by Band Back Together | Sep 13, 2010 | A Letter I Can't Send, Grandparent Loss, Grief, Guilt, Help For Grief And Grieving, Hospice, Loss, Stroke |
Dear Grampa,
I don’t know if I will ever be able to live down the guilt that I feel for abandoning you in the end. I should have gone. I should have called. I should have written.
When the stroke hit, I felt like my own life was falling down around my feet. I was barely hanging on to my own sanity so I said a few prayers and cried a few tears as you lay in that hospital bed over a thousand miles away. I took the rest of the day off of work to feel sorry for myself and to soothe my sense of loss but I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
Time went on and you went home. Gramma did her best to take care of you with some help from Dad and your other kids and my cousins. I cried when I talked to Mom about the difficulties you were facing. You had to learn how to let other people do things for you instead of being independent like you always had been. I felt better with the sense of urgency gone so I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
It was a Sunday when Mom called. You were in the hospital again and it wasn’t looking good. Your kidneys were failing. They were going to let you die. I cried and I cursed Mom for waiting to tell me as you’d been hospitalized days before. I went to work the next day, numb and angry but still I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
You slipped away on a Thursday, two weeks before my birthday. I got the voicemail from Mom just before I went into a meeting at work. It was all I could to keep the tears from my face as my boss yammered about something or another. I sobbed all the way home, grief and guilt overlapping in my tears. I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
I don’t know if I kept myself from your funeral because of the expense (which is what I told everyone), out of selfishness (I’ve never been good at dealing with death) or to punish myself. By staying away, my guilt is complete. I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
My Grampa, I have eulogized you in my heart: You were a mean, ornery old bastard that said what you shouldn’t and stepped on plenty of toes, but we never doubted that you loved us. You taught me my first swear words and gave me my first gun. You were the hardest working and most independent man I’ve ever known and I will miss you for the rest of my life.
I’ve never believed in communication with the dead, so my pleas for forgiveness must fall on deaf ears or be lost in the air. Still, I wish I could tell you that I am sorry that I didn’t go and didn’t call and didn’t write.
I will love you always,
Stephie
by Band Back Together | Sep 12, 2010 | Adult Child Loss, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Infidelity, Loss, Trauma |
The Year Was 2009
I was 19 and had been attending college but, thanks to financial difficulties, had to leave. I moved back in with my parents and started working a minimum wage job, 50+ hours a week almost an hour away from home. Mid-December, in the middle of my shift, I got a tearful call from my mom asking me to come home. I left as soon as I could.
At home, I calmed my mom down so that I could understand her. She dropped the bomb: my dad had been having an affair for about a month, told her about it AND had no intention of stopping it.
I called into work the next day to be home with my mom to make sure she didn’t try anything stupid and when I needed a second day off, I was fired. Guess I got all the time off I needed, right?
I saw my dad about 3 times between the 14th and Christmas. The presents he got us he bought while he was with his girlfriend, and were wrapped in surgical paper from the office because he was there with her the whole time. My mom, younger sister, and I moved out the day after Christmas. It was mostly quiet for a few months, other than struggling through visits with my dad when I was so angry at him I could barely control it.
In March, my aunt came up to visit and we planned to visit my dad at my grandparents house one night. Because of a rumor, my dad ended up staying with his girlfriend that night. My sister and I stopped by dad’s on the way home, to find a police car sitting out front speaking to my dad, and my mom at the gas station across the street. ‘Supposedly’ my mom had tried to break in to get financial records and then tried to attack my dad when she realized he was there instead of with us. ‘Supposedly’ my dad then punched her and pushed her down a flight of stairs. April to June was a constant barrage of being lied to from both sides and listening to my parents bad-mouth each other.
On July 12th, 2009, I was headed home from a bonfire at a friend’s house. I was completely sober. Northbound on a north/south highway, there is a hill with an intersection about 100 feet from the crest. I looked down for half a second to put my cell phone in the cup holder. Wrong second to look down. There were two cars stopped at the intersection, going opposite directions, each making left turns. As soon as I saw the car in front of me, I slammed on the brakes. It wasn’t enough. My truck rear ended the car in front of me, which cause the car to spin around and hit the other car in the gas tank. They caught on fire. The car headed southbound had 4 teenagers in it, who all got out okay. The car I struck had a teenage girl driving and her boyfriend. She got out okay. He did not. He was pinned in the backseat and burnt to death. I can only pray that he was knocked out from the impact.
At 20 years old, I was responsible for someone’s death, a someone who was a son, a brother, a boyfriend. I was charged with vehicular homicide as a 3rd degree misdemeanor, which carries a 2 year license suspension, 2 years probation, 200 hours of community service, and 90 days in jail. I was given the maximum sentence.
