Page 78 - Senior Link Magazine Summer 2023 - Online Magazine

Focus
FAMILY
Legacy of the

listener

by Anna Bromley

His condition slowly deteriorated, and he lost the ability to
play the guitar. Next, he lost the strength to wrap me in a hug
that made me feel safe, like nothing could break the security
of his grip on me. And it continued, as it sometimes does with
cancer, until I found myself kneeling beside his hospital bed,
crying into the crisp white sheets, telling him how I wasn’t
strong enough to lose him. And he opened his clear blue eyes,
rubbed my forehead, and just listened.
My father died on March 8th. In the weeks since, I have
thought a lot about what it means to carry on a father’s
legacy. I’ve decided that a person’s legacy is not the same to
everyone. The characteristics we choose to preserve are those
that we cannot imagine living in a world without. For me, I
will just listen.

’ve always been a talker. I’ve been told that, when I was
little, I used to have to take these big, deep gasps mid-
Isentence because I would literally talk until I was blue in the
face.
My dad, on the other hand, has always been a listener, the
kind of listener who was not trying to fix anything or direct
the conversation. He’d just listen. As a grade-schooler, I would
fill the air with words about the inane details of who I was
inviting to my birthday party, and he’d just listen. When the
star basketball player broke my heart my sophomore year, he
just listened. When I landed and then lost my first “big-girl”
job in my twenties, he listened. And I realize now, as an adult,
that listening is not simply the absence of talking. I learned
from him that really good listening is more like clearing out
a space for someone to feel joy or pain or confusion. It’s like
when children are toddlers, exploring the world, you move the
furniture back in the living room and watch as they try and fail
and try again. That was what it was like when I called my dad.

And it is not as though he was just sitting around waiting for
me to call. My father built a wildly successful dental laboratory
that served the crown and bridge needs of dentists and patients
in Texas and New Mexico for almost four decades. Technicare
was, at one point, the largest privately owned dental lab in the
country. At the height of his business success, he had a standing
rule with his administrative staff that, no matter what he was
doing or who he was talking to, if one of his children called,
he’d drop everything to take the call and listen.

In 2017, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and even
as he endured the rigors and side-effects of radiation and
chemotherapy, he had the remarkable ability to make space
within his world to listen to the seemingly trivial minutiae of
mine.

78 Lubbock Senior Link