I cannot promise to leave this up forever because it is deeply personal, pretty raw, and I can imagine some may find it monstrous or grotesque and that makes me feel a bit squeamish; YMMV
5/7/16
My mom only seemed to have three types of dreams. Most frequently she dreamt she was being chased by “drug dealers” whatever that meant. Her life experience was more with “drug reps,” than drug dealers, pharmaceutical salespeople who bought her hospital fancy lunches and stocked our home with useful but meaningless accessories like umbrellas, pens, post-it notes and tote bags with words like “Wellbutrin” and “Mirena” stamped on the sides.
Less frequently she dreamt she was riding in a car without a driver, which made sense, seeing as life in our house always felt slightly out of control; we were moving forward but with no direction and no clear sense of who was getting us there and how.
Least frequently, but most significantly, she dreamt about my dad. In the dreams he always showed up somewhere that he was no longer welcome – family weddings, school graduations, work cocktail parties. Social events she reminded us he had ruined for her, in one way or another over the years (well, always a very specific way, with various outcomes — he was drunk and he had embarrassed her) but that deep down we knew she still wished he could be her plus one.
These dreams were premonitions, almost always. If my mom had a dream about my dad, it meant that my dad was going to show up again in our lives in an expected but uninvited way. We had kicked him out over and over again over the years; sometimes in an attempt to get him help and get him sober; sometimes to give ourselves a break from the chaos and demolition of his unpredictability; and always, we hoped (but knew better), for good.
The ways he showed up fluctuated – sometimes we would get a collect call from a bus depot or hospital or local police station. Sometimes he needed money to get from that place, or at the very least a ride. It was usually easy to tell by the sound of his voice on the other side of the phone if he were sober or not, and to what to degree. It didn’t really matter, but it helped prepare us for how messy it was going to be. When he called, it at least gave us warning, a chance to collect ourselves and make the decision whether or not we wanted to pick him up and bring him back. We never wanted to, but we always did. We pooled the necessary money for bail or the bus ticket, one of us drove the one car we ever had at any given time and picked him up.
Other times we would come home from school or soccer practice and he would just be sitting on the porch, smoking a cigarette, waiting. This was worse. There was no warning shot, no chance for us to mentally prepare for how bad it would be. He was just there and we had no choice but to open the door and let him in.
Like my mom’s dreams, I have premonitions about phone calls. There are times when my phone rings and I know what is on the other side. Like when I was in college and my sister called the morning after a high school dance, I knew she was calling to confess about the loss of her virginity. Or the time a friend called to tell me another friend had died by being hit by a car walking home from the bar one night. Like my mom, these premonitions were never of good news, always bad. The day I found out my dad died, I had left work early to deliver something to another department in a different building. It was raining. It was October. I was 25. My phone vibrated and a Texas number blinked up at me. My dad had been living, unsuccessfully, in Texas, closer to two of his sisters, for a while. It hadn’t been the jolt to his system to get sober that we had hoped it would be. We sent him 1250 miles away hoping he would get the hint that this time we needed a lot more space and we were making it a lot harder for him to come back. And he had stayed away.
Like us, his sisters weren’t able to help him, but they had been bitter and unforgiving: calling the police, claiming violence (my dad had never laid a hand on any of us, ever) and kicking him out. We should have known better, his sisters were in no better shape than he was, were cut from the same dysfunctional and distressed cloth. But we were exhausted and we couldn’t think of anything else to do. We had drained our resources at home, every friend and family member still willing to help had already tried and been burned in one way or another: crashed cars, stolen money, embarrassing situations. So we sent him to them, these sisters who had, for years, riled against my mother, shouting that it was her fault that our family had failed, that my dad’s problems had been caused by her selfishness, her inability to fix him. But they were our only option. And we were so tired.
So as this Texas phone number blinked from my phone, I knew who was on the other end and what she was going to say. My aunt Betsy, my dad’s younger sister who was no better off than he was, told me in a flat and accusatory tone that my dad was dead. He died of a heart attack in a homeless shelter in Dallas, where she had dropped him off and told him good riddance. He died alone and desperately lonely, but he had finally done what we asked: he had stayed away.
