Death ends and begins a journey. Marlayna Glynn Brown confronts herself while facing her father’s alcoholism and death.
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Rest In Places by Marlayna Glynn Brown
During my summer in Croatia last year, I learned that Croatians differentiate between ‘bye’ and ‘goodbye,’ with the first being temporary and the latter being permanent.
Saying goodbye to my father is an event I could not have imagined beforehand in all its layered complexity. Taking leave of someone usually optimistically acknowledges the possibility of meeting again, accidentally or purposefully. Although you may be physically parting, you are comforted by the variety of ways in which you can remain in contact: phone, email, letters. But how many times in life do you part from someone and know without a doubt it is the very last time you will make eye contact?
There were many partings I’ve had from family, friends, lovers, strangers. Each separation at the time pinched in its own way, and some pinched harder than others. But none of them felt permanent at the moment; each parting was accompanied by a small measure of hope that life is long and all possibilities exist. We may have acknowledged that our relationship as we’d known it would transition, but still there was room for hope of some sort of reunion. Some byes were goodbyes, even though we hadn’t known it at the time. It’s better not to know.
Years ago the mother of a good friend of mine passed away. My friend had cried to me in a long, thin voice, “My mother is no longer on this earth!” with such an uncharacteristically heart-withering wail that I’d pulled the phone from my ear in shock. It was that one phrase that drove home the irreconcilable permanence of death to me: her mother no longer existed. And all that talk about a person existing in your heart as long as you love them didn’t mean a thing to my friend. Her mother was gone and there was no debating the finality of physical death.
I’ve never been alive when he has not been. I exist because he existed.
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Now I say goodbye to my father, the man from whom I was created. The man lying before me had the task of setting an example at times for what a father and man should be, and more often what a man and father should not be. This is a different sort of goodbye from that to which I’ve been accustomed for it is undeniably permanent. I’ve never been alive when he has not been. I exist because he existed. And now he is leaving his body and I must say goodbye and it’s a goodbye with no possibility of ever meeting again.
I sit at his bedside, my eyes often focused on the thin plastic tube that brings oxygen to his nose. What a strange thought that he can no longer breath without this tube. Years of smoking Kool menthols have eradicated any ability he has to breathe without aid now. So the thin plastic tube hooks over his ears, allowing him to pull weak breaths in and out of cancered lungs. My father – who once won bodybuilding contests and ran races and jogged around our city parks and swam off the Mexican shore in the Pacific ocean he loved so much – cannot breathe without the cool oxygen of this artificial tube.
He tries to talk but his words are mired in wet coughs, rendering conversation cruel and laborious.
That tube stands between me and all that I want to know about him and the many things I would have liked to have said, a proud guardian against any further pain for either my father or me. I take his thin hand in mine and look him in the eye. “I’m glad you were my father.”
He nods once; a regal gesture of acceptance, resignation or possibly both. “Me too.”
There are so many questions I want to ask him, so much I want to know about his childhood, his life, his feelings, his essence.
Unasked, as if he would try to explain the one thing I might want to know, he volunteers,
“Some people were just born to drink.”
“How can you say such a thing?”
“Look at my sister. Look at me,” he coughs.
“You woke up every day and made the choice to drink. You could have changed your life any time you wanted.”
“No. Couldn’t.”
Is this then the final damning curse of a life of alcoholism, the acceptance of no reality that does not include alcohol? “You could have stopped drinking any time you wanted. People do it every day. You could have known me. You could have known your grandchildren. They are such great kids and you don’t even know them.”
“I’d been a rat for so long. Thought I might as well stay a rat.”
Here my father and I diverge paths, likely because he was one way so I went the other. I don’t understand this kind of thinking; the acceptance of something less than the highest and best, this painful resignation. It’s the final and saddest nail in the coffin of my relationship with my father.
I hear myself telling him that I want him to be at peace. I want him to be out of pain. I know even as the words are tumbling from my consciousness and out of my mouth that my father’s death is not about me; his passing is not dependent in any way upon what I want.
It is his journey and I am no longer on it and I never really was in the first place. How could you be on a journey that is not your own?
The only journey we can ever travel is the one before our own two feet, influenced, but not necessarily defined by the men who give us life.
Forgiveness is the grease of the journey.
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Today, my father died. It’s such a strange thought, and it can only be thought one day in a lifetime. Like a water-thought, it swirls amongst the oil of my other thoughts, trying to blend yet unable to do so. It’s a separate thought; a different lining and viscosity that sets it apart from all the rest.
Flashes of my father’s face appear in my mind. They are old images, such as the way he always looked at me with expectation through the ever-present haze of cigarette smoke. Perhaps he wanted more time with me, time I ultimately refused him. I meant to punish him through the lack of my companionship. The punishment was never enough to bring about lasting sobriety, but it never, ever failed to give me hope that this time might just be the time he maintained sober. It took me years to realize I was not responsible for my father’s behavior; neither his sobriety nor his drunkenness.
Yet I was always hopeful he might remain sober, and he was always hopeful I might spend time with him. But he couldn’t remain sober and I couldn’t be around him. And so our lives passed as we remained locked in a stubborn stalemate of disconnection.
His goofy ‘getting drunk’ smile.
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More memories of him rise in my memory. His goofy ‘getting drunk’ smile. The way he stood with his hands on his hips when he was at a loss for words. But my memories are so old: I haven’t had any sort of a relationship with him in more than thirty years. The few times I’ve seen him in the last few decades were because I visited him, and I was always in a hurry to leave once I’d arrived. The smells, the sounds, the conversation, the appearances, the failures and the distance made any connection too painful for me. It was better to separate permanently.
I was born on a Monday at Sunrise Hospital. My father died on a Monday and was taken to Sunrise Memorial.
My father’s caretaker had called me in the morning to say my father was passing. I moved throughout the house with the phone to my ear seeking the best of the usually poor cell phone reception. In the background the wife of my father’s caretaker wailed, repeating, “Don’t leave us, John! John, don’t go!” Even something as personal as my father’s passing could not be private. Wilma’s yells detracted from every aspect of my quiet self trying to process this major life change in silence. In between Wilma’s cries I heard my father moaning with his exhales.
There are no funeral services for my father. I imagine services are for people who have been collectors in their lives. My father did not collect friends, or furniture or jobs or clubs or people or even experiences. Now that he has passed there is no reason to put together any sort of celebration or mourning or service. Yet it feels wrong not to mark the passing of a person.
Even my father, my unmourned, tortured, addicted father, deserves something.
That is when I decide to take his ashes around the world with me and my teenage son.
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