deep in the ocean, there lies a wave for you

How does my dad’s death relate to Clark’s? How am I making connections between them?

My hour-long therapy session this morning was so intense and I cried so hard. I love nothing more, though, than linking up parts of my life to create an entire picture. In my brain it looks like a shoebox I decorated while in high school with (obviously hilarious in retrospect) clippings from magazines. I kept little souveneirs and reminders in it.

Why did I freak out two weeks ago when I ran into a guy I dated for a brief period of time before he blew me off? Well, I had really liked him, and I had trusted him. And then I turned out to be wrong about him. Who else have I trusted only to be disappointed and proved wrong? DING DING DING. In reality, the asshat who didn’t want to date me has no effect on me. His treatment of me says nothing about what kind of person I am. He sucks, and I’m not dating him anymore. I win. But the fact that I was earnestly believed in his goodness and was then wrong about him … that’s some Hunchback of Notre Dame bell-ringing, for sure.

My father’s death was preceded by a weeks-long period of craziness on his part. He and his third wife of 13 years or so were separating. He wanted to tell the family about it, so he told all of us via email. In the emails that followed he asserted that he didn’t have a drinking problem.

The sentences that I find hardest to read, which are in the last email he wrote to us, are these:

“One of the twelve steps in AA tells you that you go back to anyone that you have damaged in your life due to your imperfections and your drinking, re-hashing the past and offering sincere apologies.  I never saw any value in such actions.  Again, we can’t change the past.  I believe it to be much more positive to actively live today and in the future as the best person we can be, totally outside of ourself [sic] and into the well being of others.”

“Let me state that I simply do not believe that I am an alcoholic.  Granted, I have always been prone to excess with a number of things in my life.  That is just my genetic makeup.  There are many times in my life that I embarrassed myself or others with excessive drinking, acting like a college frat boy while inebriated.  But, I don’t recall ever being belligerent or mean, just stupid in a stupid state. To satisfy others, I’ve attended many AA meetings over my life.  I went into those with a humble and open mind, listening carefully of all that was said,  but never got one single thing out of those efforts.  I never lasted more than 2 or 3 meetings before I felt it was simply a waste of my time.”

I was never going to be enough here. Nothing I could do would ever be enough to change him, to get him to keep the handfuls of promises he made to a younger me that he would quit drinking. It was completely out of my hands. So was Clark’s disease.

So when my therapist told me that all I need to be – and all I am – is enough for just myself, well. That’s something I can work on believing.

my attempts:

1.

2. ranking things. top 3 albums of 2010, for example: beach house, deerhunter, arcade fire. i am a weirdo and checking shit like that off my “list” makes me feel a bit calmer.

3. (that’s right. credit card paid off)

4. i love my friends and every single little note or piece of love sent my way makes me cry, in a good way. i’ve cried more in the past couple of days because of how wonderful people are.

5. thinking about thanksgiving, the theme of which is VEGETARIAN SIDE DISHES. PIIM.

Therapist lady says that when the universe seems like it’s fucking you over and so many things are happening at once, it means things are changing, and often for the better.

It’s being wrong about people that puts me in an unsafe space. I want to believe that everybody is good because I have witnessed so much of it. When someone is bad, it sends me into the red zone – the panic, freeze up, sob, give in and have a cigarette. Since I am half my dad, I couldn’t always fully believe that he would forever be bad. I took a huge leap and gave him a chance right after I graduated college, about four and a half years ago. After he hurt me again, I shut that down. And now that he is dead, there are no more chances left, only questions that will persist unanswered. How do I find my peace? I’m going to try and figure it out.

The other thing was that last night after I came home from being comforted by friends, I was alone and it was around 11 p.m. I took a Klonopin and made some tea and I started cleaning up the kitchen and roasting vegetables. I watched about four episodes of Parks and Recreation. When Clark was in the hospital and then in the hospice, I had a nightly ritual that was all too similar. Everyone would leave for the day, he would be asleep, and I would be alone. I’d shower, get into sweats, take an Ativan, tidy up the room and make sure he was properly tucked in, and position the laptop on a chair where I could see it. Then I’d climb into bed with him and watch 3 – 4 hours of Sex and the City.

I had forgotten what it’s like to feel that numb, and I’m shocked that the death of a man who has only existed to disappoint me has elicited that same behavior.

