2014 was a thing that happened. Honestly, I don’t
even know how to begin to describe the year, but I think I’m in a good enough
place to give it a try.
So, here’s my try.
The beginning of the year meant the end of my
father. I found out that he passed away on January 1, 2014, and I didn’t know
what to do with that information. You see, I hadn’t seen my father since I was
eight. My last, most vivid memory of him (there aren’t many memories of him)
was when he managed to track us down to our new house. My mom called the police
on him as soon as he showed up, and he was a hurricane of anger and alcohol.
That was probably the best way to describe the man: anger and alcohol.
What he was angry about and drank away, I’m still
not sure. I never got the chance to ask him.
Whatever the reason, he was these things a lot. Not
that I remember too much about him – or my childhood. I repressed everything
that had to do with him. I have no memories of anything that happened while we
lived with him, and I have no interest in getting them back.
I thought I was ready for the day he’d die. I spent
all sixteen years he was gone preparing for it like it was an Olympic Event. I
was going to get the gold medal in coping with your absentee father’s death.
But when the day came, when it was time to show the world what I had, I fell
apart.
I didn’t know why I fell apart. Death is difficult
(understatement) but, for all intents and purposes, the man had been dead to me
for sixteen years already. I owed him nothing, he owed my family (and me)
everything. He owed child support, so much child support, to my mother who had
to work multiple jobs to keep us afloat. He owed me all the memories he robbed
me of, and all of the time I spent watching my younger brother while my mom
worked, and worked, and worked. He owed my brother an explanation as to why he
wasn’t there, because he’d ask nearly every single day. After a while, he
stopped asking because he stopped caring.
But all the walls and safeguards I’d built up for
sixteen years crashed down when I learned that I also had two half-sisters.
Before my father married my mother, he was married to another lady. I had
sisters.
And it was weird then, because things clicked into
place somehow. It’s weird to explain, but I’d gone through life feeling like
there was this missing part. A hole that I couldn’t fill. But I figured it was
just me being super philosophical, so I didn’t pay much attention to it. Then
this happens and it’s cool and terrifying all at once. My family had known
about them all these years and kept my brother and me in the dark. Once I
realized that, the good outweighed the bad. It was rough enough to be betrayed
by my father – now I could add my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and my
hard-working mother to the list.
All I wanted was an explanation. Why were these people kept from me? When
I couldn’t get one, I got even more frustrated.
My father’s death left me filled with grief, though
only a small bit of it was over him. Instead, I grieved for the life I could’ve
had, if only I’d known I had sisters while I was growing up. How I could’ve had
people who knew exactly what I’d gone through with my father, because he was
just as terrible with them.
I ended January with a broken heart. My heart would break
a lot, though I didn’t know it yet.
My brother broke my heart in March. He’s struggled
with depression for almost ten years now, and one night he called me, saying
things that smashed whatever was left of my heart. I flew down to Virginia to
show that he wasn’t alone, and that I really would be there if he needed me. I
was already emotionally drained, and everything else I had went to making sure
my brother would be safe when I left him.
Due to various circumstances, I wound up planning my
father’s funeral. Since he was cremated, we waited until June to have the
service. While I planned his service, every person I spoke to about it offered
their condolences (I was tired of hearing that) and some (the Priest,
definitely the Priest) were supremely unhelpful and even went so far as to ask
me why I was the one planning the
funeral. My answer as always that it didn’t matter why I was the one planning it. I just needed it planned.
But it kind of did matter. I planned it more for me
than I did for him. I hadn’t seen the man in sixteen years. I couldn’t tell you
what his voice sounded like, or his laugh, or even what color his eyes were. I
planned it because that was a way for me to get closure. It was a way for me to
know that this was final. I also planned it because no one else would.
No one else – not his siblings, or my mother –
wanted to plan his funeral.
How sad is that?
My father was terrible, yes. Drunk, abusive,
continuously unemployed – but he was still a person. Throughout this whole
thing, I’d been trying to find something positive. Some glimmer of the person
he was, because he couldn’t have always been this monster that haunted me.
