The Hard Year

This was written before the fires, and it’s not about the fires. It is about personal grief.

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In Naples, a neighborhood in Long Beach, the sidewalks along the canals are filled with tourists watching the boats strung with Christmas lights reflect on the water. My sister, Christina, and I were walking with our children and our aunt. There were high school kids performing carols on violins. One played “Silent Night” on a xylophone. Another had set out card tables with homemade cookies and hot chocolate. I’ve been bringing my kids here since they were born.

My year has been hard, and the holidays I anticipated being even harder. But my sister was in town from Saint Louis for a series of celebrations: Disneyland, my son’s birthday party that I was using as an excuse to host a cocktail party, and now this night in Naples. December in California thrills me—citrus blossoms overwhelming the evenings, an acute chill in the mornings, the woodsmoke and cloudlessness. Bringing my children here reminds me that I have been walking through this neighborhood—with its opaque waterways and exotic plantings of heritage roses, flowering ginger, hydrangeas—since I was child.

My half-brother, Jared, lives in Colorado. He had texted me earlier to call him, that it was about our dad but there was no rush. He is the only family member who has regular contact with my father, Stephen. I pulled back from the kids and called Jared back. Why? It was such a beautiful night. He had insisted it wasn’t urgent.

I held the phone to my ear. I listened to him speak. I watched Julian give his sister, Paloma, half a cookie. Zippy, my niece, peeked over a railing at the water. We were about to hit the house where the lights spelled out Mele Kalikimaka above a surfing Santa. My sister and I stared at each other. I said to Jared, “Okay. Okay.” In a way we haven’t been able to do since we were children, I spoke to Christina with my eyes. Her mouth opened slightly.

She turned to my aunt and said, “Oh my god. He died.”

*

I published a piece on my father’s crystal meth addiction in 2015. I wrote about how he haunts my understanding of California. I wrote about the ways he hurt me in my memoir. I’ve written a lot about him. Too much, I often think, though another part of me wonders if I’ve even started. I’m thinking about Dani Shapiro’s craft essay in the Sewanee Review, about why she keeps returning to memoir, to certain life events, and how they keep reconsolidating into different shapes.

Why did I find myself turning to my own life, my own family history, again and again? The world around me was infinitely more compelling. . . . Why couldn’t I just let it go? Why, each time I thought I was finished with memoir, did I find myself, instead, digging around for more answers? Each memoir was a singular and satisfying excavation, but in the end, I was left with a powerful, incalculable longing. Why was I terrified so much of the time? From where arose the debilitating anxiety and panic that lived just beneath a carefully cultivated surface?

*

In early spring of last year, 2024, I wrote an essay for this newsletter about my family’s impending move to Spain. We had decided back in 2022 to do it; I had sold a book off proposal about living in Spain, about food and wine. We were three months away from taking our one-way flight to Madrid. A visa lawyer had already been paid, along with deposits for the kids’ school and our apartment.

Days after finishing that essay, my marriage exploded. But I hadn’t realized that every single other aspect of my life had been stabilized by its foundation. This past summer I started an essay on my separation, the brutality of breaking up my children’s family, the manic highs and lows of split custody, but mainly questioning my own brokenness.

In November, I rewrote that essay, finishing what I thought that earlier piece was supposed to be. But I held off on publishing it. It invited a lot of scrutiny. A lot of my life is still in moving boxes. There were still too many things I couldn’t write.

I decided I would give up these essays, newsletters, whatever they are, permanently.

Then my father died.

Painting by Tom Thomson 1916

*

Since 2005, when his addiction was discovered by his family, my father lived in a nightmare. Though to hear him tell it, he was doing great, in perfect health, highly evolved, and surrounded by friends. A master narcissist, impenetrable: spin, spin, spin.

There were bouts of homelessness, and too many trips to rehab centers to count. There were stolen cars, a half dozen car accidents, and twice that many menial jobs he was fired from. There were surgeries (unclear whether they were all necessary), blood infections, ambiguous hospital stays, and a case of gangrene so severe it led to a surgeon having to remove nearly all of the muscle of my father’s right calf.