In October, my dad and his girlfriend announced she was pregnant. I haven’t finished a single credit hour of school since the accident, despite my best efforts to keep going. I work for my dad because I have no way to get to another job. I have a jail sentence hanging over my head as a threat. I am afraid to go places in the town I live in because I don’t want to run into the family of the boy who died and cause them more grief. I was single for more than a year and a half. And you know what?
I love my life. I am happy. I have an amazingly supportive family. My relationship with my dad is better than it has been in 15 years. I am actually pretty good friends with his girlfriend now. I love my baby sister so much. I am in a relationship with a man who knows about the accident and loves me anyway. I am proud of myself, proud of how I have dealt with this traumatic situation that I was given, and that I’ve turned it into something positive.
I talk to young drivers about what can happen if they don’t take driving seriously. And they listen. I appreciate life so much more now than I did. I know it’s easy to be preachy and say “Oh, you just have to find the silver lining, blah blah blah.” Fuck that. A year ago I was at the lowest point I’ve been in my life, but I just kept trucking, because really, what other choice do you have? And things got better. It took time. And they definitely got worse before they got better, but it happened eventually.
My only advice is hang in there. And stay off your fucking phones while you’re driving please.
You will never get a text or call that’s more important than your child’s or your mother’s or your partner’s life.
by Band Back Together | Sep 12, 2010 | Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, How To Cope With A Suicide, Loss, Suicide |
Everyone else has photos either stuffed away in a box on top of the wardrobe or crammed into battered shoe boxes under the bed, but I have none. That’s not entirely true; I do have one solitary wooden framed black and white wedding photo which is now buried in the bottom of a drawer, but that is all the photographic evidence that remains of my life.
All those yellowing albums I used to have, full of smiling faces from the past 45 years, have now been thrown away. Without ceremony, without ritual, without even a final review of the pages inside the garishly decorated album covers, all my photos were heaved into a garden-sized green garbage bag and tossed into the back of the rubbish man’s pick up truck.
Does this mean I don’t want to remember my past? That I want my memories to fade and eventually disappear? What I long for is amnesia – not to forget the smiling posed slivers of happiness captured in the abandoned photos, but to be free from the picture in my head that has been imprinted on the backs of my eyeballs and etched into the neurons of my brain.
The picture in my head is a full colour photo. Not your normal 6″ x 4″ snapshot, but a 10″ x 8″ – the size reserved for headshots and family portraits. In the centre of the photo is the oversized bright blue upholstered armchair. It belonged to the lounge suite that I always hated. It always seemed too big, too stuffed and too blue. The couch and the two armchairs had never fitted into the lounge so the extra chair had ended up in the room that had once been my study.
In that photo I carry in my head I can still see him sitting completely still and lifeless in that blue armchair, sitting in my room. Next to the blue chair is the red gas bottle used for an entirely different purpose than filling balloons for a child’s party. And carelessly scattered on the floor in front of him are those old forgotten photo albums with ugly pink floral covers. He had pulled down the box from on top of the wardrobe and emptied its contents on the floor.
So it wasn’t the albums and the photos that offended me so much I wanted to destroy them, but rather the place they occupied in that scene. They demanded that I give meaning and significance to the fact that they were now on the floor and not safely tucked away in their box. In the days that followed, when I was clearing up the mess and the blue armchair was empty again, those wedding photos jeered at me whispering “you were the last thing he looked at … so it must be your fault”.
I have eradicated the physical evidence of that day, but in my head, bright exaggerated images of blue fabric, red metal, and pink floral still remain.
by Band Back Together | Sep 12, 2010 | Coping With Divorce, Divorce, Guilt |
My parents broke the news to me and my brothers when I was nearly 17, about five years ago. We kind of expected it, really; as my mom said, “We would argue over what shade of blue the sky was.” I’d spent plenty of car rides with my mother where she angrily ranted about my father, always apologizing at the end, and me saying that it was okay, I understood.
My father wasn’t, and isn’t, a bad man. I think he has problems coming to terms with that sometimes, but he isn’t. He’s strict, and he has high expectations. But I think he’s just as lost and confused as the rest of us, trying to do what he thinks is right for everyone, and until lately that meant to the exclusion of himself. His well-paying job kept us more than comfortable, but he loathed it; business trips every few months became once a month became twice a month became every week. He hated it, and he still hates it.
My mother was, is, more laid back, and prone to leaping without looking. Which, I think, is how they came to be married so quickly after their first failed marriages. I was born into the world with a half-sister already eight years older than me, and a half-brother legally adopted by my father who was only a little less than two years older than me. My little brother followed three years later. Then my mom became a nurse, and bounced from job to job, looking for what made her happy.
