The Family Remains

We buried my dad on Halloween.  I thought it was fitting.

I hadn’t been another year older long enough to prompt the closer to X than to Y qualifier when Trex insisted that I come to her room. That morning I woke up, answered Nature’s Call, then set about to making myself a bowl of cereal, as usual.  I remember seeing two family friends sleeping on the couch and idly thought they must have been over late and Trex insisted that they stay.  Even though their homes were next door and across the street.  That’s about all the thought I gave it, there was a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in my immediate future.  At least, I was trying to make it my immediate future.  Trex made that whispery demand parents invoke when they don’t want their indoor voice to disturb others in the vicinity.  I was bold enough to give her the ol ‘Innaminute’ hand signal.  She repeated her ‘request,’ but that whisper’s ferocity couldn’t be mistaken- there was no ‘Innaminute,’ just ‘Right this minute.’

So, the obedient child that I was (still am, don’t let her sway you), sighed internally and acquiesced.  I couldn’t for the life of me sleuth out what was so important that it had to interrupt the getting-ready-for-school routine (and prolong my version of ‘morning coffee’ that was Cinnamon Toast Crunch).

We lived in the Boonie House at the time, so I walked down the hallway, past Zi and I’s bathroom and bedrooms, towards our parents’ bedroom that was at the end.  The room was dark, save for a lone lamp next to the bed and Trex beckoned me to sit down.  That’s when my thirty-six year-old mother told me my father was gone.  And I didn’t believe her.

I thought it was a joke, waiting for Dad to pop out of their closet or from behind the bathroom door.  Then my next thought was…it was a pretty horrible joke.  My family’s always had a wicked and dark sense of humor, but I remember thinking that this…this wasn’t funny.  There was a heavy feeling in my middle thinking that.  Then Trex’s words started to filter back into register and I heard her telling me the family that were making their way over.  That’s how I knew it was real- it was no trifle of a thing to hop on a plane and fly across an ocean to see us.  It had to be a particular life event, not my Dad possibly, cruelly, hiding somewhere to pop out and tell me, ‘Gotcha!’

It was a startlingly final idea that was encapsulated in the word ‘Gone.’  He’d been gone before, many times, deployed practically nine months out of the year for nearly my entire existence.  In fact, we were still getting used to him being only gone for a weekend for work, to the idea that there would be no long deployments for a long time, possibly not ever- that he’d be there for birthdays, anniversaries, school engagements, etc.  That’d he test the mettle of any poor person that decided they wanted to take either of his girls anywhere.  They were wonderfully weird thoughts and we dared to have them to varying degrees.  We were going to be one of those families now, much like we’d seen when watching the the TV.  We had no reason to think differently.

Until Trex got that phone call that told her Dad’s plane went down…and he didn’t walk away this time.  I can’t imagine what those hours were like for her, between the end of that phone call, after the notification calls, to that morning when I woke for school.  I won’t ever know until I have with someone what my mom and dad had.  I can only proffer it was an unwanted surrealism that was as huge and overwhelming as it was painful.  In the midst of it all, she had some kind of North Star.  There was some campaigning for her to tell us immediately.  She held firm in her words when she said we were going to have our sleep, that we would head into the next day, just like any other.  And I thank her for it, for letting us have that- whatever we dreamt or didn’t that night, the unconscious thought of our family intact in our heads.  She’s been that way since we were born- that firm fixture when she made a decision about our welfare.  As I type this, my existence on this earth is at about three times now than it was that night.  And I’ve seen all the fruits of my mother’s labors when she had to ask herself that day, ‘What do I do now?’

That’s why I say I can’t imagine that night.  I can’t imagine the summation of anger when Dad was deployed and she was the glue that held the household together.  I can’t imagine the implosions when she mused why wasn’t he here!?  When he retired from the Corps, he brought her flowers, told her he was home, for good.  It was a promise kept- he’d be here now, to help, to be more than a voice on the other end of a phone or a letter.  That they weren’t a tag-team anymore, that they were the ‘we’ when they told each other ‘I do.’  For reasons unknown, he was only here for one hundred and twenty days.  He’d survived twenty years of deployments to see retirement and three months later, he was gone.

