my father died the day before thanksgiving.

time travel, trauma, and the lesson of opposites

This essay first appeared on the Tears of Eden’s blog on 11/20/2024

Sorry, I’m late. I got stuck in 1995. 

We flew up to see my family in Washington for the holiday and I woke up Thanksgiving morning to a text from my sister letting me know our Dad had died. We knew it was coming but the timing was pretty interesting. 1995 in case you’re wondering, was pretty much the last conversation I remember having with him—at least any conversation about anything of consequence. And the consequence was, he didn’t talk to me for the rest of his life. 

I'm pretty sure that was the year anyway. That’s been the strangest part of the past few weeks. Well, there have been two very strange things. I’ve been a hot rolling mess - swirling around like a little trauma tornado back and forth from lands present, long ago, and far away. The first odd thing is that my memories and more specifically, the timeline of my memories about my childhood, have suddenly become soupy, mucky, and hard to discern. I’m not that old, but when I try to get it all straight, my brain just replies a little petulantly “Tsk, don’t ask me, I thought you were all done with those…you said you didn’t need them, so I made room.” The second is that all of a sudden, my brain, I think in some sort of optimistic Hallmark culture fog, has been putting out propaganda that maybe my Dad wasn’t as darn right awful as he really was. Maybe I had it wrong?

Both of these are not actually very helpful. Or maybe genius. Forget the past and rewrite it? Kind of brilliant as a survival strategy. But altogether frustrating when you’re trying to understand why you’re suddenly a big old mess over something you thought you cleaned up years ago. And I have done a lot of cleanup. Years of therapy and boundary work thank you very much. I haven’t walked around thinking about my Dad with any sort of heart pain in a long time. But finding out someone is going to die has a way of stirring things up.

And yes, like many of us do, but I think for different reasons, I have wondered how I would react if my Dad died. I would always use it as a barometer to check in with myself. As in if, hypothetically, I feel some terrible nudge in the pit of my stomach when I imagine him dead and gone, then I should do something to try and reconnect. This experiment always yielded pretty clean results; no anger or weird gladness (I know I know but seriously the abuse - cringe-worthy), but also no profound sadness, just a small quiet heartbreak over the Dad I wish had but was nowhere to be seen. This heartbreak used to be debilitating in my twenties (before I discovered the absolute MAGIC of talk therapy, I say magic in a sing-song voice here and so you should too), I thought about my Dad a lot back then and his voice was in my head…spouting toxic sermons, flooding my nervous system, booming through the rooms in my mind, judging my every choice, thought, or desire…it was distracting to say the least. But after many years and a lot of work, it grew quieter, and I learned how to turn the noise down. For over a decade, it has only come up like an old floorboard that creaks, just when I walk over that certain spot, in the hallway, that edge piece I forgot about - a small sound of protest that annoys me because it could wake the baby.

So I was feeling pretty sturdy before our trip. My sister Christa had called me, pretty upset that he was going to most likely pass away over Thanksgiving, and it would be awful. We just wanted to drink coffee and look out at the misty pastures and watch kids run around -not, well, you know…navigate a funeral. I assured her it would be fine, probably amazing that we would all be together, and that I was still coming. I imagined watching her kids at the farm and cooking in her kitchen while she did what she needed to do to put things in order. I wouldn’t be bothered because in the hypothetical, I was solid. Why would I feel any different?

Mmmm, hmmmm. Oh, those tricky and pretty hypotheticals. I think it’s a part of that Hallmark programming my mind likes to put on when things seem dire. 

As you can guess, it didn’t go as I imagined. I landed and got a text, then a phone call - he was probably going to go very soon, and my whole body went into alert. I started crying. I suddenly felt like I needed to drop everything and run to his bedside. What the heck? I had just traveled for eight hours with two kids and was still not in a place where I could put my bags down, drink water I didn’t have to pay for, or not worry about where my kids would use the bathroom…for the third time in an hour. Also, and rightly so, my girls were getting pretty loopy, like little broken records, jumping around from silly happiness to yelling to biting their car seats (Lorelei does this when she is at her max and it is really hard not to laugh at her because her whole head shakes with rage as she tries to bite whatever thing is nearest to her – sometimes a wall – which, in case you were wondering, is impossible to bite). But more importantly, the man was abusive with a capital “A.” The whole drive to the Airbnb my chest hurt, and I didn’t know why.

