grief | bloodteethandflame

Three.

Dear Bobby:

I woke up this morning, thinking of you.

When I logged into my laptop, with coffee in hand, Facebook reminded me how three years ago today, my husband, my youngest son and I flew home to Massachusetts.

~~~

Two weeks before, we’d gotten that terrible phone call.

They’d said you’d gone unconscious.

They’d said that you’d had a stroke.

We prayed so hard through the days between

You squeezing your mother’s hand suddenly

And when they’d said you had a long road of rehabilitation ahead of you.

We had so much hope that you’d come through this somehow.

~~~

Though what I remember most was sitting with you in the backyard on that warm summer day in July 2014.

We were listening to Amy Winehouse, drinking whiskey, and talking about heartbreak.

(I mean, what a cliche, right?)

But what I remember most was how easily I had slipped into sharing details with you about my most recent hurts, the latest in the litany of pain that marked that horribly emotional, difficult summer.

But that was you – you were always so open, so easy to talk to, to laugh with, and to just be. You listened and allowed me to just be what I was that summer, which was probably sad, and maybe even more than a bit emotionally broken.

And I will never forget what you said to me that day, while I wallowed in my emotions.

You said:

I don’t know how I’m gonna help, but I wanna help. I’m hearin’ ya and I want ya to know I’m here for ya. I wanna tell ya, I’m here. I’m gonna be here for ya. I wanna help ya figure this all out. Always. I’m here. I’m here for ya.

And that was so you. You always had the blunt honesty to admit to me that you didn’t know what you could do to help me, but you offered me your presence, with a standing offer to be there to help me figure it all out.

Well, Bobby I never did figure it all out, but you listened, and you were there, and that was really what I needed. It did help me, you did help me. I will always be grateful for that, for your presence, and for your help.

~~~

It was hard to say goodbye to you, Bobby.

But I am thinking of you today.

October 20, 2015

Yesterday

I hemmed and hawed about writing this post, as yesterday was a meaningful date in my personal history.

On the evening of Friday, 19 October 2007, my father died.

I would not find out about until the next day – Saturday – as my mother called me almost 8 hours later, leaving a four-word message on the home answering machine, to inform me that my father had passed.

My husband, my sons, and I had returned from a local skate tournament to see that little flashing light notifying us of an incoming call that we had received earlier that afternoon from an unfamiliar number.

I had been estranged from my parents for several years at that point. To put it bluntly, my mother had ‘disowned’ me in 2005 over something so incredibly petty that I am ashamed to admit now that I honored her wishes for nearly 2 years. And, unfortunately, my father did, too.

But I remember that last conversation that I’d had with my father in early October 2005.

Cancer had returned – malignant melanoma – but my father had insisted that it wasn’t such a big deal.

We danced around the subject of the impending surgery that would require the loss of his right eye, and, in typical form, my father joked about his options upon coming to terms with the reality that he’d probably have to wear an eyepatch.

He insisted that he couldn’t decide if he should tell people that he’d become a pirate, or if he should tell people that he’d given his eye to Odin, for knowledge.

I didn’t know what to say; I was just pleased to be speaking to my father, and I told him that I would be delighted to support him in either choice. In a roundabout way, I was trying to comfort him, but honestly, I would have agreed to support him in any way that I could, even if most of the time my support of him simply required that I cheerfully go along with his jokes.

That was my father. That’s the way that he coped best with adversity – through joking about it.

Though I didn’t want to discuss our own adversity — that elephant in the room — concerning how he missed me, and how he hoped that my mother and I ‘could somehow work things out’ so that he would be ‘allowed to talk to [me] again.’

I was inwardly furious that he felt like he had to sneak around – while my mother was not home – just to talk to me. (Of course, I was too stubborn to look the other way concerning my mother’s obviously toxic and controlling behavior. I was well aware of what a rare occurrence it was that my mother was not at home.)

Despite this, I truly thought that my father and I would speak again.

But we didn’t.

After my father died, my brother told me that the cancer had spread rather fast – but my father was overly proud man and it surprised no one that my father insisted on downplaying the debilitating effects on his quality of life – but as a result, my father refused to allow anyone to contact me concerning this reality.

I’ve no doubt that my father thought that he’d live forever, as long as he could joke about it, but he told my brother that he was even more ashamed to be seen as sickly or frail by anyone, let alone, his daughters.

Please let them remember me the way that I was was what I was told that he had said.

It turned out that my older sister -who was also estranged, also ‘disowned’ by my mother – didn’t even know that he’d died until two months after the funeral. While I am grateful that at least I had been informed in time to actually attend his funeral, I’m ashamed to admit that I was told that she knew but that she just didn’t show.

I regret that I didn’t question that further.