I think I nodded when mom told me I needn’t bother about getting ready for school.  I’m certain my bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch understood my rain check too.  In the days that followed, the house was filled with strangers and I avoided everyone that I didn’t know somewhat.  What I really wanted was to be with my family and mostly, I wanted to be left alone but there was no where to be left alone for a long while.  People meant well, but I knew what I needed.  I needed to breathe.  I couldn’t breathe with everyone just waiting for me to lose my shit.  Eloquent I know, but when you trim out all the fluff, that was what was happening.  Waiting, watching for us, all of us, to completely lose it.  And we didn’t.  Not then.  Perhaps, not completely ever.

We’re all built differently.

None of my friends knew how to talk to me when I came back to school- I understood why, but I didn’t like it.  I didn’t like the change effected, there was this aura of tension I felt for some weeks.  Something akin to ‘mind your step or it’ll break.’  No one wanted to be that person that reminded you of the agony that was grieving.  Somehow my friends and I managed without really saying anything about it.  I saved any tears for my house, where I could cry and rage in peace, on my own terms without having to explain my feelings or reassure someone I was OK.  I wasn’t OK and I wouldn’t be for a long while.  I remember being tired. Tired of hurting, of making sure I kept a lockdown while ourside the house, of the wishing it was a really bad dream. I did the best that I could.  It wasn’t pretty.  There was no grace there.  There was waking up each day and mucking through until my footsteps were suddenly a little less heavy.  Then a little less, then a little less, until my gait was practically restored.  I say practically, because it was never the same again.

As I get older, I muse on a variety of things.  No one hears or sees me talk about what I’ve lost to date at large.  Under differing circumstances, that might have been different, but it’s curious how experiences imprint and influence.  I’ve had a knack for learning, and that knack is a large factor in my career choice and the things I undertake as hobbies.  So in school, said knack presented and I was involved in a host of academic extracurriculars.  You pretty much had my number if you entreated me a means to learn something new- admittedly, that’s still a siren call I have a hard time refusing.  It was a short time after I went back to school, post funeral et al, that a teacher made me so angry, it didn’t even compute that’s what it was.  I had declined an invitation to a school club or team of some sort, debate I think.  My teacher came to the side of my desk, knelt down and asked me if I wasn’t interested in it because my daddy died.  I remember processing that.  I remember the welling of incredulity as I processed it.  I politely told her no, but it looked like she didn’t believe me, her look was full of pity and it practically said, ‘poor thing.’  I remember for the longest time thinking why couldn’t I have been genuinely disinterested, because my declining was exactly due to that, genuine disinterest.  I didn’t like the idea of being defined by a life event or that suddenly it had to be the root of all my choices.  It was insulting, even if it wasn’t done with any maleficence.    And I didn’t like that ‘poor thing’ or the pity.  Even if I misread her countenance in part, I knew with certainty that I didn’t want pity.  I wasn’t broken, not in any way that elicited a ‘poor thing.’   Technically speaking, I was.  Broken-hearted, shattered- I felt like I was in pieces and I was furious that no matter what I did to put me back, it didn’t seem like they were holding.  That’s how I saw my grief, it’s how I pictured it.  And I knew that pity wasn’t the glue that would hold my pieces together.  Support?  Sure.  Knowing when I got tired of holding it together, I could fall to proverbial pieces and someone wouldn’t try to put me back for me/ They’d sweep up all my pieces into a pile so that when I wasn’t so tired, I could start again.  I didn’t need pity- I needed a person in my corner.  Yet, being broken’s default setting doesn’t allow for the outlier that wants to do it themselves.  That the only help needed is that ‘You got this,’ spoken in a voice other than thier own, that they need a Samwise who can’t do it for them, but they’ll give you that push so you can take another step forward.

After that moment, I decided to not really talk about his being gone outside the house- it was just easier.  If I got angry at the pity, it was because I was this poor thing, angry that daddy was gone and that was just an expression of grief.  I couldn’t be legitimately angry of their thinking so little of me or belittling my efforts to move forward, even if that movement was awkward and struggling.  Or that they were a complete stranger who only knew me as a piece instead of whole, or that my parents told me to never, ever be anything but polite to an adult.  So I couldn’t tell you my equivalent of bugger off and wonder how the concept of leaving well enough alone could be hard for a grown person to understand. 

I knew me well enough to know when I wanted to be left alone, it wasn’t lipservice. It was what I wanted. And I learned early that Life didn’t care that I was still a child when its course changed and left me fatherless. 

