CHAPTER SIX: YOUR HEALING STORY: Understanding
The sad things that happened long ago will always remain part of who we are just as the glad and gracious things will too, but instead of being a burden of guilt, recrimination, and regret that make us constantly stumble as we go, even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead. It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later.
FREDERICK BUECHNER, TELLING SECRETS
ONE DAY DURING THE SUMMER, on Harvester Island, I got an email from a friend whose father had died. In her grief, aswirl with memories, she sent me the eulogy she had written for this kind, generous man. I didn’t know her father, but I read her words with tears and a racing heart. In the space of a few pages, her words awakened a lifetime of suppressed confusion and anger toward my own father. I realized that when my father died, though I was a woman of words, I would have no words for him. Nor tears. Nor, likely, would anyone else. How could someone be born into this world, work, serve in the military, marry, father six children, live for eighty-some years, and leave this world without a tear to mark the loss?
I was writing about hard places in that first memoir, but I wrote as little as I could about people. How could I write well and fairly about living, breathing people around me who were not begging to be in my book? I was already on notice from one person. A few years before, when my first book came out, about women in commercial fishing, my mother stood me in front of her and said, in a commanding voice, eyes locked on mine, “Don’t write about me until I’m dead.”
“Oh, okay,” I stammered, taken aback. I had no plans to do so.
But during the time I worked on the memoir, Kate asked about my mother. Did I have a mother? Why was she virtually absent in my writing? Kate kept complaining about the holes in my story without her. I could only say, “I can’t write about her.” In the two chapters about my growing-up years, I had to account for my parents in some way. So I included a few paragraphs about my father. I knew he’d never read my book and he likely wouldn’t care. Did I dare to write anything further?
It’s scary to write about other people, no matter how warm our relationships. Placing anyone on the page, even ourselves, always requires some kind of distortion. We can only present pieces, moments, a part of who they are, and even then, it’s from our perspective only. How is this fair? Does anyone want to be flattened and examined on a two-dimensional page? Aren’t we all fragile beings, stumbling through this crooked-path life, trying to do our best?
And yet. Much of the story and drama in our lives centers around family and difficult relationships. In class, when I ask, “How many of you have experienced difficult people?” some put their hand up slowly, tentatively, looking around warily for the family police. Some raise their hand partway, limp and weary, like a flag at half-mast. Several will shoot their hand up in fresh anger. But everyone raises a hand.
Then I ask, “How many of you have written about these strained relationships?” Most of the time, no one raises even a finger. (Except Jeanna, who could fairly raise both hands and a foot.)
When I ask why, the reasons sound the same themes:
- My father would kill me if he read this piece.
- If I write about what happened, my brother would never speak to me again.
- My mother thinks my childhood belongs to her. When I write anything about it, she calls me a liar.
- One time I wrote about something that happened to me and my sister. She remembered it totally differently and took offense.
- If I told the truth about my ex-husband, he’d sue me.
Are we then consigned to silence around some of the most momentous and fascinating parts of our lives? How can we write into and out of our lives if we go mute when we most want and need to speak? What happened to the call to tell the truth?
When my friend’s email first came, I didn’t know the answer to these questions. I didn’t know about the research. I only knew I had no choice. I knew intuitively that I had to venture out into the valley of bones with my father, searching for whatever words could be found. I decided to set aside the memoir (sorry, Kate —this is more important) and to write for myself alone, without any thought of publication.
Freed from that litany of fears, I began writing down every memory I had of my father. The list was scant. Then I broke each memory open into scenes, like the scenes we practiced in the first few chapters. I needed to return to those moments full-bodied and awake.
I remembered the moment I hugged him that day when he was kicked out of the house. When he took me on a driving lesson in that old beat-up Mercedes on the potholed road we lived on. How he spent summer nights outside, smoking cigarettes and watching the sky for UFOs, which he believed in with all of his heart. The times my mother made him take off his belt and how he narrowed his lips as he whipped the backs of our legs again and again. How he drank Yuban instant coffee every morning and ate jello like he did in the army, with evaporated milk poured over the top. I remembered him out in the woods with the chain saw, helping us build a woodpile to warm us through the winter. Then my last memory: when I took all my kids to meet him in Florida for the first and only time.
I began to write. I began a story like this:
When my father dies, I may not know about it for days. The people at his housing complex in Sarasota, Florida, don’t know that he has children —six, actually. He has not told anyone about this fact of his life. When he collapsed on the sidewalk last year, it was at least a week before I heard.
