Family. We all have one, or had one. I don't think there's been any successful test tube babies gestated fully outside of a human but who the fuck even knows anymore? Human parentage can be a bit ambiguous with science playing a large part. If two genetic parents provide their samples, or whatever, and they're mixed up and added together in a lab. I imagine there would be vigorous shaking involved followed by a turkey baster of some sort? I'm no scientist so I can't be sure. Well, however it is done, if they do this thing, who are the parents? If you're genetically from two parents but you gestated in another, which is your mother/father? Does it actually matter?
This isn't a science post and it's not even going to be about the other kind of jeans. This is going to be one of those personal posts, where I just kind of type for a while and see what shakes loose. As opposed to the ones where I have a general idea (or singular topic) and just kind of type for a while and see what shakes loose. These types of posts here actually take some thought, not now though. Earlier today, or I guess it would be two days ago now. I decided it was time to talk about this stuff with myself and with whoever is reading this.
About a month or so ago I started writing again. There are loads of reasons and I've gotten into some of them already in that time period but one of them is this notion that I carry a weight. It's akin to guilt but a lot lighter, like a Halloween prop ball and chain. My actual guilt, the things I feel most sincerely about, I've never spoken of here and I still debate whether or not I want to re-live them, again. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. This will be about some of the stuff that makes my weight lighter or heavier, to me.
As a youth, I spent a lot of time with grandparents. My mother and father were shotgun married and just as quickly divorced. I have one memory of living in the house when they were together and I'm pretty sure it was my grandfather's (I called him "Pap") and not even mine. He told me the story often of how he'd chase me around and I'd hide under the table in the kitchen. It was a small house and there weren't many places to hide. We lived there for a short time and then everyone moved out.
My mother and I moved back to her parents' place and my father moved back to his. I spent every weekend and a few weeks a year with my Pap. The summers I spent mostly with my mother's grandmother ("Nan"), here, where I live now. My mother and her parents both worked so when I wasn't in school or something school related, I was with my Nan or Pap. As far as mothers and fathers go, those were mine. Neither of them gave birth to me but they helped bring me to adulthood more than any other two in my life. Both of them were retired and had the time, more importantly they had the love and wisdom to be able to handle me.
They were also both deeply religious people, but also intensely private about their faith. They both attended church and prayed. They both would quote the bible and chastise me when I wasn't being a good little Catholic. At the end of the day, they really were just trying to teach me how to live a good life and though I may make fun of this stuff at times, these two people used their faith to help raise me. I'm grateful to the two of them for everything they taught me. They're both dead now and have been for years. I lost my Pap when I was a teenager and my Nan when I was a sophomore in college.
My pap's death was one of the hardest things I ever had to deal with emotionally, and I was ill-equipped at that age. Five or six years later and my Nan passed, it was easier to deal with but still pretty difficult. The whole thing was fucked because the closest thing I'd ever had to a mother and father were dead and yet my actual mother and father were still very much alive. I struggled to address that discrepancy for years until I just accepted it ... eventually.
I've since learned to love my actual mother, in a fashion. I buy her things for holidays and mother's day and everything, but I think you just get one of those kinds of relationships. Or maybe I'm just blessed with a mother that's loved her career more than anything else, even when she didn't have one.
My actual father, well, I told him to fuck off at his mother's funeral (shortly after Nan had passed) and haven't spoken to him since. We never had a good relationship and I've always thought he was an asshole. When I was quite young, grade school age probably, he thought it was funny to have me come down to my Pap's basement and tell his drunk friends how I thought they were all assholes. This was primarily because when my father went out with his drunk friends, Pap and I would follow them. I was told it was because I needed to spend time with my father but he never came and hung out with us, just his friends. Pap just wanted to be near for whenever the police got involved or property was damaged.
It would have been damn nice to have someone like Pap around when I was off getting the police called on me and damaging property while drinking to excess with my drunk asshole friends years later. I definitely have a lot of resentment for my father because of all the extra time he had with Pap that he didn't care about. This is exactly why I have patience now for my other grandfather who is quite alive and riddled with dementia. We joke around a lot about how neither of us can remember shit due to his old age and my copious cannabis. I sometimes wonder if the marijuana might help him with his memory, but that's just the medicine man in me.
