December 3, 2012

Fathers and daughters, family and formation

Since Mom’s been gone, Dad’s compensating, and overcompensating, for the loss and the guilt of having relied on my support for so long by throwing himself into his work, a new project that’s labor intensive, and wholly dependent on his presence.

While I understand the need, and the need to fill the void, I have, for lack of better description, so many feelings, over the sense that he’s shutting out the present because he’s so intent on fixing past sins in search of redemption.

At first, I fought it, trying to draw him out and keep him in the present with me, to move forward with me, but our mutual pain flared and repelled each other. He needed to accept her loss as fact and talk about it as given; he couldn’t bear my tears even so long as a week after the burial and he’d shut down meaningful communication trying to shelter me.  His coping and mine were like magnets pushing against each other.

So I backed away and kept my peace. My pain only triggered his need to protect me; his reactions exacerbated mine, the silences triggered a ticking time-bomb feeling where I wondered when something terrible would happen and I no longer had a reliable way to find out when and what. Mom always understood that even if I couldn’t fix all the problems, I needed to know what was happening; Dad could never accept that sheltering me from the hard truth was the quickest way to an ambush. Not the best way to deal with a daughter who only has a Fight or Fight reaction.

Over the weeks and months, we’ve held a detente of sorts. He tries to convince me that he’s fine. I don’t believe him but try not to lecture, just reminding him that he’s the only family I have left so he needs to take care of himself. He’s more important than money.

I respect the things he won’t say: he needs to earn his own living to get back his sense of stability, identity, and self respect. He needs to feel responsible for his own life again, not being supported solely by his daughter while living to keep his wife alive under the most trying circumstances, a tightrope walk that stretches anyone’s sanity.

I’m giving him his space to do that, and hold my worry back as much as possible.

He’s asked to see some of the household bills since I’d taken them over and gone online with them, with the promise that if they become too onerous, he’ll let me know.

Quite honestly, I don’t believe that promise. He is my dad, after all. We have a history. The only thing I’ve never been able to trust him to do, and ever fought with him about, is to tell me when he needs help and not after it’s too late. But I can make the bills not paperless anymore while retaining online access, and keep an eye on them from afar.  It’s a slightly better compromise than any other one I’ve made even if I do keep wondering whether he’s going to keep workaholic hours, just like in the old days.

As it is, he works just about every day, for 12 to 14 hours. I know he’s injured himself several times and hasn’t gained back the 12 pounds he lost since last year. I can take some small comfort in knowing that his siblings check in on him to make sure he has food enough once in a while, though I certainly see where I get the inattention to meals from, now.

We’re too alike, he and me. Just as, in many ways, Mom and I were alike.

Workaholics, stoic and foolishly so.  Tamping emotions down to some subconscious and primal level where we don’t have to acknowledge their existence. Neither of us ever could ask for help without choking on the words; more than one friend knew I’d let an arm fall off before I’d ask. We have to prove more to ourselves than to anyone else in the world, before we can face ourselves, before we can face our families. Our families are incredibly important to us but at the core, we’re self reliant personalities and because of that, we have to know that our foundations, our identities however we see ourselves are true, first and foremost. So we will push even our families away if we need to in the pursuit of, in the proving of, that truth. It’s a flaw. A gaping maw in our armors some days.

I refuse to let those similarities drive us apart, but in the doing I have to consciously keep some small distance while we figure things out. While we develop a new relationship around our family, our money, and our individual selves so that we don’t chafe each other raw.

It’s not easy. But perhaps we’re making some progress. We’ll see down at the end of the long road.

November 28, 2012

Love, loss and finding some words

Many people mark dates. Anniversaries, milestones, important events. I rarely have, dates mean little to my mind. More than ever, now. My mom is gone.

Only the general passage of time, in weeks or months, years maybe, and flashes of memory register. And then the recollections become realizations, visceral, and acidic.

Mere days after my wedding during which I can’t even be sure she was lucid, she suddenly died.