I am practicing now, writing about him, venturing out onto a vast empty plain, knowing that day is coming. He is eighty-six, I think, with diabetes, phlebitis, and smoker’s lungs that heave his chest with every breath. We will not have a service. The cessation of his breath will not be enough to draw us together. No one would cry. I don’t want to go to a funeral where no one cries.
Remembering, for me, felt like recovery work, like I was going after a drowning man. Or maybe a drowning woman. I thought of Patricia Hampl’s words, about commemoration, her belief that “every life is sacred and that life is composed of details, of lost moments, of things that nobody cares about, including the people who are wounded or overjoyed by those moments.” She goes on to say, “I don’t think people allow themselves to value their lives enough. They ignore and discard these fragments.”[29]
I was recovering these fragments, but they weren’t enough, of course. The question beneath every scene I wrote wasn’t answered. Why did my father seldom speak to me? Why didn’t he care about anyone in his family? Why couldn’t he hold a job? Why did he steal our money and leave? What was wrong with him?
My words came in a torrent of interrogation, hurt, and curiosity. But I soon hit a dead end. My memories, my experiences were not enough, I realized, because they were only mine. If I was committed to finding truth, I could not stop with the truths of my story; I had to discover the truths of his story as well.
I began to research mental illnesses. I interviewed his brother and sister-in-law, whom I hadn’t spoken to since I was a teenager. I asked about his parents, whom I hadn’t known. I asked my other siblings about their memories. I talked to mental-health experts. I got up early every morning for months and worked.
The larger story I unearthed about my father was not pretty, but it was a relief in many ways. I found a name for my father’s condition. And more, I began to see that my father had not been loved. Yes, he abused others. The human damage is significant, and there is no excuse for that, but there was abuse in his own life as well. I began to see that my family and I were not the only ones lying on the side of the road, robbed and bleeding. He was lying there too.
As I wrote and wrestled, the most unexpected thing happened. After thirty years of little contact, the words that appeared under my pen sent me on a plane to Florida. They walked me into his nursing home, they set my hands on the handles of his wheelchair. They seated me beside him in an ice-cream parlor, sharing a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. Two years later, after he died, those words sent me into the ocean.
One hot, oppressively humid afternoon, a brother, a sister, and I, the three of us, waded out into the ocean he loved and emptied his ashes from our Ziploc bags. We didn’t have a funeral. No one would come. But we cried. The three of us cried.
The words I found to write about my father’s life still were not done. They later sent me into prison.
I’m in a maximum-security prison in California, famous for overcrowding. We’re in a supply closet ringed with shelves of prison uniforms and paper products. It was the only space they could find for our class. I’m sitting in a circle of folding chairs, nearly thigh to thigh with fifteen women wearing the same blue uniforms that are stacked behind us. They are all ages. They are blonde, dark-skinned, gray-haired, young, seniors, and they are all felons. The prison chaplain tells me beforehand that these women have found faith behind the razor wire. Some have even read the forgiveness book that tells my story with my father. When this workshop on forgiveness was offered, they were the first to sign up.
I start. “Hi, I’m Leslie. Would you all tell me your names before we start?”
“Hey, Leslie,” the woman on my left calls out. “I’m Lucy. You got lipstick on your teeth.” She points. “That’s gonna bug the heck outta me.”
“Yeah, that would bug me too.” I use the sleeve of my sweater, then turn and bare my teeth at her. “Did I get it?”
“Nope. Still there.”
I try again, then show her my teeth.
“That’s good enough,” she says.
It’s a great start, the perfect equalizer. I begin telling some of my story with my father and something about forgiveness. They listen, then speak back, telling their stories of abuse, abandonment, violent husbands, mental illness, drugs, homelessness. We talk about the ways we lock our offenders in our own prisons, how exhausting it is for us to keep them there, and all the ways anger and hate destroy us. There are so many tears that someone reaches behind her to the shelf for a roll of toilet paper and we pass it, wiping our faces, one to the next. I don’t know exactly why, but I feel at home with these women.
But talking isn’t enough. I know if we’re going to go deeper, we need to write. Writing always accesses a deeper well than our spoken words.
“Hey, everyone, looks like you all have journals or paper with you? I’d like us to do some writing.”
They pull out their notebooks instantly.
“I’m hoping you came to this workshop with someone in mind, someone you know you need to forgive. Would you write down the name of that person?”
Everyone is done in about ten seconds. Clearly, they were ready.
“Okay, tell what happened between you —a short version. And be gut-honest about it. Maybe you had a fight one night. Maybe your ex left you all his debts. Tell the truth. Be angry if you want or need to. Write what happened and exactly how you felt. We’ll take about five minutes.”
The women lean into their pens, into their notebooks on their knees. I hear nothing but the sound of words shot onto paper.