Emotional proximity is essentially what I'm talking about here. These were two of my deepest losses because of the emotional proximity I had to these two individuals. I loved them and they loved me. All I have now are memories, their stories, and the lessons they taught me.
Nan helped me deal with Pap's passing. When Nan died, something strange happened. My actual grandmother (whom I nicknamed "Bubba" when I was a toddler, I'm told) and I bonded over what amounted to our mother's passing. Over the following years, Bubba and I got to know each other very well. She always had time for me as a child but she also always saw me as a novelty because she was a 36 year old grandmother and I think she was as prepared for me as my mother. She dressed me up in sailor suits or tuxedos or anything she could think of to cart me around to show her friends at dinner parties until I started dressing myself and I always kind of resented it. Years later she told me she thought it was funny and cute, and I like to laugh a lot so I was all right with that.
She caught the cancer in her lungs. They thought it was in an earlier stage than it was, I guess, and it eventually took her. Not until a couple rounds of radiation and chemotherapy broke her spirit and body first, though. She lived a full and happy life and she was generally a very good person, like Nan, her actual mother. They both wanted to be good because it made them feel good, not really because they thought they would go to heaven. They both wholeheartedly believed in god and everything though, I had the opportunity to question both of them very thoroughly before Nan died and I followed it up afterwards, too clinically I was told, with Bubba. I was a bit hurt and asking her what she thought happened after we died if she believed in all that stuff so strongly. She dead eye told me she knew her mother was in heaven and that was enough for her.
The cancer though, that added a roughness to life that was totally unnecessary. It shades things when you see such suffering firsthand. She died 2 years ago this month and the last memory I have of her was at half her weight drooling and grasping for my hand as she lay dying. It was skeletal and cold but there was still a bit of vigor left in her hands, if not her eyes, until there wasn't. She had enough opiates in her at the end to knock out a small rhino because there was so much pressure on her skull because of some lump that the doctors couldn't remove well enough, the second time.
I dreaded the walk down her hall, alternating wafts of lemon fresh scents and lemon lingering over the scent of vomit or shit. I learned to just keep my eyes forward because the horrors of a nursing home are not for the weak of heart. Luckily, all the carpets or linoleum floors at hospitals and places like that all have nice patterns you can watch repeat as you walk down those halls.
At the end of her life, I don't know what she was to me. Part sister, part grandmother, partner in crime. She'd confide in me the things she couldn't tell her children because they were and still are too immature for a lot of life's more complicated issues. That stuff I talk about all the time with nuance. Maybe they're not so bad and it's just that I'm very non-judgmental, but maybe not. Bubba and I also made fun of each other all the time, we were friends and I lost her.
I remember a little bit of these funerals, but not much. You see a lot of people you don't normally see, you dress up a bit, you eat some food. It's the same everywhere, but when you're the one with the deep loss, none of if really matters. It really doesn't, what matters is being with people that have good memories of the person to share with. I don't remember much of the whole ordeal but I do remember trying to be open. Normally, I speak a lot, but at these times I didn't have much to say. I listened to people tell nice stories about the people I'd lost and that was basically awful. I took a lot of cigarette breaks and brought a flask. I suffered through everything and was relieved when it was finally over, each time, because it was an emotional ordeal and it's only worse when there's loads of extra people around.
I remember pacing the parking lot until I could leave because I needed to grieve in my own way. All three of these times saw me grieving with alcohol. I was actually first learning to drink when Pap passed in my youth and it worked a little bit then so I did it the next two times I had to deal with loss as well. The realization that they won't be there anymore is immediate but it takes a long time to settle in to your everyday routine. What do you do with their number in your phone? What do you do with their stuff? What happens the next time everyone gets together and they're not there? None of my people had Facebook, I don't know what then. There's so much stuff you don't think of until you have to, but I guess death is like life in that way.
I've learned to deal with things much better now. I smoke more weed and exercise more and things eventually sort themselves out through my intervention or non-intervention. I know I've said before we should laugh in the face of death. I didn't when it first happened, but now whenever someone tries to bring up something about any of these dearly departed, I do laugh. At least in the sense that whatever the story may be, I'll turn it positive. It's not that those are the only memories I have, because that's definitely not true. I remember all three of these people making me eat actual soap at one point or another for something I'd said. It got to the point where that didn't even bother me anymore. I remember the good and the bad, but I choose to talk about just the good. I think part of that, for me now, is an acknowledgment that I have to be strong because I don't have anyone else to help me anymore.
