Worry

I am so worried I will never be who I was before Dad died. Not just in the usual sense, but I had worked hard for years, developed boundaries, processed, etc., and now I am struggling with a lot of the depression and self doubt I had before. For obvious reasons, I suppose.
I wake up feeling guilty. I can find a hundred things to feel guilty about before breakfast. There can be whole weeks of productivity, of ideas, of inspiration even, and then, as if a door has slammed shut in my face, I am left sitting with apathy, worry, and guilt.
I like to plan things. I want to know what's coming down the highway toward me. I am left with such a tangled heart from the story I know the end to.
Me and dad.
Me and sis.
It's like my intellect and my actual neural receptors don't connect.
You could liken my mental self talk with me screaming at the top of my lungs in my ear, "feel better".
Ugh.
The ending is ugly. Who expects that?

Help Schmelp

I have been thinking a lot lately about the amount of time we spend on self improvement, especially those of us in the fast paced, caffeine drenched, soundtrack driven west. As someone who hovers in this life as a participant and also somewhat sideways observer, some things have occurred to me about "self help".
One thing that is very clear is that unless you are reading a book about simple living, the "help" you are going to get is to try to make you better assimilate the frantic and furious existence you are already chasing. While this is certainly true about money ( just consider all those abundance books out there) its also true of things an innocuous ( snort ) as parenting books. I remember combing them for solutions, tricks, proof that I could do more be better: produce a well behaved child.
Ah, here you have it. The goal of western self help....
To produce or be a product. To consume or be consumed.
What does well behaved mean, anyway? Compliant. But that's another blog post.
The next thought I have about self help is that it has consistently pushed me in what it turns out is the opposite direction of where I need to go. Instead of observing my life: both inner and outer, which takes more time than I like, namely all of it, I am busy judging it, measuring it, plotting it like a movie script. And if I am doing that to myself, then imagine what I am doing to those around me.
Instead of trusting my own love for my kids I try this philosophy and that, commiting to the philosophy of living with children is easier than just living with and loving and finding your way together. But I highly recommend the latter.
Instead of just tidying or cleaning my house, giving myself permission to see what works, I buy book after book on systems, index cards, etc.
Over the last few years I have realized that we just have to simplify all of it, shut out the noise. I live on little, spend my days reading, doing chores, singing, being available, and making maybe plans. The pull is strong to join a movement, distract myself with a new total life makeover.
I am resisting.
The true direction I see that works for me is to observe patiently. Then make tiny actions. Or one big action. Accept that you will never be sure. It's out of your hands. Was it ever in them? If it all messes up, just sit still again and start paying attention.
Seriously. Better than any book.

Mourning Girl Part 3

Today on my Facebook wall, a tiny square photo of my dad keeps popping up. I feel haunted in an amicable way. A glitch in the system, I'm sure, but still. I figured it was time to write this post.
When I was little I thought my dad was the Incredible Hulk. He could lift me with one hand and spin me with my head so close to the ceiling I could taste dusty sheet rock.
We were not close. I remember trying different tactics over the years, but my father was not available for a daddy/daughter relationship. He was only peripherally interested and involved in my life, even into adulthood, even into grandparenting.
Still. He was my dad.
The other day we were sitting on the couch listening to Willie Nelson singing Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys, a song my family loved and sang with gusto when I was a kid. Before we quit singing. And smiling. And talking. I'm sure it was always a roller coaster for my parents, but to me it was like watching a decaying food or a plant wilting. All that possibility, hope, and focus whithering away into this shell of a family.
Anyway, as we listened to the song I had a flurry of memories of my dad. Bringing home Snow White cake toppers for a birthday, singing "I musta been a beautiful baby..." before church. Telling us he was going "catting". Laughing. Just being there. Not on a fatherly way, but there in his chair, all of my life.
I am sure I began grieving him after the divorce. Dealing with what is, acceptance, playing the hand I was dealt cleverly and compassionately: this has been the work of the last decade or so of my life.
In other words I make some fucking incredible lemonade.
In the hospital I listened to song after song. Landslide by Fleetwood Mac, Winter by Tori Amos, I'll Fly Away by Gillian Welch, Time To Move On by Tom Petty, Rapture by Antony and the Johnsons, and every day I listened to my friend Katy's classical music show on the local public radio station. Music and love thawed my fear frozen heart and as my dad drifted into his ativan induced sleep, I cried and cried. Quietly in a chair, in the cool dark hospital room. So quiet and private, like being in a chapel.
I think I feel sad for the girl who crawled up on her dads back while he lay on his stomach on the floor, who curled up and draped a u haul blanket over them both. Who fell asleep that way. Who made up nicknames based on horror movies watched together, who TRIED. And failed.
To know the whole story of a hard relationship, to know that there are no more memories coming, ya get what ya got, it is heavy karma.
I am working on being okay with having had a hard life.
I miss my dad. I missed him so long before this.

