A Daughter’s Goodbye

I haven’t posted here in months. In fact, I haven’t posted here since last year. However, I’ve had two or three blog posts drafted, that I simply haven’t gotten around to posting. Each post is essentially about the same thing, just written in a different way. It’s quite ironic, too, that I began drafting these posts a few months ago, and then what transpired did.

The first post I began writing, I was going to call “We Need to Talk.” The premise was that I grew up with an alcoholic father, and I myself struggled with alcoholism. Last month, I celebrated two years sober, but the post was going to be about how awkward I feel each time I bring it up. I feel like I’m not really allowed to talk about my alcoholism. I was going to take it deeper into this idea that we all live fiercely private lives, and we feel as if we cannot share the reality of our lives with each other. Instead, we pretend that all is well, and we’ve got everything under control. I was going to suggest that, in fact, we need to talk. We need to talk about alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, and anxiety. We need to stop pretending that everything is fine while we silently struggle. By struggling silently, we are perpetuating the idea that there’s something wrong with us for feeling bad. “Well, everyone on social media has their shit together, so why don’t I?” Here’s a little snippet of that draft

“I grew up with an alcoholic father. I spent countless weekends hanging out in the arcade room of bars with a roll of quarters and no adult supervision. After spending hours socializing and drinking, my dad would drive me home under the influence. Out of all of these times, I can only remember one in which another adult intervened. The lodge was having a camping weekend, and a couple that knew my father were staying in their camper on the property. When my dad was ushering me into his vehicle to head home, they convinced him to let me stay with them instead. It wasn’t until much later that I understood why they did that. They didn’t want my dad driving me home while he was drunk. If only they knew it was a regular occurrence.

When driving drunk, my dad would suddenly speed up and let go of the steering wheel. Out of sheer panic, I’d grab it to keep us from running off the road. This was always met with laughter from my dad. As I got older, this happened more often than not, my dad having me take the wheel and guide us home.”

The second post I began drafting was called “My Father is Dying.” I wrote it in a haze after having to go to my dad’s house to help him out of his recliner because he was too weak to get out of it himself.

“Since before I was born, my father has been an alcoholic. I grew up believing it was normal to be my father’s at-home bartender. From the time I could walk, I would toddle to the fridge, grab a can of beer, and open it for my father. It was celebrated. It was “cute.” When I had friends over for a sleep over, we would argue over whose turn it was next to grab my father a beer. When I was a teenager and realized the grossness of the situation, my dad would tell me stories of me as a kid to make me feel guilty for not getting him beer from the fridge anymore. “You used to love playing bartender!”

I grew up believing it was normal to take your kid to the only bar in town that had family seating for hours a day. My father would give me a roll of quarters and send me off to the arcade room. I loved it there. Dad was always so much fun on the drives home! He’d push his foot on the pedal as hard as he could, and let go of the wheel to let me steer! At 7 years old I was learning to drive.

When I turned 8, I was finally old enough to be home alone. The bar opened at 9 AM, and dad went like it was his day job. Workin’ 9-5, he’d be gone all day long. If I needed something, I had all the town’s bars’ numbers memorized. I’d call, one by one, until my “Is Greg there?” was met with a “hold on,” and a shuffling of the phone. I grew up thinking it was normal.

As I got older and wiser and began to question things, I told my dad I didn’t like that he drank so much.

“I drink beer like you drink soda.”

“My bills are always paid.”

“I’m a social drinker. All my friends are at the bar.”

He was full of a million excuses. A million reasons why he wasn’t really an alcoholic. A million explanations for his behavior, none of them actually holding him accountable.

I grew up believing it was normal to take care of your father. On more than one occasion, I had to pick him up off the ground, pick him up from the bar, pick him up from jail. He totaled our car when I was 14, and instead of admitting he had a problem, he turned it around. Now we’d get a new car for me to drive when I got my license!

My dad’s bar friends, when they saw me, would tell me how much my father loved me. I was, apparently, all he ever talked about. Yet, there I sat, from age 8 up, home alone while my dad was at the bar gushing about how much he loved me. How cute and funny I was. He’d tell the bar-goers stories about my quirkiness, only half the time, they hadn’t actually happened. “They’re just white lies,” dad told me. “They don’t hurt anybody.”

My dad was the cool dad. As a teenager, my friends could come over and get trashed, smoke cigarettes and weed and have absolutely no consequences besides their hangover the next morning. I didn’t know until much later that my dad was using these sleepovers as an opportunity to kiss my friends on the cheek and talk to them about their sex lives. One friend in particular, my dad had convinced himself they would run away with him when they turned 18.

When my dad was 18, he worked at a factory. They made different things out of hard rubber. One day, he couldn’t get the steel rollers to properly flatten the rubber he was working with. He broke protocol and put two pieces together to make them longer. Somewhere in the process, my dad’s left arm became lodged in between the two steel rollers. At 18, my dad became an amputee.

His dreams of joining the army were shattered. He spent months recovering in the hospital. He briefly attended accountant school but dropped out when his girlfriend fell pregnant. He worked odd jobs off and on. He was 45 by the time I was born, my older brother and sister were already in their later 20s. By 50, he was on disability, allowing him to drink day in and day out, not a care in the world.