I wait until they start slowing down. “Okay, so how did that feel?” The answers came rapid-fire. These women didn’t waste time.
“It makes me freakin’ mad all over again,” says an older woman with reddish hair. “I’m in here because of him.” The other women look at her and nod. They know her story.
“I know what happened. My mother still won’t believe me. I just want her to know the truth,” says a young woman with short blonde hair. I think her name is Lorie.
“The truth is the truth. Good, bad, we just gotta deal with it, you know?” says a young woman passionately.
“Yeah, you’re exactly right,” I say back. “Whatever happened, we want to face it, even when people do bad things. We have to call that out. That’s our job. But there’s another side to this. Didn’t Jesus say some things about love?” I look around the circle, hoping I’m not switching gears too soon. I’m not a therapist; I’m not a pastor. Just a writer. Just a teacher. I hope that’s enough.
One woman, Shanille, who kept her head down through most of the sharing, looks up at me for the first time and says softly, “Yeah. We’re supposed to love God.” She can’t be more than twenty.
Lucy, next to me, says, “We got to love our neighbor. We just read that in a Bible study last week or month, whatever. We’re supposed to love our enemies, too, but that ain’t easy. Maybe it ain’t even possible.” Lucy told us earlier she had been sexually abused through most of her childhood.
“There’s a bunch of Bible verses about forgiving like we’ve been forgiven, something like that,” says a woman who said earlier she has six children.
“Yes,” I reply. “So this is tricky. We need to tell the truth of our own experience, which you just did —but we’re also asked to love and forgive. How do we do that? Anyone here know the Good Samaritan story?”
“Hey, I do,” says a middle-aged woman with dark hair. “You want me to say it?”
I nod encouragingly.
She shifts in her seat and looks down at the floor as she speaks, her hands clasped in her lap. “So it’s about a guy who gets beat up on his way from one city to another. I forget the cities. But these thugs steal everything he’s got and leave him by the road to die. Three dudes come along, and they just ignore him, like they don’t even see him, but they do. They just don’t wanna be involved. And the thing is, one is like a priest, all religious, so he’s supposed to help, but he doesn’t. Then the last guy comes along . . . I can’t remember who he is, but everyone hates him. And he turns out to be the one who helps the hurt dude.” She looks up around the circle. “That’s it, right?” she asks, looking at me.
“Wow, perfect,” I say. “Okay, here’s where I’m going with this. Maybe that’s your story too? You got jumped and mugged along the way, along the way to wherever you were going. All of us did, in some way. There we are, lying on the ground, bleeding. But if we look over across the road, maybe we’re going to see someone who really hurt us, lying over there beat up too. Yeah, we need to call out what he did, what she did. We need to tell the truth. But I hope maybe, through writing, we can find a larger perspective. You want to try?” I look around the circle. What if they say no? I have no backup plan.
“Yeah, I’ll try,” Judy says. “I know I’m locked up with that guy. I’m tired of hating him. It’s like he’s ruining my life twice.”
“I forgave my mother,” Jackie adds. “It made me feel so free.”
“I’m not writing about my abuser. I can’t forgive him. He’s the demon,” Lucy says in a low voice.
“I understand,” I respond. “Choose someone you want to forgive.”
“We got nothin’ to lose,” Judy says. Everyone nods.
In the next hour, I lead them through an empathy-building writing exercise (included in the Your Turn! section at the end of this chapter).
The last question is the most important. I give each one in our cleaning-closet circle a single sheet of paper with this prompt at the top:
I’m trying to understand a fuller truth about what happened that day.
Everyone writes, bent over their knees, including me, for about fifteen minutes.
“Okay, everybody, we’re almost out of time. How’d that go?” I ask gently, as people start looking up and around.
“Whewwww,” Shanille exhales. “This is tough. ’Cause I see my stepfather different that night he kicked me out. If I were him, I woulda kicked me out too.”
“That’s what I want us to look at,” I say, looking around. “The first piece you wrote I told you to write from your anger, or write whatever you felt. The second, I asked you to use your pen as eyes, to see what you haven’t seen before, maybe. To be like the Good Samaritan, the guy who actually saw the wounded man beside the road. To see the person you’ve resented and to try writing toward them instead of against them. How did you feel after writing the second piece?”
Lucy has been fidgeting this whole time, her leg shaking my chair. “This was big for me. I, uh . . . can I read mine?”
“Please,” I nod at her.
She begins to read, her voice low but strong. She’s too close for me to watch her face, but her hands shake as she holds her notebook in front of her. She’s reading about something that happened when she was eighteen. It involves drugs, her mother’s boyfriend, a fight, the boyfriend punching her in the face. Her mother ended up calling the police.