Nothing really did.
And so I sat in the kitchen with my brothers, listening to my parents going over the reasons I already knew, and I cried anyway. Because my mom was moving out, and my life turned upside down.
I was leaving for college soon, anyway, so my mom’s new apartment only had one room for my little brother. When I was there, I would sleep on the couch. Every time I went there, I felt guilt dragging me down, avoiding saying more than I had to, to my father. Every time I left there, I felt guilt that I couldn’t stay longer, even though there was no where for me to sleep.
I began walking a thin line. I know my parents tried not to put me in the middle, but they couldn’t help it. I’m sure it’s difficult. My older brother was already in college, and he lived with his girlfriend at the time. My younger brother had no car, and was dependent upon me and them for transport, so they set his schedule. I had to balance my own schedule and pray that it would be somewhat fair.
Every week I would have a chore list from each of them, and I would travel back and forth between houses, doing what I could. There were always arguments over “you do more for your Mom/Dad than you do for me.” Eventually, I broke down. I was trying. I really was. Maybe I could have tried harder, but I hated doing chores when they were together, and now I had two different places to do them in. Plus extra chores, like sorting out the boxes of photos so my heartbroken father didn’t stumble across pictures of my mother and sob over how she hadn’t wanted to go to couple’s therapy.
When I first knew, I allowed myself some time to grieve, and then I focused on what I would do. How I could handle this. I had seen the movies and the cartoons, of children rejecting step parents and acting comically like brats in order to somehow fix their parents back up together. I knew that was stupid. I was nearly an adult, nearly in college; I would handle it with grace and maturity.
I complained, sometimes. Sometimes I bawled about how unfair they were being to me, not by their divorce, but how they tore me between them. Home became uncomfortable, a constant trip back and forth, til I had two of everything, and even then there were forgotten cell phone chargers or shoes or books. I slowly lost my “place,” living in dorm rooms, couches, or spare rooms.
I was counselor, sympathizer, errand runner, schedule balancer. I assured my father that he would be okay, assured my mother she was doing the right thing for her, scolded the both of them when they tried to talk down about the other to me. I took my mother’s elopement in stride, as well as my father’s ease away from the Catholic faith and his decision never to remarry.
I found guilt. Guilt in accidentally letting slip the word “stepfather” around my own dad, when talking about Matt. Guilt for having to leave my mother’s early for dinner at my father’s. Guilt for working for my mother watching my stepfather’s kids when I couldn’t find a job. Guilt for hiding from one parent at another’s house. Guilt for not knowing the answers, for watching TV instead of doing some chores, for asking for money because my gas was almost gone and I needed to drive between houses more, guilt for not being able to evenly spread my time during spring breaks, guilt for trying to partition holidays, guilt for blaming my brothers for not “doing anything.”
My family has come back together, in a way. In pieces. Five years is too short a time to mend everything, but I can say I’m going to my mom’s without my father feeling hurt. I can talk about her dogs in his house without pain. I can discuss my father with my mother without there being insults. Everyone is calmer, and I’m drifting away. My father still won’t call the number at my stepfather’s cabin, and avoided them at my commencement, but…steps. Everything is in steps.
I just signed a lease to live in the basement of a woman’s house, so I will be moving out on my own. I won’t rely on their sofas or guest rooms for living, their money for my car, or even their judgment on how long my boyfriend can stay over. I won’t do their chores, and I’ll call once a week or so to check in and chat. Money will be tight, and I’ll be looking for a second job to fill hours and plan for my next big life step.
But I’ll have my own space, my own time, and I’ll begin the final process of unwrapping myself from the middle and moving on.
by Band Back Together | Sep 12, 2010 | Poverty, Economic Struggles and Hardship, Romantic Relationships |
I live with my significant other. Not married, but together for almost two years. A Match.com success story, fyi. Last weekend, I decided to go car shopping. If you read my blog, you will see that my hobbies include shopping for cars at CarMax. I went, I saw, I liked, I bought. Sold the old car and came away clean. Bought the new car. Old car was part of the family for oh, about 16 months. Suze Orman would kick my ass.
Anyways, back to the title of my post. Today as my SO and I were driving I asked him, “If we were married, would you have had an issue with me buying that car?” He paused for several minutes and said hmmmm. So I said hmmmm. I think I like the his, mine and ours concept. We have a joint account that we call the “corporate account”. If I want my GD Botox every few months, I will use my money that I make from my job and get some needling. During my marriage to Evil Eye Ex, the Un Super-Hero, money was ALWAYS an issue and that really bothered me.
Marriage? Maybe some day, but I like things just the way they are right now. Mine, his and ours. Honey, put those hanging plants on the “corporate account”.