It took a bit to really understand. A couple of deaths and losses in fact. I knew I had changed, but I didn’t understand all of it, not at once.  That’s my experience with grief- feels like I was given a kind of manual, but I didn’t realize that was deal until I went through a majority of it.  And then I wanted to give someone what for for it. Still do.  That’s how I knew what was going on with me when I mourned not only my father’s death, but the death of our family.  I call it a manual, some call it instinct.  We were just three of us now, and we were all trying to put our pieces back together and It Took Time.  People remarked how well Zi and I were doing, yet it was misnomer for about nine months.  We were used to his being gone, there had always been a date on the horizon- a day we’d pick him out of a sea of camouflage, hug him fiercely and delight in his return.  Nine months after we buried him, that’s when we were reminded of the hole in our hearts.  That’s when the finality sunk in completely.  That’s when all those things that were potentially in our future were altered forever.  There was never going to be that moment we warned potential dates about our Devildog father, because there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine.

There is no Take Backs

I still don’t like pity to this day. There’s other events in my life that just expand why I’m cautious of people on the whole, they mostly deal with a lack of compassion. I identify with people considered outliers…because I was one in school.  I was in that strange dimension of not being teased/bullied mercilessly; it was somewhat teased/bullied, but also left alone.  The best way to describe it was, ‘you’re $weird, we’re going over here.  Stay there. OK?’  where weird was ‘not like us, so we don’t understand you, best to leave you be.’  The bully business comes in when realizing I’m different resulted in a ‘KILL IT WITH $FIRE!*’  response.  I’m certain my curiosity saved me in many aspects, because I’d go home and ask about things.  Why is this weird?  Why $this, why $that?  My feelings weren’t ever hurt immediately, I just took the information in, then I asked about.  It was as early as elementary school that Trex already had to tell me it was OK to like what I like and someone shouldn’t make me feel bad for it.  So I suppose I took that to my grief a short while later.  Perhaps the way I did it wasn’t ‘right way’ for most people, but as it turned out, it was the right way for me.

It’s Hollow

The funeral service felt like a show.  I felt eyes on me all the time, even though it’s quite possible I wasn’t being so keenly watched.  I just felt that way since the days leading to the wake and services felt like surveillance- well intended concern made a cage.  If I put on my best face, if I teared up in the right places, these strange people would leave me alone and take their proverbial cage with them.  Then I could fall to pieces and there would be no strangers to try and swoop in and steal any of them.

I remember sitting there during the service and thinking it was fitting he was being put to rest on Halloween.  I suppose considering the roots of it, deep down I was hoping to tell him ‘Goodbye’ because I can’t honestly tell you I told him ‘I Love You’ when he left for work.  I don’t remember.  That’s not to say it’s a throwaway when its said- I rarely say something without it having substance.  I want to think I told him that, but he wasn’t going to be gone long.  Just another charter flight.  I don’t know if I hugged him goodbye, I can’t remember if I was there when he left or at school, or sleeping.  In truth, without the pictures I have and the few home videos that exist, I wouldn’t be able to conjure him.  His memory would be almost mute and abstract, it’s been so long and what I have in the way of memory is so little.

I hadn’t thought about this day in this fashion for nearly twenty years.  It’s perhaps age, it’s perhaps because I’m coming out the other end of a kind of hell.  If it’s the latter, then I’m telling myself, you’ve weathered it.  It’s in you to weather it.  And it’s OK if you’re completely graceless at times while you do.  Sometimes I’m asked how I managed to get over it.  I usually ask if they want me to be completely honest.

‘Yes.’

‘You never get it over it.’

Twenty years later and I find myself wondering about the relationship we would have now.  The things I would have been taught, the stories I could corroborate or conveniently forget.  Would he lend a hand for a Comic Con cosplay? Would we share a love for the nerd/geeky things?  Would he be a Whovian, who is his Batman and if he was game for Netflix marathons?  It’s an evolving wound, at least it is for me.  I see the kind of relationship I’m fortunate to have with Trex- that somewhere along the way, she was not just my mother, but someone I could call Friend.  Someone that I liked as their own person and not because they’re family.  I can’t help but wonder that perhaps, that might have been in the cards at one point for me and my Dad.  And I would have liked that.  Very much.

^{*No one tried to light me on fire in school- I’m just referencing various vanquishing techniques humorously.  Or I’m failing at the humor bit spectacularly.}