Maybe that's why I throw myself so hard into exercise and health. I want to be as strong as possible because I'm finally all alone? There can be plenty of people around but it matters who you choose to have emotional proximity with and at the moment I'm standing alone. Which is kind of how I'm going to circle it on back for a conclusion part of this already maddeningly long soliloquy.
I've had a weird emotional upbringing, maybe. Like I'd asked earlier, does it actually matter? I'm an adult now but I don't think I needed to see my parents die to get here. Maybe it helped. I'm impulsive but I'm also slow to change, so who can really say? I'm curious to see how I'd handle these losses now, after I've handled these losses. If I could keep my experience but go back in time, would I be better, worse, or exactly the same?
The last two years have been tumultuous, but in a good way. I've been telling everyone and anyone that'll listen about how proud I am of myself for finally getting my shit together. The rest of the world merely looks at me and asks why it's such a big deal that I essentially act "normal". That's a terrible word, but it's what I'm using to describe these days. This time now where I've successfully avoided succumbing to my neuroses or depression or whatever the fuck it is that sucks me down into a spiral of wild drinking, odd drugs, dangerous people, or any combination of those with police involvement fairly often but with some type of guaranteed altercation.
I know how to act right, obviously, because I told you about the proper raising I was forced to endure. I guess I just never much cared what other people thought of me as long as I had someone to assure me I wasn't the craziest person in the world even though I may have been at times. I still don't care and I may even care less, but I'm acutely aware that some people matter. Those people that matter, those people that are important, you should try and keep them. People that care about you are critical of you at times, and it's because they care. I'm critical of everyone so maybe I just care too much.
That's difficult and I need to be strong to do it, whether I actually care or don't care about everyone, I know there are important people that will need my strength. Maybe those people aren't even people and they're just three stupid cats that are picky over what kind of bottle water they drink. The two dogs I live with fucking love hose water but these cats refuse to drink the cheap bottled water. Maybe they care about me, they certainly care about their food and treats, but it doesn't matter because they're important to me.
When Pap dragged me to the bowling alley at midnight for whatever tom-fuckery my father was getting into, it was because my father was important to Pap. I was too, and I was a lot more portable at 7 or 8, so off we went. And often times Pap would end up getting my father out of trouble or even dragging him home. Even though my father was essentially a hopeless drunken idiot with a coke problem, there was an old man that gave a shit whether he lived or died even if he didn't himself. That's a kind of love, for sure. It's a thankless kind of love that takes strength and I hope I'm capable of it someday.
I understand some of those things now that I didn't when I was younger. Even a few months or years ago I don't think I would have even taken the time to think about the kind of love my Pap had for my father because of the resentment there. The distance lets you see it a little bit better as the details get a bit hazier. Pulling back lets you see the whole picture, including those bits you wanted to hide away and forget about, and they give you perspective.
It's easy to help someone who wants to help themself. They're gonna seek out the help or at least be receptive to it. Telling a loved one you're worried about their drinking, their drug use, or anything like that is risky business. You need to love them and have a strength capable of weathering the possible storm because they don't want to help themself. Simply having the conversation or acknowledging the problem is a lot, to me. Those that loved me are dead and gone now, and one of the reasons I think of Bubba as a bit sisterly is because we never discussed our vices much unless it was joking, like friends or siblings. People you truly love are worth fighting for, even if you have to fight them a little bit. This big picture view of things is a little depressing. It makes me accept the good with the bad of the past because it's the whole picture, not just how I want to remember it.
That's the point and it should be my conclusion, but it's still important how I deal with this acceptance of me. Letting loose my savage soul has had all manner of unintended consequences. Not least of which is the fact that I firmly believe self-examination shouldn't be this thorough. I feel a little raw when I'm done here sometimes, especially today. That's all right because everyone knows things are always better raw. And the real point is right there. It's important to laugh. This may have been a bit dark and stormy but the sun is on the horizon and the weather has calmed now.
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