To anyone looking over at me, it would seem I was sitting in the car looking out the window, but I wasn’t - I was time-traveling all over the place. Bouncing around in my painful childhood, collecting evidence to present to my body to say Um, excuse me, No -  this person was dangerous, harmful, and cruel, and we will not rush to his bedside now. That would be incongruent. Incongruent! I shouted to myself! Why would we want to do that now? To which my brain simply started scrolling its programming to show me what it was thinking, clicking through Hallmarkesque images; a girl crying by her Dad’s bedside, an IG tribute to my Dad someone had put together, friends sharing images of fathers they have lost, someone having a spiritual moment walking and saying something about forgiveness, whispering I love you Dad in an ear.

Just today I connected the dots and remembered where I’d seen this before. It was familiar, this creative storytelling. The Hallmark effect, as I’ve been calling it this week. During my Freshman year at Bard College, I started a volunteer program to connect students with the local women’s shelter. Working with the women and advocating for them, I would watch helplessly as often, after several days or weeks at the shelter, they would start to rewrite their story. They would start to minimize their experience and often return to their abuser. Because in the end, no one wants to be a victim. We all want our story to be a love story.

This level of story rewriting has been happening all day and night for the past two weeks. It has been exhausting. And humbling. To watch as my brain and my heart wondered if maybe I had it wrong. I can sit here and tell you my brain was just trying to normalize and even romanticize my experience. It did not like the truth of the situation - that by all accounts, when someone says, my Dad is going to die, that person would / should be running to their parent's side, according to all the movies, books, and stories our culture will tell you about blood and family. That the fact that I wasn’t going to do that, that I did not do that, told a sad, uncomfortable truth. My father was a sick person who hurt a lot of people, and I lost him a long, long time ago. I can tell you this now, sitting on my blue couch in front of my Christmas tree, but lordy, it took almost two agonizing weeks of rewrites, wondering if I had it all wrong to come back to what was true.

There’s a small handful of people who know the details of my childhood, most of them have been therapists, and their eyes would always get a little wide, and they would move to the edge of their seats with their mouths open a little. It’s a longer story than an essay is made for, and one I haven’t known how to tell yet. I want the fundamentalist home church, purity culture, misogynist, corporal punishment, and bigot story to be a comedy. I’ve always wanted to make it a little bit funny because it’s a little bit outrageous when you get into it — but also I haven’t wanted to go back and think about it.

Of course, this is what death does to all of us. It makes us think about stuff. The talk I had with my father, circa 1995 - the one moment that has always been clear (the talk, not the date and time) — It happened at a weekend custody handoff, in a parking lot, at a rodeo. The announcer was blaring something about clowns. I timed it right before I was going to be picked up by my mom, ya know, for safety….it went something like… I wanted to ask you, to tell you, that you keep hurting me, and it feels like you’re not even sorry. I would like you to say you’re sorry and try not to hurt me as much. I remember it was this simple and a little childish. Please stop hurting me. Please show me you’re sorry. Hope. I was looking for some hope…my Dad looked at me and said I’m sorry you feel that way…and then a bunch of words after that, which faded away. I remember feeling all the blood leave my body, and I knew it was never going to get better…or maybe it would, because I knew I had to stop seeing him if I had any chance at staying alive. My sister Amy described it as recognizing your position as a victim of something outside of your control and deciding that you would no longer be a volunteer in that circumstance. I loved that. We can’t change what we are the victims of, but we can change what we volunteer ourselves for.

After my Dad died, my sister Christa and I were sitting in her cloud room - a room with a BIG white extremely soft cushy sectional couch and lots of lots windows so you can see the farm and the willow tree. The couch is a bold move considering she has six kids and quite a few dogs. We were talking about our memories, and I was still trying to piece together the facts. Still trying to convince my brain that the story I had was true. I was talking about the rodeo conversation, and she said Oh, yeah and do you remember when he put a gun to his head? Um, no. I did not remember this. I had completely and utterly forgotten about this. Just blank. No memory. I was like one of those people in those movies!! Amnesia! When my sister told me this, I thought wait, what? And then an hour later, it all came rushing back. We were at his trailer out on the Key Peninsula, and when I told him I wouldn’t be coming back to see him anymore, he put a gun to his temple and said he would pull the trigger if I didn’t come back. I remembered the feeling ( I felt ashamed of him) and the room (sitting at a table in a trailer, a mess of papers, the smell of propane and peanut butter. The Bible and a Hebrew concordance in front of him, because he liked to cross-reference his examinations of our virtue, and my voice in my head flat and pointed watching him thinking, no, no you won’t. 