Mourning Girl Part Two

If this post had a subtitle it would be subtitled untwinned.
If my life were a movie, you would think that the revelation and life changes that happened would be about my father, since he was the one dying. And of course, much revelation and composting and newness and agony was had about my dad, but it was the quieter sort, of the long grieved variety. I had been turning this pile a long time. I knew the parameters, what kind of refuse remained unchanged. In a movie, the twist would be that my relationship with my identical twin would finally reach some sort of feverish catharsis. I am such an empathy saturated loon when it comes to my family that I was blessed to be exhausted and reeling from my fathers request, aimed only at me. Not at my sister.
I will never know why. Most of my family believes that my sister had to play some role, but at this point, my dad made the decision, you know? I can grieve that one cleanly.
My sister has been a pathological liar since our early adolescence. More than once as an adult she has told me that she has a hard time caring about right and wrong.
She acknowledges her diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, stating she also has sociopathic tendencies (both statements I validate and see evidence of)
But she only acknowledges these things to me. She has no plans of seeking treatment, ending the affair, telling her husband, etc. To the contrary, she has gone on three trips with her lover in the past six weeks. On the way to turn in papers at the funeral home, my sister tried to talk with me about her trip to San Francisco with her lover. About seeing the Grateful Dead play.
This was after hours of her curled up on my mothers couch, demanding my mother order pizza, asking me to bring her a pair if my moms socks. I demurred, obviously. She didn't ask how I was feeling. Not once.
Later she would say that this day, the day my father died, that I didn't answer my phone or was "unwilling to do the work". I was there in forty minutes from Winslow to sign papers that same morning. I also ran back to the funeral home, with her later. My sister chose to exclude me from funeral planning. She was still taking a lot of Xanax and forgetting herself and making up stories and calling to start crap. Some days I would have seventeen calls.
At the funeral she was hysterical. She called my dads girlfriend "mama". She tried to dominate me but I resisted.
My big wake up was that I can't fix a personality disorder. I can't love her enough, or be faithful in prayer enough, to make up for her free will.
I can now officially surrender this relationship, admit powerlessness to fix it, and work in healing the effects of years of repressed character assassination, worry, lies, and the most apeshit holidays you have ever witnessed
( this year my mom asked me to let her punch me in the face and my sister wanted to sing show tunes. Yeah)
I have not been able to practice the most effective tool in dealing with narcissists, which is zero contact, but I'd say I'm at 5% contact. I am much happier with that than the way it was before.
Tomorrow I will write about my actual grief about my dad.

