Nice, but a little bit violent.

I’ve been a little morose lately. I thought it was one thing – something that happened recently that was a shock to me. The fullness of my own self discovery, or something like that. It’s amazing to me how much I’ve learned to hide from myself just to function like a normal human being. Of course, all that hiding makes me abnormally weird to others and so my strive for normalcy ends up taking me further and further from it.

Anyway, new crazy feelings coursing through my mind, new thoughts, and things I didn’t want to feel were all sitting in my psyche, taunting me. But I was also getting more and more sad and I thought it was the thoughts and realizations that were doing it.

I was wrong and what a relief, although the realization of what was truly eating at my emotions makes me even sadder.

People around me have been wondering about me because I’ve been drinking more. I made a promise to my husband that I wouldn’t get hammered every night, but I did not promise to stop drinking. I do things to limit myself. Instead of bringing my entire bottle of gin to a party, I just brought a flask worth. Three drinks later, I’m done for the night. Poverty helps with the rest, although every now and then my efforts are foiled by people who want to keep me drinking because they are. Because I’ve only been a heavier drinker in the past couple of years, I hadn’t figured out the triggering factor. Until now, that is.

In January, my father will have been dead for 2 years. My uncle will have been dead for 4.

My uncle was like a dad to me. When I was younger, I would visit him and he would do all the things that a dad should do. Despite the fact that he might not have been a good dad to his own children, though he did try, he was a great dad to me. He encouraged me to keep my grades up, gave my fragile ego the boost it needed when my grades were excellent, gave me advice on how to handle the bitchy preteens and teens at school, encouraged my competitive spirit and made me laugh.

My dad, on the other hand, was a sullen alcoholic that would rather sit in his room and watch westerns on television than interact with us. In my mind, I saw him as the person that stopped all of my attempts at being a normal kid growing up because I had to be responsible in his stead. He was abusive to my mom, and his drunkenness, like clockwork began on Friday night and didn’t end until early Sunday morning. When I was 10 years old, I gained a grown up understanding of what was going on and the thing that I’d been feeling since I was 6 blossomed into something harsh and destructive, something that now had a name. I hated him until I was 22 years old, even after finding out at 19 that he wasn’t my biological father and that he’d taken me as his own with no hint ever that I wasn’t his flesh and blood.

While I wouldn’t claim to be a traditional Christian, I do have a ton of God moments in my life. Losing my hatred of my father was one of them. It was weird. I’d begun trying to talk to him and be there for him because I realized that he wasn’t a monster, just a sad man with issues that began after his tour of duty in Vietnam. Every time we spoke, a knot would form in the place where my heart beat and I would get off the phone filled with anger – rage actually. It wasn’t anything he did necessarily, just the remnants of 12 years of interacting with him in hatred. One day, while sitting at my desk eating lunch, I felt as if a load had been lifted off of my shoulders. It was weird. I actually felt lighter. I didn’t know what happened, but I felt as if I could finally go on with the rest of my life. I just didn’t know why or why now.

The next conversation I had with my dad, I didn’t feel that burning rage in my heart. I never felt it again.

It was 2005, Thanksgiving. My uncle was the skinniest I’d ever seen him. I wondered if something were wrong, but I knew that I would be told if it was. He was in good humour, which was normal, but he didn’t look like his normal self. I still remember the feeling when he told me he had lung cancer. I still remember space collapsing around me. I still remember hearing his words from within a tunnel. Everyone else had known almost the entire year. I was the last one to know. What made it worse was that when he died, not even two months later and shortly after my birthday, I wasn’t told. I wasn’t able to be with him and the last time I saw him, the words, “I love you” went to his lifeless body, not to him. He didn’t know how much he’d meant to me outside of being my uncle. I resent my family for doing that to me. I’m not over it yet.

I found out the next Thanksgiving that my dad had throat cancer. I knew something was wrong because he sounded like a train had crushed his larynx earlier in the year, but he refused to go to the doctor. By the time he went, he was stage 4 and even though it hadn’t metastasized, it was still dire enough. VA benefits took so fucking long to come through that I thought he would die before my first trip to Europe. The problem would have been that his death wouldn’t have stopped me from going and I knew my family would hate me for it, even though my dad already understood. As he lay dying, we came to an understanding. It is weird. He couldn’t talk because he had a hole in his throat, but we communicated more than ever in our life. The day before I left for Europe, I went to visit him and his benefits had finally come through. He was now on chemo and he looked better. Much better. A part of me thought, “He could beat this!” That was in March.

In January of the following year, he fell out of his bed and my grandmother couldn’t lift him back in. They made arrangements to send him to a care facility. That night, in the care facility, he died. We all think that he clung to life because he didn’t want his mother to find him dead in the other room. Once he was free from being a burden to her, he stopped holding on. I’d saved my time to visit until Saturday after I taught my class of teenagers. Halfway through class, I got a call from my mother. I ignored it because usually she was calling to gripe about something I’d done. This time, however, it was to tell me that my father had died. I cried the 35 miles it took me to get from class to my grandmother’s house.

After that cry, I was tearless. In the light of day, I was the strong one. My family had lost two brothers or two sons, in a short period of time. Their faces were swollen and sad. My face was determined. My tears only came in the dead of night, after we buried him, when I couldn’t hide from them anymore.

If love could be used, I would say I didn’t love my dad. I think we’d come to a sort of mutual respect and understanding. Maybe I would say I didn’t love my dad because I’d lived the majority of my life not loving him. I don’t know. But I do know that the things that made the holidays with my family good no longer exists  and that my drinking increases. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know how to talk about it and I want to stop effing crying about it. I like the holidays with my friends, my new family in a way, because there isn’t the constant reminders and the requisite awkwardness of what is missing from our family gathering. Maybe all it takes is time to heal and I will be able to sit with my family without resentment. Here’s hoping all it takes is time.