I think you took off into a life you always wanted instead.
When we get the death certificate, I will probably still question if it’s fake.
If other people can believe in heaven, what’s the harm of thinking this way?
To keep feeling like you’re out there somewhere and I might ever see you again. That you’re doing better now — doing what you want.
You’re still gone. That’s the point, isn’t it?
###
You lived a miserable life.
That’s just the truth — at least as far as I knew you.
It’s not something you typically say in an obituary. But it feels important. The world should know what really can happen to a person. How their life can really go. People don’t always get a nice ending, or a nice journey for that matter.
I’m still conflicted about just what you might have done differently to have a different life.
Trying to side step the stigmatized bullshit mentalities of the past. Knowing you can’t blame drugs, or “bad choices”, or mental illness like that. There are plenty of examples of enormously successful people who went through worse situations, who did more drugs, more made more horrible choices, who had more debilitating conditions — and they still would have a different story come time to write their final page.
So what really happened to you? How will I ever know if I can only go on the information I have at this point?
It’s just a guess, a hypothesis I can never prove or disprove. A way to make it make sense — but I know I could be wrong.
Did you just piss off someone more powerful than you early on, and they never let you have a better day?
Did you just not know how to care — or show care — for people?
Did you lean into your suffering because you wanted people to care about you, but that just pushed them farther away instead?
At the very least, what can I do different? I tried to encourage you, to wake you up, but you didn’t listen, didn’t hear me, didn’t respond, didn’t change. If you had just told me you were happy as you were, it would have been fine. But you were always so unhappy. It made me unhappy too.
People have told me I’m a misery, and I think they were wrong, that they just don’t understand me. Is that how you felt? It seems like we had different things to say. Different reasons for our ultimate unhappiness. Am I just this way because you were that way? I don’t mean to be unkind or unscientific, but I don’t want to be you. Not the “you” I knew. I don’t think you did either.
Unhappy and stressed as I am, I still have a happiness that you never seemed to show. I still find some sense of wonder in things. I love to learn, and I nerd out to cope. You would smoke cigarettes and stare out the window, pace a track along the carpet, lay in bed. You shut everyone and everything out to cope. I wish I knew why. Should I expect what small light I have to die out eventually, too?
###
You did have so much going for you.
You were smart. Your own family said you were a genius. Built a computer at the age of 16, which would have been about 1972 or 3.
You went on to study to be a doctor. Got the highest grade in organic chemistry that college had ever seen.
But something went “wrong” your sophomore year. At least that’s how the story goes.
You said once the real problem was your parents cut you off a semester before college ended. You never got to graduate.
You’d go on to get other degrees at other schools — an associate’s in customer service administration, a BA in computer science — but that original path was destroyed for you.
You were capable of flying small airplanes. You knew how to talk on a CB Radio. You used to take apart small gadgets like the speaker phone and put them back together again. Remembering the one holiday when you rigged a model train around the ceiling of the room. That light you built with an old CD drive and a Coca~Cola can — when it spun around it put shapes on the wall.
You had a creative soul. What happened to it?
I imagine you had an idea that life could be different, someday, and as the years went by it became more and more clear that it would never change for you.
Had you taken that initial path, would you be at the level your siblings are today?
Would we have spent a lifetime traveling the world? Eating the best food? Doing all the cool stuff? Wanting for nothing? You would have had the best healthcare, the best of anything you could afford. Networking with people who could open doors of opportunity. Having them know you, know me, since childhood. To be known and loved. To be cared about by a whole community that encircled the globe, who had the means to change the world if they wanted to…or at least that’s how it seems from this distance.
Or would you have been just as ghostly, just as aloof, and I would have always been a bastard child that was forced upon you?
Realizing if you’d had another life, I probably wouldn’t have existed at all.
Either way, is it better that I lived my life like I have? How many other people can say the same? To know poverty and to have also stood at the gate of another life, close enough to see through the bars with my own eyes, even if I wasn’t let in? So I can tell you from experience what can make a difference in someone’s life, and that everyone deserves to have their basic needs met…if anyone really cares about people being their best selves at all.
P.S. It isn’t just about money. It’s also about love. People need both for the best possible results. If our basic needs were handled differently, we might need money even less, but we’d still need an evolved sense of love.
###
I think you tried to be a Dad. You tried to step up. It just didn’t work out, and like me, you don’t like things you’re not good at.
You said yourself that you had no paternal instinct. You weren’t meant to be a parent.