Lucy looks up at all of us and says, with half-closed eyes, “Being in here, this place” —she waves her hand to indicate the prison —“I’ve only thought of all the people I’ve hurt. People I hope will forgive me and all the s*** I’ve done. But people have hurt me, too. Like my mom. She had so many rotten relationships that put me through hell. But she was lonely. That’s what I wrote about. I’ve been so mad at her.”
“Forgiveness, Lucy. You gotta forgive yourself. Your mom might forgive you,” says the red-headed woman.
“Can I read what I wrote?” Shanille asks. Her story is about her stepfather, who she’s always hated, she said. She wrote about seeing him in the hospital, how weak and small he looked. She looks up after her last sentence and fixes me with her gaze. “Hey, I see him differently now, I do, but don’t tell me I gotta go take care of him or do what he says. He’s crazy. I’m done with him.”
“I’m not telling you to do that, Shanille. You can forgive someone, let go of your hate, and see them with compassion, but forgiveness doesn’t always mean reconciliation. Some people are too dangerous for that.”
“That’s right.” All the women nod.
Judy, the woman with six kids, reads about her ex-husband, who didn’t support them, and how she took to stealing to provide for her family. She closes by reading, “I made choices too. I ran him off. I ain’t ever takin’ him back, but I gotta quit blamin’ him for everything.”
Before the afternoon is done, every story has been shared. The first stories they wrote are the same stories they’ve written and lived for a long time. The second stories are new. The last words I heard just before I passed through the iron gate that locked behind me were, “We gotta do this more.”
I’ve talked a lot about movement in the past chapters. If we want our writing to move our reader, it must move us first. The question is, where do we want to go? Maybe we want to stay as we are. Maybe we’re perfectly happy with our life and all that’s happened and we just want to record who did what and when and maybe a bit of why and throw around a little blame to feel better. Maybe we don’t mind a bit of anger and hurt. Maybe we’ve been estranged so long from a father or a sister that we don’t really care anymore. But I’m hoping we want more. I’m hoping we’ve seen something of the force of words to enlarge our lives and the power of the Spirit to crack open our hearts and eyes. Don’t we need them opened? I know I do. The hardest work of our lives, as daughters and sons, as husbands and wives, as human beings, is to tilt ourselves off our own hand-carved thrones. In my own myopia, I knew only one story: hurt daughter running from her abusive, emotionless father. My story mattered, but through words, through a seeking spirit, I discovered some of my father’s story, which surely mattered as much as my own.
Are we courageous and daring enough now to write beyond ourselves toward the wounded others in our stories? I’m not asking anyone to whitewash sin. I’m not asking anyone to erase the past in a momentary spasm of feel-good forgetfulness. Rather, this is about using words to find, to write, to live out a loving-your-neighbor story, a story better than the one you’ve been living. Whether you include it with your life stories or not, I hope you say yes.
Through those two years with my father near the end of his life and the two years of writing after, I discovered it’s never too late to embrace the ugliness of the past, to love even the people who ignored and harmed us, and to find the God who carried us through it.
Jeanna, who began the class writing rants against her ex-husbands, began new work. She began writing about her complicated relationship with her mother, her taciturn father, and her aunts. At the end of the year, in her smoke-and-whiskey voice, Jeanna read her best piece from her new memoir: a story about her chain-smoking mother who grew potatoes in stacks of tires and her father who had been a miner and now spent most of the time in his rocking chair on the porch. It was a story that moved us all with its perception and compassion. At the end of the year, Jeanna wasn’t the same woman who began the class.
Heather felt decades of hurt and resentment toward her mother-in-law shift and evaporate as she attended her deathbed —and then later as she wrote into those final moments.
Alysson, despite a shaky past with her family, discovered how much she valued her father.
Lucy, in prison that day, with a pen in her hand, took a first step toward her mother.
I’m not promising butterflies and hot-fudge sundaes at the end of all this. There is vast potential for healing and reconciliation through our writing, but there can also be a cost if we make that writing public. Whenever we’re pursuing truth, especially about difficult relationships, someone will be unhappy. Anne Lamott solves this by saying, blithely, “All I actually have to offer as a writer, is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine. As I’ve said a hundred times, if people wanted me to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”[30]
Yes, so many people should have behaved better, but they didn’t and now what? We walk between the call to truth and the call to compassion: “Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor” and “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”[31]
Every writer must choose a path between the two. Here are some guidelines I’ve discovered along the way:
I’m not saying any of this is easy, but with these guidelines in place, you’ll be surprised how relieving and cathartic it is to write with full honesty and yet also to grow in empathy as you write about hard places and people in your life.
