Part of me feels guilty for writing this, putting these words out into the virtual world forever. But then part of me hopes that sharing some of this pain will release it and I can let it go. I have long ago forgiven my parents for the wrong doings in my childhood and beyond. I believe in my heart that they were only doing what they believed was right. Someone I worked with a few years ago told me that some people need more help than others and although I felt as though I was left to wither in the shadows in actual fact they knew I would survive with less nurturing and that he just needed more of them than I did. Like a plant that lives in shade. I don’t know really, I just believe that there is no point in holding the grudge.

When I was 27, I picked up my life and moved West, as far as I could go at the time. I felt some sadness from my Mom, but it was more like she felt I was leaving her than chasing my own life. When I was about 15 I met a woman who was extremely mom like and nurturing who had always wanted a daughter but was blessed with a son instead. We met through a co-ed sports team her son and I were on and we became fast friends. My Mom was jealous. She made me feel like I was spending too much time with this woman. I remember my dog Sam playing with a tennis ball and completely ignoring his raw hide bone. When I picked up the raw hide he followed me and whimpered for it back. I gave it to him and he ran and hid it away and went back to the ball. He didn’t want the raw hide, he just didn’t want me to have it. That was a bit like this situation. My Mother was always hard on me and I am sure a lot of girls would say the same – the mother daughter dynamic is never easy. She had a hard time with her own mother and probably never learned how to be nice to a daughter. I do remember going back to visit in my later 30’s and having relatives and neighbors seem surprised I came back to visit. They would ask why I was still in contact with my parents and that is when it hit me. This was not something I imagined, but it was real and not something I made up in my head. My parents came out West to visit me once in the 17 years give or take that I have lived here. The weekend they spent (a whole three days) was completely overshadowed by the fact that my brother got his diagnosis that previous Thursday and they were anxious to get back to him to take care of him. So they were here but they were not really here. They told my then boyfriend and now husband that they were proud of me, that I had moxie and were glad I was doing so well. But they never told me that.

About year 8 into my brother’s cancer I received a frantic phone call from my Mother while I was at work that said I needed to get on a plane and come back East as soon as possible. My brother needed a transplant and I was going to give it to him. Immediately I thought about all the Christmas and Birthday gifts I had bought over the years that he had sneered at and tossed into the trash unopened. I thought about my parents watching those exchanges and never saying anything to him about it. All the while reeling from what I had to do to save him now. Give his this gift he could not refuse – not if he wanted to live. I called my spouse and he was pretty upset, as was my best friend here who knew my life story. Both would not tell me not to do it as it had to be my decision (something my parents seemingly never considered). I pondered it for a long time. I pondered it while I had my blood tested, while I waited to find out if I could be his donor, while I read up on what complications lay ahead for me as donor, what outcomes he faced and the chances it gave him. My friends cried and my spouse yelled at the situation while I waited. I found out that I had about a 75% chance of not being a match for him only to discover my blood was a 100% match. I agonized over what to do. Do I help this person who will likely die without my blood? Do I risk my own health for someone who I knew didn’t care for me or like me or whom may not have done the same for me? Do I treat him like a stranger that I could fix with my blood? No one around me could understand why I would consider it. When I was 21 I was walking my Golden Retriever and we were attacked by a pit bull. After everything was said and done and I knew I was okay and my dog was okay, I worried for the pit bull. I am a creature that accepts the flaws and takes them in, I have seen anger and rage first hand so I know that it comes from pain in a lot of cases. When I spoke to my Dad on the phone about donating my blood to my brother he said that I could do it, or I could choose to no longer be a part of the family. It was my blood or no relationship. He never asked me what it would mean for my health, he was only focused on saving his son. Rightly so? I felt like a used part and terrified at the odds that I read that said my blood could kill him just as soon as save him. I knew if that happened I would be forever blamed and if I didn’t help him I would be cast out. Agonizing time passed until a decision would need to be made. Every time the phone rang I dreaded it would be the call. In the end that call never came and he died before I would have to make that decision. Never well enough to try that path. Years later Dad and I spoke honestly, or at least I did about what that decision would have meant to my life. Three weeks out East, pumped full of chemicals to increase my stem cells, 8 to 12 hrs of dialysis to donate and then another week of recovery. Long term effects of this treatment are still not known for donors, it is still a relatively new process. He seemed stunned and a bit shaken at the words, that I was possibly putting my own health at risk. But still nothing was ever said to appease my sadness in this situation. We just carried on like it was all just water under the bridge. And perhaps that is what this should remain. But since my father’s death so much has been in my head that I need to share and say aloud. Perhaps now is the time.

