(NC) Another Chapter of My Living Dead: Eulogy of My Father

[Kintsugi]

My father decided, somehow, maybe three years ago or more that he “wanted a relationship” with me, which was, to me, abrupt and which he pursued with sudden... aggression is my word. Zeal, maybe.

It was something I knew I could not give him. Something I had already long wrestled with and fairly gave up on. I knew he could die soon. My parents are a great deal older than most of my peers’. Adoption is a bizarre thing. Transposition of life. Crossing through universes. No one asks the infant’s opinion, and when they grow into a person, they don’t want to know.

I felt he could die more peacefully with me at a distance. To have a relationship would have meant his walking through the fire of my rage. Observing the hell he threw me into by choosing the path of least resistance—harboring my brother in his home when I walked away, at seventeen, and then through all those years I when I scraped and scrounged and suffered knowing I had nowhere else to go.

This will take me a long time to write. But I needed to begin. This death of the living is a living grief that will never itself die. It is the most unkind death I have known. It’s a chosen death, but it’s worse than suicide, for The Living Dead just keep on choosing it every moment of every day and still don’t have the decency to actually die. Going no contact with someone who is poison is the best option, but it’s a shit one.

Yesterday I thought about the phrase “between the Devil and the deep blue sea.” When faced with a devil, who wouldn’t choose to swim?

 

[internal]

Going no contact with someone who is poison is the best option, but it’s a shit one.

especially a parent. it is real hard to explain this to people who haven't done something similer. and you vacillete back and forth of wanting to reach out. and remembering all the ways in which is harmful and dangerous to do so.

especially if you have a family of your own. you need to protect them. and you need to protect your self. exposing your self to that again is not feaseble either. and people ask. why this. why that. oh. they're your family. give them a break.

To have a relationship would have meant his walking through the fire of my rage.

i know that i will not speak with my mother again before she dies. i might. that might change. but as it stands now. that it is not possible.

the last conversation i ever had with her she told me my father's death was because of me. and i knew then that i would never be able to reach her. she was broken in a way that was irreparable. yelling and screaming which i still feel that rage to her.

it is useless. she is broken. and some times that is the way it is. things are broken beyond repair and to continue trying to repair them. is an exercise of insanity.

"doing the same thing over and over again." but it does seperate you from your peers. from your friends. people often do not comprehend what this all entails. the grief that you experence because you did not have the parent that you needed.

that every one is entitled of having. forgive me if you had not wished any comments on this. i was not sure based of how this was structured. if you were intrested in this type of discussion. or if this was intended of being a more personal thread.

or if it was meant to continue of providing more details.

it was just some thing which had spoken to me. i know this pain very well. i stopped speaking with my entire biological family at 19. it is like being anchorless. you're floating along the abyss. you have no life jacket. at any moment you can be sucked down.

and my husband says "we're your family." and he is. that's true. but there is a distinction there. he knows that he has people other than me to rely upon. i have only him. maybe my daughter. when she gets old enough to take care of her ailing dad.

and that's the end of it. and it has to be that way. because any other way is insanity.

harboring my brother in his home when I walked away, at seventeen, and then through all those years I when I scraped and scrounged and suffered knowing I had nowhere else to go.

it sounds like you have come quite far from that time period. and the thing of it all is that you know you do not need him. you know you have what it takes to survive. to do what you need to do without that influence.

it just hurts. because there is a role there that was never fulfilled properly. and this is the statement which claims that will never be filled properly.

 

[Kintsugi]

@grief Thank you very much for responding and sharing. All my threads are always open for discussion. I just have a very strong lean towards a narrative style that gets stronger and stronger the more emotional and painful something is for me to write.

In most ways, going no contact with my father is likely to be far easier than with my brother. I never had a relationship with my father that was meaningful beyond around 12-14 years old (around my disclosure of abuse and the full surfacing of all my symptoms). In other ways that made him the “safest” person in my life. Unlike my brother, who raped me for years though I loved him more than life, and my mother, who psychologically and verbally abused me my whole life though we shared such a (freakishly, pathologically) close relationship, my father and I had close to nothing at all between us. When I didn’t speak to my mother for a year, he was the only one I would talk to from my “nuclear” family. He did wound me terribly with the things he said and the choices he made after “learning” (god what a f*cking LIAR) what happened to me, but he was set apart by being not nearly as guilty as the rest of them.

That was all a lie. All of it. And I have spent years working so hard to get to a place where I could give him the relationship he is supposedly so desperate to have with me.

I read your reply and was going to start pulling quotes to which I wanted to respond, but really it’s just “yes, that, yes” all the way through. I have been separated from my family because of my brother for twelve years. I volunteered to work every holiday. I gave non-answers to why I couldn’t go home. And yes, there is no life vest. I curated a collection of deeply meaningful friendships only to turn around in my mid-late 20s and realize every single one of them is like me. It seems that with the exception of my husband, all of my friends are those who have no family they can turn to, because they’re all toxic.

And yes especially to what you say about your own husband. It is not the same. I keep waking up and falling to weeping for hours. He asks what’s wrong and I ask how many times I have to tell him I just lost my father. Yesterday he asked, As in life function has ceased?

I try to explain how much worse this purgatory is. The grief is consuming and never ending. My father has chosen to be dead to me—over and over again, day by day, moment to moment. And yet without the decency to simply be dead. There is no closure. It is a gaping wound that does not heal over. I feel as though a shotgun has torn through me. There is a hole in my center. It will not stitch shut until I finally stop caring. Indifference is the only salve in my experience, of which I have too much.