What happens on the other end if you decide to make your writing public? Surely you’ll be safe, writing from a desire for fairness and compassion. But even then, you need to know that someone still might get angry. Someone might call you, shouting, at all hours of the day and night over the lipstick they did or didn’t wear, or they’ll change their minds about being in your book after the book releases. They may say, “I never want to see you again” because you told the family secret, that you were once poor, or that you were once rich, or that you were hungry, or you weren’t. There could be years of angry silence over something you didn’t write. If there is significant family dysfunction already, know that your stories, however careful, true, and kind, will not change your family. But they will change you. And they will change those who read your words.
So it has been for me and for many others. We’ve all been given one life, one “wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver has so beautifully said.[32] Life has been granted to each one of us not to be hoarded but to be given away, fully, extravagantly. So keep writing. Tell the truth. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies. And keep writing.
I did. Four years later, that first story about my father led to a book about forgiveness that went out into the wide world. So many stories came back from fractured families, stories of fierce mercies and of unexpected restorations. These stories still come into my inbox every week.
Patricia Hampl, when talking about commemorating events in our lives, finishes with these words:
I would like my writing to be precise enough, detailed enough so that the attention I bring to bear on something unlocks a door to the reader’s life. In that way, by honoring one’s own life, it’s possible to extend empathy and compassion to others.[33]
For me, it began with one story written with trembling hands —one story about trying to understand another’s story. Henry David Thoreau asks, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”[34]
Through writing, we can make that miracle happen every day.
Your Turn!
- 1. This chapter is more personal than previous chapters. What thoughts and ideas made sense to you? What thoughts and ideas did you find challenging?
- 2. Read the two essays that follow: Heather’s essay about her mother-in-law and an excerpt from that first essay I wrote about my father. Identify those places where we’re truthful about our feelings and our experiences with a difficult relationship. Identify where we move toward understanding. Do these stories move you in a particular direction?
- 3. Now it’s time to do your own writing! Here is the series of questions I used with the women in this chapter. Because the questions build on one another, it’s best to do the whole series in one sitting. With a timekeeper, the entire exercise can be done in sixty minutes. Feel free to take longer if you have the time. Write freely, openly. This exercise is not for publication —it’s for you!
Writing toward Compassion
- 1. Choose someone you’re in conflict with or someone who has deeply disappointed you. Write down his/her name.
- 2. What lies between you and that person? Describe the break or gap in your relationship briefly but honestly. Don’t be afraid to express the depth of your emotions.
- 3. Take five minutes to consider this person’s life. Make a list of some major challenges, disappointments, and losses he/she has experienced. (Example: abandoned by father, lost jobs, raised by a single parent, mother an alcoholic, Iraq War vet).
- 4. Choose one of these events or circumstances that you know something about. In ten minutes, describe the hardship with as much detail as you can. Then write considering what kind of impact this might have had on his/her life and development.
- 5. Return to a moment of hurtful conflict between you and the other person. To write into that moment, choose one of the following options (whichever feels most appropriate). Take a bit more time with this, at least fifteen minutes.
- a. Write into this moment of conflict using this prompt: For once, I want to tell a fuller truth about that night/day. Write with a desire to understand this event from the other’s perspective as well as your own.
- b. If you’d like to take a step closer to this person and this event, try stepping into their shoes, writing about that event in the first person, taking on the voice of the other. (Example: I could write about one of the times my father left us. I would write as him: “I wasn’t thinking about leaving until that last job. I knew I was going to be fired again. And so soon after losing the other one. I couldn’t face my family again.”) Note: This is not an appropriate exercise for situations of abuse or other serious mistreatment.
- 6. If appropriate, and if writers are willing, consider sharing your final stories in a LifeStory Circle. Giving our words and our out-loud voice to another’s perspective can be particularly powerful.
LOVING AGAIN
by Heather Johnson
I sit by her side, stroking her thin, gray hair adorned with a rhinestone headband, a fitting crown for our family matriarch.
“She’s close,” the hospice nurse tells Todd and me as we hear the death rattle begin.
“How long?” I ask.
“Maybe ten minutes.”
I wonder how Karen can be so certain. Then again, her job is helping people die. I stand and turn away from Avis’s hospital bed, which is set in the center of her living room. Todd pulls me close as I cry softly so she won’t hear.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” I whisper to Todd. “Maybe she doesn’t want me here. Maybe I’m causing her distress.”
Todd remains calm, comforting. I should be the one comforting him, the second son of his dying mother.