It’s been over a year since her passing and I haven’t been able to write a memorium post. I keep thinking to do one, on a milestone date, and they keep passing by. And I sit, empty. I can’t write, because as important as everyone else I’ve memorialized here has been to me, she was the most important loss of all. I can’t eulogize her when I still haven’t forgiven myself for losing her. For failing her so remarkably.

A memorium would be as much for me letting her go as to memorialize her, and I haven’t found that peace.

~

I don’t know why I picked up the phone that night.

I’m ashamed to say that calls from home by that point had begun to spark an adrenaline rush, a flood of fear and trepidation, a “what’s wrong now?” reaction that I coped with, tamped down, by putting time and space between myself and the call before I could connect. The needing, the bad news and the “can you fix this.” They pulled at the scar tissue, picked away my scabs.

After a long workday, usually a hard one, my emotional reserves were dregs and so, more often than I like to admit, I’d let myself return the call later.

Not this night.

There couldn’t have been any reason for it. I had no sense, no feeling of anything, except a question mark in my mind about the timing of the call. And that lasted for as long as it took to raise the phone to my ear.

2…1….

His voice half firm, spiralling and tottering to an end, a sentence spilled out that broke sense and language and life for me. Your mom has died.

It couldn’t be….and yet never in my life had I heard tears in Dad’s voice. Only losing his wife could move him to cry. As much as the words, his voice seized my breath.

Selfishly: this was the beginning of the end. Selfishly: if it was true, we didn’t have to worry about her every waking and sleeping moment. She couldn’t hurt or be hurt anymore.

A minute passed, I needed to know…. A minute passed, he needed to call back….

I had to tell my new husband of less than a week. I had to say it out loud to begin to understand the world fracturing around me.

A coward’s way out – I texted a friend instead. Texting, testing the waters, testing the edges of my sanity. My new reality.

I stood there in the station, back to the street, leaning against a pillar, sightless, unsure what to do next. Unsure of breathing.

~

They say weddings and funerals bring out the most in people. I couldn’t manage a wedding during her illness, but the funeral showcased the Best of the Worst of her family. The offers to pay for the funeral expenses as a show of their love, after years of abuse and neglect were clumsy at best, and insulting in the main.

Even hadn’t I the cash ready to pay for the funeral, I would have gone into debt before I allowed them that gesture. Such is money and emotion. But it’s been many a year since money was a leash attached to my collar.

That week was rough shod practicality. Making the funeral arrangements, running errands, contacting family and friends, hunkering down, holding my breath.

They waged warfare, her family, those who had treated her so sneeringly, and far worse, at the end. She never did see her mother one last time, before she passed, though her desire was only fueled by fear for her mom’s advanced age. My paternal aunts quietly wished that she’d reserved her strength for herself; my maternal grandmother had been in no danger, well preserved by spite and malice. I clung to my last remnants of civility at her funeral, under provocation, for her sake.

Even Dad’s famous patience frayed around the edges with the innumerable calls from her father to pressure us.

~

In a haze of incense, Buddhist chants and the murmur of relatives, we honored my mother as we laid her to rest.  Across the altar, my new husband and my father’s new son, PiC stood up for my mom, to her relatives, greeting our guests in a tradition new to us, courtesy of my paternal aunts’ arrangements.  They may not have always been her family, but in the end, they were. She would have appreciated that.

My brother, in a new iteration of his usual fashion, couldn’t be relied on to stay in through the first day of viewing and didn’t show up for the second.  His spiral into wherever he was headed, now ever more unchecked, couldn’t be held back for love or money.

~

She wasn’t suffering anymore. This was a release from a long, slow, painful, and humiliating degeneration to which I’d been losing my mother and friend, confidante and ally, beloved hero and mentor for the past seven years.

I should be grateful she wasn’t living in fear and pain, worry, doubt and regret during her few lucid moments between the long stretches of mania and childish regression.

I should be grateful for Dad’s relief from long years, endless hours, days on end of caretaking for his lifemate long without respite, without the daily fear that she’d slipped away from him, without bending or breaking under her illness’s capricious moods.

