Monthly Archives: January 2024

Shoulda, Coulda, Wouldas

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I’m pretty sure Dad had something he wanted to tell me before he died, but I was too willfully ignorant to accept the signs and get my ass home.  He always asked when I was coming up, and this time he asked from the hospital, and I told him “after Thanksgiving.”  I was so excited to host a big gang at my house and to see Liz Phair in concert that Saturday.  I’d spent a fortune on the tickets.  I told my brother I had spent a fortune on the tickets.  I put it out there.  When I told Dad my plans, he said something like, “24 hours makes a difference.”  That SHOULD have been my queue, but instead I asked—I put it on him—“Do you want me to come up sooner?”

You would think that after all this living, after losing my mother the way I did, that I would be cognizant of the impending doom, or that I would recognize a hint.  I think, in fact, I did recognize the hint, but I ignored it.  I put a Liz Phair concert before my dying father.  What does that say about me?  JUST like I did with Mom, I pretended it wasn’t the end, and I went about my business.  Mom said, “I told you so,” when I arrived home to find her in her hospice bed in the living room.   Dad wasn’t cognizant enough to tell me that by the time I got to him.

I KNEW I would regret saying that.  I KNEW I would regret doing that.  The day after the concert, I felt sick.  I took a COVID test, and the result was undeniably positive.  I had to tell my dad, over the phone, that I couldn’t see him for another week.  He was disappointed, of course.  I could hear it in his tone.  He was cognizant then.  What did I do?  What did I do?!

Really, Truly, Looking at Death

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Some reps for a solar company came to our house two nights ago and presented us with a breakdown of the benefits of going solar.  I had so many questions that these guys couldn’t answer.  Solar is so new.  When the main guy told us that our system would be guaranteed for twenty-five years, and that each system tended to break down after thirty, I asked him about the game plan for replacing a system:  would it be cheaper, since there was already a system in place?  He did not know the answer because there is very little data out there for thirty-year-old solar systems.  Then my husband interjected, “We’ll be in our eighties when that happens, so…” So we’ll be close to cashing out on our lifetimes by then–I believe he was implying with the unfinished sentence.  Shit.

I have fewer years left than what I’ve already lived.  There’s a thought that I didn’t dwell on in my glorious forties.  When you’re in your forties, you think you’re about halfway there. Even when you are forty-nine, you still think you’re at the halfway mark.  When the number rolls over into fifty, you KNOW, you FUCKING KNOW, that you aren’t making it to 100.  Well, I know I’m not making to 100, and neither is my husband.  I’m not aware of any heavy smokers or heavy drinkers who have passed that threshold; but hey, if you can reverse diabetes through diet and lifestyle, perhaps you can reverse liver disease and lung corruption. 

And then there’s that woman in the trance years ago who told me how long I would live, but I will not commit that number to print.  I’ve been fooled by that sorcery before– when I was twelve or thirteen, my sister-in-law asked some deadbeat to give me a reading.  NONE of the shit this woman predicted happened, not even close.  I just spent the next ten years of my life wondering.  She looked at me, and she knew I was smart, so she gave me a future that she envisioned for a smart kid with the prospect of going to college.  It was ridiculous—public speaking, a lab coat, several children.  This woman clearly had no idea how the white-collar world conducted its affairs or who I was.  So no.  I will not commit to a number thrown out there by a clairvoyant.  But, realistically, I’m not making it to 100.

What am I getting at with this, exactly?  I believe that with the passing of my father—an event that I have still not acknowledged on many levels—I have crossed the threshold into their world.  I am now among the oldies; and us oldies handle this shit in very, very different ways.  I am fortunate to have friends of the same age who deal with aging very differently—some were mentally in their fifties before they graduated college.  Some, like me, burned through a few relationships and careers before they found themselves.  Others have had vaginal rejuvenations, boob lifts, and Botox shots.  I’m in some category for women who didn’t expect to ever be fifty, and then one day, there we were.  Intuitively, I knew I would have to face the deaths of my parents one day.  Intuitively, I knew I would be an “oldie” someday—I see the grays coming in—but mentally, I’m not ready for this. 

