Personal rant that I've been avoiding posting because of the sensitive nature of the rant. But it needs to come out. Please recognize that this is a part of how I cope with my baggage. I release it for the world to read. Even though I'm not looking for anyone to comment with sympathy, or for anyone to try to help, it is helpful for me to own up to it and put it out there in black and white.
Mom.
She passed away when I was 9. She had Lou Gehrig's Disease. According to my birth father (dad is the man who raised me, father is the man who gave me dna), she showed her first symptoms while I was in the womb. I never knew her when she wasn't bed ridden. I never knew her when she wasn't eating baby food or using a bedpan or having her children help her balance her checkbook because she couldn't write. In many ways I never knew her. I knew who she was after her diagnosis, but she had limited communication skills and could barely talk so I never really got to sit down and have a heart to heart talk with her and get to know who she was as a person.
I remember watching an episode of ALF where there was going to be a new baby in the house who would be growing up with ALF and how ALF being there would always just be normal for that baby because they didn't know any different. I remember identifying with that after mom passed. She was always in that state since I was a very young child, so I never knew any different. In what I can only describe as an act of intended kindness on her part that went horribly wrong for me, she never told me she was sick. That's just how she was. She never told me she was going to die. Everyone else knew, even my sisters. But she couldn't bring herself to inform her youngest son that she would be passing away from a horrible disease that no one could cure. I'm positive her intentions were good. The result was disastrous for me.
Imagine being the only person kept out of the loop on something huge that will inevitably impact your life. It's a betrayal, and an enormous painful lie. I harbored a lot of resentment toward her for a long time over that. Unlike everyone else, who had some time to mentally come to grips with the fact that she was going to be passing away soon, for me it was as though she had passed away in an auto accident unexpectedly. I had no time to come to grips with it, and no time to understand what was going on while I still had her in my life.
One day in April of 1990, she could tell apparently that if she went to sleep she wouldn't wake up. She stayed up for two days, and on April 26th kept my two sisters home. She sent me to school. I was furious. I didn't understand why I had to go to school if they got to stay home.
Around 10:00 that morning, she passed away. My sisters were there. My grandparents were there. I was at school and completely oblivious.
I held on to some resentment toward her for most of the years that followed. About two years ago or so, my fiancé Laura told me that she understood mom's actions from a parental standpoint. How could you look at your child and knowingly rip their heart out? She was trying to protect me because I was her youngest son and unspoiled by all of this so far. That perspective put me at peace with it finally after 22 years. That peace didn't last long.
My father wasn't there to raise me. I was the result of my mother and father being unfaithful to their spouses, and when I was born my father went back to his family and I never saw him. Mom told me a couple of years before she passed that he existed, and that the man I called dad wasn't my biological father. I was still too young to understand this, but maybe I'd have been mentally better off if I'd have not known of him. I don't know.
I made contact with him when I was 15. I met him over pizza and he told me I had siblings. He told me briefly about his life, and then I didn't hear from him for a few years. I don't know what I was expecting, but I was let down.
I met my siblings through an accidental encounter with a musician in town who said that I looked just like them. I was 17. My father still wasn't really a part of things though.
I tried a few times through my 20's to get his attention, but to no avail. Finally, I decided that I was going to move on with my life. I moved to Colorado, and just before my 28th birthday I receive an email from my father. He tells me he doesn't expect me to forgive him, but he wanted to apologize for having never taken the time to get to know me. He recognized that his actions were unforgivable, but if I was willing to try he would like to get to know his son.
I struggled with this for two weeks, trying to decide whether or not there was room for him in my life. I finally decided that if he wasn't going to be a part of my life it wasn't going to be my fault. I called him, and over the next year we spoke on the phone semi regularly.
I went home that christmas. I lied to my job that he had just been found and that I wanted to go and meet him. Truth is that I wanted to go and confront him and get more information about who I was and who he was and why he was never there. This was the only way I could think to get the time off of work to do it, and it worked.
So I drove to his apartment in Marietta Ohio. I sat outside his apartment for what seemed like an eternity, but was likely only 5 minutes. Then I asked myself what the fuck I was afraid of and went inside.
We talked for about 5 hours. We talked about his life, as well as my own. He explained to me some of the circumstances surrounding my birth, and how he never believed that I was in fact his until he had seen me when I was 17 and I looked just like his son Ryan. He said he realized then that he'd made a big mistake, and that he didn't know how to fix it so he just stayed away.
I left somewhat satisfied. I called him a day later after reflecting on it at mom's gravesite. I told him that I was forgiving him. I meant it. I've forgiven him for not being there when I was a child. The wounds don't go away when someone is forgiven though. You just realize that you can't stay mad forever, and it's a part of the process of moving on. I was initiating that process.
