandria basement, and for years couldn’t eat any meat I could recognize as a part of an animal.

My mother’s side of this story is all quite different. There are vegetarian ancestors, writers, righteous liberals, player pianos, people with passports and college degrees. It all makes sense if you know me, I think. It took me a viewing of American Graffiti to catch on to how all this happened. There were years of visits to soda fountains. Roller rinks. George was living with his sister outside Washington, DC. The decision by two near-kids to start a family made sense at the time, but somewhere along the way, the world spit out Gen X and here we are, products of the lunar landing, assassinations, Watergate, and transformations brought on by technology.

But I can still drive a stick shift, unlike many of my contemporaries. I learned how to take care of myself, not due to my hillbilly blood but because George had other things to do. A neighbor had to drive me and my mom to the emergency room when I broke my arm on the monkey bars because George decided to go to a turkey shoot. Do you even know what a turkey shoot is? I do, because I went to several as a little kid. But not that day. That day, I was getting a cast put on my arm.

I think my dad won a slab of bacon at that turkey shoot.

For what it’s worth, here I am, somehow George’s daughter, Powhatan cheekbones and all, the only kid who both had a turkey foot at show-and-tell and also spent every day devouring library books. A product of both Star Wars and Hee Haw. A kid who grew up on country banjos but also thought she was a Monkee and when she first said “I’d like a Beatles record,” got The White Album because it literally said The Beatles on the record cover.

Anyway, George was gone from my life a long time ago, and so I am here, a little puzzled over what people are supposed to think when they lose a parent, and yet my reaction is mostly clinical. Like my mom, I look back on the legendary moments, the fun times, the insights I gained from a world of outhouses and dead copperheads in jars. But these are memories, not current events. Nostalgia is a privilege.

To paraphrase June Carter Cash, who I think of when I remember George’s sister, Aunt Boots, playing the autoharp in her family’s trailer in Bath County, Virginia…I ain’t never gonna see George Javins again.

Or to quote a complete human opposite, Aunt Karen from LA whose mom was a Holocaust survivor and dad was a porn producer…”George shot me a turkey. That was very sweet. I didn't really know what to do, but it was sweet.”

Enjoy your Wednesday. Embrace the turkey shoot and the oat milk. That’s what I’m trying to do.