*The following is from 2010, thirteen years ago; I found it recently on a flash-drive I found in a tin in which I keep small but important documents, like my vaccine record for Covid (I was boosted this week). Since writing this, any number of specifics in life and in the world have changed, including the death of the lead singer of Linkin Park, Chester Bennington. Bennington committed suicide in 2017, after a series of physical setbacks, a long struggle with substance abuse, and the darkness that accompanies all of us who were sexually abused as children. As I have dug deeper into yet another local predator uncovered these past several weeks, the sadness, the immensity of the derailment of entire lives due to the selfish acts of adults and even older children (Bennington’s abuser was ‘an older male friend’, my childhood rapist was my sixteen year-old cousin), haunts me, punishes me, keeps me up at night, and I return yet again to the mantras that help me make it through: may the whole world know peace and healing. I am safe, happy, whole, healthy, and I am loved. It helps, but – it’s not always enough. Friends. My friends help keep me hopeful, my friends and the multiple generations of women, and men, who are younger than myself lift me up. I believe that the gens in their teens, twenties, and thirties now are healthier still, by far, saner too, kinder and more loving, than any generation prior. They are the future; they are my hope. Thank you for reading.
‘Lift me up, let me go’ are words from a song I’ve been watching on VH1 lately, by a group I’ve never heard of before, Linkin Park. This is not surprising, my not having heard of them, nor is it clear to me what is being lifted up or who as well as what or who is letting go or what the entire video is all about period (they’re floating through water some of the time or getting heavily splashed although looking at the album cover, I might be mistaking water for fire, hmmmmmm – should I wear my glasses while watching early a.m. TV?) but I have been caught by the tune, which is the point after all, of showing ones music on TV, catching people and inserting your songs in their heads where they can’t, in fact, let go, thus forcing them to buy the album, which I have in turn done. Damn them, damn them!
I don’t get the words, entirely (and the album liner notes are no help, unreadable as they are for the most part) but I like the music. I haven’t watched VH1 or MTV for years; there’s too much irrelevant ‘reality entertainment’ to be found there and way too many commercials for things I don’t want or need, mainly acne meds in the mornings when the music of music television is actually being played. Yet lately I am to be found sitting on my settee, drinking my black as night tea with soy milk regardless of how I long for half and half, yet I am lactose intolerant and, let’s be honest, trying half-heartedly to lose weight. Sometimes I sit there for as much as an hour, even two on a day when I don’t need to be anywhere and can wait for the NUMBER ONE VIDEO IN AMERICA that YOU (no, not I) voted for. They take forever (two hours is a mini-series) merely to count down the top twenty videos of the week; they show plugs for other MTV or VH1 shows and the endlessly repetitive commercials, over and over again during the hour (would you really buy car insurance on line from a company called ‘the General’ whose commercials are clearly made on the super cheap?) until my saturation point is reached and way, way beyond. And yet, there I sit, yearning for music, healing music, distracting music
My father died recently – this year, six, seven months ago – and I have more time on my hands, time that used to be spent taking care of him, his house, his dog, his groceries. For the time being, since the work of clearing and cleaning his house is over as well along with the settling of his estate, I am floating, floundering, flopping, watching Linkin Park and Rhianna and Pink do their thing on the boob tube. I am feeling the space he left, the gaping cavernous space of his non-presence. I am filling it, in the mornings, when I would take him his breakfast and walk his dog, with MTV and VH1. I am digressing back into my thirties, not. And yet, still, sometimes it does feel as though I am.
I feel like a boob, in the non-breast sense. I have trouble completing thoughts and finding the words for a thing I am holding in my hand or for something I saw earlier in the day. Without my dad, in mourning as I now am, my world is so utterly and completely changed, I can almost not function. The summer passed in a blur; I drank a lot of gin and spent as much time as I could near water but my body was worn down and out after 6 months of taking care of a dying man I adored, taking care of his dog, his household, his doctor visits, scheduling his hair cuts to be done at home, his personal effects (OMG please give me the strength to throw away everything I own before I die!), his funeral, his friends, his relatives, his other siblings, and finally his children – my siblings with whom I promised him I would not fight when he was gone, fight over money, over stuff, over the past, the imagined and other hurts, whatever.
Six weeks after his funeral I went to Fire Island for a week break of sorts, leading up to the Saturday wedding of a friend I had introduced to her groom; he was my tenant, a classy, good to the marrow kind of guy; I’d always dreamt of match making, finally getting my wish with their relationship and this celebratory occasion. The heat was intense, too much for pale skinned, thin skinned, still deep in mourning me. I spent the afternoons in the house the bride rented for me and our closest mutual friends reading or napping, sweating and fretting in the stillness of a hot as hell August day, trying to regain my equilibrium, something that eludes me still. I drank too much and ate too much and was uncomfortable in every single cell of my body, filled with emotion I felt I could not freely express in this happiest of times for my dear friends even while I did cry, often and with gusto, given the chance, the privacy or the right reason, another kind friend’s ear. And I know now, at fifty-one, that am an introvert, liking a small world, my world, dreading parties and large social situations, a truth that left me hoping I could get through the weekend gracefully and return to my mourning life, quiet, peaceful and mine, alone.
