Orange Roses and Celery Salt
Desiree Marchand
There’s one image I cannot get out of my mind recently: a blood stain on an otherwise beige carpet. Of course, the carpet would have to be cleaned, the landlord said. A man whose name I’ve already forgotten. Of course, my sister replied with downcast eyes. That blood stain is all that is left of my father now besides his body that lies in the cemetery and a small group of belongings divided among the three of us and Goodwill.
My father was an alcoholic. He loved reading. His mind was reduced to newspaper reading after so many years of alcohol. He had scoliosis. We have the same deep chocolate brown eyes. In the last few years his hair grayed. He only ate meals a couple of times a week. He had a fondness for candy of almost any kind. We found wrappers all over the living room. He was a baker for Wellesley College for over thirty years. He loved celery salt and always kept it on hand. We found a whole unopened bottle in the kitchen. None of us inherited this taste, so we threw the bottle away. Even I could write a better obituary than that funeral home, and I barely knew the man.
On January 13, 2011 I learned, to my horror, that an open casket is a trademark of Catholic funerals. There I was in the front row of the funeral home chapel staring at the corpse of my father. I opted for the floor instead. I trained my eyes on one spot of the carpet throughout the service. I don’t know who created funeral traditions, but I’d be willing to bet they never had to sit in that front row. The last thing I wanted was to be hugged by a bunch of strangers and family members I hadn’t seen in at least ten years. Their trademark expression was, “I’m sorry for your loss.” So am I, but I don’t have to tell people that for them to understand it.
The only thing that kept me from breaking out in tears like my sister was the priest. I’m an atheist, but my father’s entire family is Catholic. The priest had to be the least comforting person I’d ever met. Maybe there’s a missing link somewhere in Catholic education which ensures that enough biblical passages, hymns and grandstanding about the nature of the soul are the proper ointment for grief. What I do know is that my father receiving a fully Catholic education ensured that my siblings and I did not. He told us as much on multiple occasions.
This man started by reading two biblical passages followed by a recording of a hymn which he waited minutes for. He stood there telling us that he wasn’t sure if it was going to play. Obviously his planning skills weren’t very reliable. Then he spent the greater part of an hour and a half explaining the two passages he had read in the beginning. As I was trying not to stare at the coffin and my father’s face, he talked about salvation and Jesus. I tried not to roll my eyes at my father’s funeral.
I may not be religious, but I know the story. The basic plot of Adam and Eve and the birth and death of Jesus are common knowledge. They are certainly important in the literature that I study. They are not relevant to my father’s death. The priest, who from his introduction seems to do funerals all across the state of Maine, did not realize that while he was delivering his speech, my brother and I were fuming with anger. My aunt and her mother started talking. I just wanted it to end, but not for the usual reasons.
My history with my father was complicated at best. After he moved out I only saw him in nursing homes and several times, not by choice, at his apartment in Framingham before he moved back to Maine. When he moved back to Biddeford, Maine a little over half a year ago, I wanted his siblings to look out for him. In the end, I found out that they didn’t do much except pick out his scenic waterfront apartment where he drank himself to death at the age of 63.
After the brief burial, my Uncle Donny took us over to my father’s apartment. He gave us a short tour and led us into the room he had refused to enter four days earlier when the landlord called him to say he hadn’t seen my father for a few days. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the red rectangular spot on the floor where Donny explained he had been found, dead, probably for days.
When my parents were dating, my mother asked my father for orange roses. After his funeral she explained to me that at the time they were very difficult to find. If he took the time to track them down, she knew that he had made an effort that normal red roses would not require. My sister broke down in tears and left the room after she saw the bouquet of orange roses and yellow daisies on my father’s coffin. I didn’t know the story then, but if I did, I imagine that my reaction would have been similar. So I asked my mother to explain it to me. The strange thing about this is that my father was a very private person. None of us could believe that he told anyone about this.
I’ve been thinking a lot about orange roses lately. My father used to get my mother, sister and me orange roses for Valentine’s Day. The tradition continued even after they became something available at local grocery stores. This Valentine’s Day weekend, almost exactly a month after my father’s funeral, when I went home, I stared at a bouquet of orange roses at Whole Foods. I almost bought them for my mother. I decided that if the idea made me sad, it would probably be the same for her. Despite my father’s alcoholism, my mother has always maintained that he was a good man.