I can’t be sorry for existing. I wish you had to foresight to see the ways you made things more difficult — the ways it could have been different if you just had a different attitude about me. About everything.
But that anxiety and depression was all supposed to be part of your mental health struggle. I can’t be mad at you for that.
There’s no use in harping on how it might have been different in the past, except to try to make better choices in the future.
One of the last things you ever said to me was that you “just wanted an A”. You also said you’d gotten As your whole life, jumped through all the right hoops academically, and in the end it didn’t matter. If you had any kind of philosophy, it was a sort of nihilistic futility — but you still wanted to be seen as a good person, even if nothing mattered, even if everything was kind of fucked up.
###
I don’t want to set your soul in stone — as if this is all you ever were. As if this is it. Whatever I say is just how it was. That doesn’t feel fair to you — to anybody.
I’m sure there are other versions of you that have existed throughout your lifetime, I just didn’t get to know them.
For me, you have mostly been a warning.
What I don’t want to be. Don’t want to do. A relationship I don’t want to get trapped in. The wrong way.
I never want to be obsessed with a man, like my mother was with you, who goes on to call me a troll and a gold digger. Who never loved me. Who would refuse to marry me.
Now, of course, I have to worry you were right about her. How am I supposed to know? I spent even less collective time with her than I did with you. I spent more time talking to family on the phone than we ever spent in person. It’s easy to think I never really knew anybody, and they never really knew or even cared about me.
What would you say if you knew your siblings explicitly told me not to contact “my family” about your death until they’ve settled all the “logistics” themselves? They’ve already had your funeral, although they were abroad and did not attend. It seems no one attended. You were buried by strangers; funeral home staff. My mother lives in the same town as you and as far as I know, she doesn’t even know you’re gone yet. What will she even do when she finds out? Act exasperated — have something to tell her friends — but then what? It’s not like you hung out. If you had, maybe you would not have died alone only to be found by an outreach worker how ever many days later.
There was no love there between you. Only circumstance.
I don’t want that.
Did you ever love me? Or did you just want to be seen as a good Dad?
Did you ever even know me? The memory of dinner with my high school roommate. Her dad had just gotten out of prison after 13 years. You exchanged factoids about us as we sat there. You got everything wrong about me. He knew more about her and hadn’t even been in her life. After, in the car, I brought it up. I was upset. Hurt. You said you “didn’t know much about me, but I was expensive, and that’s all you needed to know.”
Is that how you still felt to your dying day?
Why?
Almost any other parent would have loved a little overachieving artsy punk science nerd like me.
Why was I never good enough?
Because you felt like you weren’t good enough?
You never learned that being resilient, not giving up, still caring, and not expecting or defining perfection but just celebrating the good is what would have made all the difference. It would have changed the atmosphere of the story, even if the events were the same. Even if we were always going to be poor and uneasy about the future and with justified reason to be so unhappy — we could have been unhappy differently. Just didn’t know how.
You drove me half crazy with your own anxieties. Put that pressure on me. And meanwhile never clapped when I won. Did not care when I did well. It’s almost like you resented my accomplishments because you had been that kind of kid yourself, and it had gotten you nowhere. How dare I be loved when no one loved you for the same things?
I do feel sorry for you. I see how the cookie might have crumbled over generations. Still, I don’t want it to continue…if I ever have kids of my own.
###
What will I tell those kids about their grandfather? Or any other family member?
It terrifies me that I’m in a position where no one wants me to tell the real whole story of anything. Maybe they did the same to you. Maybe that explains it all.
###
I don’t want to be scared out of living my own life.
I do feel like I’m existing for a greater purpose, a deeper meaning.
If only I could have instilled that in you, would it have changed everything?
I was always the parent while you were the child. It’s what the social worker/therapist person told us when you got custody of me.
I tried so hard in so many ways to have a better situation with you. But I was still only a kid.
I am prone to putting blame on myself even when it’s not my burden to carry. I want to extend something towards you, a feeling of grief, sorrow that not only are you gone but frankly your life sucked —you never even got to go to Myrtle Beach again. All I could possibly do to right this atrocity is write characters inspired by you. Explain this phenomenon through some kind of sci-fi story. Hope it has political resonance. No one should be left behind like that.
I could never seem to reach you when you were alive. I want to give you some kind of dignity in death. I just also want to tell the truth…the whole truth. I’m trying to do that even as I admit I don’t know what the whole truth really is or was.
Is this a test, only a test, or should I be calling it Coca~Cola?
###
Rabbit forever.
###
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