Personal Stories: I am Living. I Remember You.
This article was originally published in Medium on 11/11/24.
I am Living. I Remember You.
Memorializing a life when they chose death
“But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deepfor my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.”Marie Howe, “What the Living Do.”
My dad ended his life.
And then I had to plan his memorial.
We don’t talk about this aspect of suicide very often: how to celebrate the life of a person who chose to die.
How do you strike the right tone? Convey the exact blend of rage and love and shock and sadness at the way they exited the world?
How do you memorialize an entire lifetime without ignoring the gruesome end and the complex things that led to it?
Dad wasn’t married when he died, and his girlfriend had long since left. I loved her; I was glad she had moved on. But it meant solving this puzzle was left to us, his kids, the adult daughters he had once abandoned.
I wanted to comemorate the life he lived and pay homage to the depths of pain that had made it impossible for him to stay.
I wanted to honor it all: the funny memories, his heroism, the living, anger, loving, and disappointment, perfectly and fairly and evenly together. To show the distinct balance of dark and light in his existence.
I wanted to get it right for him and for everyone who had loved and lost him — like I had — years before he actually died.
Most of all, I wanted to get it right for me. Because if I could capture it all for his memorial, then maybe I could sort it all out for my heart, too.
***
We listened to oldies together. It was our thing. 97.3 KBSG, “Good times and great oldies!”
I thought one day maybe I’d become a radio deejay, spinning the tunes my dad shared with me: Tommy Roe, CCR, Simon & Garfunkel, Righteous Brothers, The Beatles, Buddy Holly, Elvis. I named pet parakeets after each of those last two.
But the Beach Boys were his favorite. We saw them live at the Puyallup Fair sometime around 1989, John Stamos guesting as their drummer and me screaming in the aisles as if I were a teenage schoolgirl in a sixties-era Beatles mob.
When I got married, our father-daughter song was God Only Knows.
Years later, his wonderful girlfriend Ronni would tease him for his unwavering fealty to the bubblegum pop songs of the sixties and for having completely missed out on all of seventies rock.
It was a fair observation. Knowing what I know now about his alcoholismand how early it set in, I think I understand it. That music was his comfort food. It made him feel safe and happy. He stopped trying new things after the sixties; his tastes stuck in time with his high school memories.
I think the music must have reminded him of the years before he drew that terrifyingly low Vietnam draft number—before the prospect of the war led him to college and then the police force to avoid having to fight.
The irony was that, in the end, he got shot in the line of duty all the same. It was just right here at home, not fighting the Viet Cong. That event, one year before I was born, left him with PTSD, exacerbated his drinking, and set him on a path from which he never recovered.
But my dad was more than the sad things that happened to him. He wasn’t just depressed and broken. He was oldies and silliness, Beach Boys and bad movies, he was ridiculous neon baseball hats that always seemed to hover right atop his head.
He was missing his right pinky, and we were never sure why because he loved to make up ridiculous stories about how it got chopped off.
And to me, he was breakfast. Saturday morning bacon and “snotty eggs,” a Clint Eastwood movie on TV as he sat in his chair to read the newspaper while watching.
I would slide under the paper, sit on his lap, and stretch out my kid legs so they mimicked the path of his own. My little feet resting somewhere above his ankles.
Those smells, those routines, will always be my dad. And I will never stop longing for the distinct comfort of being a little girl on her father’s lap,always begging him to change the channel and secretly delighting that he never would.
***
The last gift we ever gave to Dad was to let him go.
It was early December 2015. His sponsor had called me, frantically asking for help. Dad was barricaded in his house and refused to open the door. He was trying very hard to die.
This was our cadence, over and over and over, for all of those years: fire drills and cycles of disappearance. He’d go off the grid for days on end. We would worry and text and make calls across the country, asking, “Have you heard from Dad lately?”
His brand of alcoholism was both shameful and arrogant, alternately unfolding in the confines of some cheap motel room or poorly concealed in sneaky behaviors that he thought we’d never notice. We always assumed he’d just turn up dead one day.
To the very end, he believed he’d eventually conquer this disease. And in the very end, it killed him.
The drinking wasn’t a part of our relationship; it was our relationship.