When my Aunt Carol called almost a week earlier to tell us that he died she asked to speak to my mother, but my sister answered. She left the room. I was on the sectional on the right wall of the living room. My brother was in his computer chair so his back was to us. She hung up before she came into to tell us “Dad’s dead.” For a while I just sat there.
After a certain amount of time you get used to the calls. Since my parents’ divorce almost three years ago, we’ve gotten the call when he’s fallen down and been taken to the hospital. From the hospital he would go to a nursing home where he’d stay until he finished his physical therapy. They never could get him to agree to rehab. I was a senior in high school the first time he was hospitalized. I spent a week writing a poem about it. It was a pattern, if not comfortable, at least reassuring in a way. We knew that the hospital would take better care of him than he would of himself. There was no alcohol there for him. Each time I would see how much worse he looked. The last time I saw him almost a year ago he looked like an old man. I knew death was coming. I just didn’t know when.
After a few minutes I got off of the couch and walked through the dining room into the kitchen. I started doing dishes and crying. I had been trying to get through the massive pile of dishes on our counter all day. Now seemed like as good a time as any. I started tearing up so much that I had to stop washing the dishes. I backed up and slouched into the door that goes out onto the porch. I cried so hard my nose started running.
When I was in elementary and middle school, I learned that if I cried in class because I was frustrated or sad or sick, teachers would get concerned. They would ask me if I was okay. Of course I wasn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be crying. Did I want to go to the nurse or out into the hallway? No, I wanted them to leave me alone. So I learned to control my tears the best I could. I don’t usually let people see me crying. I cry alone.
So that day while my sister sat on the other sectional in the living room bawling, I stood in the kitchen doing the same. My brother was stone faced. My mother was at work. My brother-in-law was upstairs on the computer doing job applications. My niece, who only met my father once, was too young to understand what was going on. My sister called my mother to tell her. When she got home she told us she’d cried her tears years ago.
My father’s death was like a second loss. We all lost him many years ago to alcohol when he put it ahead of his family. I tell most people now that I grew up in essentially a one parent household. It’s true. Even when my father lived with us he wasn’t really there. He was a ghost. He slept in his bed. He went to work. He came home and sat out on the porch and drank beer after beer after beer. That was his life. He didn’t talk to us or my mother. He didn’t eat meals with us. He didn’t help raise us.
When I was young I didn’t talk about my father. None of my friends met him. No one asked questions. In high school I finally wanted to talk to someone, anyone outside of my family, about my father’s alcoholism. Most of my friends shrugged it off. They didn’t want me to talk about it. There were two exceptions: my best friend Tiffany and my close friend Rai. They let me talk on and on. After high school I found out that two of the friends who wouldn’t talk to me about my father had alcoholic mothers. They didn’t want to talk. I wanted to scream. I wanted everyone to hear me including him. It took me years to realize there is a difference between hearing and understanding.
When I first found out about their alcoholic mothers I was angry. At a time when I felt like I couldn’t get anyone to hear or understand me there were two people close to me with similar experiences. I wanted to know why they wouldn’t talk, but eventually I understood. Knowing that about their mothers made me realize why they would never talk to me about anything serious. In middle school when I was first coming to a full understanding of my father’s alcoholism all I wanted to do was close the door to my room and cry. Denial is a form of coping which is more powerful in a way than acceptance. Marie was always saying derogatory things about her mother. It took me until near the end of our friendship to understand that “My mother’s an alcoholic” was a confession, not a joke. Kelley was always telling us that her mother was sick. She got seizures, the local policemen and paramedics were on a first name basis with her. Once she told me, in a barely audible tone, “My mother used to be an alcoholic.” I thought nothing of it because she stated it in the past tense. Over, I thought. Done with. Fixed. Later Kelley moved back home instead of going back to college so that she could be closer to her mother if her health declined. I hope this is a step toward acceptance for her.
My sophomore year of high school I met a man who understood my struggle. Mr. Sullivan is the advisor of Philosophy Club and a Psychology teacher at Hopkinton High School. His father was an alcoholic. He shares this information with his Psychology classes every year. He also shared it at Philosophy Club. So did I. I have been fortunate enough to have great teachers who have taught me not just about class content, but also about life. I only had one semester of Psychology with Mr. Sullivan, but I had three years of Philosophy Club. He is the only man I have ever really been able to talk to, and he is my father figure. I shared the poem I wrote about my father’s first hospitalization with him. I still go back to visit.