“But I’m your family.” It’s a nice thing to say. A true thing. But it is not the same.

 

[internal]

I never had a relationship with my father that was meaningful beyond around 12-14 years old (around my disclosure of abuse and the full surfacing of all my symptoms)

that makes sense of that you would not have had the reletionship after this time. he did not respond appropriately so it would not be reasonable to expect you to maintain any posetive emotions to him. and in fact the expectation should be that your feelings of him are negetive and filled with anger.

he did some thing wrong. he did some thing that no parent should do. his child came to him and told him that they were being abused. and he did not act. that is wrong! and he is bad because of that. but i am just telling you things you know, ha. but you know. some times it is good to hear it again from the outside.

i have diffeculties with that. i know my parents were bad but then i go "well, what if... what if my mom is actually okay? what if i'm bad?!" and my therepist is like, "stop being insane, that is pants on head crazy."

He did wound me terribly with the things he said and the choices he made after “learning” (god what a f*cking LIAR)

i just wanted to say that i under stood exactly what you were conveying here. we had many of these "open secrets" in my family as well.

denial and suppressien were my mother's favored tactics. and the unfortunete thing is that i inherited the tendency. along with what ever drugs she was taking. (lorazepam/diazepam most likely.) (i inherited that tendency, too. love you, mom.)

and there is this plauseble deniability that they provide us. i remember many conversetions with my mother (who i was closest with as well) that she had said, (and i apolegize that this is going off on a tangent of my own, about my self-)

you're making up dreams. this isn't happening. and i said, it is happening! he was doing it to her! in front of me! it was literally happening in front of my face. in front of her face. and she is like why are you talking about this? this is a dream.

like there is clearly something f*cking wrong with this woman. in a deep, deep way. and she would say the same things even after the trial. after he went to prison for it.

she'd be like, "he's in there because you didn't keep your mouth shut." and i'm like he's in there because they found terabytes of f*cking csam and illegal weapons all over the f*cking house, mom!

christ. what a headache. all this to say i understand implicitly what that is like, the headache of plaseble deniability. especially when they particepate in the same kind of sinister abuse to you. the "oh, i really didn't know. i didn't know how bad it was."

yes you did. it was literally happening in front of you. when you're a parent-and this is about you not me well sort of both. i'm a parent so i'm talking about my own perceptions as well. i know what my f*cking kid is doing almost all the time. and like there are gaps where things could happen.

but when you're a parent you learn the signs of abuse. you just do, you just know, because people are actually a lot smarter and more aware than we want to really admit. how many times have you heard the neighborhood pedo got busted, how many people were surprised? no one was surprised, because everybody f*cking knew. it's like that.

so when you add that up with all the other things your specific parents did(n't do) you end up coming up with a pattern of complicity. which is time after time after time of not only they "didn't know" but they literally ignored information that was being told to them by their kid.

that is a huge f*cking breach. it is. and i'm really sorry that happened to you because it shouldn't have. it just shouldn't have f*cking happened. and i know you don't, like, need validation on the internet from some random guy but just in case it helps any? you are entirely justified to never, ever, speak to these people again. ever.

I have been separated from my family because of my brother for twelve years. I volunteered to work every holiday. I gave non-answers to why I couldn’t go home.

this is the part that's almost, in my opinion, the hardest. it's becoming so seperate from other people in this intrinsic way. not having a family not only being an orphan, but having a family that is that f*cked up in the first place. it sets you apart. you make excuses. you lie. you make up bullshit reasons.

for the most part i've stopped doing that. i just refuse to comment. i used to lie. i'd be like "oh yeah, my parents are still in canada, they have a little property up there..." like no they f*cking weren't. lmao, you know.

and it still sets you apart from people. but f*ck it, people are different anyway. this is your thing. other people have their own weird shit. but it does suck, so much, to be part of this, like, "tribe" of people with no real home except maybe what ever we've managed to scrape together ourselves.

and that is what is distinct. my husband's family are f*cked up and i hate all of them tremendously, but they will help him if he needs it. if one of them gets cancer and suddenly dies, my husband will care and it will effect him a lot. there is a huge familiel like connection there, they're all south american so there's a big generational thing there.

no matter how abusive they were, they still weren't like my family was. because my family was insane, and they're just like moderately awful. so it's hard to, you have to almost measure it in this weird way like what warrants all of this and shit-my husband is like oh well they hit me and bullied me but i still love them.

i'm like well f*ck them! lmao you know. so it's different, too. he tolerates a lot of shit he shouldn't, in my opinion, but maybe that's my own whatever cultural attetudes i've absorbed that i don't f*cking understand the difference. but they will still help him. they'll still try they're still people who are able to be in society and be somewhat prosocial.

and he has that, and so he doesn't understand what it is like not to have that. and not because my mom or my extended family are all dead, but because i've chosen to make them dead. this is permanent. it is as permanent as death. maybe i will talk to my mom again one day.

maybe there'll be a f*cking apocalypse and it'll just be me and graham and my mom, like, on earth, alone. (jesus christ isn't that grim.) but what she is to me, is dead. and that is something that you just can't f*cking explain to people who haven't been through it. and it sucks.

hugs if you except them. this is hard shit to get through.