I should be grateful for the freedom from watching my mother slowly slip from my grasp no matter how hard I held on; for the ability to make some decisions for myself and not entirely around how it would affect their lives; not to live in fear of the sound of my phone ringing lest it bear bad news, of a fall, of an illness, of an injury.

I am, for the painful parts. But for lost days, I can’t. Because I bore always in me the hope we’d find a way to bring her back from the dark, to lure back that spark to the flame I adored.

~

When she became ill, I took up her standard. And when I lost her, I didn’t just lose my mother, I lost my way. We lost the foundation of our family.

I mourned my matriarch, grieved over our lost future, regretted my decisions that failed her, my choices that led to a life lacking redemption.

I mourned my mom. I mourned for her, the mourning she only allowed to creep in, in her last, her never-loved days, for the childhood she never had. For her life with parents who beat and abused her, wishing she’d never been born, siblings whose selfishness reached beyond her death and etched themselves even unto her funeral day as grasping and ignorant souls. For her fears, real and realized, of a family slowly falling apart.

I grieved, alone. The person who loved me unconditionally, a gift she was never given, the one I could rely on to tell me the truth as she saw it. My mother, become a friend, become a soul and mind wandering in shadows and darks I couldn’t reach, swallowing daggers and poison, lost. My last ten years spent in fruitless attempts to save my family, all for naught. Our jokes, our possibilities, our plans, gone.

A life I once led without fear was now filled with regret: why hadn’t I done differently, better, been stronger, or smarter?  How had I failed so badly to spare her that pain and this early demise?

~

No slow healing of wounds, no steady grieving process for me. Instead, the months and weeks of self-examination gathered up loose threads of guilt, accusation, failure and missed opportunities. I hadn’t loved her well enough and made the wrong choices. If only I’d done this differently, if I had made a different decision in that year.

Bit by bit, I unravel the past seven, ten, twelve years of our lives, questioning where it had finally irrevocably come apart, when had I steered us completely off course, how each little misstep led to a larger misstep, how my indecision or my inability to see more clearly had cost her more suffering.

Why didn’t I know sooner about her dental problems? She couldn’t have hidden her eating discomfort if I’d been more patient with her, more present.

Why didn’t I go with her to more, to all, of her doctor’s appointments – what was I doing that was so important? I should have kept better track of all the diagnoses (or lack thereof), of the treatments and medications like I had managed her diet after her surgery.

Why didn’t I choose more carefully my career or school? Which of those had I gone more wrong with? A millenia ago, it felt like I was lucky to have parents who encouraged me to pursue what I loved, not money, status or prestige, but now, what hubris, what lack of foresight was that for me to think that I’d make anything work?

Could her depression, anxiety, the panic attacks that compounded her myriad other health problems have been alleviated if I had taken a different path?

Would their business decisions have been different if I had made different choices of schools early enough?

How did I end up such an utter failure that at 30 I’ve managed to lose one of the most important people in my life, with my family basically disintegrating?

~

We buried her and I returned to a professional life, all personal life in a box, and climbed back into a competitive saddle. I was immediately interviewing for a promotion against people with twenty years more experience. Mom would have wanted me to get it together. She simply expected me to win out. That’s the adamantine she put in me.

~

I went home for the weekend, a year after her passing. Not to remember, there isn’t time to forget; not to commemorate, all’s too raw to bear fanfare, but to …. simply be there. Be home, where it feels I should have been more and better, somehow.

Coming home, it was clear that Dad’s immersed himself in work and projects as much as I have, more so without a partner to keep living for, leaving all the niceties of civilized life to slide away.  It was no more than I expected, and yet the state of the house rang so hollowly, reflecting,  resonating to my core, it was only by the labor of my hands that my head didn’t sink forever to my knees with new loss, renewed grief.

The essentials function. The plumbing flushes; the hot water is hot, the cold is cold.  There is electricity. But throughout the neglect is draped.The toilet is jury-rigged, sinks and walls grimed over, clutter crowding shelves, boxes stand half full.

Looking around, it’s clear. Scour a wall, clear the boxes. It’ll make no difference. The soul of our family has been torn away and only ragged bits of us remain.