It tore you open
But how much?
- Florence and the Machine, “Third Eye”
I thought it would help.
Riding in my stepfather’s place. Finishing the 50-miles on his bike. I thought it would help.
It wouldn’t fix anything. There was nothing that could be fixed. There was just death and loss and a terrible shattering of things that couldn’t be put back together again. Everything would still be in pieces, but for a few hours, it wouldn’t be worse and that would somehow be better.
There was no thought. I wasn’t thinking at the time or at all over those months, really. I was just in this traumatized state of operating, functioning.
It was all gone. Everything was gone. Everything. My whole life. It was just… gone. It was gone.
My mother-in-law’s cancer had consumed first my wife. It had transformed her into someone wholly different who I didn’t recognize, didn’t know, couldn’t even be in the same house with some days. It had consumed my marriage. It had taken my mother-in-law who I loved with my whole heart; and then, with her gone, I had separated from her daughter which took away the family that had also been mine.
The latter had been long overdue, long certain. I had held back because I loved my mother-in-law dearly and loved her family, my family, our family. I knew how much it hurt her to watch her cancer hurt everyone else. Her family was falling apart individually and as a unit. I wasn’t going to pull it further apart as she watched.
I stayed in my marriage to keep her family, my family, our family together while knowing it was already lost. My mother-in-law and I were the two components that enabled the entire circuit board to function. She was the power source and I was a capacitor, a transistor. She was the person who poured in a constant emotional energy. I was a capacitor. I absorbed the excess voltage from people prone to spikes in emotion which shorted the whole circuit if not buffered. And I was a transistor. I converted my father-in-law’s intensely anxious energy to a lower voltage that his daughters could handle. Late in my mother-in-law’s cancer when everyone’s voltage was the highest, my father-in-law would talk to me and I would then talk to his daughters. I was a transistor. Without one, fuses would have blown.
The family that was mine too - that I had loved being with, being part of - I held it together because that is what held it together despite knowing that when my mother-in-law was gone, it would be too. And then she was, and it was too.
She died and I separated. And with those two things, it was all just gone. My whole life. It was just fucking gone. Gone. My home – not my house – my home in the world, it was just gone. The place where I spent Christmases and the people I spent them with, gone. The place where I had felt the greatest love, the greatest peace, the most belonging, the greatest happiness, it was gone and so was everyone in it.
And then three weeks after separating, my stepfather was killed, and now it wasn’t one side of my life that had been shattered, it was both; and it wasn’t just my life as I knew that was gone, my mother’s was too.
Everything around me was fucking gone. It was just fire and helplessness and things already lost or beyond saving.
And I thought riding a bike in some random event would somehow help.
It made no sense. What I needed was rest, help, closeness. I thought going off to ride a bike by myself would help. I thought riding 50 miles in my stepfather’s place would somehow do something.
After a lot of painful revisiting, I think riding in my stepfather’s place was a small act of wresting back control so as to not be so agonizingly helpless. It was me clinging to a photo album already ruined by the flood because to give it up would be to drown. It was a futile, desperate “No, you cannot have this too, death… You cannot. This, I can keep you from taking.”
My stepfather died under a month before the bike tour. I decided to ride in his place the week after. I wasn’t in shape for it. I had no time to train. I wasn’t sleeping as it was, but I had newfound inexhaustible batteries. I was Very Good in a Crisis and apparently they came with the package. I didn’t think about whether I could do the ride. I just decided I would as if there was only that.
Every Saturday up until the event, I took my son to my mom’s house. He would get time with his aunts and a grandmother who adored him. They got the distraction from grief of a child’s joy and energy and laughter. The two of us would sleep over, and then the next morning, I would go to church with my mom so she didn’t have to go alone.
My mom had met my stepfather at church. He had been active in the church’s various groups and functions and had sung in the choir. Had you attended a service, that last fact would not have been lost on you. He had a booming tenor which filled the rafters. My mother felt his absence at home. At church, she heard it. I didn’t want her to hear it alone, hear only that.
On Saturdays, once my son was in bed and fast asleep and everyone else had gone off to bed too, I would slip out of the house and drive out to a place where the landscape thins to mostly fields and farms. I’d just slip away and get on my stepfather’s bike at the time of night when it is so dark, it is as if the sun has simply lost the war and darkness is spreading out to occupy its province. Three in the morning. Four.
I’d ride west into the ink and then time when I turned back so as to be heading east as the distant ridgeline began to burn the red-orange of ember before setting fire to the sky as I rode. Then I’d go back home and slip into bed next to my 2-year old so I’d be there when he opened his eyes.
I was training for something that would help somehow. It wouldn’t fix a thing but it would somehow show that all wasn’t lost. This fire wouldn’t destroy my family. These fires wouldn’t destroy me – that they hadn’t destroyed me. I was still going… even if just on a bike in the dark and with no one but me there to see it.
The day of the bike tour, I drove to the starting point alone and rode the 50-miles. Apparently there had been other people riding who knew my stepfather. I hadn’t seen them, and to be honest, I hadn’t looked for them. I just went by myself, rode by myself, and left by myself.
After I finished the 50 miles, I walked through the finishers tent only to grab an orange juice and then left with nothing but the t-shirt they had given me at check-in. I’ve never worn it. It went directly into a box with things to be saved.
It hadn’t helped, the riding in my stepfather’s place. It hadn’t made me feel better. I had done it largely on my own. My mother had known and been supportive but it had been me doing something important to me – and for reasons I couldn’t have explained.
It hadn’t ‘helped’ anyone per se. It had merely kept me from feeling worse. At the time, I suppose that was as close as anything came to helping.
A week later, there was a memorial service for my stepfather.