Karen assures me. “I’ve been watching her. Whenever you stroke her head, she settles. Her breathing eases. She’s glad you’re here.”
I want to believe Karen. But Karen doesn’t know our history. In the beginning, Avis and I enjoyed a warm relationship. We walked often along Lake Michigan’s shore, chatting about the grandkids before Todd and I adopted kids of our own. I even called her my “Naomi,” after the biblical story.
Avis’s idiosyncrasies were endearing at first, especially how she preached about her top three values: God, family, and country, although not necessarily in that order. In fact, I’m pretty sure Ronald Reagan ranked right up there with Jesus; next to the lighted Christmas star hanging year-round on the front of her carport was a white, metal sign with red letters declaring her territory: Reagan Country.
Avis also mixed God and country inside her house. Above the sofa in her living room, Avis displayed a framed photo of Ronnie wearing a cowboy hat. Next to him was a hooked rug of Jerusalem, and next to Jerusalem was a stuffed barracuda she caught off the coast of Florida so long ago that the fish had lost most of its teeth.
When it came to family matters, Avis knew best, and she made sure everyone knew it. She could not understand why other family members didn’t agree with her.
We soon saw this side of Avis when Todd and I decided to homeschool our kids during their elementary years. We bought a travel trailer and took our books on the road. Sort of like living in a bookmobile, except we owned the bus and the books. After relentless coaxing on my part, Avis gave in and joined us.
The six of us traveled coast-to-coast and border-to-border on five trips from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Ronald Reagan’s ranch in Santa Barbara. But our first trip to Texas should have been our last with Grandma Avis.
Avis felt free to critique our parenting, especially our requirement that the kids do schoolwork on our trips. (We were, after all, homeschooling!) One night, after another negative comment, I was exasperated. I stepped out of the trailer and marched over to Todd, who was stoking the campfire.
“I’ve had it with your mom!” I hissed. “If she doesn’t stop criticizing our parenting, I might just have to break a commandment and strap her to the top of the trailer with bungee cords so we can get her home for a proper burial!”
I remembered Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Vacation doing this to his infuriating aunt.
Todd’s even temperament calmed my anger that night. But it was Scrabble that got us through our subsequent trips. Avis was the only one who could beat me, and she did so repeatedly, with outrageous words like ZIT placed over the triple-letter word square. We both had an equal love of the game that often redirected negativity and helped us focus on our enjoyable experience.
Through the years and the trips, I kept quiet about her criticisms of our parenting. Until a trip to Arizona to visit my dad with our three kids and without Todd.
One morning, while having coffee overlooking the contours of the Santa Rita Mountains, Avis began expressing her concerns about our kids again, all three of whom had been adopted from Russia. I had plenty of concerns myself. By this time, they had been tested by many specialists. Medications and multiple therapies had become our daily routine.
“You know, the only thing wrong with your kids is you,” she blurted that morning over her coffee cup. “They spend too much time with you. They need to be in school to be socialized. This homeschooling isn’t good for them.”
I couldn’t breathe. I felt hurt and anger running through me like flame set to a gasoline trail. As the kids’ issues had become increasingly apparent, I was already plagued with self-doubt. Were Todd and I parenting them right and well, especially with their disabilities? What was it about me, specifically, that made me not good enough as their mother? Now, I felt sliced to the bone by the one I loved as my own mother.
I put my shaking coffee cup down on the table and looked her straight in the eyes.
“Avis, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Furthermore, your opinions about me and our kids aren’t helpful. They’re hurtful.”
“Well, it’s what I think,” she retorted unapologetically.
“Maybe it might be better to keep your opinions to yourself unless I ask for them.”
She glared at me. I stood up, walked inside to the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and cried, my hands muffling my mouth so she wouldn’t hear.
Avis’s direct criticism of my parenting continued, spreading to extended family and some of my closest friends, who told me what she had said. I felt betrayed and began distancing myself from her, going to the lake less often, avoiding being in her presence without Todd. But in the last two years of her life, through her steady, rapid decline, I began feeling compassion for her. The early love we once shared began returning. After all, she was losing control of her family, her decisions, her bodily functions. How would I feel if I were in her position? What would I want in my last months?
I bought her fuzzy, fingerless gloves for her always-cold hands. I made her favorite apricot-shortbread cookies that always brought a smile to her face. I cleaned her house, and she not only allowed me, she thanked me.
I began seeing my part in our broken relationship, how my own insecurities allowed her critical words to take hold and fester. And I began recognizing that much of what she said and did came from fear of losing her family, whom she deeply loved, from fear of losing control.
Now, she had lost all control. She could do nothing but lie still as we swabbed the saliva she could no longer swallow, as we loved her the best we could.