I often think about how, if my father had not lost his arm, he would’ve joined the army. If he would’ve joined the army, the chances of me being here are slim. But the price of my life is the one he wasted away. I can only begin to imagine the loss of a limb, how that could affect someone. His drinking began shortly after and simply never stopped.

My dad is 69 now. Today I got a call from him asking for help. He couldn’t get out of his recliner by himself. When I arrived, his adult diaper was soaked with piss. His cheeks were sunken in. His body was so bony, so fragile. He could barely make it from his recliner to his kitchen table, where he smokes and drinks his days away.

My dad has been dying for the past year. Cirrhosis of the liver, no one can say they’re surprised. However, I am surprised he’s made it this long. I’ve never seen the man drink a glass of water. He doesn’t take care of himself even slightly. Drinking has become the only thing he lives for. Even now, not a day goes by without a drink. Last year, he had a stent in the ICU. I thought he was finally going to get it together. The health situation was going to scare him straight. He was there long enough that he had completely medically detoxed from the alcohol. He got home at 9 AM on a Sunday and was at the bar by 10.

I’ve never had a real relationship with my father. The closest thing to kinship I experienced was my own bout of alcoholism. I’m 24 now, and I’ve been sober for 2 years come Christmas eve. My dad didn’t offer me a whole lot, but he did teach me what not to be.

Seeing him today has really shaken me. He is so frail. So small. While talking to me, he’d close his eyes. I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking about. Does he realize he’s dying? Does he care? Has he simply given up? How can this shell of a man be the same one who I’d stay up with till 3 AM playing cards, smoking cigarettes and drinking with? Joking around and listening to the oldies. The man I’ve felt such strong demise for. The man I grew up admiring. He’s none of those things now. He’s a jaundiced skeleton, hanging on by a bare thread, and soon, quite soon, he will be dead.”

For months, I’ve been compiling these words. Sitting on them until the right moment came to finally post on my blog. School has kept me busier than I imagined. I had a goal of posting once a week here, but as soon as school started back up, that was out the window. After the initial busy-ness passed, I don’t know what kept me from posting. I had two solid passages written, I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down, edit them, and post them. A couple of days ago, I tested positive for Covid. I’ve got plenty of time at home now. Plenty of time to process what has happened in the past month.

My dad died. On January 9, around noon, I received a phone call from the nurse at the nursing home he was in. “Brittany, listen. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your dad has passed.” My heart immediately began pounding. You see, I knew it was coming. I’ve known it for years. Knowing doesn’t make reality any easier.

The day after I wrote “My father is dying,” I went to check on my dad. It was December 23. I had been calling him all morning, but he didn’t answer, and I realized I needed to go see how he was. When I walked into his apartment, he was laying in his bed, cell phone in his hand. He was too weak to bring the phone up to his face to answer it. I looked at him, and I knew.

I called the ambulance and the paramedic asked me when the symptoms began. “I was here yesterday, and he was weak, but he was not like this.” The paramedic told me about UTIs and how in older people, they can cause scary symptoms. I was too upset to roll my eyes at him and tell him I work at a nursing home. I was terrified to see my dad that way, and I knew it was much, much more than a UTI.

At the hospital, the ER doctor told me, “Your father is a very sick man.” She said that his organs were pretty much failing collectively. When I asked about a timeline, she told me, “It could be days. It could be a couple of weeks.” Thus began the long process of waiting. In the hospital, my dad was restless. He was groaning in pain. Most of his time, he spent sleeping. When he would wake briefly, he’d take a few bites of food, and fall asleep while chewing. He was so weak. So tired. We made arrangements for my dad to be taken to the nursing home for end-of-life care. I knew I could not give him the 24-hour attention he needed at home. Of course, it was a constant battle with my sister. She was convinced I wasn’t doing enough for my father. She had a hard time accepting that the best thing we could do was keep him comfortable and surround him with love as he left us.

At the hospital, my dad obviously wasn’t drinking or smoking anymore. He was getting all of his medications as prescribed. He actually began to incrementally improve. The day the hospital discharged him to the nursing home, the doctor told me, “It is no longer days. He could stabilize and remain this way for quite some time.” That was December 29. 10 days later, he would pass.

It has been a whirlwind. Grief is such a strange thing, especially for someone that you didn’t always feel the most positive emotions toward. I experienced a lot of resentment towards my father. Yet, being present during his last days on earth gave me such a unique perspective on my father’s humanness. Seeing him so naked in the vulnerability that is death and dying gave me more respect and empathy for him than I’ve had for my entire life. All of the memories of myself as a child being in wonder at my dad’s intelligence and comedy came flooding back. I realized that the part of me that adored my dad never went away. There were simply layers stacked upon layers, like sediment, preventing me from accessing that part, until the tsunami of his death came and swept them away. What remains is a complicated mess. The good times, the bad times, the beautiful moments alongside the ugly. The love, the resentment, the fear, the pride. It’s all there, now, for me to figure out what to do with it.

Despite all of the complications that came along with my relationship with my father, this I know for fact: he loved me the best way he knew how, he would’ve done (and did) anything in his power to help me when I needed him, and I would absolutely not be who I am today without him.

My father is no longer in pain. Not only physically, but emotionally. All that drove him to drink his life away can no longer hurt him. He is free, and for that, I am grateful.