Grief. We all experience it at some points in our life. The death of a beloved pet, the death of a loved one. It comes for us all, eventually. How do you explain that feeling, though? If you haven't lost someone yet, how do I explain that hole? How do I explain trying to fit that square peg of their memory into the round hole of the loss in my heart? Especially when that peg is spiked and tainted with negative memories of abuse and neglect. The person who is gone wasn't a saint, they weren't even a good person, but I still miss them! Amanda Palmer's song “The Thing About Things” put it so well. “If you aren't allowed to love someone living, you learn how to love someone dead.” No one stopped me from loving my father when he was alive except me, and it's a damn good thing I did, too. He was toxic. He was abusive. He was neglectful. He was manipulative. He was everything negative that you shouldn't have in your life. And now that he's gone, I'm trying to learn how to love his memory, the GOOD parts of his memory (because, despite all the negative, there WERE some good parts), and it's so damn hard. Every time I think about him, I think about how he hurt me and how he hurt others around me. Every time I think about his memory, I think about his mental illness that he refused to get help for. Every time I think about his presence in my life, I think about how adroitly he manipulated me every time he was in my life for any length of time. I can't extract the good from the bad. I can't just remember the man who was there for me when everyone else bailed. I can't just remember the man who taught me, as a toddler, about life and death by explaining that he couldn't resurrect the dead grasshopper on the asphalt. I can't just remember the times we would talk and laugh and share stories. I can't just remember the man who took me to San Francisco when I was a teenager, for my 13th birthday, because he knew I loved the city. I can't just remember those things, because those memories are constantly crowded out by the bad ones. I write Dead Letters to him on occasion. The irony of doing so now that he's actually dead is not lost on me. I tell him how he made me feel, how he screwed me up, how much I wished he would have been a better dad. I learned the routine back when I was a kid, from a counselor who gave me many tools to deal with an absentee father. So I write my letters and pour my heart out to a father who never would have read them anyway, even before he died three years ago. Now it just feels pointless, and I realized today that somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought I was writing them to get my thoughts in order to confront him. I honestly thought, deep in the subconscious, that I would be able to talk to him about these things someday. I don't know what I expected to happen, but I thought it would be… cathartic. Some closure. Release. I hoped for it, since I was a little girl--the chance to confront him about what he did to my psyche with his behavior--and now I am faced with the stark reality that I will never get that chance. I don't like permanent doors closing on me--ever. I've never been good with that. I struggle with goodbyes, I struggle with permanence… let's just say I have “commitment issues”. Even when I was a kid, I was afraid to put stickers somewhere, for fear of finding somewhere better later. Now that anxiety plays out in various ways in my life, all because I'm terrified of something going wrong later. That “future fear” is something I've always been afraid of, and it has led me to catastrophize almost CONSTANTLY about the people in my life. When my father died, one of my biggest Future Fears came true. It was one that was in the back of my mind for decades--I even had nightmares about his death, some in which I even killed him myself--but this time it was really happening. Now here we are, three years on, and I still can't process the permanence of it. I still remember his phone number, and every once in a while I will reach for my phone to call him, to try to reach out one last time. I can't parse in my brain the fact that he is actually GONE. The reality of his death is so much different emotionally. I have lost people before, but never someone that I simultaneously loved and loathed. It has made grieving for him difficult. I swing between missing him and hating him, between wanting to talk to him for reassurance and wanting to confront him for the abuse. I am a strange dichotomy of grief. My grief is an ugly animal sometimes, eating me up inside. Other times it lies dormant, just a hole in my heart. Every once in a while, I smell his smoke in the elevators at my apartment building. When I go out for my last smoke, I try to time it where the light is just right, and it reminds me of him--of the good times with him--and I put on music in my earbuds that remind me of our good times.
How many of you grew up without someone who was supposed to be there for you? How many of you lost friends as you grew older, or people you just really cared about? How did it make you feel? Age 3. My earliest memory was waking up in a bed that seemed familiar, but I could not figure out where I was. I left the mattress and explored the apartment that I strangely knew like the back of my hand. I came face-to-face with an elderly couple. I had called the woman my mother, and the man my grandpa. I did not know why. I assumed they were my parents. It wasn't until later that I gained a memory I can still recall: meeting my biological mother and brothers. I know I must have met them before, but my mind at that time had deemed them as strangers claiming to be my family, and all I can think was "why wasn't I raised with you guys?" Age 5. My mother took me and my little brother to a strange place past a fire station (I now recognize it was a police station). We stood there for a whole boring hour until a strange man wearing a black baseball cap and dark sunglasses walked in. He spoke to my mother before coming over to us. He introduced himself as our biological father. I accepted it without question. I expected him to be in my life again like my mother. However, after a few months of constant visits, we stopped going to the station to meet him and I didn't see him for a long time afterwards. By age 6 I began to wonder why he wasn't with my mother anymore, and by age 9 I had almost forgotten he existed until he finally returned to us again. This cycle continues to this very day. Age 10. I now only have a selective group of friends. We were a group of four with a couple of extras we liked hanging out with individually. Then one of us left, never to come back. I can barely remember her face now. Age 12. I was in one of the best relationships of my life. Granted, I had wronged someone, and I regret it to this very day. But we were happy together. That was until someone took him away from me. He went on to a better life (I can only hope so at least), and the night I heard the news I had lost all faith in God and the angels above. I had run back to the man who I had wronged, and in turn he did twice what I had done to him. My love life afterwards had been rocky and unknown. To this day I still refuse to worship such a god, but that boy gives me a hope that perhaps there is an afterlife. He sure as hell deserves the best of them. Age 14. I had made the biggest mistake of my life, and everyone I had once thought cared about me left. Friends turned on friends, relationships broke and mended, and I was shown a pain unlike any other that still haunts me to this very day. In the end, some of them came back and we promised a new life for ourselves. However, the betrayal has me weary and I still cannot trust him with everything I know and love. Not with my whole heart anyway. Age 15. These experiences still mess with my head. As I lay in bed late at night, I am kept awake until the early hours of dawn with these memories playing in my head. The pain becomes hurt, which in turn becomes rage, and eventually settles to sorrow if not quenched with revenge, and it all returns to a stinging numbness that makes me feel both everything and nothing at the same time. I fear closeness to those I care for most in the case of them betraying and leaving me behind just like all the others. As my 16th birthday approaches, I cannot help but wonder how different my life may have been if the choices we all made weren't the ones we had chosen. Would it be better? Would it be worse? Would I still think of the "what ifs" in the end? What is it like? What am I like? Will I ever know, or be kept in this darkness until my dying days? Would I ever be the patient and trusting person I hope to be one day, the person I am working to become, that everyone loves? Would I continue to be a shame to my family and an embarrassment to them, or would I give them nothing but pride? So much could have been different, but would I want it that way?