In those final moments, her breath became shallow and soft. As I sat beside her on the bed, I saw the death of each of us. Now I wanted only one thing: I wanted Avis to pass peacefully, surrounded by love.
A few moments later, I place my hand on her arm. No response. No movement of her chest. I lower my ear. No rattle. No breath. Her eyes are frozen, half-opened.
“I think she’s gone.”
“No, she’s still breathing,” Todd says to me, hoping.
Karen rises from the old oak table where the family has gathered for decades and walks past Todd. She places the stethoscope’s metal disk over Avis’s heart. We wait in silence.
Karen gently removes the stethoscope and pulls them from her ears. Her next three words shatter my husband’s wishful thinking.
“She’s with God.”
I hold Todd’s hand, tighter than before. He squeezes mine.
His tears fall freely now. He leans over the bed and pulls the white blanket up to his mother’s chin as if she needs to be warmed. Tenderly, he closes her half-open eyes with his fingers and kisses her forehead. Karen calls the funeral home. Within the hour, Avis’s lifeless body is bagged and removed on a gurney. Later, her body would be cremated and her life memorialized.
Something else went out on that gurney the day of my mother-in-law’s death. I saw it. My grievances and hurt were bagged and wheeled out with her. They would burn to ash like her lifeless body.
I know we’ll be together again someday. And when we are, I can’t wait to tell her she’s still my Naomi. And then I’ll say, “Let’s get that Scrabble game. And this time, I get the Z.”
FINDING OUR NAMES
by Leslie Leyland Fields
Fathers and teachers, I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
When my father dies, I may not know about it for days. The people at his housing complex in Sarasota, Florida, don’t know that he has children —six, actually. He has not told anyone about this fact of his life. When he collapsed on the sidewalk last year, it was at least a week before I heard.
I am practicing now, writing about him, venturing out onto a vast empty plain, knowing that day is coming. He is eighty-six, I think, with diabetes, phlebitis, and smoker’s lungs that heave his chest with every breath. We will not have a service. The cessation of his breath will not be enough to draw us together. No one would cry. I don’t want to go to a funeral where no one cries.
When I was nine, I remember him standing in the den, his dark suit on, his hat, a gray overcoat, the clothes he wore when he drove off every day. A traveling salesman, like his father. But his jobs never lasted for long. He was always fired. My throat caught as he stood there, suitcase in hand. He was leaving: my first memory of his many banishments.
When I was in eighth grade, he left on his own. We had a little money left in the bank from the sale of our last house three years before —less than a thousand dollars. Our cupboards had always been sparse, but now we were down to twenty-seven dollars a week for food, eating canned mackerel for dinner, boiled chicken necks, or cracked eggs that we bought for twenty-five cents a dozen. On one of these days, my father drove to the bank, withdrew all that was left to fix his car, and then motored off. We found him one night, a month or two later, I think. I am not sure how long. He came back, promising that he would keep a job; he would show interest in his family; he would care about his children; he would be a husband and a father. I never wondered why he did not do any of these things.
He had been Christian Science for a while, then nothing, then an atheist, with special enthusiasm for UFOs. He watched for them every clear summer night, standing out on the grass, surveying the dark tent overhead. When we were younger, we watched, too, sometimes. He told us of spaceships he had seen, close-up, of fireballs shooting at him right there on our back road in New Hampshire —his conversion experience. He never wavered in his belief after that. Except one year. A letter with his tight scrawl showed up in my mailbox, the second or third letter he had ever written to me. He had read all the way through the New Testament, he wrote. He believed in Jesus. Would I forgive him? I cried bitterly for two days after that letter, because I could claim no part in his scandalous redemption. I had never even thought to pray for him. And I was not sure I could forgive him —for my persistent invisibility, the times he made me touch him while tucking me in at night, the poverty and the work. . . . A year later, after a flurry of mail between us, he wrote his last letter for a while, tucked inside a box of all the books I had sent him, along with magazines with aliens and spaceships on the covers: Dear Leslie, don’t call me daddy anymore. I am returning all the books you’ve sent, I don’t have room for them on my boat. Don’t talk to me about God or church. I’m sending you some magazines you should read.
Fifteen years later, we all flew down to Florida, my husband and children and I. This was my children’s only chance to meet their grandfather. He was eighty-four then. They had little curiosity about him, and he knew nothing about them. I wanted them to know who he was for themselves. Someday they would care.
I warned the older kids, sixteen to nine years old, that he probably would not look at them or ask their names or ages. I didn’t tell them he was their grandfather; I just told them this man was my father.
