Recollections from 1995-1996
Reading what I wrote at 18 years old, the depths of pain that I detached from, wrote out, and placed upon a shelf. Recently dusted off like an old guide book to be reinterpreted through the murky lens of three decades. So many years have passed but the words written like it was yesterday. The green marker ink still vivid, capturing the rawness of the words with heart breaking vividness. Words written down 30 years ago, put in the Lane trunk from Mom-Mom, next to Uncle Walter’s Purple Heart.
“Dad, why did you have to kill yourself?”
This thought emerged again as though from the rubble, trapped in an air pocket, vague at first and then gradually solidifying: did dad, suffering from alcoholism and depression, realize too late he had lung cancer? Was his approach was to ignore it, hoping it would go away? Did he allow himself to die, thinking it was too horrible to be true so we could somehow avoid it, if we all pretended that it was not happening? These were the thoughts I struggled with, recorded in a marble notebook, letting the words sit on the page for years and years. I intellectualized the reality of our life because actually feeling it was too crushing. But perhaps if I allowed myself to feel then I wouldn’t have built up years and years of scar tissue that occurred because I did not allow myself to feel at the time. I ran from it, ran from the pain. It will always catch up, in one way or another. Pain cannot be outrun.
How horrible it all was, dad dying young, dying with the promise of life crumbling around him. Dying with the hopes and dreams of your immigrant parents and your younger siblings. Dying young, leaving behind your girls, your wife, your career that you scraped and climbed and strived and endured bullshit and refinery fumes and unions and strikes. Leaving us behind, vulnerable at 12 and 16, leaving us without a father to navigate life in the suburbs of Philly among upwardly yearning middle class and working class messiness, with mental health issues and generational trauma and alcoholism and cigs – like a noose around our necks. Leaving us without a playbook for dealing with the onslaught of sexism, misogyny, infidelity. Layers of trauma, stacked up in our cells and DNA, passed on from generation to generation, following us across oceans. Left at our feet to sift through, on top of your death, lacking the tools to do so.
Dad was bright, smart at math and engineering and the things I struggled with in school. One of the last things I told him as he was dying was that I got my math grade up to a C. He just looked at me. Mom didn’t know what to do without him, so she would buy things…. things to fill in the void left when you died. Now mom has rats in the basement and cigs in random ashtrays all through the house. Thanks a lot, mom spending our college education that you scraped for. I am trapped here, she’s out of control. You kicked us out of the hospital room because you didn’t want us to see you dying but guess what, we lived with you while you were dying yeah I lived through it so why kick me out. Then, you had a shot of morphine and you died.
The Dark Ages
Those years, the time of deep depression, the “Dark Ages” as Jen Breen called it, when my hair fell out because I dyed it so many colors and I was going to drop out of college and spoke to the dean to do so, to go bartend in Ireland until my roommates dad said absolutely not. Mom said yes, I could go. I needed to get the fuck out of dodge but I stayed, and I lived in the basement with the tiny window and the water bed that I bought to punish my mom for taking me furniture shopping while she was drunk.
The dark ages had some funny stories, like the time we got really high and decide to take the old toro tractor with the trailer out for a spin which consisted of putting Breen in the trailer, and driving up the driveway at 2 mph until we realized my mom was in her car 2 inches from us beeping the horn at us while we all laughed our high asses off while Breen froze in the trailer and locked eyes with my furious mom. They locked eyes while I howled with laughter and tried to gun it on the tractor but we went no faster. My mom was so annoyed with us. The Dark Ages should be a book in itself. Getting towed when I parked in the President of the colleges parking spot after driving drunk to class.