Mourning Girl Part One

I have said to Cheyne many times over the past five years that when my dad died, it would probably fuck me up.
That was an accurate assessment.
I come from a very dysfunctional narcissistic family system. I am an identical twin, one of the only two children my parents had.
When my father left my mother, she asked him if he wanted any photos of myself and my sister.
He said no.
Later my mom would say, "I tell you, when your father was done, he was done." In the months after the divorce, finally, we all told the truth. My dad had been a crappy dad. I didn't have to pretend, for five more minutes, that he cared about me the way my friends dads did.
My father called me that winter and invited my family over for Christmas.
I was a nervous wreck. I can't remember my father ever even initiating a conversation with me. We went over, met his girlfriend ( who he had cheated on my mother with and ultimately left with ) and he gave the kids gifts. This was nine months after the divorce and the only time he ever called. Ever. A few months later he was fired from his job at the hospital as a security guard. Later wild tales would surface about the grandiose lies my dad would tell while working this job. He hit on one nurse, telling her his wife left him when his twin girls were so small and he raised them on his own.
My mother worked at this same hospital at the time!
My father was a narcissist.
This was so normal to us, that I knew it was pointless to complain or expect better. We treated him, in a way, like a grown up child. He sat in a chair watching tv non stop. I know a lot of kids had "dads in chairs" but here is an example of the extremes in my house. I was on the school drill team and forgot my flash gloves. We lived five minutes from the school and my mom was working nights and I had to call my dad to bring them. I was cussed out. Because he was in the middle of "his show". He came to maybe two performances, one of which the only reason was because I was being awarded Star Dancer and threw a fit to have a parent there. He didn't mind that though. He preened and puffed. Not at all the man who threw a fit to not have to come.
I am not trying to malign my father. Or exonerate my mother, whose entire existence became a controlling and manipulative method of keeping everyone, including my dad, in check. We were pretty rudderless boats, my sister and I. We didn't get love, not the unconditional kind. As an adult I have empathy for my parents and the deep wounds they carried in ways they just couldn't overcome. But I can't paint a pretty picture of the past.
Fast forward to this year:
My dad gets sick.
My dad gets sick again. He has seizures. He has cancer and it spread to his brain. He is dying.
I rush to the emergency room to greet my sister. I wonder why she isn't hugging me back. She is sitting with my dads girlfriend. I visit dad briefly. My mom comes up and she and dad have forty five minutes together. My sister makes eyes at dads girlfriend.
Over the years I have asked my sister for my dads address. She claimed always to not have it.
You see. My sister is also a narcissist. Which she admitted in a text to me, also stating she had sociopathic tendencies.
Just like dad, we have a special set of rules for taking care of her. She needs eggshells, special treatment, people to keep her secrets, support her lies. She expects you to be without boundaries, to hold her sin for her so she can feel less guilty.
I found out my sister was having an affair in the middle of my dad dying.
I confronted her about it gently at the hospital where she smoothly and condescendingly denied all. Showed me pictures, called the man "old", even pulled my husband in on this. "this is who your wife thought I was having an affair with, can you imagine?"
I can't remember if this was before or after she pulled someone in from her church to pray over dad.
I had read the texts. I knew she was lying. But I just wanted her to stop.
The next day while I was at my mothers, grieving dad, and my sister, in a way, she called and told me how her "friend" just took her for sushi, bought her jewelry, gave her 500$ to buy gifts for the kids.
She is not content to get away with it. She is DESPERATE for a co conspirator.
This phone call was about how he and his fiancée were the family she never had, how she was not used to being loved for being who she was.
Within 24 hours she would tell me about the affair. That it had been going on for more than a year.
Right after Christmas she flew to San Francisco for New Years.
With her lover.
Lying to every single person we know, including her husband and kids and the fundamentalist church she attends and draws much of her support from.
Her 57 year old lover.
But I digress.
I had been visiting my father, having awkward visits. My sister would not have me participate at all in any memorial planning. ( Later she would state publicly on Facebook that I wouldn't "answer my phone" or "show up for the work". ) She also was taking large amounts of Xanax and anyone present would be sure that he was ONLY her father.
My sister pursued my father after he and my mom split up. They got together a few times over the years. Not sure how much, because my sister didn't always invite me. Usually, the two times I remember, in Christmas Eve or something she would mention having Dad over the next day for Christmas. Too short notice for us, which she knew.
I would tell random checkers at Harps about my father dying. I felt bereft, buying him new York strip steaks, almost passing out when I couldn't find chocolate covered cherries, his favorite candy. I luckily found some Hershey kisses with cherry cordial centers.
We brought the kids to see him. It was awkward. But important, I thought.
At my next one on one visit, my dad sat me down and let me know that I was not welcome, his girlfriend didn't want me there.
That's when I finally began to let my dad go. I told him I loved him. I thanked his girlfriend for caring for him. And I went and wept with a friend.
I have worked with dying people. Enough so that I respect their wishes.
So I went home.
I listened to Walls by Tom Petty and Rapture by Antony and the Johnsons and Good Ole Boys Like Me by Don Williams.
There were layers of things to mourn. Even just that finite knowledge that your family really won't support you when you are at the end of yourself.
I was wise enough to realize there WERE people who would.
More on that tomorrow.
For now, just know that at the end of yourself is a cliff. You will never know who you are, or how much you are loved, until you jump.

The Blackbird Song

When Cheyne and I were married, we had our dear friend Jory play the old Beatles tune The Blackbird Song at our wedding, in honor of Cheyne's father, who passed away while he was growing up. We played it at the children's blessingways and naming ceremnies, and now it is in remembrance of many other loved ones who have passed: my Grandmother Aley, my cousin John, my Aunt Mary, and , of course, Cheyne's lovely and one of a kind mother, Sheryl. Songs about ravens and blackbirds and mockingbirds fill my playlist lately. A family Cheyne grew up with lost their twenty four year old son to suicide. They were and are a lovely family, full of life and love. truly devoted and kind people. When we were expecting Sol, Cheryl, the boys mother, pulled Cheyne aside and told him that people would bombard us with advice, but in the end we would need to trust our own instincts, follow our own hearts, find our own way. She told me something similar at my baby shower, that all advice was neither here nor there BUT if she were to give ANY, it would be that stroking a baby's forehead between his eyebrows would lead him to close his eyes.

I feel rocked to my core that the boy she first practiced this on is gone, ripped from her by pain and a horrible rush to action. Cheyne's first response was, " I wish I could tell him it inevitably gets much better than twenty four." We both can remember some pretty wretched feelings in our twenties, and our hearts break for how lost this poor young man must have felt.

I am listening to Coltrane play the Blackbird Song. And I am trying to find my bearings for so much grief. Such loss.

I though I would share this lovely poem by Ronald Stuart Thomas:

A Blackbird Singing

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes'
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history's overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears

Ronald Stuart Thomas