And so, on that week in early December 2015, I called my sister. I flew across the country to Seattle, and then we drove seven hours south in her minivan to Coos Bay.
We knocked on Dad’s door. We convinced him to let us in.
And then we said goodbye.
We didn’t go there to save him because we couldn’t. An entire lifetime in the shadow of his struggles had taught us both that.
Instead, we sat for a while in his dirty, damp living room. We looked him in the eyes and explained that we weren’t there to ask him to sober up. He seemed relieved at that.
We said we wanted to let him go. We thanked him for our childhood memories and shared specific stories. Laughed a little. We told him we loved him.
He cried. We cried.
He said he was terrified that we might end up like him. We told him how healthy and happy we both were.
And then we stood up to leave. And gently, with the frail remains of his tired, wrecked body, he hugged us with all the weight of a feather. As if we were precious crystal, too delicate to touch directly.
He wore a neon hat perched atop his head, and he didn’t ask us to stay. To the end, he didn’t fight for us. He never had. Only years later could we see that it was because he didn’t think he deserved to.
We watched as he turned around and sat back down, waiting for death to come.
It arrived four weeks later. The newspaper guy found him right where we had left him. Lifeless, in his recliner.
66 years of life. 46 years an alcoholic.
I was six weeks pregnant, one life emerging just as the other went out. I flew once again across the country — this time, with a sinus infection, morning sickness, and all the rage and shock of a tragic ending that I had anticipated for years.
We did the seven-hour drive once more. We cleaned out his house, deconstructed towers of empty Franzia boxes that lined the walls from floor to ceiling, and wiped blood off the walls from all the times he fell while drinking himself to death.
My brother-in-law bravely removed the recliner from the house. It was full of fluids.
It was, in a word, gruesome.
We visited his AA meeting, met friends he’d never introduced to us, and visited with Ronni. She gave us a recording of an hour-long testimonial he’d given at a regional AA meeting in 2011 during his longest period of sobriety which, we learned, was only four years.
Because the week couldn’t get any more difficult, we listened to his speech together on our drive back to Seattle. Hearing his voice, clear and warm, his jokes and his recollections of the shooting, his divorce, and all of his failures, filled us with rage and love and deep, deep grief.
We planned his memorial as we drove. I told my sister that I couldn’t remember him anymore and had no stories for a eulogy. My memories felt empty after watching him waste away for so damn long.
She reminded me then about the breakfast, the snotty eggs, the oldies, and the awkward kid in my third-grade class who dad took a liking to once on a field trip because he started every sentence with the phrase “personally speaking.”
For years, Dad would ask me out of the blue if I knew what had ever happened to Personally Speaking. (I don’t. His name was Joe Peterson. If you know him, please reach out).
Dad was the kind of dad who chaperoned field trips. I had forgotten all about that.
We gathered up these memories. We talked about how much he loved music and the water. And we made our plans.
***
We held his memorial at the Alki Beach Bathhouse.
It was January in Seattle, right on the water in an appropriately old-school venue in a part of the city that never really changes.
I can’t remember if it was sunny or grey that day. But the room filled with people who had once loved our dad and from whom he had turned away several years before his death. I think he didn’t believe he deserved those friendships anymore.
Former cops from his K-9 unit showed up, his old roommate told everyone the true story about his pinky (I’m going to keep that one for myself, but it was not at all what I expected), and both my sister and I gave eulogies.
My husband and my toddler came out from DC to join me, Emelia climbing into my lap to try and stop my tears when I broke down and had to stop speaking.
And in the end, as is often the case, the answers for how to do justice to his memory came through words.
Through poems and through music.
My friend Ashley sang a few of his favorite oldies, her operatic voice bringing an unbelievable poignancy to Imagine and Let it Be and Wouldn’t It Be Nice.
We shared and laughed about the old memories together.
And we read some poems.
My favorite was “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe.
It ends with this:
“But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deepfor my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.”
That is what I read then.
That is what I read every year on the anniversary of his passing.
And that is what I say to everyone who struggles to remember those who left us by their own accord. Everyone who has been here, planning the service.
And to everyone who has left us feeling utterly and absolutely alone.
We are living. We remember you.
Dad. The way I like to think of him.