Inheritance

 

Reclamation

One after another, the losses just kept piling up. Only recently did I realize how much I’ve lost. Looking through old photos: my ex-girlfriend, Heather, standing on the shore of the Black River on our first camping trip together; Otis, a black cat looking above the rim of a white claw foot bathtub; Loca, the calico, stretched out on the windowsill, another cat she’d been watching on a fence in the distance; my Dad sitting on a park bench in a camo t-shirt and sweat-stained straw cowboy hat at Fort Mont; a smiling Grandpop Dunham with a cross tie clip, proudly clutching the New Testament; an old black and white photo of Grandmom Stolar beaming, kneeling beside a horsie rocker with her sons, my Dad and Uncle John; My Uncle John’s portrait in his school teacher tie and jacket, I can see the sadness in his eyes; and Eli, my three-legged cat napping on my lap, my air cast ankle in the background.

They’re all gone. Those sentient beings that I loved and once touched are gone. Heather is far away. Even further than she was when we were together. I sometimes see them in my dreams. I wake up sad. If only I could hug and hold them one more time and tell them I love them. To ask all the questions I never had a chance to ask. To tell my Dad that I’m sorry I wasn’t there for him when he most needed help, a hug, an embrace, a kind word.

I didn’t cry when my Dad passed away. Partly because I didn’t have time. I was broke as shit and had to take time off from work. Make travel arrangements. Type up an obituary, only to still be charged $200 for the service by the funeral home, where the Medical Examiner dropped off his body. There was no examination, no autopsy. Just some poor, dead old man expired on his kitchen floor. I’d found out via Facebook. The apartment manager found his lifeless body. All I got from her was a message: “Call the Pennsville Police. It’s about your Dad.” My Sister called her. She called me bawling, crying. She couldn’t utter the words, but she didn’t have to. At the time all I felt was the stress. And going back to New Jersey didn’t help. I’m pretty sure my sociopathic sister was on the grift and hoping she would get something out of it, which she did after it was discovered that  Dad left a $75,000 insurance policy to my Nephew who he raised from around 11 years old. A good thing, because if he’d stayed with his mom, Psycho Sister, his life would have been hell. He knew that and made a conscious choice to stay with Grandpop. My Sister was able to get $9,999 dollars out of my Nephew (for me as well).

I feel that she shouldn’t have even been there. She had abandoned him after promising my nephew she would keep an eye on him. I too had trusted her to do that as well. And it turned out that the reason she and her boyfriend had even moved back to South Jersey wasn’t nostalgia for the Jersey Shore or love of my Father, but escaping a meth habit, and escape payback from a dealer they’d burned. That’s nothing. I recently learned more about just how depraved she was. It makes me feel sick to think about it, so I’ll spare you. Anyway, everything about Wilmer’s death should have been between my Nephew and myself. Something which also might have bonded us, but no, my Sister wasn’t going to allow that to happen. I was to be robbed of an  opportunity to bond with, and morn Bill’s death with my Nephew. Now I am estranged from him, too. And maybe that was part of my Sister’s goal. I never had the chance to have that heart-to-heart with him. I wish I had. My family is so broken.

My point is that the whole affair was awful. And stressful. So I didn’t have time to morn, or weep. But, that’s another story for another day. This is about grieving. Only recently has that kind of all come to the surface. Greatly due to my decision to quit alcohol almost four years ago. I have clarity. I sit with my feelings and figure them out, work through them.

The sense of loss is palpable. I was looking through my old photo albums the other day, including the memorial album I made to commemorate my Dad’s life. I felt so alone in the world. All the beings I loved gone, either through death or by distance. I felt a desire to travel back in time with the consciousness I have now, to reconnect, to make amends, to offer words of love and encouragement. But mostly to hug them and let them know they are loved. If only. But I can only do that here, now, in the present. All the loss, the grieving, has made me a better person. It has opened my heart up to others, and feel what they are feeling, more than ever. To quote Paul Weller, The Jam, “There’s enough in this world of sorrow/I don’t wish to add some more to it.” It is also true that empathy can be a heavy weight. One of the reasons I drank was because it is all so intense, that awareness, being in someone’s presence, and being able to “feel” them; their “energy” or “vibrations”, as they say; the good, the bad, and the ugly. And the awareness of all the unnecessary suffering and enforced misery in the world, which is always pushing its way into my consciousness. It’s relentless and exhausting. And hard for me to shut off. Alcohol caused it all to slow down. Some quiet. And peace.

I was four years old. Maybe three. We are living in an apartment complex in Pennsgrove, NJ; my Dad, my Mom, and maybe my Sister, if she were born by then. White stucco exterior two story buildings with pine green trim. I think this was at the time my Dad had a primer-gray Studebaker, with a black iron cross painted on the doors. I walked across the asphalt parking lot to the complex across the street. There was little girl around my age who lived on the second floor. I was at the bottom of the narrow stairwell, she at the top. She couldn’t come play. She was being punished. She told me her Mom had washed her mouth out with soap for telling a fib. Or maybe it was a bad word. I pictured soap bubbles coming out of her mouth, floating in the air. But mostly I felt sad. I felt her distress. And I remember it. It may even be my first memory. I also think I understood something dark about adults.

 

 

This was my consciousness breaking through the mist. My first act of consciousness as a self identified “I”. And my first conscious act: grasping something indelible about the world outside me that would become part of the very essence of who I was and am. I’ve really only recently comprehended the significance of that moment, how it was an expression of my temperament and the beginning of the formation of my Self. I think it was my grief that brought me back to this, and back to my self; who I am.

I have thoughts of doing a memoir. Maybe two: one about growing up and one about my time in San Francisco. Maybe this is the start of that. I just know I have been wanting to get back to writing, so here I am. Writing.