Recollections from the mid-90s

Reading what I wrote at 18 years old, the depths of pain that I detached from, wrote out, and placed upon a shelf. Recently, I dusted it off like an old guidebook, reinterpreted through the murky lens of three decades. So many years have passed, but the words feel as if they were written yesterday. The green marker ink is still vivid, capturing the rawness of the words with heartbreaking intensity. Words written down 30 years ago, put in the Lane trunk from Mom-Mom, next to Uncle Walter’s Purple Heart.

“Dad, why did you have to kill yourself?”

This thought emerged again, as though from the rubble, trapped in an air pocket—vague at first, then gradually solidifying. Did Dad, suffering from alcoholism and depression, realize too late he had lung cancer? Was his approach to ignore it, hoping it would go away? Did he allow himself to die, thinking it was too horrible to be true, so we could somehow avoid it if we all pretended it wasn’t happening? These were the thoughts I struggled with, recorded in a marble notebook, letting the words sit on the page for years and years. I intellectualized the reality of our life because actually feeling it was too crushing. But perhaps if I had allowed myself to feel then, I wouldn’t have built up years of scar tissue from not feeling at the time. I ran from it, ran from the pain. It always catches up, in one way or another. Pain cannot be outrun.

How horrible it was, Dad dying young, dying with the promise of life crumbling around him. Dying with the hopes and dreams of his immigrant parents and his younger siblings. Dying young, leaving behind his girls, his wife, his career: the one he scraped and climbed for, endured bullshit and refinery fumes and unions and strikes. Leaving us behind, vulnerable at 12 and 16. Leaving us without a father to navigate life in the suburbs of Philly, among upwardly yearning middle-class and working-class messiness, with mental health issues and generational trauma and alcoholism and cigarettes like a noose around our necks. Leaving us without a playbook for dealing with the onslaught of sexism, misogyny, patriarchal nonsense. Trauma layered in our cells and DNA, passed from generation to generation, following us across oceans. Left at our feet to sift through, on top of your death, without the tools to do so.

Dad was bright, smart at math and engineering, the things I struggled with in school. One of the last things I told him as he was dying was that I got my math grade up to a C. He just looked at me. Mom didn’t know what to do without him, so she bought things, things to fill the void left when he died. Now Mom has rats in the basement and cigarettes in random ashtrays all through the house. I was trapped there, while she spun out of control. You kicked us out of the hospital room because you didn’t want us to see you dying. But guess what, we lived with you while you were dying. I lived through it. So why kick me out? Then, you had a shot of morphine, and you died.

The Dark Ages

Those years, the time of deep depression, the “Dark Ages,” as Jen B. called it, when my hair fell out from dying it so many colors, when I was about to drop out of college. I even spoke to the dean about it, planning to go bartend in Ireland, until my roommate’s dad said absolutely not. Mom said yes, I could go. I needed to get the f*ck out of dodge. But I stayed, and I lived in the basement with the tiny window and the waterbed I bought just to punish my mom for taking me furniture shopping while drunk.

The Dark Ages had some funny stories. Like the time we smoked pot and decided to take the old Toro tractor with the trailer out for a spin, with Jen B. sitting in the trailer, me driving up the driveway at 2 mph, until we realized my mom was two inches behind us in her car, laying on the horn. We all laughed our high asses off while Jen B. froze in the trailer and locked eyes with my furious mom. They stared each other down while I howled with laughter and tried to gun it on the tractor, which of course didn’t go any faster. My mom was so annoyed with us.

The “Dark Ages” should be a book in itself.