My head is on repeat like my music. I know there was nothing I could have done, but I can’t stop thinking about it. My father died, and no one was there for him. It was the way we always thought it would happen, but it breaks my heart. I carry a laminated remembrance card of him in the back left pocket of my jeans. My Uncle Donny gave it to me at the funeral.
There’s a stinging irony to the date of my father’s death and funeral. He died a week before my 21st birthday. His funeral was the day before. For a year now I’ve made the point to anyone who would listen that it’s just another year for me. There is nothing to celebrate about turning twenty-one. In fact, for me there is a lot to mourn. I let everyone know that I don’t and won’t ever drink. The odds are stacked against me. My father suffered with alcoholism all his life. Four out of his five brothers have also struggled with it. Only one has come out sober.
I know what alcohol does to people. The smell makes me sick. Being the child of an alcoholic is very difficult at college. When I was a freshman, I let everyone know my father was an alcoholic. I tried to make it drown out all I overheard about fellow students drinking. It didn’t work. Even now, especially after my father’s death, it stings. The people on the first floor of my building get drunk all the time and do karaoke to horrible popular music songs. It’s gotten worse this semester.
Last semester I was talking to my friend and apartment-mate Joe about turning twenty-one. I told him, not for the first time, that I am never going to drink. He stared right at me and said “Not even wine?” I’ve known Joe since freshman year. We’d known each other for a semester when I told him about my father for the first time. This time I just looked at him. I thought has nothing I’ve said to you for the past two and a half years sunk in?
It’s like that for me most days. I’d like to lie and say that I can get people to understand why I don’t want to hear about their drinking or see them drunk. The truth is this: every time I hear about people drinking every night of the week and making fools of themselves at parties, I think about my father. I see alcoholics in the making. I think about all the suffering they will put their families through in the future if they don’t stop this. And I cry.
At the beginning of the semester I told my apartment-mate Mike that housing for next year gave me a headache because I wouldn’t be able to find a whole group of people who don’t drink. “Let people have fun,” he said. I exploded at him. I told him my father just died at 63 because of his drinking. He promptly went silent.
I spent most of my twenty-first birthday watching TV trying to drown that blood stain out of my memory. Rai came over unannounced to see how I was. Later, when she left, Tiffany came. We exchanged overdue Christmas presents. She gave me a tea tumbler for my birthday. We sat in the kitchen drinking strawberry tea and talking about our lives, our schedules for the upcoming semester, and our perilous housing options for next year. In that way it was just what I wanted, but there was the hollow part of my heart that knew my relative anonymity came from the proximity to my father’s death.
The next day my sister, brother-in-law, brother and I drove the two hours to Biddeford to clean out my father’s apartment. When we saw it after his funeral, we figured that it wouldn’t take very long to clean out. My father was a minimalist. He didn’t hold onto much. Most of the furniture and pots and pans were given to him by my mother when he moved out. An entire room was devoted to storage. When we cleaned out the closet we use for an attic this past summer we found some of my father’s belongings including many of his race car trophies, records and books. Only about half of his belongings that were in the closet had gotten to him by the time he died. He didn’t unpack anything that we gave him from the closet. He kept his jeans in an old suitcase. He had a toiletry box. Only one of the drawers in his bedroom had clothes in it. The rest of the clothes were in trash bags.
At the end of the day I had a hurt back (I inherited my father’s scoliosis) and a greater understanding of the man my father was. He wasn’t there for us, but he loved us. He kept every anniversary card my mother ever gave him. He had my sister’s marathon jackets and my brother’s robotics medal. He kept every present and every card we ever gave him. I found some of my sister’s homework from early elementary school. She’s thirty-one now. He had pictures of us everywhere. He’d framed a picture of him and my niece that my sister had sent him. Three trips to Goodwill later we packed the cars up with everything we were keeping. We only left behind an empty box and the blood stain.
The last time my father was in the hospital and then the nursing home my uncle Donny gave him an ultimatum: go to rehab or he would stop being my father’s power of attorney. Eventually he backed down, but not before my mother read the four page letter he wrote telling my father that if he didn’t go to rehab Donny would refuse to handle his financial affairs. Donny is the only one of my father’s brothers who hasn’t had problems with alcohol. He had the arrogance to try to do what we never could. If my mother, siblings and I weren’t enough reason for my father to go to rehab, what made his brother think that he would be?
