I think my father died today.
There were daffodils, but no tulips. Because the daffodils come up before the tulips.
I know it was sometime around now, but I don't know the exact day. Isn't that odd.
Logan works across the street from the "Memorial Garden" my father is buried in. I drive past the cemetary on occasion while meeting Logan for lunch, as I pass the southeastern most corner I briefly ask myself, "How does this make you feel?"
I answer to myself, 'Nothing really.' I then ask myself, as a therapist from my past did, "What do you imagine someone in your position might feel? Passing the cemetary her father is buried at. The father who committed suicide. The father who was not very good at being a father. What do you think she might feel?"
This weekend Logan and I were driving to Ann Arbor, alone, with no kids, which means we can talk and I mentioned how I don't know how I feel about it all. Logan said, "Well, you know how you feel about it." This website is volume upon volume of how I feel about things. Logan has listened to how I feel about things for nearly 12 years now. Where Logan has often struggled to pinpoint his feelings, I typically know how I feel about things. Sometimes I'm so sure about how I feel, I know how he feels too.
But I replied that no, I really didn't. And I don't, exactly.
For most of my childhood he drank on the weekends only. Which doesn't sound that bad, except that he started after work on Friday and drank all night and all day right through until he blacked out on Sunday. Then on Monday morning he pulled himself together and went back to work and all was relatively calm. Until the next weekend. I hated the weekends. I cried as I rode home on the bus on Friday afternoons knowing what the weekend would hold.
At some point after the first suicide attempt he just stopped getting up on Monday morning. He stopped going to work, he stopped pulling himself together to face the week like a normal person. They tried not to fire him. I remember co workers coming to the house, begging him to get help. To come back to work. To get it together.
For some reason, this finally broke my mother's will to make her marriage work. And God love her she tried to make it work for so damn long. The cost of trying to make it work is something I still hold anger in my soul about.
They divorced and my father refused to leave. He lived in the living room for nearly a year while my mother went through the long drawn out process of evicting him from the home. He watched the Gong Show and became quite adept at The Price Is Right. The house was silently stewing with anger and grief.
Walking into that house felt like dying.
One day my mother sent us to a friend's after school and we knew what was happening. The police came to physically remove my father from the house my mother had been awarded in the divorce. He'd been preparing for this day. He'd started loading up our only car (which had been awarded to my mother as well, but she cut her losses on that one, happy to have him gone) with his belongings. He'd put a chain lock on the bedroom door. And most importantly he'd stacked cases of Old Milwaukee in the bedroom.
After he was gone I would have nightmares he came back. I'd come downstairs in the morning and he'd be sitting on the sofa watching The Gong Show
"This Unknown Comic, would you look at him! He's got a God damn bag on his head! He's hilarious!"
I'd look at my mother and she had no answers. He was back. It was all starting over again.
After he left I'd see him around town. The sight of a brown Town and Country station wagon with wood on the sides would give me panic attacks on the bus. I would duck so he wouldn't see me. He'd fallen hard and fast to the gutter type of drunk once he finally left the safety of the Gong Show and the living room sofa.
A girl I knew in high school saw him at the fast food restaurant she worked at. He told her he was my father. This bloated homeless looking man who drove with all his belongings in a station wagon was my father. He told her to say hello to me. So she did. I'm sure she also mentioned it to her friends.
"Melissa Williams' father is a bloated homeless man who hangs out at fast food restaurants."
This did not help my invisibility cause.
When my father died, it was all so horrific. Not the death, but the whole life before that single event where it ended. It sounds horrible to say but his death was a release from the guilt of having a father I had given up on. A father I was humiliated to have. A father who had let me down.
I was 15 or 16 when he died. I remember my therapist from that time saying to me. "You lived with him for 15 years of your life, it will take that long for you to feel removed from all that pain and suffering. It will take at least that long to be separated from the shame and memory of where you come from."
At 18, thirty looked so far away. But he was at least sort of right. I can write about it now. I can think about it now. Except now that I'm removed from it, I'm able to actually grieve it in a way I couldn't when there was so much shame piled on top of me. Shame of where I came from. Shame of who and what my family was.
I didn't and still don't for the most part, feel sad about his death or the way he died. I feel the most grief for the way he lived. And what it cost us all to live with him.