A few days after he died, I got a Facebook message from one of my other aunts, one who had been more understanding and caring, but who herself was too broken to be capable of helping my dad to the extent he needed. She wrote, “I talked to your dad not long before he died. He was in a dark place and having a hard time getting out of it. His coming to Texas, while thought to be necessary at the time by your family, was never going to work, and he knew it. ‘I feel I have made my final and fatal mistake,’ he told me. He was right, but I told him that God had a plan for him and that it would work out. Many times when he was defeated, he rose from the ashes and began his fight again. As if he had nine lives, again and again he tried. I can't help but think, maybe this time he did get it right- with God; and He called him home.”
We tell ourselves things like that to make our grieving easier. We tell ourselves these things to absolve us of our true feelings, chief among them being relief. The worst kept secret in my family is that we were relieved when my dad died. Relieved that none of us had to suffer that way anymore. We were relieved because now we could all be free. Free from the chaos, free from the uncertainty and the failures.
When my dad died, it was only the word of my unstable aunt that confirmed his death when she allegedly saw his body. His ashes were shipped back to us in Michigan, and we morbidly joked over the years that we don’t know for sure if he really died; that none of us would be surprised to find him on the front porch, smoking a cigarette. But we know that he is staying away for good this time because my mom no longer has dreams about my dad.
My dad died 10 years ago this week; between the three of us, neither my mom nor my sister nor I can remember the exact date. I wrote the above first in 2013 and again in 2016, and I will say to you it is the truest and most accurate description of my relationship to my dad’s illness and his death. But something has shifted in the last 5 years, and I can say now (which I honestly can’t imagine myself saying then), that I miss him. Not his illness, not the unpredictability and shame that surrounded it all of our lives, but him as he truly was. I told my therapist today that I think of my dad now like an artist whose work was not considered until after their death. This too feels accurate and true. I often talk to her about how unfair it feels that he did not get to live long enough for the conversation around addiction and alcoholism to shift; what we as his family knew then (that it is a disease afflicting folks, and not a personal moral failure) is now more known and widely accepted, both by people we know and society more generally. It is unfair that my dad did not receive the apologies, the understanding, the healthcare, the legal protection, the grace, humility, and tenderness he deserved. Including from me. I am so sorry, Dad. We do miss you so much.
I know that the reason I find myself missing my dad now is because of my nieces and nephews. Thinking of my dad now as he would have been, had he lived, had he gotten better, as “Grandpa T-bird,” makes me mourn the missed opportunities. He would have been such a game grandpa: playing dress-up, playing catch, marveling at the wit and the wisdom of the 4 little people in his family tree. I find comfort (cold though it may be) knowing that his life, like the works of a great artist after their death, is receiving the reconsideration he deserves.
Indeed, I think of a quote from the writer Kahlil Gibran (a favorite of my dad’s, whose work was also not widely considered during his lifetime) that I used as my senior yearbook quote (omg CRINGE), in part because I was deeply pretentious and in part to honor my dad.
I existed from all eternity and, behold, I am here; and I shall exist till the end of time, for my being has no end.
weekly wanderings
“In comparison to parties powered by alcohol, the vibe felt much more intense and intimate — we had to hold on to each other for support while exploring this unpredictable psychic terrain.”
“That’s brilliant, and if you learn that as an actor, you understand that there’s a whole musical sense at work. That’s the classical root. As a pig-ignorant Scot, I’m incredibly grateful to have learned that. Not everyone has.”
“It’s difficult to believe in the lived experiences of other people. That’s a terrible danger – more than danger, a consequence – of great wealth.”
“When he’s in town, he likes to lead the charters, passing out charcuterie plates, and even preparing traditional Welsh rarebit on the open seas using a blowtorch.”
This second season of This Land does such good work interrogating Native sovereignty through the lens of child welfare, foster care, and the American adoption system in ways I find deeply troubling and enlightening. It is answering, “what is at stake?” and “who gets to decide?” with chilling clarity.