by Band Back Together | Oct 15, 2010 | Cancer and Neoplasia, Grief, Loss, Parent Loss |
Cancer might not have destroyed my childhood, but I sure grew up faster. I knew from the time that I was six that my dad was going to die. My family never hid Daddy’s sickness. Even though my parents were divorced and my dad went on to remarry when I was seven, we were always very close. I have great memories of my dad and he will forever be the one I compare all men to.
Nobody will ever be better than my own dad.
My dad was diagnosed with cancer when he was sixteen. It started in his jaw and he went through countless surgeries, had many teeth removed, radiation and chemo (all beginning in 1966 when cancer was very hush-hush and nobody talked about it).
Eventually my dad wound up having half his jaw removed. The cancer showed up again, this time in his lungs. Over the years my dad underwent countless surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy treatments.
My dad didn’t have “Lung Cancer” and to be honest, I don’t know what he had, but he would get tumors that would grow in the pulmonary artery. Chemo would shrink it, but the bitch kept coming back. My dad never quit smoking though, and he made me promise I would never pick the habit up (which I have stood by and have made my own kid promise to never smoke either).
According to my aunt, my family believes that my dad got the cancer after cleaning up some land for some extra money. Years later, that land was found to be a toxic waste site. To this day there are efforts to clean up that land to make it profitable for the city where my dad grew up.
My dad worked hard even though he wasn’t supposed to do physical labor and when he would get sick he would be down for days, sometimes weeks. That didn’t stop him from moving back to NY when I was ten and buying a house on three acres in upstate NY, building a barn and putting up fence so he could have his own little farm. Nope. Nobody stopped my daddy. I’m fairly certain that if his doctors had known what he was up to, they would have committed him. My dad became a farmer when he was thirty-six. He raised cows, pigs, goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits, a horse named Rusty, and had an enormous vegetable garden.
I remember going with him to a chemo treatment when I was eleven or twelve. His chemo treatments were done seventy miles away in Cooperstown at the hospital there, so my dad, the trooper, made a day of it like it was just another day in his life. He had his chemo and then we walked around Cooperstown and then drove the seventy miles back home. Just another day.
I remember the last summer I spent with my dad. My stepmom took the kids to the store or something and my dad was watching TV. He called me into the living room and wanted me to sit with him. He looked at me and told me he was dying. It broke my heart. In my heart I had always known Daddy was sick but I will always remember that day. We sat there crying together. It was very emotional.
My dad died on February 25, 1991. He was forty-one.
I was fourteen.
Daddy died of pneumonia in the hospital. I had spoken with him two days earlier on the phone for our weekly Sunday afternoon call. My grandma, aunt, uncle and my dad’s cousin had gotten the call late at night to get to the hospital because he was fading fast, but they didn’t want me to see my dad in that condition. They didn’t want me to remember him that way so I wasn’t told anything until 6:00 the next morning when the call came.
I crumbled.
I fell apart.
I knew it was going to happen one day. I had expected to have my daddy longer, not to lose him just as I was learning about life.
Nobody at home understood what I was going through. Most of my friends took off, not knowing what to say or do. My best friend, the girl I knew I could count on for anything, was the one who stayed… the only one. The one who I am still best friends with to this very day.
My gram, Dad’s mom, died five weeks later of colon cancer that was diagnosed not six months earlier. I think she just gave up after she lost her youngest son.
After my dad died, my stepmom deeded their house back to the bank, took their three kids and moved to California to be with her oldest daughter.
Without telling me.
I will never forget calling on Christmas morning to wish them Merry Christmas and getting the this number has been disconnected message. I sat and sobbed. I frantically called my dad’s cousin who couldn’t believe that this woman didn’t have the guts to tell me she was moving. She didn’t have an address or a phone number for her because she hadn’t contacted her.
I didn’t hear from my stepmom until 3 ½ years later when my mom passed away unexpectedly. She wanted to play mother-figure to me and at the time we got along fine, cordially. I didn’t see my siblings for eight whole years. My sister would call now and again to say hi, but we never got the chance to be close. My brothers don’t talk to me at all.
I don’t speak to my stepmom.
My kid has my dad’s middle name as his first. I wanted to name him after my dad outright, but my stepsister went and did that first. He wasn’t even her dad. I tried the reverse, but it just didn’t sound right.
I miss my dad every day. It never gets easier. The pain changes but it never goes away. I see my dad in my own son every day, in his mannerisms and his kindness… in his temper, too.
He lives through my son, yet I still miss him so much.
by Band Back Together | Oct 15, 2010 | Postpartum Depression, Postpartum Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (P-OCD), Postpartum Psychosis |
It’s cliche.
I’m standing in the middle of a room, screaming at the top of my lungs and no one notices.
I’m surrounded. Surrounded by a husband and family who love me. Friends, both on-line and in real life. But no one ever says anything.
I want to yell, Can’t you see how much pain I’m in? Why are you ignoring me?
WHY? WHY? WHY?
Do they think I’m just asking for attention? Do they think I’m faking it for pretend sympathy? Do they think I could fix it but I don’t because then I would have nothing to talk about?
I didn’t choose this. I didn’t choose to feel helpless and alone. I didn’t choose to have to battle with myself every single day to just get out of bed.
I have to talk myself into getting up. Talk myself into feeding myself breakfast. Every single day is broken up into tiny increments. Small goals to achieve. I say to myself, I have to make it through this hour and then it’s time for a nap. Just a couple more hours and then the husband will be home. One more day until the weekend.
I fight the urge to cry and do nothing but lay on the couch. I fight the urge to go into the kitchen, late at night, and pull a knife out of the block and put it to my wrist.