And I am volatile, one moment happy as a clam, the next down in the dumps or at least contemplating going there. Happy to sad or angry in four seconds or less, less, when I am this discombobulated, this lost. This is my new life; my life without my dad. I cry every single day. I mourn. I grieve. I fumble and stumble when the disorienting fog of loss and mourning swamps and sometimes, not always as I hold it at bay, overtakes me. I keen and wail, keen and wail, mostly when I have turned out the lights and my mind, not distracted by books, movies, TV, begins to wander. I flash suddenly on that day, the day of his death, and what I found, him, my father, dead. I took my time getting to his house, hesitating on the endless round, another long day, of chores that lay ahead, calling him just after seven a.m. to see if a muffin was an acceptable alternative to his usual bagel with butter and a coffee. He did not pick up and I felt a sense of dread and foreboding, eventually deciding that he was okay, just on the toilet or for some other reasonable reason unable to get to the phone, and me, because he was dragging his oxygen tank or having trouble maneuvering it around.
Having left the muffin on the kitchen table, knowing the house was too still and his dog unusually quiet, subdued, I entered further, calling out ‘Dad? Daddy?’ – fearing finding him half-dressed, on the can, not wanting to embarrass both of us although earlier in the course of his last months I had helped him off the toilet, helped him clean himself and pull up his pants; he was embarrassed ‘you shouldn’t have to do this’, but I was not embarrassed or disgusted, only determined to get through this without tears, sad for him, for us, in that tiny room off the hall; love knows little shame in such moments.
And so I went on, that morning in May, deeper into the house, to find my father flat on the floor of the big bathroom, obviously dead, face down and hidden, pants down too, right where he had fallen. I thought I had wanted this moment, to be free of the burden of his illness and care and I did want it, yet I knew nothing, nothing, of what truly lay ahead of me, in that life without my father, my dad, my dear beloved pop.
I screamed my head off. I walked through the house, I returned to the bathroom, I knelt down next to him as best I could, I hugged him as best I could (the room is long and narrow), I rubbed his back, calling him honey and dear, daddy, I cried out over and over daddy, daddy, daddy!, called him sweetie, screamed some more – wailed, keened, screamed, paced, screamed and called my brother, who lives nearby to scream and wail some more. He could not, at first, understand me. He arrived, breathing deeply and unevenly, in distress, and we embraced; he pulled my dad’s pants up while I stood numb in the kitchen; he called the funeral director or did I do that? It is no longer clear. I called hospice while he left to get his wife at her job. I cried more, screamed a little more, walked his dog all the while sobbing, felt the world tilt out of whack, definitely out of my control, as if it ever had been in it, which it hadn’t. These kinds of mornings, these kinds of events, remind us of just how little we are in control and do us a service, hateful, hateful reminder, in so doing.
The Catalyst ~ lyrics by Linkin Park
God bless us everyone
We’re a broken people living under loaded gun
And it can’t be outfought
It can’t be outdone
It can’t out matched
It can’t be outrun
No
God bless us everyone
We’re a broken people living under loaded gun
And it can’t be outfought
It can’t be outdone
It can’t out matched
It can’t be outrun
No
And when I close my eyes tonight
To symphonies of blinding light
(God bless us everyone
We’re a broken people living under loaded gun
Oh)
Like memories in cold decay
Transmissions echoing away
Far from the world of you and I
Where oceans bleed into the sky
God save us everyone,
Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns?
For the sins of our hand
The sins of our tongue
The sins of our father
The sins of our young
No
God save us everyone,
Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns?
For the sins of our hand
The sins of our tongue
The sins of our father
The sins of our young
No
And when I close my eyes tonight
To symphonies of blinding light
(God save us everyone,
Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns?
Oh)
Like memories in cold decay
Transmissions echoing away
Far from the world of you and I
Where oceans bleed into the sky
Like memories in cold decay
Transmissions echoing away
Far from the world of you and I
Where oceans bleed into the sky
Lift me up
Let me go (x10)
God bless us everyone
We’re a broken people living under loaded gun
And it can’t be outfought
Can’t be outdone
It can’t out matched
It can’t be outrun
No
God bless us everyone
We’re a broken people living under loaded gun
And it can’t be outfought
Can’t be outdone
It can’t out matched
It can’t be outrun