It’s not always the greatest or most traumatic moments that play on repeat in my mind. I find it interesting how so many mundane and insignificant moments will sear into my brain for reasons that seem to have no logical explanation until later in life, at which point I wonder how my brain knew to save that memory. How did it know that one day this moment would be significant? That one day I would see why a moment which seemed so nothing would turn into….everything?
I have this memory of my Dad eating lobster at a seaside shack in Florida six years ago. It was an “in between” moment of time, which I suppose all moments of time are in the end. The small picture is that we were in between checking out of our hotel and waiting to go to the airport. The big picture is that we were in between having my Dad and losing him.
I was really mad at him then. I suppose that was the beginning of my deepest and most complicated anger towards him, an anger born of watching who he could have been and who he chose to be. For the entirety of our vacation my Dad had snuck out to the bar every night and this was the morning after Trump had officially won his first election, so between those two painful realities it felt like my whole body, my insides and my outsides, were all rigid and strained.
I remember that we were sitting at a table outside where the salt from the ocean next to us was so thick in the air that it practically seasoned our food while we ate. My Dad had ordered a whole lobster all to himself and while he dipped large flakes of white meat into a porcelain cup full of melted butter his happiness was pure and childlike. We were serenaded by the sounds of crashing waves and herring-gulls while Dad was hunched forward over his plate, so absorbed in eating that he could have been at that table all by himself and not even known it.
I know only now the reason this memory stayed with me. I wasn’t watching him as much as I was seeing him. My anger was momentarily replaced with something else: I felt sorry for my Dad.
I wanted to beg my dad to get help, to get better. I don’t know why I didn't fight harder but for some triggered darkness inside of me that was utterly exhausted of taking care of the adults in my life instead of being taken care of like I’d always craved.
I went to an al anon meeting one year before my Dad passed. It was raw and holy and intensely healing. On the drive home from that episcopal church where the meeting was held, while the sun dipped behind the mountains beside me, I cried the kind of ugly sobbing that is visceral and loud and uncontrollable.
I never went back.
I have a picture that I keep on my dresser, propped up against a ceramic incense burner, some dried lavender, a glass roller filled with cedarwood oil and a tiny metal urn that holds my Dad’s ashes. It’s a 4x6 photo that looks like it came from one of those fujifilm quicksnap flash cameras, which is what all of my childhood photos are made from. It’s me when I was six or-so years old with long strawberry blonde hair and fringe bangs. I’m staring directly at the camera and my blue eyes are complemented by the mint-green one piece pajamas that I’m wearing. There’s a brown hand-knit afghan on the couch next to me and a blue decorative vase on the coffee table that I somehow vaguely remember but can’t quite place. Blurred in the background behind me is a yellow-lit christmas tree and a younger, slimmer, healthier, full-head-of-hair version of my dad reaching a present out towards me.
I put this picture out a couple of years ago and it has stayed there ever since. There’s an aura to it that somehow pulls me. It’s the eyes, I think…they are small, not just in size but in so much pure innocence that I forget they’re my eyes.
My greatest strides in healing have been because I started carrying that little girl with me. I think for a long while I buried her and tried so hard to become someone else, someone new - but I realized that until I heal her and become her again, I will only ever be searching for someone that doesn’t exist.
Everything about that picture, the home I know but can’t place and my innocent eyes and Dad blurred in the background, is a reminder. A reminder for my inner child that she is me and that my job now is to take care of her. A reminder that it’s a heavy burden to break cycles and that even though it hurts like hell, I understand it. I understand why he got stuck and chose not to evolve. I understand that growth is hard and that staying put is easy. And, as only us kids with a parent who is complicated understand, when you become a parent yourself you have choices then - choices to continue a cycle or to break it.
And so I look at that picture and I break the cycle. I decide that life is not meant for answers to all of our questions. I decide that acceptance of sorrow and heavy human emotions mixed in with joy is not just inevitable, it’s actually the most essential part of survival because trying to avoid it is what slowly kills us.
I look at that picture and remember that all of life is meant to be felt.
I guess in that way, I feel gratitude that my Dad didn’t leave this earth until I had painfully gained the wherewithal to trust this complicated truth and to move forward without any answers. To move forward feeling, not numbing, all the parts of my life. To move forward healing what I can, and accepting what I can't.
I'm tearful and contemplative after reading this reflection. Thank you for sharing a glimpse into your heart and your world. Sending you so much love. Keep going, beautiful soul. I see you. xx