When I moved back to Ohio in 2010, he was living in the Columbus area. I stopped by to see him now and then. When things went south for him in his relationship, I spoke to him and worked out a plan for him to stay with me for a while. He agreed to it, and I started prepping a spare bedroom. The time came, and he stopped answering his phone. Two days later, I see a status on Facebook about him moving back to Marietta. Everything came flooding back to the front. All the resentment and mistrust that I'd tried to squash came flooding back like a tidal wave, and I lost any respect I had gained from him. Was it too hard to just pick up his phone and call me to tell me he'd changed his mind about moving in? Why did he need to keep that from me?
I decided he was a coward. I stopped contacting him. He'd email me and the other siblings now and then to tell us about his life in general terms, but he made no efforts to reach out to me either.
Then I got a call in July. It was 1 day after hearing that my friend Joseph Moore had passed away, and I was coming to grips with that. He told me that the doctors had found a small cancer that he was going to be treated for, but it was likely nothing to worry about and that he'd keep me posted. I didn't hear his voice again.
In october, my sister Laura was going through some of his pictures and ran across one he had of my mother. She sent it to me asking if it was her, and we got to talking. I realized that if she was going through his old pictures, then things must've taken a turn for the worst. I asked her to level with me, and she told me that she thought I knew. According to the information I received from her that night, they had given him 12-15 months and there were about 12 tumors. He'd lost a lot of weight and was in a decent amount of pain. The official diagnosis wasn't given to me that night.
Thinking I had 12-15 months to make peace with this and try to make one last attempt to get to know my father, I decided to take two weeks to think things over and sort out my feelings just like I had done when I turned 28. I wrote to him and told him that I had heard of his diagnosis, and he gave me his new phone number and told me to call him when I got the chance. I held off on doing that til I had sorted things out.
A few days later, I get messages from my brother Mike and my sister Laura that they'd just moved him to hospice and things weren't looking good, and that they were calling the family in. I had received a call exactly like this one month earlier when my grandmother Jackie passed away, but I couldn't make it as I was out of town and she passed before I got back in. Getting a second call of that nature in the span of a month is hard enough. When it's involving someone who is associated with so much personal baggage within you, it's even worse. So I get in the car and drive to Marietta. I'm numb the entire trip there. I'm not sure what I'll find, and I'm not sure what I'll say to him. I did expect him to be coherent when I arrived. He was not. He was in a great deal of pain and had been given a healthy dose of morphine.
I asked my brother to leave the room, and I told him that I wasn't mad at him and that I loved him. That may be the first time I ever told him that. I told him about my beautiful children, and I told him that I was going to do ok. I was preparing myself for his passing, and saying goodbye.
When my sister and my other two brothers showed up, we were all hanging out in the room with him. I was trying to keep calm and just sort through the oncoming loss, when I heard Laura asking the nurse what had happened. She mentioned that she knew it was stage 4 lung cancer…and the rest of the sentence she said is lost in my memory. Those words hung around in my head echoing a painful reminder to my past.
I was not told this. It's hard not to make comparisons to my childhood, when yet again I'm the only one in the room who didn't know what was going on. At least this time I was given a heads up that he was dying, but it was too late for me to have had time to come to grips with it in any way. And now I'm the last to know the specifics surrounding what he has that was taking his life.
I became flooded with anger. He didn't bother to pick up the phone. I became enraged and extremely emotional. I had just been hit by a truck that dug into an old wound with a rusty ice pick.
I said my goodbyes to him again and left. If I stayed, I was going to turn it into me processing my wounds in front of everyone, and that moment needed to be about them saying goodbye to our father. I couldn't be there, so I said goodbye and walked away. To walk away from someone who is alive and know that you will never lay eyes on them again for the rest of your days is a very surreal thing.
I drove home slowly, and just thought. I was again rather numb.
The next night, I was told that he was given only another 3 hours or so. I hopped in my car and went for a midnight meal at Steak And Shake while watching my phone for updates. While I was eating, I got a message that his vitals were slipping. I wrapped up my meal, and started to drive. I drove through the streets of Columbus that night while staring at my phone for any word. At one point, thinking that it had likely happened and that they were too emotional to call me (which would be understandable), I call the hospice and got an update that he was in fact still alive. So I decided to go home.I tried to get some sleep, and had just fallen asleep when my brother Ryan called with a choked up voice to tell me that he had just passed away.
It was 3:20am.
Numb. I went back to sleep and tried to ignore all of this for a few days. I went about my normal life and routines, while not letting my brain go anywhere near the subject of my now deceased father unless it had to. Finally, I broke down. I was angry. I was furiously pissed off.
How could two parents deny their child the knowledge that they were going to leave this earth, while making sure that everyone else was informed? How could two parents die of terminal illnesses and purposefully not brace me for impact? How could they both have done this?
I broke down crying in my fiancé's arms that night. It wasn't a mournful cry, it was a rage filled cry.
To feel lied to and cheated when it comes to someone's death is the hardest betrayal feeling I've ever had to come to terms with. And I've failed so far.
But now all that is left is me and my emotional wounds yet again. So over the next 48 hours, I'll begin the processes of analyzing my anger at both of my parents so that I don't bring any extra baggage to the funeral of the father I never really had a chance to share my life with.
