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Hey, Fiona. So you don’t need to make your dad’s death your new personality.

Blah blah blah. Don’t care. Here’s a story anyway.

So my mom likes to tell a story about my birthday that has basically had the same detail for all of my siblings: Mom went into labor, and my dad had to take a shower before they left. Didn’t matter how much pain she was in or the fact that we lived at least an hour away from the closest hospital and pretty much had to leave when she started having labor pains. He had to take a shower.

In my older sister’s case, she was almost born in an ambulance. In my case, I was born mere minutes after they got to the hospital. After hearing I was a girl like my older sister, my mom said he said, “Oh no, I have to pay for another wedding.”

Side note: Mine has been the only wedding of his four children as of this writing, by the way, and I absolutely had him pay for it.

Anyway, the moral of the story is supposed to be that my dad didn’t think of anyone but himself while my mom only thought of other people and sacrificed for everyone and all that I’ve heard my whole life.

And yeah, I get that perspective. I‘ve spent a lot of my life trying to put others before myself (and yet somehow also making it about myself in martyrdom, still working on that one) instead of just stopping for a second and admitting I need help or care or whatever I’m avoiding doing for myself at that moment.

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The funeral service has passed. Dad’s celebration of life was yesterday. I still haven’t asked for the letter he wrote for me. My aunt asked how I was doing and if I have had time to reflect during the celebration yesterday, and I brushed it off saying life has to go on like I usually do with these sorts of things because it feels easier than being vulnerable.

Maybe that’s putting too tight of a bow on it.

I never feel like there’s time. If it’s not rumors at work about something that could happen, it’s that I have a six-year-old or there’s another holiday coming up that I should prepare for and make special even though underneath it all it’s still there. I thought the whole point of the last two years was pre-grieving, like maybe I could get this out of the way and then move on or something. Yet the thought of moving on at this point feels disrespectful too somehow. Really none of this makes any sense.

My intention on opening this entry was to add to it as I think of things during the course of cleaning I need to do, but it already feels like too much. I’ll try again later maybe.

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Things have been feeling more and more real the closer the actual service gets. It’s tough breaking through the veneer of okay-ness, and I already have a problem with caring too much about other people’s expectations of how I should be or act. Hell, my own expectations for myself have always been really high and strict. The should-haves or should-bes are difficult to fight against. Who I am actually underneath it all comes as a surprise even to me most of the time.

Enough navel gazing in that direction though.

I think there was always going to be a part of me that hoped that things would be resolved before he died, that there would be a grand reconciliation of needs versus reality. No matter how well I understood that about my dad and who he was as unchanging and unmovable, I also couldn’t help but secretly hope. Folks right now are very fond of saying that two things can be true at once: First that my dad wasn’t going to be anyone other than who he was the whole time I’d known him; and second that I didn’t get what I feel I needed out of the relationship.

Something about Hollywood and fairytales we tell ourselves for comfort when what’s in front of us is starkly different.

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How do we celebrate the middle, time neither beginning nor ending but somewhere resembling progress. The incremental notch of a moment in the stream

We look back at moments enduring, the confirmation of a trend but not enough to seek help for the pattern. A fully realized entity, yet seen as mere plodding journey

Easy to say enjoy it while it lasts, to be more mindful, to find something to cling to while it’s here. Presence being the goal, not assigning importance but seeing what’s in front of you for what it is

Right now

Easier still to let it pass and, once slipped through your fingers, mourn.

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As long as I’ve known him, my father has had a habit of making announcements. These are usually statements that someone else then has to make true, most of the time that someone else being my mother.

The car registration needs to be renewed.

The cats need to be fed.

I don’t need this anymore.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the man would make an announcement about his own death: I will die on a Thursday. I will be okay the Wednesday before but be dead the next day.

I can understand intellectually why he would say that. Some parts understanding that the calcium will eventually build up so much that it will overwhelm his system. (If not that, the rest of the cancer.) Some parts lifelong appreciation of symmetry. (He was born on a Thursday after all.) Some semblance of control over the narrative of the whole thing.

Beyond that, there have been hopes and goals: I want to vote one more time in person. I want to make it to see who gets elected. I want to wrap things up.

We look to the universe to see if it will make it so: Every Thursday I wonder if this is the day. If I will get a call. I know it’s superstition, and no one knows when, least of all him. Still I wonder. I text my mother to see how he’s doing and get little news. He admitted that he fell to the nurse. He’s accepted that he’s in pain and needs a little bit of morphine to ease it. He’s sleeping more and more.

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“And I feel just like I woke up in somebody else's skin
Who else is gonna remind you to take a picture of them?