But in the days after his death, I recalled that the nightmare didn’t begin in 2005. He had been a high-functioning crystal meth addict for at least a decade before that. For two years while I was in high school, his parenting of me was largely defined by wild neglect and occasional, though scorching, cruelty. He terrified me then. He never cared for my safety. On a highway in Missouri, driving while fucked up on meth, he lost control of the car, ran into the grassy center median, then swerved back across the highway. He then threw a water bottle at my head when I told him I wouldn’t let him drive anymore. He gave me, a seventeen-year-old girl, all the Percocet I could ask for, left me bottles of Tanqueray and tonic to drink at home. I could go on and on, and in the days after his death, I did. Texting my sister and friends: Do you remember? Did that really happen? How did I think it was ok?

That is what bothers me now: I thought his behavior then was acceptable. I thought the fact that he didn’t parent me meant he respected me, that he thought I was strong.

He never attached meaningfully to another person: not his siblings, his children, or his wives. Everyone, everything, was disposable. I told an EMDR therapist, after a session about my father that was so intense I vomited, and so disturbing I never returned to EMDR, that I could not be safe until he was dead.

So what is this amorphous grief, disenfranchised and confused as it is because it’s colored by relief? Why is it that I’m floored by this gift he’s given us?

*

This by Louise Gluck is always with me.

First Memory

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

*

“He didn’t hurt anyone,” Christina said, as we continued our walk. Julian didn’t let go of me for the rest of the night. Paloma and Zippy remained unaware, begging for more sweets. I cautioned her against saying much more in front of them. But Christina was right—my biggest fear, for years, was that he might kill someone else.

I didn’t know then that in the previous six months he been in two wrecks. He had been charged with DUI (a meth pipe was reported to be in his car), had lost his license. He had been actively and self-righteously fighting it in court.

He did hurt people. He had three children. I can’t speak for them, but I can speak for myself, the only child of his that lived with him full-time.

He hurt me. Made me broken, just like him.

*

On my forty-first birthday, my father texted me. I was with a friend, and he asked if my dad always texts me.

I shook my head. “It depends on how sober he is, or if he’s like, in the world.”

“Are you going to text him back?” He asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to speak to him again before he dies.”

Six days later.

*

Maybe someday I’ll write about watching him go through withdrawals on a train moving through the highlands of Scotland. How gray he was, shriveled and sweating and convulsing, and although Christina and I were horrified, we also could not stop laughing. Forty-eight hours earlier he had blamed jet lag for nodding off at the dinner table, then blamed food poisoning when he missed Jared’s wedding, and then told a room full of people that he was nineteen years sober as he took a swig of scotch. We led him off the train in Edinburgh, placed his suitcase on the platform, and he couldn’t say goodbye because he could not form sentences. He also didn’t seem to know who we were.

As the train went on to London, I said to Christina, “We’ll never see him alive again.” Even two days later, over glasses of wine in Bloomsbury, ensconced again in our good health and good fortune, we laughed uncontrollably, hiding our faces behind our hands.

*

I’m thinking of Raven Leilani’s piece on grief in n+1, where she names it:

It was a kind of laughter that happened to me. . . . Humor, like grief, like poetry, is occasionally a language of dissonance: dissimilar things side by side reflect back on each other some surprise or shared meaning. But there was no apparent meaning in the adjacency of my mourning and erratic, often ill-timed laughter.

*

Last summer, as my family took on its new shape, as I watched my children suffer, and as the tragedy of that became increasingly unbearable until the tragedy became that all of it was bearable, Julian asked me one night as he was falling asleep:

“Don’t you miss your dad?”

“Not really,” I said. “He wasn’t around so I didn’t really know him.”

“But didn’t it make you sad that you didn’t have a dad?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was really sad. But I had a great mommy and I had Christina.”

“Do you ever want to go see him?”

“No,” I said, as gently as possible.

“Why?”

“He’s not a safe person.” I had no idea what else to say, though how would a five-year-old know what a safe person was.

“Does he know about me?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Someday when I’m older, I’ll go see him. He probably wants to meet me.”

