A Messy Grief

Reflections, on the anniversary of a complicated death

Photo: Donald Lee Pardue

Yesterday was my father’s birthday and the one-year anniversary of his death. He lived 80 years to the day. For a man who loved numbers (in their Ohio Pick-3 form), it was a numerically tidy end to a complicated, hard-lived life.

I spent the past few weeks dreading the arrival of the day. There are adages about grief not moving in a straight line, but birthdays and anniversaries create flares of dark emotions and a double whammy was coming. I expected a gut punch, a break from an anger that mostly exists as a numb pit in my chest. I hoped the day would bring with it some healing.

Grief so often prompts magical thinking.

I hadn’t been to the cemetery since my father’s ashes were buried. I hadn’t even seen the grave marker. It’s been busy, between work, raising kids, and tending after my ailing mother. And I don’t feel the longing that sometimes comes with loss, that urge to wander close to whatever remains of our loved one.

I’ve just started writing more openly about what childhood was like with my father. It wasn’t intentional. But over the year I was writing Disobedient Women—a book that details staggering abuse—my father grew ill enough that I had to begin coordinating both my parents’ care. Abuse was on my mind in what I was writing and in what renewed proximity forced me to remember.

As his dementia worsened and his rage did not abate, I had his voice screaming in my ear a dozen times a day. It might not have been so bad had that same voice not berated me every night as a child. It was almost Pavlovian, the way his tone could so readily instigate fear inside my body. When he got sicker, I feared that he would die because I hadn’t done enough—even when cancer made his death inevitable. I played the role of the good daughter, trying to make nurses understand this was just his way, to please help him even when he bellows. Nearly every relationship he had left broke under the strain.

I couldn’t break—my mom needed me too. So did my kids. So did this book that means so much to me. With no alternative, I kept going, but some of the memories leaked into my writing.

Children of alcoholics are conditioned to keep family secrets. I’ve been thinking back this week to how I tried not to let the kids at school know how bad things were, and how in some ways it was a benefit to my secret-keeping that my father never attended any events at school. But then at the end of junior high, he decided to come along for the 8^th grade banquet.

There’s a reek to booze that you don’t really appreciate until you’re in a room full of sober parents scrubbed soap-clean, doting over their kids. He didn’t fall down drunk but leaned and veered between chairs. I can’t remember what we ate, but I can say that it tasted like shame. Until 8^th grade, I’d mostly isolated at school. I was shy, a timid thing younger than all my classmates. If I was anything, I was a good student, a good, church-going girl. There was a cloud around where we sat, a dark fug from clothes worn too many days during a whisky bender.

He didn’t see any of my plays, any of the little roles at church. I recognize now that something was far too fractured inside of him. He didn’t want to be anywhere in public other than the bar where he was comfortable, preferably on the same stool where he normally sat. I didn’t push for him to come see me in my child’s milestones, because there was often no knowing how he might suddenly explode.

It took too long to get to the S’s during my older half-brother’s high school graduation and he stormed out, missing his big moment. Most nights he’d erupt in cursing and sometimes throw things at precisely 7:30 pm, when he’d lose the Ohio lottery.

I’d see the kids with two parents and feel jealousy, not for someone I had who was not present, but for the alternative conditions under which other kids evidently lived.

This grief won’t travel in clear, straight lines. The memories that became sharpest over this past year date from those farthest back years.

My father got sober when I was 21. I wouldn’t say he was kind, but he did become more functional for a period. He still grew impatient and exploded, pouring down an unreasonable wrath that was just barely more rage than anxiety, but he had stopped self-medicating. He tried.

I worked to forgive him over those years, and it was easier, seeing living proof of an imperfect man trying to be notches better than he had been. His illness and death seems to have folded all he was in an accordion’s compressed lines. The sharp edges stick out most visibly.