~~~

But, my dysfunctional family aside, I miss my father dearly, even now, even today, eight years later.

So what do I do to honor my father?

I will hold a ‘silent supper’ for him this week, wherein I provide him offerings of his favorite foods. Steak and potatoes. Blueberry pie. Sardines. Figs.

As well, it is likely that I will go to McDonald’s today. I will order – and mindfully consume – a Big Mac and a strawberry milkshake. It was the meal that my father loved, the ‘last meal’ that I was told that my father would often insist that he wanted – and then insist upon eating – even though I’d imagine that his body could scarcely have handled digesting such ‘junk food’ towards the end of his life. (Though that wouldn’t have deterred him, however.)

But I will enjoy it, as he would have wanted to enjoy it. (I mean, what the hell, I can imagine him arguing, I’m dying. I don’t worry about nutrition now. Fuck that. I want McDonald’s.)

As well, I have a playlist of his favorite songs that I will allow myself to listen to, and it is very likely that I will have a good cry over this one:

Perhaps I will read him Philip Levine’s poem, ‘Starlight’

(This is the poet, Philip Levine, reading ‘Starlight’)

~~~

This is a photo-booth photo of my father and I from 1974ish or so.

It is one of my favorite photos that I have of my father.

This is a photo of a self-portrait that my father painted in early 2007.

~~~

I miss you.

I love you, Dad.

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November 20, 2013

Death’s season. (trigger warning)

*****Warning/Caution: Possible triggers…descriptions of death/dying, death of a child, and grief, from a personal perspective****

(From November 13th 2013)

Last night, I spoke with my older sister who lives in Hawaii.

Over the weekend – while K and I were at FPG – my sister’s boyfriend died.

I know that he had been ill and in the hospital a week or so before, but the last time that I’d spoken to her, he’d been getting better, she had said. Looking back on it, his illness seemed a weird respite from the appallingly stressful situation that their life together had become.

She had only begun to tell me the story.

She had been thinking of leaving him.

But now, she was telling me a different story.

She told me how he had left her on Thursday night, courtesy of several seemingly sudden multiple organ failures.

He was just 34 years old.

I don’t know, and there is a quality to that that seems surreal.

To think that two, perhaps three weeks ago, she was hiding in the bathroom of their apartment, sounding desperate, whispering hurriedly into the phone about how controlling he’d become, how abusive he was, his incredibly heartless and selfish he had been, and how hopeless her life had become.