*

There was a host of promises I made to my babies—in my arms, wet with the infant holy trinity of breast milk, tears, snot, their beauty so startling it disoriented me—but the main one was that they would not be raised in a broken family (made me broken, just like him). How retrograde and stilted I found myself once the stakes surged. The number of times I stared at the wall while they slept—weighted limbs atop me, unwashed heads burrowed into my armpits or rising and falling on my stomach—and wondered how much longer this idyll would last.

The reassurance I took from picking a good man who was the opposite of my own father. A man devoted to his children. A man who would never hurt me.

It’s difficult not to revise every statement, dream, sliver of triumph, to reread each as evidence of hubris.

Children are resilient, people kept saying to me in the months after. Sure, I would think. Look at Christina and me. We made it to forty-one and thirty-nine, and here we are, looking at holiday lights along the canals. Minutes after my phone call with Jared, an acquaintance of Christina’s from high school stopped her. Polite conversation, indistinct clusters of white lights, a nod, a smile. At the end she said to the two of us: “Your children are beautiful.”

The performance of ease. It photographs well. Our barely concealed bones absolutely rigid with control.

I know they’re resilient. But now I also live with being the one who is making them that way.

*

I am aware of how fresh my hurt is, how this writing wants patience to polish itself, wants time for precision, that it is seeking and circling a larger truth about grief and parents and abuse. But there have been many times in my life that I’ve relied on writing that was a dispatch from the blast site. And I’m not sure I want to keep circling this one.

I have been grieving the father I didn’t have for all my adulthood. I feel great pity for him: that he died alone, days after telling my brother that he was sober; that he was about to get a job; that he reunited with his friends at the hiking club.

In his room at the senior living center where he died, there were journals and papers. One was a worksheet from his last stint in rehab. It was a list of regrets. The first one was actually two: “Showing up on drugs to my son’s wedding and detoxing in front of my daughters.” He means that train ride in Scotland in 2022. There are people who find such efforts toward self-awareness moving. And there is something childlike, almost embarrassing, in thinking about his handwriting, the act of putting pen shakily to paper. The vulnerability of reading the words out loud to a group of fellow addicts, the only people in the end who had the tolerance to listen.

Perhaps I’m too hard.

I find that note alarming—I never knew how cognizant he was of his offenses, or whether he even fully perceived other people. But he knew it was us who helped him off the train. And it was the last time I saw him.

For my father, there were endless chances. So many near deaths. So many meetings, so much rehabilitation, therapy, cocktails of psychotropic medications. But he never apologized to me. I don’t need the apology. It was him. He needed to do it. Any kind of humility, and I might be telling a different story.

In my entire life, he never asked me a question. Not, How is high school going? Do you want to go to college? How does it feel to publish a book? Do you like being a mother? What do you do in your free time? Are you happy?

These are his losses. Or they were his losses.

*

I accepted that I would always be at war with my parents, combating their lethal sadness, the undertow of their self-hatred. I am long past believing that this is something I’ll move through or get over. But I have longed for a life with less fear, less hypervigilance against bad men, less rage for people who hurt children. And I had long thought just maybe, when they died, there would be space for something else. But I have lived for forty-one years in the shadow created by my father’s abandonment. It’s almost as if my own shadow conjoined with his. They’re both gone. So, what now?

*

I started 2024 as the center of a family of four. I was the recipient of so much pressure and so much adoration. I spent every waking moment trying to keep it together.

My life today is unrecognizable. Matt and I have divided our days so that one of us can nest in our home with the kids while the other lays dormant in a studio we share.

I am also unrecognizable. I see my children half time and it kills me. I can’t write. I can’t read. I can’t keep on weight. I can’t stop booking plane tickets. I can see the other side, I think. I can’t stop sprinting towards it. I’ll be trying to understand this year, the incoherent darkness that overtook me, the vivid grace and clarity, the story it’s telling me, and how it changed everything, for the rest of my days.

The light is bright. Blinding, actually.

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For grief support, related to the fires or not: My best friend Carly de Castro and the writer/therapist Claire Bidwell Smith just launched ELEGY, a space for conscious grieving. The website has resources for the LA fires (therapists, books, places to donate) and they are hosting weekly support circles via Zoom.