I’m not ready to make a decision about going solar that will live on past my existence on this earth.  I like the idea of setting this house up for future residents.  Isn’t that nice?  Thinking forward into the future of our kids’ generation and our grandkids’ generation sure is nice.  But, unfortunately, we oldies have to live for the now and the immediate.  We have to secure our long-term care insurance and save for our retirements and make sure we don’t end up where our parents and our grandparents did in those last, demoralizing days.  I say this with all the bravado of a woman who has just witnessed the indignities of “skilled nursing” facilities.  Dad probably had a similar reckoning back when Grandma was carrying around a child’s baby doll and crying at reminders of her real self.  This will not be my future, but this just might be my future.  

The Dirt that Siblings Throw

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I started talking to a grief counselor, and she wants me to journal about my grief.  I can do that.  Hell, the only time I ever journal is when I am trying to make some sense of my grief.  I didn’t tell her I already blog about it, but that’s irrelevant. 

I’m not good with counselors.  I can smell a scripted approach.  I picked this one because I plugged all my needs into a website that could find me a counselor based on my insurance and my problems.  Her’s was the second profile that came up.  In her picture, she was standing outside in rain gear in horrible weather, smiling like she had just climbed Mount Everest.  She told me later that she was standing in a hurricane in that pic.  That picture and her credentials were enough to sign me up—extensive post-graduate work in grief and trauma.  I think she’s going to unearth a lot more than grief.

So this entry begins my “grief journal.”  One of my brothers, the one I don’t like, didn’t give me a Christmas present this year.  I think it’s because he knew there wouldn’t be any blow-back from Dad.  It’s a sinister assumption to make, but my brother is sinister.  I can picture him ranting to his wife about how he’ll keep me in the loop until Dad’s gone, then he’ll make a neat, clean break.  His DNA is 50% ADHD and 50% anger.  Life has no meaning for him if he has nothing to rage against.

I told my new counselor a little bit about him—that he’s a narcissist, that he ruined his children, then turned his back on them, then turned his back on me.  But I won’t let him ruin me.  Why is all this coming up in a grief journal?  Well, we have no more parental glue.  My kind brother wants to foster more communication.  My narcissist brother wants to be free of any obligations to a sister who clearly thinks she is better than he is.  His words.  As I write this, I wonder which one of us needs the counseling more. 

Everyone—family, colleagues, friends—loved and appreciated my obituary for Dad.  I made him human, my husband told me.  My eulogy will do the same.  I will send him off as the dad that I remember, not the one my brothers do.  But I’m not stupid.  I know that they had a very different experience being raised by young parents.  My mother was nineteen when the first of my brothers was born.  And she told me stories about trying to parent in the ‘60s, and it wasn’t pretty, and my dad was far from saintly.  Dad tried to tell me the same from his angle after she died.  He had a lot of guilt.  I told him that everyone has their regrets, everyone has made their mistakes.  The secret to happiness is you don’t dwell. 

Poor Dad was convinced he was going to hell.  I think that’s why he clung to life for so long.  The truth is, like my obituary expressed, that he was a deeply caring and complex person, a man many many people loved.  You don’t earn that status by being a bastard or alienating your children.

The Aftermath–Little Triggers

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I’m sitting at my dining room table in the dark with my laptop and half of a bottle of Maker’s Mark.  C and I bought it to celebrate New Year’s Eve with our own party of two on the balcony of our hotel overlooking the Savannah River.  We drank half of the bottle then, in our pajamas, smoking cigarettes and remarking how relieved we were that it had occurred to us that our room came with a balcony and we didn’t need to squeeze ourselves into the New-Year’s crowds waiting for hours on the Savannah riverfront or up on a rooftop bar that charged a fortune for the privilege of being there.  24 hours we’d been at that place, wondering where we could position ourselves to glimpse the fireworks without having to actually socialize with other people. 

That’s the kind of people we are.  Smart.  But not so smart.  So we parked ourselves on the narrow balcony with some prosecco and some Maker’s Mark and watched lame fireworks on this New Year’s Eve.  Our neighbor who blows up the neighborhood every fourth-of-July puts on a better show, sadly, than the city of Savannah did this year. This is a city that prides itself on two holidays–St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve–but it “dropped the ball” on this occasion. 

Hey, I’m not complaining.  We didn’t plan to go to Savannah to celebrate New Year’s Eve.  We had planned to go there just because we’d never been and—months ago—it seemed like a good time to go, considering that we’d probably spend Christmas with Dad and new a few buffer days in-between before hitting the road again, and just before C and I had to go back to work.  Those were the plans just a few months ago.  Once again, our world changed brutally and abruptly.