She whispered and paused at intervals, because she feared talking about him as he was just on the other side of the wall, and she feared that he’d overhear her plans to leave him come January.

~~~

I noticed now, as she spoke of her grief at his death, that there wasn’t a catch in her voice. One would have thought that, when she begun to tell me the details of how he had died on Thursday night, that she was simply relating the plot of a suspenseful film. She was immersed in all of the smallest, most mundane details: what he had eaten on Wednesday, what he’d watched on TV, what he’d said just before he lay down less than 12 hours before his death.

Again, it was if she was reciting the details of an interesting television drama, but there was strange denial to her grief, I suppose, in the fact that she still spoke of him in the present tense, He does this….He says that…He is…

But then, then again, there is a catch in her voice there, there it is — when she tells me how she had been praying in that selfsame bathroom, whispered desperate prayers, asking God to help her get through this illness, this latest difficulty with him: What can I do? Help me, Oh Lord, please help me…Help me help him to get better…

And her voice cracks and finally breaks when she tells me how she had lain next to him on their couch at 9 PM on Thursday night, and woke up to realize that oddly enough, he had fallen asleep holding her hand, with his fingers interlaced with hers. Her hand, she explained, had been numb with pins and needles — and funny, how it had frustrated her – but hadn’t struck her as too unusual at the time — that it had taken her several minutes to pry her fingers from his grip.

She began to cry then, explaining how strange it was that his body had been warm, but she couldn’t awaken him.

And then, she broke down in uncontrollable sobs as she described, haltingly, when she realized that she had mistaken the relentless thudding of her own heartbeat for his, and that’s why she called 911:

I looked and looked for his pulse and I listened for his heart, but then I got scared — I couldn’t hear it because mine was so loud….I couldn’t hear it!

I devoutly wished that I could’ve comforted her somehow, listening to her sobs over the roar of blood in my own ears, trying to quiet my own heart as it hammered in my chest, as my brain chattered you cannot fathom, you cannot fathom that grief, and hating myself for that, for being so useless to her as she sobbed….

And then, almost as suddenly as she had begun to cry, she abruptly turned the discussion over to other topics, and she began a disjointed rapid-fire chatter about her memories of our father, complaints about our mother….

Then, she asked after the details of my camping weekend.

It was so surreal to find ourselves laughing, twenty minutes away from Death Who had just been standing so close to us.

My sister admits to feeling guilty, feeling scattered, desperate to fill up the spaces in the conversation.

She asks about my failing marriage.

We talk about it as if it is a difficult math problem that we could easily solve together if we follow some sort of prescribed set of steps, and she returns to discussing her boyfriend in the present tense: Oh he does that, too, she commiserates. That sounds like something he says.

I don’t correct her. I can’t bring myself to, but my heart breaks a little listening to her ragged, uneven breathing, and her voice cracking in odd places.

We are drowning, she drawls, suddenly suppressing a laugh, Our lives have both gone to hell.

So we talk of our kids.

She tells me about her plans for Thanksgiving, but things quickly devolve into reminiscence again — this week, last year, some Thanksgiving from years ago…and then, some particular difficulties of our shared childhood.

Again, Death returns, and clears Her throat, and my older sister and I are suddenly talking about the inexplicable death of our baby sister, when she was five, and I was three, on a horribly confusing day in August 1974.

We compare our strange, sharp memories of the weight of silence punctuated by sirens, or the useless distraction of the popsicles that we didn’t want to eat that melted down our shirts, and how no one thought to wipe our faces at all that day, because…because Death was sitting at our front porch, surrounded by flashing lights…and our mother was making a strangling keening wail unlike anything that we’d ever heard back then or since….

We agree on the fact that such grief as that can surely drive anyone insane

That is the sort of grief that certainly drove our mother insane, and maybe, she’d never recovered in some way.

Remember how it was, for the longest time after that, when she seemed out of touch with anything going on around her, but how she would shudder and stare off into fixed point just beyond our faces if we spoke to her?

These are the sorts of things we are talking about, the smallest details of that particular Thanksgiving, that haunted Christmas.

I miss him, but thank God it’s nowhere near a grief like that, my sister blurts out suddenly.

Nothing is unimportant, and yet everything seems profound as we talk, before the conversation wheels about again, turning to the mundane, the easy, the surface details of the present day:

Today is a school day, I say. It is 4 AM here.

I look up and realize that we have been on the telephone for 9 hours.

This is how we get through.

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bloodteethandflame

Tag: grief

March 3, 2022