I’ve noticed a pattern in the way the universe operates. It likes to remind me of that which I don’t need reminding, and it likes to do it like bam, bam, bam, right in a row, kicking me when I’m down. Last week I had four or five things happen that knocked me flat on my face. And I was already so tired because I’d worked three 16-hour days and was dogsitting. Today I feel a little under the weather and like I need a bit of a recovery period.

My therapist has her MA in art therapy, and she sometimes likes to have me draw stuff. Which I am obviously not so into doing. But last week I had to use colored pencil to express how I felt on the inside, or how I see myself on the inside, or something, and I drew a big ball of yarn made up of different strands of color. And she interpreted that as me not having an end to pull on because everything’s all tangled up.

Luckily I did get reminded – overwhelmingly – how amazing my giant group of ladyfriends is.

And I had saved this blog entry as a draft earlier today, and since then, I’ve found out that my father has died. We were, for the most part, estranged, but I can’t say this hasn’t fucked up my current state of mind even further. So I think my theory about the universe is right.

So remember on Sunday when I cried all day after going to church and then I had to go to work at the club and I was a disaster and looked like I had been run over by a garbage truck carrying only dirty diapers? Well. The next day I had a date to see my good friend Megan’s new apartment. The address was on Tunlaw, which is near where I went to college, and there’s an upperclassmen “dorm” on the street and I’m familiar. Also, Clark was staying with a friend who lived on that street when we met. The first night we spent together was at my then-apartment off U St. on the Friday of Labor Day weekend 2007. On Sunday, I was in the box office waiting to get off work and texting Clark, hoping to meet up again. Finally, he agreed to have me over. The last text he sent before I left work to go to him was, “Bring food?” So I got jumbo slices. And I brought them to where he was staying, which was in Glover Park, on Tunlaw Rd.

On Monday I parked my car after driving from work through Georgetown, which is tough enough because Clark was at the hospital at Georgetown and I hate going there. But I get onto Tunlaw, find a parking spot in the number range of Megan’s address and start walking. I’m studying addresses, waiting to find hers, and I walk a little bit past the side of a building before I turn into a driveway and see this:

My entire body collapsed into itself. This is the apartment at which Clark was living when I went to meet him for our second night together. I called him and waited for him to come retrieve me from that sidewalk. I rode up that same elevator. I did laundry with him the morning after in that basement. And I went back in and my whole body went back into numb, pit-of-my-stomach, knot-in-my-heart mode. I could not fucking believe it. What the fucking fuck, universe.

Today Cella and I went to hear her mom preach at her new UCC church on the Eastern Shore in Maryland. Her sermon was about All Saints Day which, according to my program, “celebrates not only the martyrs and saints, but all the people of God, living and dead, who together form the mystical body of Christ, the ‘communion of saints,’ as the apostle Paul described.”

I still don’t know how I feel about God or Jesus or religion. A large part of me really rejects it. Clark was taken away from me, in which I see no part of any god, but then again, I had it in me to take care of him. The two seem to cancel each other out.

Cella’s mom told a story about how 20+ years ago, a good pastor friend of hers died in a car accident, and it was the first time in her life that someone her own age had passed. A few months later, she dreamed that she was walking in an airport surrounded by other lady pastors, and her friend that had died was there, too. “Does this mean you’re with me all of the time, and I just can’t see you?” Anne asked her, and she responded affirmatively.

Obviously at this point in the service I was crying.

Then Anne went to describe how we are all saints, and how we all go to heaven, and I continued to sob uncontrollably.

When Clark was on his deathbed at Georgetown Hospital, he pulled my mom aside. “Is this punishment for my sins?” he asked her. “Babies are born with cancer and die,” she told him. “This has nothing to do with anything that you did.” After he was assured that he didn’t earn death by cancer, he reminded me daily that he was going to be just fine. “I’m going to miss you so much!” he’d say, as if he were going on a vacation, someplace where he’d be aware of me down here aching for him.

The sermon today brought all of that up, and now I look and feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.

Writing this piece for the “Write About Love” contest was a very intense experience. It brought up a bunch of buried memories, ones that cause my chest to tighten and the knot in my gut to expand. But here’s what I submitted. I chose this particular moment because I think it sums up what I know to be unconditional love.

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