Dear peripheral darkness in the corner of my room, are you my mother?
Have you come to wet my eyes again with tears of ethanol or return the memories you took with you?
I’d like the ones with the sunshine through your golden hair, the healing of your food, the safest hours of our private conversations and those nighttime psalms you sang, please.
Will I cry like I cried when you called me from purgatory in my dreams? Can you explain what you meant when you said, “Our boss won’t let us talk too long”, and faded into the back of a dusty stagecoach? Its just that the panic I felt when gripping your hand woke me up and I never heard your voice again.
It reminded me of the time, your purple arms made me advise, “Love does not tolerate abuse”, but at the last minute, I asked the veterans to write “LOVE NEVER FAILS” on your headstone.
You had cried wolf so many times that without warning, me and some familiar strangers, at the time, plummeted, guts first, through the years of our future together in an hour and three minutes, clenching every inch of your body in a quiet hospital room.
They wheeled in what was left of Dad, and he grieved his oaths, for better or worse, into your thigh, since they cut his wedding ring in half to save him enough to bear the guilt of your death. You’d be proud that I cleaned the mucus from his face and forgave him before he died like you taught me to. You probably know this since he’s probably with you right now, but I’m not sure if your boss let’s you guys hang out there, so I’ll keep being specific.
If he is there, let him know, I really loved the dream where me and him played together as little boys in a field with river water. There were fewer people to help him die than you had and I felt sad that it was mostly just me and him at the end. After a year of thinking about the differences between your funerals, I think some people blamed Dad for the situation. If your boss lets you watch me, you probably know that I’ve tried to make it clear that you two were responsible 50/50 for this 30-year tragedy from the moment you met on that ditchbank. That you died just like you fell in love, two codependent teenagers with PTSD.
As I left the hospital room with your body in it, I saw your framed picture hanging in the hallway. I realized that the title of “Distinguished Nurse” likely came with an auto-immune disorder and the regret of leaving your son with the addict you married. It sucks that you carried so much responsibility with your shame. Its a pattern I’ve tried to avoid.
Anyway, you left so many things here: Your uncut wedding ring, for example, and a house with 30 years of trash and memories in it. You taught me to be clean and orderly so I had to throw 20 years of it away. Even the family that rarely talks to me showed up to help me. I wish you were there when I climbed to the top of the 18ft dumpster by myself and cried so much that I laughed at the sight of our lives in 32 cubic yards. P.S.: At least 10 years of it got stolen by the people living in my childhood neighborhood. The police told me they couldn’t help me get it back.
I watched parts of the videos in your iPad of Dad yelling at you while hitting the wall, the one documenting the parts of your body that stopped working and the one where you recorded your cat dying from heart failure in all that trash.
I read your AA journals, your letters to your three sisters and Dad, my great grandfather’s baptism certificate and scanned 100’s of Polaroids of our lives into the computer for your funeral. I played “Time in a Bottle” and Sarah McLachlan just like you asked me too. I also did your taxes, so no worries there, I think.
That wonderful doctor you love came to the funeral and apologized to me for what happened, even though none of it was anyone’s fault but yours. Is that why you were so silent with us before you left?
On the note of silence and your siblings, they’ve all become closer to me. Particularly, the ones you taught me to not trust or talk to because they were “sinners” or “toxic”. They are the ones who have listened to my cracked voice cry for hundreds of hours about what happened to us and supported me with the selflessness of saints. Can you explain why you never apologized to them? I’m trying to learn to forgive but I’m uncertain you taught me that? Now that you’re dead, what have you learned about the cost of speaking for God and not letting things go? Just send your notes in another dream, I’ll be waiting.
The boy I’m raising talks about you all the time. He’s struggling in school, but thriving in every other way and wonders why so many people have left him behind. Tell Dad that he still loves talking about cars instead of his feelings or ideas. I’m realizing while raising him, you skipped some valuable lessons raising me. Send that along too if you’ve picked anything up since then. Just send it in separate dream from the one you’ll send about you pretending to be God. Otherwise, all of that might ruin my sleep.
I can’t think of anything else to say except that I now hate you as much as I love you and this revealed every flaw in my spirit at once. I’ve become more neurotic, depressed and lonely but more insightful, resilient and artistic too. I learned that like this letter, our family legacies and my sexual relationships, I am so juxtaposed and paradoxical that I rely on substances, achievements and other people to see reality clearly. No one understands this well but us, I think. However, unlike you, I have puzzled out that you should never leave unprocessed shame for too long, otherwise, it might return to orchestrate your demise, isolate you, flip your paralyzed body face down into a pile of every shit-covered, garbage mistake you’ve ever made before erasing you, piece by piece, from mind to soul. I’d like to think that makes you proud of me, for better or worse.
Most of all, know that I will always be your precious baby but I am also the sole witness to the way the permanent shame trickles down the family trees like the tears of ethanol on a glass of cold beer that the blood of Christ seemed unable to free us from like you said it would.
Love,
Jake