Alcoholism is a twisted riddle in that way. If you don’t see it up close it gets distorted, but if you see it too close you’re likely to be blinded by your experience. When it comes to drinking, I see in sharp black and white. There is no gray. It’s a blessing and a curse, especially in college, where gray seems to be the only viewpoint. It took all the strength I had not to cry every time I smelled alcohol my freshman year. The reaction is that knee jerk.
Aside from pictures, there wasn’t much of my father’s that I wanted to keep. I took a box of books and a box of kitchen supplies. I’d lost what I wanted from my father years ago. I wanted him to be there for my siblings, my mother and me. I wanted him to stop drinking. I wanted a normal life. Whatever that means. I’ve wanted and wanted for years until I’ve broken down crying. I need to stop wanting what will never come to pass. It took me until high school to accept my father’s alcoholism. I’ve been trying to move past it ever since. I’m not sure there is a way to move past death.
On Saturday, March 26th I stood in front of a small room of people at the Sigma Tau Delta Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and read a piece I wrote during finals week last year titled “Anonymous” about my father’s alcoholism. I submitted it back in November. I didn’t expect it to get accepted. When I got the email notification I had a mix of joy and utter pain. Two months after my father’s death I stood in front of an audience and told snips-its of my story, his story. I was the last of four people doing readings in the room that day. Another woman also wrote about her father’s alcoholism. I’ve learned something about children of alcoholics. They come out of the woodwork when you tell your story. The moderator of our session shared the fact that her father was an alcoholic during the question and answer segment of our reading. There is a power in speaking what you often try to hide.
As these women told their stories I become empowered to tell my own. I’ve never been much of a public speaker, so when I stepped up to the small round table that served as a podium I began with my dedication to my father in a shaky voice. However, as I continued reading, my voice grew strength.
We were all asked what the distance between the events we talked about in our work and when we wrote it was. Did we choose to wait? Did we almost decide not to write about it? Writing about my father’s alcoholism has never been a choice for me. When he was in and out of the hospital I would write for days straight in-between my everyday life. After he died I knew I would write about it. I forced myself to write. I typed through tears so that I could speak for all those who choose to be silent.
My father was an alcoholic. He loved reading. His mind was reduced to newspaper reading after so many years of alcohol. He had scoliosis. We have the same deep chocolate brown eyes. In the last few years his hair grayed. He only ate meals a couple of times a week. He had a fondness for candy of almost any kind. We found wrappers all over the living room. He was a baker for Wellesley College for over thirty years. He loved celery salt and always kept it on hand. We found a whole unopened bottle in the kitchen. None of us inherited this taste, so we threw the bottle away. Even I could write a better obituary than that funeral home, and I barely knew the man.
On January 13, 2011 I learned, to my horror, that an open casket is a trademark of Catholic funerals. There I was in the front row of the funeral home chapel staring at the corpse of my father. I opted for the floor instead. I trained my eyes on one spot of the carpet throughout the service. I don’t know who created funeral traditions, but I’d be willing to bet they never had to sit in that front row. The last thing I wanted was to be hugged by a bunch of strangers and family members I hadn’t seen in at least ten years. Their trademark expression was, “I’m sorry for your loss.” So am I, but I don’t have to tell people that for them to understand it.
The only thing that kept me from breaking out in tears like my sister was the priest. I’m an atheist, but my father’s entire family is Catholic. The priest had to be the least comforting person I’d ever met. Maybe there’s a missing link somewhere in Catholic education which ensures that enough biblical passages, hymns and grandstanding about the nature of the soul are the proper ointment for grief. What I do know is that my father receiving a fully Catholic education ensured that my siblings and I did not. He told us as much on multiple occasions.
This man started by reading two biblical passages followed by a recording of a hymn which he waited minutes for. He stood there telling us that he wasn’t sure if it was going to play. Obviously his planning skills weren’t very reliable. Then he spent the greater part of an hour and a half explaining the two passages he had read in the beginning. As I was trying not to stare at the coffin and my father’s face, he talked about salvation and Jesus. I tried not to roll my eyes at my father’s funeral.