When we pulled up to the VA-housing complex in Sarasota, my husband, Duncan, who was driving, saw him first. “There he is.”
I recognized his head, nearly bald, distinctively square, with a barely visible neck, dark-skinned. All as I remembered. But heavy, maybe forty pounds heavier than the last time I had seen him. He was wearing shorts and a jersey, the jersey tight over his belly. I stared at him, suddenly frozen. What do I do? How do I play this scene? Loving daughter greeting long-lost father? Kind daughter bringing her children to meet their invisible grandfather? The van stopped. I got out slowly. The side doors opened, and the kids piled out, one after another. My father stood there watching, looking past the kids, not seeming to see them. I suddenly knew what to do. I smiled and hugged him lightly, patting him on the back.
“Hi, how ahh ya?” he asked in his Massachusetts accent. He smiled a little, showing most of his teeth broken or gone.
“Good. We had a little trouble finding this place,” I said, with false brightness.
He walked us around his apartment complex and then up to his room. “I cleaned up for you.” He grimaced, waving around the room, showing us the results —a box of a room awash in old newspapers and stacks of magazines and ash trays, a bed and couch taking up most of the floor space. He showed me his refrigerator and the contents of his freezer —mostly cheap TV dinners and ice cream. My brother told me he had eaten ice cream before bed every night of his life since the divorce. Coffee in the morning, cigarettes, ice cream at night, UFOs. That was all he needed.
We loaded into the van, nine of us now, and drove to Crystal Beach on his suggestion. Everyone went in the water except my father and me. We sat there in the white sun on the white beach, just he and I. This was my last chance to know who he was, to find a fissure, something to take me down into that frozen stillness. I asked him about the war, about his mother and father, about his childhood —I knew so little. He didn’t remember much and answered in short, vague sentences, spoken sideways, eyes always away. I was bothering him. I hadn’t seen him for ten years, but all he wanted to do was sit in the sun, watch the water, and be quiet.
Two hours later, we were headed back, the day at the beach already exhausted. Had we really spent all that money to fly down here for these two hours? He hadn’t asked the names of my children or spoken to them. We dropped him off at his building. I got out of the car to say good-bye, my body leaden, ready to drive away. I gave him a quick hug, shoulders only, not wanting to feel his body against mine. As I pulled away, he held on and looked me in the eyes, his face just a foot away from mine, and said, “You’re amazing.”
I startled, not believing what I had heard. “What do you mean?”
“Up there in Alaska, fishing, with six kids, writing. You’re amazing. You’re a success.”
I blinked, aghast. He had thoughts about me? I patted his shoulder, pressed my lips into a smile, and ducked down into the car, quick, before I could want him to say anything more.
This is almost everything I know about my father. I had no intention of ever writing about him, but an e-mail came last week from a friend whose father had died. She sent the essay she wrote for his service. It was beautiful and mournful, filled with all she would miss without him. Hours later, I began to write, and I could not stop. I wouldn’t be satisfied with a pat and a fake smile this time. Not until a name was given —any name.
I began with a guess, searching on the Internet for information on schizophrenia. I read pages, scrolled through every personality disorder until I found it, from the American Psychological Association:
A pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:
- 1. Neither desires nor enjoys close relationships, including being part of a family.
- 2. Almost always chooses solitary activities.
- 4. Takes pleasure in few, if any, activities.
- 5. Lacks close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives.
- 6. Appears indifferent to the praise or criticism of others.
- 7. Shows emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affectivity.[35]
Why have I waited until I am nearly fifty to find this name —schizoid personality disorder?
I cried most of the week I wrote this essay, but in finding his name, I found my own true name, too: Mercy. Pema Chödrön has written, “How did I get so lucky to have my heart awakened to others and their suffering?”[36] What mercy is this, to be given life from one who cannot love or cry and to be granted the glad burden of others’ sorrows? In The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zossima claims that hell is “the suffering of being unable to love.” I am not sure this is true. I have lived in the house of such a man. His face is almost heavenly —content, his visage unwrinkled and untroubled even at eighty-six, a sure tranquility without the complication of remembrance or regret. And he has loved. It is never a question of not loving —it is only a question of what is loved. He loved what little he could.
Maybe I will go back when the call comes. Maybe I will go sooner. I could fly down and take him back to Crystal Beach. I wouldn’t ask him questions or want anything from him. I would be grateful for that one moment when he saw me and almost spoke my name —
No, this is not enough. This is not the ending I can write or live. I have to want. I have to believe that fathers should love their children; I have to remember and write all that was done and lost and missed. And if, each time I remember, I can cry for him, for me, for my family, maybe this is love.