The first morning, when I woke up at the Airbnb, still confused as to what I should do about my Dad still being alive but dying soon. I realized I had a sore throat and felt like I was getting a cold. I silently thanked the universe for this excuse to sit on the couch for a few hours. My stomach protested, though, and I went to make some tea and scrambled eggs. I was quite surprised when the eggs I cracked, one after the other, had double yolks. Have you ever seen this? - four eggs with eight yolks. I’m not kidding you. I’ve never seen anything like it.

It would turn out that the entire carton of eggs had double yolks. I googled the meaning of course, and it said - new beginnings, either that or I was having twins (I’ll keep you posted on the twins, but that would be a Christmas Miracle).

For my birthday this year in October, I had a Cards of Life reading from Mallory Leon of Four Corners studio (wonderful, magical human), and at the very beginning she said Hey love, it’s the weirdest thing all the stars are aligned to exactly how they were the year you were born. I hardly ever see that, it’s so sweet.  It’s a fresh start. A new beginning.

Sometimes the old things that hurt us finally actually die. That last bit of hope you had dies with them - you didn’t even know the hope was there but of course, if you are of a certain ilk you always hold out hope that your story will be a love story, that people will change, that they will heal, that no matter how far gone we find ourselves we can find our way to a place where we can say I’m sorry. It’s a small, simple thin,g but for some, it is out of reach.

It, of course, doesn’t look like the Hallmark channel, and thank God for that. My poor brain just wants it to be easy. It isn’t easy. I’m still a mess and still time-traveling a bit. But the rewriting of the story has stopped. I’m still walking over the creaky floorboards in my head and crying a bit, but I can see the noisy spot and walk around it if I need to.

My father’s will was just read, and he went out the same way he lived his life, hurting people. My youngest sister is probably the only person in the world who actually loved him. She always told me she did it for herself and that she went in knowing who he was. She was the person who brought him the cookies he liked, and shared his grandchildren with him, who drove out to see him in the middle of the night, who saved his business when it was failing, and who helped him get the care he needed when the nursing homes kept kicking him out, the person who put a washcloth on his lips as he lay dying. In his will, he stipulated that she, along with my three other sisters, should receive $10, and if she contested, she would receive nothing; that the rest of the inheritance should go to our half-brother. The inheritance, which only existed because of the business my father built on pain, Drive-Thru Freed was built after he blackmailed my mother by stealing my horse to get her to sign over the deed to a property in Alaska they owned together. This is not a love story. This is not the Hallmark Channel. He gave everything to a half-brother he never spoke to us about growing up, that I’ve never known, from a marriage before my mother’s. Our Brother’s response to this news was that he would honor our father’s wishes.

Here’s the thing: sometimes we forget what we knew, even when that truth is BIG and BOLD and UGLY. Remembering is hard. We think the actions of others against us, what we are the victims of, define us, but they don’t. My father’s wishes and his choices are a reflection of who he was. Not a reflection of who I am or who my sisters are. We are the women who decided not to volunteer anymore. We are the women who decided to have a love story after all.

My Dad taught me so many things through the lesson of opposites. When I was with him, even as a small child, I knew I wanted to be the opposite; I wanted to be kind, I wanted to be gentle, I wanted to love and be able to fall on my knees and say I was wrong or I was sorry. I wanted to be generous and unafraid of other people’s differences. I wanted to be creative and joyful. I wanted to love every woman I met for everything they were and trust that each of them knew exactly what was right for them. I wanted to parent my children in a way that made them feel unafraid, safe, and inspired to be alive. 

Thanks, Dad, for teaching me the opposite of how I want to be in the world. No one else could have done it better. 

I would love to hear about your love stories. About what you have stopped volunteering for. About any lessons of opposites, you have held in your heart. I’ll see you in the comments. Much love my friends.