So yes, Dad passed away in the middle of July this year. I had somehow convinced him after years of nonsensical badgering to spit into a cup and partake of 23andme the site that can tell you about your ancestry and your DNA. Over the last four years of getting to know the man I called my father I learned a few truths about him and who he was that I didn’t know. We are a lot alike I found. We were/are both fixers in that we see someone in trouble and our instinct is to save them or we find a friend in need and want to fix them. When he found out his best friend of 50+ years had Cancer his first instinct was to jump into his car and drive two or three hours to be with him. When my “niece” who is technically not related to me but important just the same told me her dog needed immediate surgery my first instinct was to take out a loan for her and fix it all. In both of these cases what both of us wanted didn’t happen, due to circumstances beyond our control. And our hearts both sank, both feeling as if we had let that fixable person down. Not grasping the enormity of the situation or what part we really played. It hurts not to be able to fix and help. Both my Dad and I share a stress rash in the form of a welty skin condition that itches beyond belief and both he and I only responded to one type of medication for it. Both Dad and I have/had short fuses that once lit made for entertaining and dangerous outcomes. My Dad was a good man. He tried to do right by his son, spending thousands of dollars on treatments for my brother’s Cancer that my Mom would continue to pay after his death. He tried to do right by his wife and take care of her in her times of need that grew like weeds once my brother died. He got to know me, even for a few short years after my brother died and while my Mom struggled. We knew each other as people a little bit more and I like to think that was a blessing. He was adopted and knew about abandonment. He was funny and witty and flirty. All things I got from my father. He was smart and he was strong.

When I was growing up my truth is that I was in the shadows. My Mother tells me that my birth was hard and almost killed her. Her own mother was cruel to her and treated her poorly her whole life. She at 78 still carries a tremendous amount of bitterness for her own mother and I think as I write this now that this is a way for me to work through it, however partially so that I can eventually let it go. There are many forms of abuse and just because I seldom had bruises does not mean that I did not suffer as a lonely person in my childhood. There is nothing quite like being bullied in your own house but I was and this is my truth. I was not a great kid. I was a little shit sometimes and I lied, was bossy and pushy. But I was lonely and begging for acceptance at every turn. When I wrote my first poem at the age of 7 my mother asked me where I copied it from and told me that lying was wrong. I wrote it, it came from my brain to my hand to my pen to my paper. Why at 7 did I have to say that? When I was singing I had to prove to her that the teacher liked my voice. Behind my back she told everyone how proud she was of me, but she never told me. Not once. Ours was such a difficult relationship was it any wonder I married the first person who asked me despite his vicious hands and words? I married into abuse because it was what I knew and what I felt I was worth. She knew the whole time how he was treating me and often would ask me what I had done to deserve it? Where was the blame to be placed? Perhaps if I behaved better it wouldn’t have. She wouldn’t help me leave. She said it was not her place. She swore me to secrecy from my father as his reaction would have been decidedly different. I remember being a teenager in their house and being shoved up against a wall by my brother as my father passed behind him. My brother held a X-acto knife to my throat and laughed. I escaped and asked my father why he hadn’t helped me and he simply said “You must have done something, and you shouldnt have been in that hallway”.

So my Dad died in July of this year. My Dad and I did not always have the best relationship, but in the last years of his life we got to know each other more as people than we had in my previous 44 years on this planet. We had a lot between us, not the least of which was the angry son he had, my brother, who died of Cancer four years before my father at the age of 41. My brother was an angry person his whole life. Gifts of ability for sports notwithstanding he was always negative and I have come to see in the last few months how much of my Mother is in him. Dark and brooding, angry at the world and all its stupidity in so many forms. He was above it all and these people around him were nothings. He never lived anywhere but under the roof of my parents, never ventured out into the world despite his smarts and larger than life stature. He was a self-imposed hermit who stayed to himself, alienating himself from everyone and everything that didn’t meet his tremendous standards. He was violent with me, at times with both my parents and when he got sick he was more violent and angry which was blamed on the drugs given to him to release the poison from his body. He died bitter and alone in a hospital bed where nurses said it looked like something was trying to pull him up and out of the bed. Was it the demons he dreamt of in the months leading up to his death that came to drag him away? Or was it just the seizures that ravaged his already weakened body? Perhaps no one will ever know. What I do know is that neither of my parents went with him on that last trip to the hospital in the middle of that cool April night. Neither followed behind the ambulance to see that his journey was successful. I think both had seen him go so many times that they just decided to let him, perhaps in some parental way knowing this would be the last trip, the last time they would follow those lights and sirens and neither wanted to face that.

