Get It Out

This year, the anniversary of Dad's death passed without a lot of observance on my part. Jen makes a point of sending flowers to Mom from the kids. My role in this is to accept that she is doing this and thank her for including my kids names on the card as well.

As if they are from me, or that I had the slightest involvement in them arriving .

I think the first year, I may have actually sent flowers - or conferred with Jen prior to her sending them - but ever since I've regarded it as something that was being handled.

Blogs being wonderfully self indulgent things - my observance took the form of heartfelt, yet virtual text. This year, I simply could not locate the right frame of mind to post.

In a self justifying way, I viewed this as progress.

Having spent countless hours bending depressing music towards my situation – this might actually be progress.

But there’s a certain amount of baggage that refuses to go quietly – and this is an attempt to shove it out the door despite the screaming.

What I’ve come to realize is that this stuff never really comes up. While this is good in lots of ways, it lays down a pattern of avoidance that is unhealthy. Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for me.

Mom is in the other camp – which is perhaps the reason I’m not. When I was in Norway, Mom started talking about Dad and Katrina with our assigned dinner group and I remember being angry with her. Angry because Mom talks about “the storm” a lot. It always seems to come up – any tenuous connection is an excuse for Mom to recount some storm-related factoid. “We didn’t have that during Katrina…”

You were in Katrina?

“Oh yes,” she’ll say with a sort of Now that you mention it… air. And she’ll start in with one of the stories I’ve heard too many times.

This is bothersome for all sorts of reasons. Ones that are easy to conjure up, but hard to articulate.
Trolling for pity, trading on the death of a loved one – or just simply the overwrought segue that precedes the story.

Now I say all this having vividly felt this – but having never breathed a word of this to Mom. I would never do that. Yet the moment we’d finished dinner with the Norway crowd - Mom all but apologized for it. “I know you don’t approve of that, but…”

I clearly need to restrain my facial expressions better.

Having thought about how little I’ve spoken to others about Dad – it occurred to me that I’ve managed to guilt my own mother about discussing what is clearly the defining event of her life right now. I so clearly failed her up to that point – and I can’t recall what I said – but I was too surprised to say anything intelligent.

Really. Why the hell should she hold back on that stuff?

This was my realization today. Think of any time somebody lets loose with a painful story. What happens? Someone else does the same.

I’ve always viewed these exchanges as a race to victimhood (“Oh, you think that was sad? Try this…”) and while I’m sure there’s some of that – think about these stories a minute.

They aren’t the box score for the local team - these are stories that never come up. They have no segue. Events that forever alter the lives of a person, or a family. Stuff that really matters, not some crap you saw on TV.

And you can’t bring them up without looking unseemly, or pathetic, or ghoulish.

My dad died from a heart attack brought on by massive head injuries. Who do I talk to about that? When does that come up?

Fricking never, is when. You can wait a long time for that perfect segue. And while you’re waiting, you build up a collection of anecdotes that are harmless to everyone but you.

Mom’s got it worse – she was there for the whole thing. Saw him sputter, watched the neighbor do CPR – and I’m slighting her for edging anywhere near that story? WTF is wrong with me …?

I’m beginning to believe that when somebody starts to lets something like that out, it’s because they need to. Yeah, it might come out as one-upsmanship or a rehearsed anecdote, but there are damn few opportunities to say what you’re really thinking.

Outside of blogs, that is.

You spend a lot of time conjuring up discussions that never, ever happen – and then you sit on them until one day something sets them off.

….

The lighted match of the moment are the words “passed away.” Some months ago, E surprised me by saying my exact thoughts on them – at least as they applied to my Dad.

As in – they don’t.

E said she couldn’t bring herself to say that my father had passed away. Because those words are the sanitized, polite form of what happens when a person lives to a ripe old age before going on to their final reward.

Passive. Passed away.

Gradual.

Internal

Only my dad’s death was not passive. It was active, external.

He did not go, he was taken.

And for some reason I’m sure I’ll one day realize in a sudden eureka-moment – I’ve resisted this categorization with the fervor of a fundamentalist.

Not “died,” but “killed.”

I wince even writing that, because I know how it sounds – but I refuse to put a polite face on something I find so offensive. And I don’t indulge others who try.

For some reason, it is also important that the blame be properly assigned. “Accident” is so beneath my father.

For years, my mind has saved a justification I’d direct at anyone who would try to exonerate the guilty party. My hope is that by giving it substance it can finally just go away.

If my mother is to be widowed,
If my children must be denied their grandfather,
If my grandmother must bury her oldest son,

If all of this must happen
– let it be a hurricane.

A storm like no other.

One that empties cities and erases towns.
One whose name is forever associated with destruction and loss.

If my father is to be brought down,
let it be a hurricane.

Anything less would seem inadequate.