Something Good

Christmas had been good that year.

I was 25 and I had a girlfriend, a real girlfriend, for only the second time in ... well, ever. And for the first time in four years.

And for the first time in as long as I could remember, my life was starting to settle down. I had returned to my old job after a six-month hiatus/walkabout that included two months at a newspaper I never even wanted to work for in the first place but felt I could not pass up, four surprisingly restorative months working for my hometown newspaper, and one day (yes, one whole day; I went back the second day only to return a camera!) at a newspaper owned by the same company as the paper I had left in the first place.

I had resumed the friendships I had made during my first year here, and I had formed some new ones in the three years since my return. I had fallen head-over-heals-over-head for a truly fucked-up woman, with whom I eventually grew to care about as “just friends” because I realized my need-to-be-needed was outweighed by my need to be around people who actually wanted/needed to feel good once in a while; nevertheless, this woman and I were platonically and rather miserably roommates for a few months, but even that bit of aggravation could not keep me from enjoying my life.

In no small part because I had found a girl who was rapidly becoming my best friend ... with benefits. And I was falling in love with her.

; )

And immediate family-wise, I am sure everything was as fine as it usually is. I am rather certain I had not seen my dad since Easter of that year, if then, because he and I had gotten into a fight over the care of my grandmother, and he had acted, in the words of Sheryl Crow, “plain ugly to me,” and later, when I was discussing the situation and the conversation with my mom, she had tried to do what she had tried to do the entire time I was growing up, and that was not to say anything bad about him (except for the drinking and the smoking; she could not pretend to condone that, on any level).

And then she did something I had never heard her do, at least not in any discussion of my father: She began crying.

So there we were, crying on the telephone, me sitting on the bedroom floor in my second-story apartment, her standing in her kitchen, tears and words flowing between us in an unexpected several moments of daughter-mother closeness.

Honestly, I will never forget that conversation.

The events of the next few months — falling completely out of love, moving into a house, getting a roommate, falling completely in love, discovering exactly how to go about Being in a Relationship — kept me occupied, so much so that I probably did not think much at all about family squabbles.

I found out, around Thanksgiving-time, that Dad had decided to marry the woman who had been living with him for the past several months. And I probably had some profound thoughts on the marriage — his fourth, if you were not counting his third marriage and his actual fourth marriage, which happened to be to the same woman ... the woman for whom he had left us, Debra, Mom and me, something he had regretted every day since he had left, he told us every time he got lit, which amounted to a lot of times repeating the same story when you add it up over the course of 20 years.

Anyway, my profound thoughts on his actual fifth marriage were probably something along the lines of “That’s cool.” You know: “Do whatcha gotta do.”

And deep down, I probably felt good knowing that maybe he would not feel so lonely all the time. ’Cause those were his two main themes: Loneliness and Regret.

We went to see him at Christmas, and it was a good visit. We ate and talked, and exchanged gifts. He gave me a khaki-colored button-down; I do not remember what we gave him. All I ever remember giving him, at Christmases and birthdays, were a bottle of Hai Karate cologne and a carton of cigarettes (Winstons when we were younger, Marlboros those later years), or an occasional flannel shirt.

We departed on good terms.

And less than a month later, I had the second-ever conversation with my mother, regarding my father, that ended with both of us in tears: The Friday morning, Jan. 18, 1991, that she called me at work to tell me Dad had died of a heart attack shortly after he awoke that day.

The next few weeks went merrily, madly out of control, as I spun my way through some of the so-called stages of grief. I do not remember ever going through Denial, quite honestly (perhaps that is what makes it Denial: the fact that you never acknowledge it?), but I recall spending a hell of a lot of time on Anger.

Anger over feeling angry toward my dad for what proved to be the last few months of his life. Anger over him not taking better care of himself. Anger over his inability to have his accounts in order, so to speak, so that, in the case of his untimely death, his daughters would not be spending the time they should have been able to spend grieving on taking care of the financial aspects of death.

Anger over him being gone before I, as a reasonably well-adjusted adult who was finally starting to feel settled into her life, had a chance to get to know him.

[I remember the moment I knew, as Robert says, and later Francesca, in The Bridges of Madison County, with the “kind of certainty that comes but once in a lifetime,” how much I loved the girl I still love, to this day: A moment not long after my father had died, and I was lying in bed, next to her, my eyes filled with tears, and hers, too, and she did not look away. She simply pulled me closer.]

Yes, Anger delayed the inevitable, but soon Sadness came, to stay. Not Depression, as all the psycho-babblers would have you believe, but pure Sadness.

Because, honestly, that is how you feel when one of your parents, one of the two people in the world who love you more than anything, dies: You feel sad.

There is one less person in the world who loves you.

I feel sad now.

The death of my father was not the first death I ever experienced, but it was the first that knocked me completely out of the orbit in which I had been revolving. And that Sadness? It comes back every time someone else dies, different yet similar but not quite the same. Sadness stays close to the surface, sometimes, ready to bubble over ... and not just over death, but over life and the troubles that come up, and the ways we sometimes fuck it all up, for good (or come close).

Sadness over someone else feeling sad — someone else that, maybe, you never expected to feel any sort of true intimacy with, ever again, and then, WHAM! — she shares something with you that nearly levels you, not because you have never felt that Sadness before, yourself, but because you never expected to know she felt it, also.

Christmas was good this year.