He died alone in a hospital bed having never fully awoken from his afternoon nap. His last act was one of kindness I must say though. Although he lived with my parents in his old room for his whole life the last two years of his life he didn’t speak to my mother. She tried in vain to get to him but he was angry that she couldn’t name the medications he was taking for his treatment; or at least that was his chosen reason for his cruelty to her. He blamed her for his Cancer and said that her years of smoking had caused it. He did everything he could to hurt her from the physical to the mental and back again. But she never stopped trying to reach him, to understand him, to love him. This first-born son whose existence made her whole was pulling so hard from her and she could never let go. His last day on this earth was like so many before, medications and poisons to kill the poison in his blood, sleep, hardly any food, and pain. And silence. Then in his last act he asked if he could sit with her for a few moments and she in her shock and awe of this gift was alive again, his mother, broken shell of a woman, who sat and waited for this moment his whole existence extended her hands and he sat with her. Rested his head and went to sleep, never to open his eyes fully again. Years later this once strong woman who raised two children, not just one, would remain in this place, seated and waiting for him to ask for her again, long after he was gone. She withered here, in this place of solitude and silence waiting for the ambulance to bring him back as they had so many times before, but knowing he was gone, just never having to accept it.

After my brother died my father became everything to my Mother. I was the distant child who never fit in and moved three thousand miles away to put the distance between us I had always felt. It was never enough. The time passed after my brother did and she weakened further until she could no longer walk or stand for a long time, until the type two diabetes became type one, until all of that strength and power had dwindled away to where she was just a shell. The loss of a child is not something I will ever know, but those I have spoken to tell me it is not something anyone could ever understand or accept. She would go on to have both hips replaced and one knee and that modern medical wonder would decay in her living corpse as she waited to join her son on the other side. My father took on the role of caregiver. He cleaned up after her, shopped for her, did laundry, added sage counsel and did everything he could to keep her going. He too weakened after my brother’s death. This was another in the long line of friends that he lost over his 80 years. My brother was a confidant and a friend, a golf buddy who shared so many of his passions. His last link to technology and the marvels of the new generations. I envied their closeness but found their relationship comforting in a way. My Mother’s neediness gave pause for my father to need that relationship and I was grateful for it. They golfed and talked about computers and cars. They commiserated over sports losses and trades, they were friends. My mother was an island, even then content to sit and be alone and not in the fray. Somewhere on the edge of existence and reality. All my childhood she never participated in our lives really. She did go to baseball games for her son, and most school events she was there sitting alongside my father. Dad coached and Mom watched from the sidelines various sporting events. But for the social side of things she stayed to herself for the most part the older we got. She preferred to hear about the wins other than witness them. As I faded into the background my brother stood out. He was a star in High School, extremely smart and talented and excelling at all he tried. I didn’t get the same attention and I know what it sounds like to say that but it is true. The greatness in my family was meant for my brother, not for me. As years of this went on I had to work to find my self-worth in other places, not in the proud faces of my parents. I had to work to earn their pride, their acceptance and their concern. I still struggle with my self-worth to this day, but everything I have, I have because I earned it and there is something to be said for that.

My Mother ended up in the hospital about a year after my brother died, having fallen and being unable to stand one evening. My father was not strong enough to lift her and her muscles were quite stiffened from sitting for so many years that she did not have the strength to lift herself or help him lift her. So there she sat, on the living room floor for hours as my father begged her to let him call an ambulance. She flat-out refused because of her pride and when a neighbor finally came over and he couldn’t help lift her either she finally relented and an ambulance was called. During this trip to the hospital she was left on an emergency room gurney for several hours developing a bedsore that metastasized into a gaping wound. She was given lotion to treat it and sent home. This ordeal did nothing to help her distrust of the medical profession and the wound grew. She has had a wound nurse that has been coming to the house to help her for the last three years and the wound is almost healed. But this only lead her to be more sedentary despite the fact that moving might have helped the healing process. She loves her caregiver and between this woman and my Dad all was right in my Mom’s world. defiantly my Dad grew tired as his age caught up with him and his inability to keep constant care of my mother grew and took its toll. He was tired and his friends noticed. We spoke about it a few times and he did try to lean on others for help. They were married for 57 years after all and we all know that love changes and takes many forms. He was at the pharmacy getting her prescriptions when the heart attack hit. The pharmacist gave him two nitrate pills and made him sit for a while. My Dad was old guy tough, sat for a few minutes and then brushed the incident off. He went home finished his Saturday in his usual way and then went to bed. July was the month my father died. This July that has just passed.