No one wants to hear me say this. No one cares.
I keep screaming. And screaming. And screaming.
All I hear in my head is the screaming.
by Band Back Together | Oct 14, 2010 | Abuse, Alcohol Addiction, Coping With Domestic Abuse, Domestic Abuse, Intimate Partner Rape, Rape/Sexual Assault |
It’s your 27th birthday today. All day today, everything I signed and dated put knots in my stomach.
This is the first time in three years that I am not bending to your will.
The first birthday of yours that we spent together was the first time I felt truly afraid of you. It was the first time you made it entirely clear what you were capable of and willing to do to me.
I was to start my first post-college job that day. The night before you got drunk. You were throwing things, making degrading jokes, grabbing at me and my clothes, and cutting me down to size. You made it clear that I was worthless and that the job I was to start as a social worker was pointless.
That I had no worth…to society or to you.
After you destroyed our living room and kitchen, you began throwing beer cans and blasting your racist music. You kept me awake until three in the morning with the noise. Besides, I was too afraid to sleep and leave you unattended in the house. You came upstairs and realized that I was still awake. I tried to explain to you that I needed to sleep which you thought that was funny. You said that I had kept you up many a night when you had to work and that I would be fine.
You then proceeded to “do” what you wanted. After my first day, I came home and surprised you with a cake and a card. You thought they were both bullshit. You wanted booze instead. You did not ask about my day. Instead, you sent me a text in the middle of the day to pick up alcohol for you.
Now we’re done. So entirely done. And I still have moments where I feel worthless, useless, and unable to ever love or be loved again. I don’t trust men. I don’t like being touched. I have a hard time eating, sleeping is impossible, and romance makes me so angry.
My emotions are raw and I feel like I’m trying to swim out of the center of a lake. I can see myself on the shore but it takes one stroke at a time to get there.
Now you’ve moved on to another woman. I’m relieved that it’s no longer me that is the center of your “affections.” I’m hurt that it was so easy for you to move on when I’m stuck. I still hurt and rage and ache.
I didn’t expect today to be so hard. After all, it’s YOUR day, not mine. But I’m proud because I made it through. I’ll keep swimming back to myself and away from the sinking pit that you pulled me into.
I’ll find myself.
I will heal.
by Band Back Together | Oct 13, 2010 | Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Loss, Parent Loss |
Always when I least expect it, something will stop me right in my tracks and make me yearn to see my father again or just hear his voice one more time.
I think they’re called grief attacks and they come out of nowhere; it might be a song on the radio, an expression on Lucas’ face, or a memory that flashes through my mind in the middle of doing something totally unrelated.
Luckily, these “attacks” usually only lasts a few minutes but they take my breath away and I don’t see them ending any time soon.
Recently I was waiting for my suitcase in the baggage claim area at the airport and I saw a man with a beat up old briefcase between his legs that looked just like my dad’s. I couldn’t stop staring at it.
A briefcase that I keep in my closet because I don’t know what else to do with it.
A briefcase that I have only been able to open a handful of times because it physically hurts too much.
A briefcase that is filled with my dad’s scent, his check books, keys, business cards notes to himself and wallet.
I hate that god damned briefcase and I miss the man that carried it.
by Band Back Together | Oct 12, 2010 | Addiction, Self Injury |
Inside my chest – there’s static. It started when I was small, so small I can’t remember a time I felt still. There’s static in my chest and noise in my head. The kind of noise that reminds me of a Devourment song, but instead of Mike Majewski screaming at me through my iPod, it’s my subconscious screaming at my insides.
12 years ago, I found the thing that made the static stop.
Cutting.
5th grade saw the beginning of my war against self-injury. I started burning myself with my curling iron and scraping the skin from my arms with a craft scissors. The injuring became more frequent over the years, the wounds more and more severe. By the time I was 17, I was cutting everyday. I had a make-up case stocked with scalpels and bandages and would cut dozens of times a day. I couldn’t imagine my life without cutting, couldn’t imagine the next 45 minutes without it. I spent the next two years plastering myself with my pain. The injuring, an elaborate metaphor, the vent through which my fear and anxiety, my blood, flowed. I spent the next two years breaking, and eventually attempting suicide.
Six months after I was released from the hospital, I looked in the mirror and saw the mess I’d made. That day was the day I QUIT cutting.
God, it hurt.
But the hours clicked on, adding up to days and weeks…months. My life changed on September 9th, 2007, the day I’d stopped hurting myself and it changed again on November 24th, 2007, the day I learned I was pregnant. I had an even bigger reason to heal. I used my pregnancy as a catalyst, everyday inspiring a change in my heart, finding a healthy way to ease the anxiety. I was inspired, but there were still bad days. I remember one such day, somewhere around my seventh month, sitting in the bathroom trying to break the straight razor out of a gillette shaver and the glint of metal struck me, lain against the backdrop of my growing belly. I stopped. I didn’t get the razor out. I threw it against the way and screamed. My child was NOT going to grow up with a self-injuring train-wreck for a mother!
I couldn’t let that happen. I’d eliminate myself before I’d let that happen.
It has been 3 years and 21 days since that September night. My daughter was born healthy and beautiful in July ’08 and every day she continues to inspire me. I kept the promise I made to her, I have not injured myself. It’s hard sometimes, I can admit that I’ve had some close calls, but I’ve kept that promise.
I think self-injury is a lot like alcoholism – always recovering, never recovered. But with the support of my amazing family and my miracle-worker therapist, I will continue to beat this thing. The hours clicked into days, then weeks, months, years. Let’s make it decades.
I WILL make it decades.