So we went to Savannah after my dad died.  It was a lovely distraction, but I knew it for that–I always knew, at every juncture that I should probably be grieving.  We drank all day on December 30th, starting with a welcome glass of champagne at check-in for being special traveling members of the hotel chain, ending in the hotel bar, ordering purple cocktails that I cannot name at last-call.  I could barely walk during our ghost tour earlier that evening, over cobblestones and down into cramped basements.  I don’t remember what the tour guide told us, but I remember feeling like we were characters in a big charade, nineteenth-century folks ooooing and ahhhhhing over the freaks in the circus tent. But without the freaks or anything so interesting.  After the ghost tour, we made our late dinner reservation at a place that I should have been truly present to experience.  I can’t really remember the food—just some fuzzy images and C’s reminders the next day of how fucking brilliant those wings were, the wings that earned the restaurant a Michelin star. Each day in Savannah began later, with clouded heads and clouded emotions and more adventures with unsustainable habits.

Savannah is a beautiful city, though.  I think it’s the most beautiful city I have ever seen.  Still, every once in a while, something would trigger me, and I’d start crying, seemingly at random.  Wild new thoughts would hit me at inopportune times.  The biggest bash in the head was the realization that I don’t have a place to go home to anymore.  I have my brother, but we’re not so close despite these months of bringing us somewhat closer.  I can’t just announce that I’m going to come up and stay with him.  It puts me in position I have never been in before—I can’t go home without an invitation.  My brother and I, we still have some communicating to do, or—rather—to practice.  He asked me on Friday, two days after Dad died, when I was planning on coming back.  The only answer that came to me was maybe in a couple of weeks, because I thought I might be able to deal with it in a couple of weeks. 

In truth, I am putting off going back up there because I can’t face going into Dad’s apartment.  It’s too soon, and I just can’t turn around and go back like that.  I’ll have a breakdown on the threshold of the place.  It dawned on me though, that my brother might think I don’t want to come up and claim what I want of Dad’s things.  He’s so efficient, already taking trips to the Goodwill and divvying up the stuff.  Wants me to tell him what I want.  I don’t know what I want.  Maybe I want that marble ashtray that he used for his cigars, or maybe I want his cane with the handle that unfolds into a little seat, so he could take a load off when the walking got too much.  Maybe I should just go up there and do what I need to do.  But just thinking about the five hours in the car each way… damn, I’ll cry myself off the road. 

I can’t be with people, but I can’t be alone, if that makes any sense.  So I wrote an email to my brother because I can express myself better in writing than in any other way.  I told him how I felt, and I told him to call me, and he did. It’s hard to START a communicating with a sibling with whom you have never really had a close relationship.  Miscommunication can happen in crisis, even among people who are close.  I thought I was walking on eggshells, but he told me it’s all good. He said my uncle, my dad’s littlest brother, probably couldn’t come up for the same reason. He got me.

We let politics get in the way for a long time. My big brother is so much kinder than I gave him credit for, so much more intuitive, so much smarter, so very ethical and thoughtful. I understand now why his wife acts like she does–defensive, territorial, protective–around me. I have been the snarky lefty, and my brothers have been the imaginary enemy for a long time now. I’ve been the fly in the ointment and the abrasive other side of shit. It’s been a battle, when it should have been a bonding. We shouldn’t HAVE TO BOND while someone we love is dying, but in these waters, death and tragedy are the only way we’re going to connect and maybe even get us to another level. 

My big brother likes to be organized–he got that shit from our mother–he likes everything in its place and things to be where they need to be. He sends me pictures of Dad’s stuff, and I pick out the piece or pieces that I can’t live without from among the piles, and he sets them aside for me. I don’t know where his mind is, but I know he’s hurting. He’s the oldest son, the man in charge, and perchance he didn’t ask for that title, but that’s what he got. He was the first. When he was born, my mom was nineteen, and my dad twenty-one, and I’m not even sure my dad was present for the birth of his first child. He and my other brother who I can’t bring myself to talk about got the young–the very young–parents. I got the ones in their thirties. 

But I believe I started this reverie with a bottle of Maker’s Mark, or half.  It’s still there.  I got it out my bag when I decided sleep wasn’t coming and brought it to the dining room table as an option.  But I don’t want it.  I really don’t want it.  I’m staring at it now with more curiosity than actual desire to consume.  I’m so tired of booze.