The halls of my junior high were louder the day after my father died, full of audible whispers comprising a cacophony of sympathy I was not ready to accept, not ready to hear echoing off lockers I once looked forward to opening daily.
Strangers looked at me with tears in their eyes. Teachers spoke gently, pulled me aside before and after classes to offer condolences. “Was there anything they could do?” they asked a little too loudly.
I despised their gentleness. I abhorred being special in the way I now was. Every teenager wants to be recognized, to be noticed, to be praised for exceptional test scores, for record-breaking attendance, for unparalleled athletic ability. No one wants to be the girl without a father.
I wondered silently why my mother had made me go so school as the flood of unwelcome well-wishing rushed onward. The notes, the awkward hugs and abundant pats on the back, the hideously designed “While you’re grieving” cards. All of it a cruel, unfunny, pathetically maddening joke.
I wore my grief like a badge I had not earned. I smiled wryly as classmates who once ignored me now looked on, interested. My best friends had little to say. Their mothers had advised them to be calm, to be quiet. I wanted to scream, to slur profanities like sloppy joes across the cafeteria, to kick and fight and flee every wayward glance that sought to canvass my grief.
I was twelve, almost thirteen. No one had taught me how to lose my father.
I would have sooner kicked someone in the shins than cried. I wouldn’t realize I was allowed to feel anything but sorrow until college. Someone kind, a Professional, would tell me anger is normal, to be expected. One of many phases I would be forced to traverse on a rocky road to healing. That Monday I felt mostly nothing. I walked around wrapped snugly in a fog of stoicism rising from somewhere deep inside me I didn’t create and couldn’t find. I wasn’t accustomed to everyone staring. And there were questions. Too many questions to which I had no answers. Not then, not yet.
He is dead. Yes, he died. Drowned. No, he was a good swimmer. I don’t know. No, no funeral yet. Maybe. Mike. His name was Mike. Michael Francis Ladish. He was thirty-nine. Yes, five sisters. Well, four, actually. One of them identified his body. Hypothermia, they said. He was my father, ‘the deceased.’ What does it matter if he’s being cremated? I DON’T KNOW.
Years later I would forge a conversation in my head while my mother and I drove across the river where my father took his last breath.
“Mom, you know you shouldn’t have sent us back to school the day after he died.”
“I know, dear. I thought it would help.”
“You only thought it would help you.”
“I know, dear.”
It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.
-from A River Runs Through It → Read more...
I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I → Read more...
I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.
I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...
[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]
It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...