I may not be religious, but I know the story. The basic plot of Adam and Eve and the birth and death of Jesus are common knowledge. They are certainly important in the literature that I study. They are not relevant to my father’s death. The priest, who from his introduction seems to do funerals all across the state of Maine, did not realize that while he was delivering his speech, my brother and I were fuming with anger. My aunt and her mother started talking. I just wanted it to end, but not for the usual reasons.
My history with my father was complicated at best. After he moved out I only saw him in nursing homes and several times, not by choice, at his apartment in Framingham before he moved back to Maine. When he moved back to Biddeford, Maine a little over half a year ago, I wanted his siblings to look out for him. In the end, I found out that they didn’t do much except pick out his scenic waterfront apartment where he drank himself to death at the age of 63.
After the brief burial, my Uncle Donny took us over to my father’s apartment. He gave us a short tour and led us into the room he had refused to enter four days earlier when the landlord called him to say he hadn’t seen my father for a few days. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the red rectangular spot on the floor where Donny explained he had been found, dead, probably for days.
When my parents were dating, my mother asked my father for orange roses. After his funeral she explained to me that at the time they were very difficult to find. If he took the time to track them down, she knew that he had made an effort that normal red roses would not require. My sister broke down in tears and left the room after she saw the bouquet of orange roses and yellow daisies on my father’s coffin. I didn’t know the story then, but if I did, I imagine that my reaction would have been similar. So I asked my mother to explain it to me. The strange thing about this is that my father was a very private person. None of us could believe that he told anyone about this.
I’ve been thinking a lot about orange roses lately. My father used to get my mother, sister and me orange roses for Valentine’s Day. The tradition continued even after they became something available at local grocery stores. This Valentine’s Day weekend, almost exactly a month after my father’s funeral, when I went home, I stared at a bouquet of orange roses at Whole Foods. I almost bought them for my mother. I decided that if the idea made me sad, it would probably be the same for her. Despite my father’s alcoholism, my mother has always maintained that he was a good man.
When my Aunt Carol called almost a week earlier to tell us that he died she asked to speak to my mother, but my sister answered. She left the room. I was on the sectional on the right wall of the living room. My brother was in his computer chair so his back was to us. She hung up before she came into to tell us “Dad’s dead.” For a while I just sat there.
After a certain amount of time you get used to the calls. Since my parents’ divorce almost three years ago, we’ve gotten the call when he’s fallen down and been taken to the hospital. From the hospital he would go to a nursing home where he’d stay until he finished his physical therapy. They never could get him to agree to rehab. I was a senior in high school the first time he was hospitalized. I spent a week writing a poem about it. It was a pattern, if not comfortable, at least reassuring in a way. We knew that the hospital would take better care of him than he would of himself. There was no alcohol there for him. Each time I would see how much worse he looked. The last time I saw him almost a year ago he looked like an old man. I knew death was coming. I just didn’t know when.
After a few minutes I got off of the couch and walked through the dining room into the kitchen. I started doing dishes and crying. I had been trying to get through the massive pile of dishes on our counter all day. Now seemed like as good a time as any. I started tearing up so much that I had to stop washing the dishes. I backed up and slouched into the door that goes out onto the porch. I cried so hard my nose started running.
When I was in elementary and middle school, I learned that if I cried in class because I was frustrated or sad or sick, teachers would get concerned. They would ask me if I was okay. Of course I wasn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be crying. Did I want to go to the nurse or out into the hallway? No, I wanted them to leave me alone. So I learned to control my tears the best I could. I don’t usually let people see me crying. I cry alone.
So that day while my sister sat on the other sectional in the living room bawling, I stood in the kitchen doing the same. My brother was stone faced. My mother was at work. My brother-in-law was upstairs on the computer doing job applications. My niece, who only met my father once, was too young to understand what was going on. My sister called my mother to tell her. When she got home she told us she’d cried her tears years ago.
My father’s death was like a second loss. We all lost him many years ago to alcohol when he put it ahead of his family. I tell most people now that I grew up in essentially a one parent household. It’s true. Even when my father lived with us he wasn’t really there. He was a ghost. He slept in his bed. He went to work. He came home and sat out on the porch and drank beer after beer after beer. That was his life. He didn’t talk to us or my mother. He didn’t eat meals with us. He didn’t help raise us.
