A letter that will never end that I will never send in Das Book
- June 3, 2018, 9:11 p.m.
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- Public
Feels important to write all of this down right now while it’s present.
Dad,
My feelings toward you since I was eleven or twelve have been extraordinarily complicated. I’ve navigated what I thought was hatred, exhausted myself with fury, cycled through resentment, all of this carried in waves of confusion and fear. Right now what often feels present is resentment and a despair encompassed in hopelessness. Something else that I thought was acceptance but was actually just the opposite – grief too immense to hold myself in contact with.
I just came back from the Caribbean. You taught me everything there is to know about the Caribbean. About what tropical and game fish are called, how to fish for them. How to spot conch; how to dive for them without choking on a rush of snorkel-funneled water to the mouth. You taught me that coral is precious and slow growing, that it comes in too many shapes and colors to describe, that specific corals have certain relationships with specific fishes. That to crunch your way over tiny coral colonizing the seabed on your way to the more visible reef you are headed to is deeply disrespectful and undoes decades of polyp’s life works.
You held my hand in the ocean when I was afraid. When others would promise to stay with me but swim away at the first sight of some brilliant color or shape, you always stayed near me, glancing in my direction to ensure I was with you and present and not panicking.
I am so grateful for that.
And I am so resentful of you for the way you have handled the past twenty-three years of your life. Alcohol has superseded everything else in your life. As a mental health professional, I know in my brain that it is unfair to blame you for this, and thus my resentment is twisted in with guilt, with horror, with hopelessness.
It’s so easy to have compassion for my clients. I teach them about the impact of trauma and attachment on their brain development. I offer unconditional positive regard even when their behavior begs me to lecture, to solve, to change their thought patterns, or to disdain who they are as human beings.
But when it comes to you, this is so hard for me to do. When dear, close friends ask me how you are doing, or how I am doing with who you have become, I answer similarly every time. “He’s dying. I’ve accepted it. I’m OK.”
You are dying.
I have not accepted it.
I am not OK.
I recently challenged myself to open to the morass of emotions that underlie “Dad”, by taking LSD and spending a day in and near the Caribbean Sea.
A lot of memories, aforementioned already, arose.
More tears than I knew I had, a nose full of snot, a heart aching. And compassion. And fear for the day when I finally hear that you are gone. You’ve been gone so long already, in so many ways, I tell myself that when you are actually dead I will already have grieved it and it won’t shatter my world.
But that isn’t true.
It’s going to shatter my world. It already is shattering my world. I needed you, Dad. I needed you to love and accept me unconditionally even when I was young, and perhaps dumb, and when I was sad and didn’t know why and especially didn’t know how to say it, and especially when I was fearful. I needed you when I was self-medicating with drugs and choosing the wrong friends and self-sabotaging in school.
I needed you to make a speech on my wedding day about how much you love me and how much joy it brings to you that I’ve found such a loving partner who is there for me in all of the ways that you never were.
And I know you are capable of these things, in some way, because you were capable of it when I was afraid of the sea, and refusing to put my face in, and angry with anyone who would try to make me, “just try it”.
I’m grateful that you could be there for me in that way and that I can and will always be able to float in the Caribbean and feel held by you and by all the knowledge you gave me there.
And I’m also so angry that that is the only place I can go to remember, feel, believe that I am loved and wholly accepted by you, even if I am afraid.
Deleted user ⋅ June 03, 2018