I found the glimmer at a very odd time in my life. I
was visiting one of my half-sisters, and our father came up. She told me about
how they used to have dinner at his mother’s house, and how his father was
worse than he was. His father would berate my grandmother, yelling at her about
dinner and then refusing to let her sit at the table while everyone was eating.
His father also couldn’t hold down a job, and when he did manage to get money,
he spent it all on alcohol, instead of on his wife and kids, or the home they
had. He was abusive, too, and terrible, too.
And my father was like me. He picked up the pieces.
He was the oldest, the responsible one by virtue of birth order. He held down
jobs, watched his siblings, did everything I did, but decades earlier.
All my life, I’d been terrified that I would turn
into my father. But I’d already become him. Well, the good parts anyway.
For the first time in my life, I was able to
sympathize with the monster.
I decided to take the good parts, whatever I could
salvage, and ditch the bad. I couldn’t carry the fear around anymore – I wasn’t
my father, and I wouldn’t make the same choices he did. I knew better, I could
do better.
I’ll be better.
But.
By the end of the year, I was crying on my kitchen
floor at the end of every day. Depression had claimed me, as I struggled to
reconcile my father’s death, my new family, my brother’s depression (he broke
my heart several more times this year), and my family losing a very large sum
of money that we didn’t have in the first place. Work had also been especially
difficult over the summer and fall semester, so that added to my stress.
It didn’t help that I refused to acknowledge that I
was depressed. Dishes piled up in my sink, sitting there for weeks – but I wasn’t
depressed. My apartment got messier with each day, and I had no motivation to
clean it – but I wasn’t depressed. I hadn’t written anything new since
February, and couldn’t, just couldn’t, because everything I touched was
worthless – but I wasn’t depressed. I cried on the floor for one, two, three,
four, five days straight for no reason in particular – but I wasn’t depressed.
I felt like I was terrible at my job, I couldn’t do anything right, I was a horrible person – but I
wasn’t depressed.
And it’s weird, really weird, but the thing that
helped me admit it was a horror movie. My friend got me to watch this
Australian movie called The Babadook
(which is a really awesome movie and you should watch it if you haven’t yet). I
don’t want to spoil the movie, but it made me realize that I’d had more than my
fair share of bad days, and I was, indeed, depressed.
I held everyone together while I was falling apart.
I helped everyone find their way while I lost who I was.
And I fell, and fell, without realizing it.
The good news is, I’ve stopped falling.
The good news is, I was selected to participate in
Pitch Wars this year, which was an amazing writing contest and the lifeline I
so desperately needed – even though I didn’t know it. Pitch Wars made me focus
back on writing, as I had to revise one of my books. I reconnected to something
I loved, to who I used to be, and my heart stopped breaking. It pulled itself
back together, very slowly.
It’s still trying to re-assemble, and will be doing
so for a very long time.
But.
For the first time in a while, I have hope. Although
cynicism and sarcasm are quite natural to me, at my core I’m an obnoxiously
annoying optimist.
But.
This year leeched all of the optimism out of me. I
walked around like a zombie, not feeling, or caring, or thinking. I was on
auto-pilot, I was in despair, I was lost, confused, and locked away somewhere.
I’m not sure how the optimism came back. It just hit
me one day, like the universe remembered it borrowed it and gave it back,
apologizing for keeping it so long.
The good news is, I’m really looking forward to
2015. 2014 was a rough year – and not just for me. All of my
friends had something terrible happen to them or the people they love this
year. And that’s not counting everything that’s happening in the country and
the world right now. But I’ve got a good feeling about 2015, because I think
this year will be about change.
The world is changing, for better or worse
(hopefully it’s for the better). I’m determined to change – to let go of things
that are out of my control, and all the anger and resentment I’d carried around
because of my father. I don’t want to walk around thinking he owes me anything
anymore. I want to let the guy rest. Maybe he’ll find more peace wherever he is
(if he’s anywhere) than he did in this life.
The beginning of the year marked the end of my
father. So, it’s kind of fitting that the end of the year marks the beginning
of whatever I choose to become. There are a lot of options out there, and I
have no idea how this is going to go.
But.
Despite whatever happens, I’ll be better. Which was
the whole point of 2014, I suppose.