When I was young I didn’t talk about my father. None of my friends met him. No one asked questions. In high school I finally wanted to talk to someone, anyone outside of my family, about my father’s alcoholism. Most of my friends shrugged it off. They didn’t want me to talk about it. There were two exceptions: my best friend Tiffany and my close friend Rai. They let me talk on and on. After high school I found out that two of the friends who wouldn’t talk to me about my father had alcoholic mothers. They didn’t want to talk. I wanted to scream. I wanted everyone to hear me including him. It took me years to realize there is a difference between hearing and understanding.
When I first found out about their alcoholic mothers I was angry. At a time when I felt like I couldn’t get anyone to hear or understand me there were two people close to me with similar experiences. I wanted to know why they wouldn’t talk, but eventually I understood. Knowing that about their mothers made me realize why they would never talk to me about anything serious. In middle school when I was first coming to a full understanding of my father’s alcoholism all I wanted to do was close the door to my room and cry. Denial is a form of coping which is more powerful in a way than acceptance. Marie was always saying derogatory things about her mother. It took me until near the end of our friendship to understand that “My mother’s an alcoholic” was a confession, not a joke. Kelley was always telling us that her mother was sick. She got seizures, the local policemen and paramedics were on a first name basis with her. Once she told me, in a barely audible tone, “My mother used to be an alcoholic.” I thought nothing of it because she stated it in the past tense. Over, I thought. Done with. Fixed. Later Kelley moved back home instead of going back to college so that she could be closer to her mother if her health declined. I hope this is a step toward acceptance for her.
My sophomore year of high school I met a man who understood my struggle. Mr. Sullivan is the advisor of Philosophy Club and a Psychology teacher at Hopkinton High School. His father was an alcoholic. He shares this information with his Psychology classes every year. He also shared it at Philosophy Club. So did I. I have been fortunate enough to have great teachers who have taught me not just about class content, but also about life. I only had one semester of Psychology with Mr. Sullivan, but I had three years of Philosophy Club. He is the only man I have ever really been able to talk to, and he is my father figure. I shared the poem I wrote about my father’s first hospitalization with him. I still go back to visit.
My head is on repeat like my music. I know there was nothing I could have done, but I can’t stop thinking about it. My father died, and no one was there for him. It was the way we always thought it would happen, but it breaks my heart. I carry a laminated remembrance card of him in the back left pocket of my jeans. My Uncle Donny gave it to me at the funeral.
There’s a stinging irony to the date of my father’s death and funeral. He died a week before my 21st birthday. His funeral was the day before. For a year now I’ve made the point to anyone who would listen that it’s just another year for me. There is nothing to celebrate about turning twenty-one. In fact, for me there is a lot to mourn. I let everyone know that I don’t and won’t ever drink. The odds are stacked against me. My father suffered with alcoholism all his life. Four out of his five brothers have also struggled with it. Only one has come out sober.
I know what alcohol does to people. The smell makes me sick. Being the child of an alcoholic is very difficult at college. When I was a freshman, I let everyone know my father was an alcoholic. I tried to make it drown out all I overheard about fellow students drinking. It didn’t work. Even now, especially after my father’s death, it stings. The people on the first floor of my building get drunk all the time and do karaoke to horrible popular music songs. It’s gotten worse this semester.
Last semester I was talking to my friend and apartment-mate Joe about turning twenty-one. I told him, not for the first time, that I am never going to drink. He stared right at me and said “Not even wine?” I’ve known Joe since freshman year. We’d known each other for a semester when I told him about my father for the first time. This time I just looked at him. I thought has nothing I’ve said to you for the past two and a half years sunk in?
It’s like that for me most days. I’d like to lie and say that I can get people to understand why I don’t want to hear about their drinking or see them drunk. The truth is this: every time I hear about people drinking every night of the week and making fools of themselves at parties, I think about my father. I see alcoholics in the making. I think about all the suffering they will put their families through in the future if they don’t stop this. And I cry.
At the beginning of the semester I told my apartment-mate Mike that housing for next year gave me a headache because I wouldn’t be able to find a whole group of people who don’t drink. “Let people have fun,” he said. I exploded at him. I told him my father just died at 63 because of his drinking. He promptly went silent.