During the service, I started crying and then couldn’t stop. It was like a dam breaking after rains had swollen a reservoir beyond its limits. Under stress left to build for too long, a fissure opens, and then the water behind shifts before throwing its full shoulder into the gap.
When a dam gives way, the collapse is never sudden. It is first slow and then very fast. The fissure widens until the water roaring through it has such force, concrete and rebar crumble away and are carried off in a churn of water and rock and whole trees.
My breakdown was not much more restrained. I started crying and then cried harder and harder until I was almost sobbing. It was the grief of a soul saturated with it. I just cried with everything I had.
After the service, my emotional dam collapse had been enough of a spectacle (and out of character enough) for my older sister to say something to my mother about it.
My mother just replied “I think it was just everything.”
It was just everything.
Up until the service, I had been consumed in the way I always am during crises. My attention swings outward. I ‘attend to’ while not asking to be attended to nor attending to myself. I just stand in the fire without noticing my own burns after having not noticed I was suffering them.
I had been on fire for months. I hadn’t been just in the fire, I had been on fire. It wasn’t just my life that had been burning to the ground. I had been too. I was just too wired to focus on everyone else to even check on myself.
Before I started crying, I was focused in just that way. I wasn’t thinking about myself or what had happened to me the past few months. I was thinking about what was happening to my mother, my siblings, my family now. I was seeing in them the experience I had just been through myself with my mother-in-law’s passing. And then I started crying… and it was for them… but then it was for me. It was for everything I’d lost. A life entirely consumed in the space of a month. Gone. A marriage. Gone. A family. Gone. A stable life and plans for the future and traditions that would never again repeat. All gone. Everything was just gone. I wept it all out as if a dam had burst because a dam had burst and it had washed away my entire life with it.
Looking back, it had all been about others but about me too, about me first, me most. The dead of night bike rides. The tour. The going with my mother to church. I had been on fire and burning to the ground and attending to others because I didn’t know how to attend to me. I had given company because I hadn’t known how to seek it when it had been me. I hadn’t known that I needed it… that I deserved it… that it would have helped. I just dealt with it alone because, as a kid, you don’t ask for support from the person who set the fire… and if you don’t heal as an adult, you just fight fires not knowing you don’t have to do it alone… that you shouldn’t have had to… and that you shouldn’t now.
And even after my breakdown at the memorial service, I just treated it as if it had been an emotional day. I didn’t seek support. I didn’t tend to myself. I didn’t do a thing. I just got up and got on with it the next day. The next month. The next year. And the next eight after that.
When a dam collapses in real life, an investigation occurs. Inquiries are made. A structure has failed. There can be no arguing with a flood. Something has failed at its purpose. Its mere replacement would invite only an eventual repetition.
I did no such investigation. I thought I had. I thought I had dug fully into the events and their effect on me. I thought I had turned over every stone in my mind and had reconciled them so completely, I could talk about them easily and with insight. I wrote about them and wrote about them and wrote about them. I thought that was proof.
This summer, I came to painfully realize that there was a quality to the writing though. It was ritual without rite. It was the performance of steps meant to be sacred but as process absent spirit… and without that investment, I had merely interred things in the ground not given them a proper burial.
I saw for the first time what has always been right in front of me because it was me who put it there on the page. In all of the times I have written about my mother-in-law’s death, I have written some version of the words: the wounds have never healed. They hadn’t. The pain had stayed just as present, just as acute. I literally wrote in the clearest possible language that I had never healed, and I still didn’t see myself in my own confession. I didn’t process that it was actually me who hadn’t healed. I just took a weight that has never gotten any lighter to mean that it was the wounds that hadn’t healed because some just never do.
It took nine years for the last fire to be out without another waiting to replace it. The hangover flattened me for the next two, but then things began to improve. The depressed exhaustion began to abate; there were suddenly some positives; and then I found writing and loved it more than I’ve loved any other occupation in my life.
By early this year, I felt like I had come into my own. Maybe not fully but I thought I was on the cusp of an arrival. A full inhabitation of my whole humanity with a loving acceptance of all that I both like about myself and wish was different.
I thought I had processed and made peace with all of my terrible things.
Had I not examined them closely, turned them over in my hands, held them up to the light?
I certainly hadn’t just buried them. Had I not given them their due autopsies and then laid them to rest? The post mortem had been thorough and conclusive: there had been an 100-year flood. It had been agonizing. It wasn’t that a dam had failed; an event so catastrophic that it was beyond what could be expected of a dam had just occurred. It had been painful and tragic, but I had buried its dead and learned to carry the loss.
I had come to fully understand that I hadn’t been Prettygreatman back during the flood, but I had changed… grown… I had come to understand that I hadn’t had magic batteries; I had been coked out of my mind on the neurochemicals flooding my system in a perpetual state of fight or flight.
I had also come to fully grasp that I hadn’t been doing pretty great, man, at all. I had actually been reeling from an undiagnosed case of PTSD or something close. Granted, I only came to grasp that by reading a book someone sent me in the mail; and, sure, I had done nothing with that knowledge other than say “Hmmm, so that’s what that was.” Still, I had clearly given all of this thought and grown wiser, stronger, and more resilient.
I knew I might not have been Prettygreatman back then, but I hadn’t just survived, I had grown! I had become something even better! I wasn’t strong; I was resilient… VERY resilient!
Forget Prettygreatman. I was Veryresilientman now…
Now, I was someone who could weather any storm, and hold back the very ocean with a dam that would never collapse.
I needn’t fear the weight of water. I would never collapse under it again.
And then my friend died.
I know. I know how it is to save your tears until there's nothing to do but release them some other day, for some other sorrow.
So, so good. Such honest writing.