My Awkward Life

Welcome back to the shit show. Buckle up, kids. This post is a little long.

tl;dr Today marks 16 years since my dad died and I'm venting about it because why not?

When I was 14, I was taught the hard life lesson of what grief was as I watched my tiny, adolescent universe implode and get swallowed by the darkness that is depression. Prior to this event, I thought I was depressed because I didn’t know if I was a girl or a boy and I was going through puberty and it was very confusing to me. The universe saw my struggle and showed me a pain like I’ve never felt before and suddenly I didn’t really care what the world saw me as because I could no longer see me. I lost sight of myself and began my spiral into a dark hole until I just sat there for about a year. I often look back on this time in my life and regret not doing anything with myself, but I have to remind this new, adult version of myself that I was not well and every day I peeled myself out of bed was a victory. I went through the motions of living and I looked like I was alive, but to be honest, I was nothing but a shell of the oblivious, ignorant teenager I used to be.

My dad was a passenger in a fatal car accident that took his only life and left the driver with a scratch on his forehead. The other vehicle was a parked truck on the side of the road with no passengers. I want to tell you that the moment he died, a piece of me died or something poetic like that, but to be honest with you, I cannot tell you exactly what happened the moment I learned he died because for years, I thought the whole thing happened differently. (Did you like that run on sentence?) It was only up until a few years ago that I learned what actually happened from my mom.

What did you think happened vs. what actually happened?

No one

Well, this is what I thought happened and how I’ve told this story for years:

My mom came upstairs (where my room was) and woke me up. She asked me to come downstairs because she needed to talk to me. I got up and went with no questions asked even though I wanted to just go back to sleep. I went to her room and she was sitting on the foot of her bed and told me to sit next to her, so I did. This was our supposed conversation while my mom was (obviously) crying:

Mom: Uncle Yugo just called and your dad was in an accident…
Me: *thinking* Okay, I guess we’re going to fly to Nicaragua and visit him in the hospital or something. I wonder what he looks like and how bad it was. I wonder-
Mom: …he didn’t make it.
Me: *thinking* What the actual fuck? Is this a joke? whatthefuckwhatthefuck. I don’t want to be in front of anyone anymore, I just want to be alone. Okay, count to three and on three you’re just going to run to your room and lock the door and cry or collapse or die or whatever. Okay, ready? 1 – 2 – 3 GO

Then I ran upstairs in a very dramatic fashion because, like, how else would I run? Anyway, after that, I thought my mom and Andy followed me up there and comforted me, etc. then I cried myself to sleep.

What actually happened is my mom just came up to my room to tell me and comfort me like an all-in-one type of deal, but I don’t remember what happened after that. I guess my brain noped most of those memories out of my long-term memory along with a lot of helpful things that I wish I could remember.

I would get so angry when people around me were smiling and happy because my smile was stolen from me. Like, how are you happy? Don’t you know that my world was just turned upside down like a purse in the backseat of a car when you slam on the brakes and its contents fly everywhere? What the FUCK are you so happy about? After my depression stopped holding my smile hostage, I would feel guilty when I smiled or laughed. I felt so numb for the majority of the year following my dad’s death and the rare times I did feel something, I felt so much that the pain was virtually unbearable. I think emotional pain is the worst pain to deal with because there’s no escaping your thoughts. As much as I wanted to crawl out of my skin and kick it away, I couldn’t. I was stuck in my own personal prison with a life sentence for something I didn’t even do.

My dad and I had a very complicated relationship. We were in a fight when he died and hadn’t spoken in about a year, so not only did I learn the lesson of grief, but I learned about closure and what a lack of closure can do. I feel like with death, there’s never really any closure, but I think with like slow deaths, it’s a little easier because you can say so many things and you have time to think about what your last words will be to that person. My last words to my dad were something along the lines of “I hate you, go to hell” and those words paved a very long, tough road for me.

“You were just a child, he knows you loved him. You can’t beat yourself up over that.”

Everyone

Yes, I get that, but it doesn’t make it any easier. My heart still breaks every time I think of that and I punished myself for a long time over it. I sometimes still do, I guess that’s just the self-loathing in me. I think it makes other people feel better to tell me those things because they don’t want me to hate myself for such an insignificant-to-anyone-else thing. I guess it’s like: who actually listens to what 14 year olds say and take it to heart? Especially one who’s so far up their own ass they don’t even know if it’s night or day? No one around me wants me to beat myself up over something like that.

The truth is, it was crazy I ever thought it was okay to talk to my dad like that. It was crazy of me to ever think it was okay to say something like that to anyone. I had so much anger inside of me when I was younger and I still do, but I can manage it a little better… sometimes. Clearly, I still hold a lot of anger and today, more than ever, I am feeling that anger with a sprinkle of defeat. I never could express myself healthily and often times my loved ones took the brunt of that anger, but it was mostly my dad who got the majority of it. I would rationalize this anger with him because he lived so far away and I never got to see him but once or twice a year. So all of this was his fault, he did all of this to himself. That’s what I thought at that time. He had started a new family, my mom started a new family, and I felt like I was just falling through the cracks. My life felt chaotic and I had no control over any of it. I couldn’t even figure out which bathroom to use for fuck’s sake.

I remember my mom and I were in the car going over the 312 bridge and he called her. They were talking and then I guess he wanted to talk to me and she tried to hand me the phone and say he wanted to talk to me and I told her I didn’t want to talk to him. That was the last time I remember having the chance to talk to him and I chose not to.

Before we stopped talking, I used to get so fucking annoyed when he would call because I felt like he called me all of the time and we never had anything to talk about. Our normal conversations would go something like this:

Me: Hello?
Dad: Hi Alex, how are you?
Me: I’m good.
Dad: That’s good, how was your day?
Me: It was good.
Dad: How’s school?
Me: *Why is he always asking about school?* It’s good.

Then we would have awkward silences and small talk until finally hanging up. I would dread those conversations and I ended up hating talking to anyone on the phone. Then I got my first cell phone when I turned 13, I think and he would call me on that and I would get even more annoyed. Eventually, we had our fight about God knows what and then we stopped talking, forever.

As I get older and experience more, I add more reasons onto my list of why this event has been so unfair. I’ve realized that yes, of course he’s going to call me on my cell phone because that’s his direct line to me now and all he ever wanted to do was talk to me. I’ve realized that now, as I look for houses, he and I could have built one together because he owned a construction company Tablayeso. I’ve realized that I’m going to have to live with this grief for the rest of my life.

Today, my grief turned 16 years old…it’s old enough to drive on its own. Two years ago marked the beginning of remembering my dad longer than I knew him. I’m rapidly approaching the time where I will have outlived him. The grief will always be there, like a scab that just won’t fucking heal no matter how much you try to leave it alone, it just opens itself back up.

The world is a crazy place and it’s amazing how much can change in the blink of an eye. So just make sure that each time you open your eyes, you’re making it worth while because this could be the last time you open them.

To be continued.