A brief handful of memoirs

My dad died on October 1, 2005. I have to look up his obituary every time I say this because I always forget if it was the 1st or 2nd. But it was the 1st. We used to love The Three Stooges, and Scooby Doo, and going to what we called “junk stores” which were really more like antique shops. My favorite one, where I still have vague memories, is the Treasure Mart in Ann Arbor. It closed up a few years ago.

He died a week before his 52nd birthday, and almost a week after my 8th. I was having a sleepover to celebrate with my two friends that Friday night when he went to the hospital. I sat on the stairs and watched the paramedics carry him out on a stretcher. I think I knew that he had a headache earlier, when he went upstairs to lie down. For a really long time I was upset with myself for running around while he was trying to rest, playing with one of those little door alarms that I had gotten from selling candy bars for school, the kind of alarm that emits the loudest and most annoying sound. I didn’t know when he went back downstairs and talked to my mom that he was slurring his speech.

For a lot of years afterwards, I told myself that maybe he died because I had been having too much fun on my birthday. I thought maybe that was what karma was about, maintaining a balance in such a way that if I felt too happy, it would have to take something away so I would come back down. When I told my mom, she revealed her own self-blame, for not noticing that something was wrong, when he’d been having a headache at work all day even before coming home. Neither of us knew how to feel.

Mom didn’t handle Dad’s death well. The house stopped getting cleaned, and no place since has ever recovered from that new habit. She stopped cooking at home except maybe once a week, and instead took us out to restaurants almost every day. We went to the movies constantly. I loved it, and I guess she preferred to focus on entertainment. Eventually she couldn’t pay the mortgage on our house anymore, and it was foreclosed. We had to leave when I was 12. I miss the backyard, and my bedroom, and the attic, and the big tree outside my parents’ bedroom window, the one that I would lie in their bed and look at and find faces and shapes in its leaves for what felt like hours. I even miss the basement, a type of room I’ve always been scared of. I used to think that protective ghosts lived down there whom I called the woolie-woos. That basement had dad’s pinball machine, a lot of storage boxes that never came with us, and the big square hole in the wall that you could crawl into, that was supposed to be there, but I was never really sure what it was actually for.

I still have very regular dreams about having to leave a place quickly. Under a looming time pressure, I scramble to collect all the sentimental things that I can’t let myself leave behind with all the mess. I have to pick and choose, and every time I come to an end, another area turns up with more things I love, waiting for me to take them along too. This is not that far of a cry from what happened at that house in Saline – I still have a memory of sifting through the solid layer of clutter left on the living room floor after the furniture was taken out, picking out things I wanted to keep.

I still don’t know how to budget properly, and I never had chores. Even brushing my teeth regularly is a habit I haven’t been able to develop yet.

My first time in therapy was being in a group for kids who had lost parents or other close family. Mom thought it would be good to get me somewhere that I could work through these new feelings. But I didn’t connect with it. I didn’t want to be in a group. I wanted my experience to be my own, and not to share it with anybody. I wasn’t ready to give space to anyone else, and I hated feeling like we were all the same. In direct contrast to the supposedly soothing saying that “you are not alone,” I wanted to be alone. I wanted to be the only one who had ever dealt with this. That was the only way I felt like I could get the serious, individual attention I needed.

Therapy has been on and off ever since then. The next time I went was around middle school, or a little bit before, when I could feel the beginnings of something bad coming, but it wasn’t quite here yet. Mom signed me up, but we stopped going after a while because the therapist didn’t see anything wrong with me. A couple years later, when the depression was full and present, I asked to go again, and mom told me no because I hadn’t made use of the last time, and she felt like she had wasted money paying for those sessions. I tried to tell her why it was different, but she didn’t care. She was really angry about everything by those days, and still holds onto that anger now, in a lot of ways.

My relationship with her deteriorated in those years. She relied on me as an emotional support because I was the only one left in the house and she was never about asking for outside help. Every day she came home from work and complained, about her job or about traffic, and then I would get annoyed, and then she got mad at me, and I got mad at her. This cycle hasn’t ever really ended.

Before her anger, she was sad. We tried to get through grief together, but she went down farther than I had the capacity to. My first time hearing the word “cyanide” happened before I turned 10, when we were lying in bed together and she mentioned that it would be easy to line a couple glasses and kill ourselves. I didn’t understand the concept of suicide yet, nor did I want anything to do with it myself until I was in high school.

I got really dark eventually, too. I reached out for help a few times, just not from mom. She was only able to make things worse. The weekend after I turned 21, I drove out to the cemetery in Ohio and sat with dad for a day, determined to make a decision on if I would end things or not. It felt like a waste to keep going if I was just going to do it at 40 or something later. I had this book in my car that I hadn’t opened yet, so I pulled it out to pass the time – The Mastery of Self by Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. I didn’t expect this to happen, but it was actually what I was looking for – a sustainable reason to keep going. It told me that my life is my own and I am allowed to do what feels good. Among other points, it shifted my perspective in a way that has never been fully reversed. The way my depression disappeared that day is the foundation of why I’ve really stopped believing that it might be a chemical imbalance for me. It seems that I really just needed better ideas.

I still think about dying, but I never want it anymore.

After Dad died, I began to fear that Mom would die, too. If she stayed in the store for too long while I was waiting in the car, my imagination would take hold and I’d think of all the horrible things that could be happening to her. I didn’t want her to leave me at all, to the point where I wasn’t okay when she went to work. One day I was so scared and upset that when she left the house, I slumped onto the kitchen floor and wailed. I couldn’t recover myself and she had to come back home early. I remember that being in the kitchen in Dublin, which probably would’ve put me somewhere around 12 or 13 years old.

I’ve extended these fears to other people I loved too. A friend I used to have feelings for in early high school received many a call from me asking if he was okay, just because my imagination had gone awry again, and I needed to make sure.

These days it mainly applies to Reh. He drives up from Ohio every weekend and I often find myself making plans to start calling every hospital along his route or driving down there to find him myself if I haven’t gotten a response for too long. It’s a 2 ½ hour drive but I’d rather go searching than ignore it and find out later that I could’ve saved him. It’s been a year and a half now and nothing has ever gone wrong, but I won’t let the possibility go.

Back when I was still in elementary school, when Harvest was still grades 1-4, I remember being out on the playground. It’s hard to pin whether this happened before or after Dad died, but it was likely after.

I had been bouncing a basketball on the playground’s court, and I started thinking about the ball having feelings. I stopped bouncing it and started crying, and one of the teachers who was supervising us came over and asked what was wrong. We sat on the bench and I cried to that teacher about how I thought I was hurting the ball. They did their best to say something to make me feel better, maybe about how the ball didn’t have feelings or if it did, how it liked being bounced.

I’ve had a trait since I was very young that makes me deeply upset whenever I hurt someone – my first memory of this came from pre-school when a friend of mine somehow convinced me to slap another classmate with her. When our teacher stopped us and pulled up his shirt, I saw the red handprints on his back and I burst into tears.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether something is alive or inanimate – if I think about it having feelings and me hurting them, I get upset. I even went through a time when I tried to look at everything in a room equally, because I thought that anything my eyes weren’t on was feeling lonely because I wasn’t paying attention to it.

I still get these feelings, though they shift through the years. My partner has begun to witness this recently, when I found out about that anglerfish in Spain, who saw sunlight for the first time as she was dying. I couldn’t stand how the popular focus was still on how scary her appearance was. Reh thought I was actually crazy for crying about it, but some other people understand.

I never beat myself up for these feelings even when they’re unreasonable. I’d rather have an excess of compassion than a lack of it.