Well, they brought hearts and daggers, they wrote songs about you
When they tied you up in the rungs of ladders
And you never ended up coming home, you just
Became something like some smoke that I tried too hard to hold”

 “Smoke”-Brian Fallon

No one is ever going to be as good at raising your hopes as you are. Somehow those inflated hopes being dashed are the hardest to take. The lies you tell yourself to get through the day. The relationships you’re convinced are genuine with little to no evidence. The things you most believe are true until the actual truth is screaming in your face.

Gone and your heart broken, and no one really to blame but yourself for believing.

Faith is that thing you’re supposed to be blind to, at least religiously speaking. The only way we’ll take risks is to actually dive in without knowing if everything will work out or nothing at all. We won’t know if its worth it without trying, and trying means failing sometimes. We don’t know the outcome until it’s already done and there’s nothing we can undo. Fix? Sure, we can attempt to repair and move on, but undo what’s happened? No.

None of us ask to be born.  None of us ask for the people we’re born to and among. The time and place is fixed. We meet other people and choose to have them in our lives or not. We cling to each other and are ripped apart.

And none of us are getting out of this alive.

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The other night, Johnny asked what he would do when we’re both gone. How would he learn new things? Where would he go?

I said I didn’t know but that there are a lot of places to still learn things. I told him he can look things up and find people who can teach him things and that he would still be able to figure things out.

He said that he would be 35 and go to the car museum. (Probably because we had just visited the car museum last weekend for something to do.) But he might not remember where it is when he’s that old, so he would draw a map to it. Then he would come back here, back home.

He asked what then would he do?

I said I don’t know but that he’d always be welcome here. He’d find his way. That’s what you do as an adult.

I think about all the times he plays with cars on his car mat his grandmother painted for his father. He asks if the cars are really loud as he vrooom oooms across the streets. He says he wants a loud car when he’s older, and it’s usually a Ford Ranger like his dad’s.

But for now, he’s only four. Any time we’re walking on the sidewalk, well, me walking and him riding his balance bike, he covers his ears no matter where he is when he hears a loud car coming. Motorcycles are the worst. I try to reassure him that it’s okay, that the loud noises startle me too and that they’ll pass, and then we keep walking.

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I think in a previous life, I must have smoked. I look outside and feel wistfulness among the clouds and the setting sun, the light slowly dying into night as I inhale and exhale the only comfort left.

Either that or I just romanticize one of the vices I never tried, given that I have very few vices to exercise these days.

Where to begin? I am now forty. All my grandparents by blood and adoption are gone. Even the house where I grew up has been sold (undervalued and to folks who bought it on a whim, but that’s a long story for another day). I somehow made it through last session, somewhat kicking and screaming but with a bang and a whimper at the end. I continue to feel lost about what direction to head in and whether I’m suited for much of anything I’ve tasked myself with.

That is a somewhat purple way of saying I’m unsure of what I’m doing.

It simultaneously feels like I’m running out of time and wasting it. During session, my father’s doctors discovered he had cancer wrapped around his kidney. Doctors plural because it involved multiple systems. The only solution was quick surgery to remove the whole thing. I went to visit him with Johnny in case it was the last time we’d see him. He talked about his youth, about waking up and hearing land rails as a boy. How beautiful they were but how nasty their calls were. I held on to this in case it was the end.

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I’m at your place. It’s not your place now, of course. Even in dreams, I know this. Still, we’re there to celebrate. The valley is all there. Remnants of your family and friends, some who moved away many years ago. Some I barely remember.

I sneak away and walk toward my parents’ house. It’s not my parents’ house anymore either, of course. I turn around and stare at your yellow house. I know those aren’t the yellow curtains I grew up with in the window. I cry because I know you’re both gone. Really gone. It’s all gone now.

I scream about how it’s all a joke and do my best to will my tears to go away.

A few folks sit down around me to socialize. I can’t think of a thing in the world I’d like to do less.

I exchange a few pleasantries then make some excuse about having to go back to work that no one believes. I am dismissed with disgust as I walk back to the house that’s not your house.

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You ever wake up way too early thinking about stupid shit you did in your twenties? Somehow, I still do. I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life, but my twenties were an especially cringe part of my life. I’m not going to get into specific incidents because that doesn’t solve anything. (Besides that, if you’re thinking about any kind of specific event, it’s probably in this journal somewhere if you really want to find it.) I am sorry if you were ever on the receiving end of that idiocy, though. I did a lot of “taking responsibility” without backing it up with actions that would have actually fixed some of the problems I caused, and for not having a lot of self-esteem, I was pretty arrogant about myself and my abilities. (I’m still that way if it makes anyone feel any better, just older and toned down for the most part.) For being so high and mighty about a lot of things, I’m also a coward sometimes. I don’t write this to justify anything I did. I know I can’t go back and fix any of this shit. It’s just early, and I can’t sleep. I’m hoping that writing about it will release it from my brain because laying in bed awake sure wasn’t doing it, and my 2-year-old will be up soon.