I spent most of my twenty-first birthday watching TV trying to drown that blood stain out of my memory. Rai came over unannounced to see how I was. Later, when she left, Tiffany came. We exchanged overdue Christmas presents. She gave me a tea tumbler for my birthday. We sat in the kitchen drinking strawberry tea and talking about our lives, our schedules for the upcoming semester, and our perilous housing options for next year. In that way it was just what I wanted, but there was the hollow part of my heart that knew my relative anonymity came from the proximity to my father’s death.
The next day my sister, brother-in-law, brother and I drove the two hours to Biddeford to clean out my father’s apartment. When we saw it after his funeral, we figured that it wouldn’t take very long to clean out. My father was a minimalist. He didn’t hold onto much. Most of the furniture and pots and pans were given to him by my mother when he moved out. An entire room was devoted to storage. When we cleaned out the closet we use for an attic this past summer we found some of my father’s belongings including many of his race car trophies, records and books. Only about half of his belongings that were in the closet had gotten to him by the time he died. He didn’t unpack anything that we gave him from the closet. He kept his jeans in an old suitcase. He had a toiletry box. Only one of the drawers in his bedroom had clothes in it. The rest of the clothes were in trash bags.
At the end of the day I had a hurt back (I inherited my father’s scoliosis) and a greater understanding of the man my father was. He wasn’t there for us, but he loved us. He kept every anniversary card my mother ever gave him. He had my sister’s marathon jackets and my brother’s robotics medal. He kept every present and every card we ever gave him. I found some of my sister’s homework from early elementary school. She’s thirty-one now. He had pictures of us everywhere. He’d framed a picture of him and my niece that my sister had sent him. Three trips to Goodwill later we packed the cars up with everything we were keeping. We only left behind an empty box and the blood stain.
The last time my father was in the hospital and then the nursing home my uncle Donny gave him an ultimatum: go to rehab or he would stop being my father’s power of attorney. Eventually he backed down, but not before my mother read the four page letter he wrote telling my father that if he didn’t go to rehab Donny would refuse to handle his financial affairs. Donny is the only one of my father’s brothers who hasn’t had problems with alcohol. He had the arrogance to try to do what we never could. If my mother, siblings and I weren’t enough reason for my father to go to rehab, what made his brother think that he would be?
Alcoholism is a twisted riddle in that way. If you don’t see it up close it gets distorted, but if you see it too close you’re likely to be blinded by your experience. When it comes to drinking, I see in sharp black and white. There is no gray. It’s a blessing and a curse, especially in college, where gray seems to be the only viewpoint. It took all the strength I had not to cry every time I smelled alcohol my freshman year. The reaction is that knee jerk.
Aside from pictures, there wasn’t much of my father’s that I wanted to keep. I took a box of books and a box of kitchen supplies. I’d lost what I wanted from my father years ago. I wanted him to be there for my siblings, my mother and me. I wanted him to stop drinking. I wanted a normal life. Whatever that means. I’ve wanted and wanted for years until I’ve broken down crying. I need to stop wanting what will never come to pass. It took me until high school to accept my father’s alcoholism. I’ve been trying to move past it ever since. I’m not sure there is a way to move past death.
On Saturday, March 26th I stood in front of a small room of people at the Sigma Tau Delta Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and read a piece I wrote during finals week last year titled “Anonymous” about my father’s alcoholism. I submitted it back in November. I didn’t expect it to get accepted. When I got the email notification I had a mix of joy and utter pain. Two months after my father’s death I stood in front of an audience and told snips-its of my story, his story. I was the last of four people doing readings in the room that day. Another woman also wrote about her father’s alcoholism. I’ve learned something about children of alcoholics. They come out of the woodwork when you tell your story. The moderator of our session shared the fact that her father was an alcoholic during the question and answer segment of our reading. There is a power in speaking what you often try to hide.
As these women told their stories I become empowered to tell my own. I’ve never been much of a public speaker, so when I stepped up to the small round table that served as a podium I began with my dedication to my father in a shaky voice. However, as I continued reading, my voice grew strength.
We were all asked what the distance between the events we talked about in our work and when we wrote it was. Did we choose to wait? Did we almost decide not to write about it? Writing about my father’s alcoholism has never been a choice for me. When he was in and out of the hospital I would write for days straight in-between my everyday life. After he died I knew I would write about it. I forced myself to write. I typed through tears so that I could speak for all those who choose to be silent.