I’ve been spending so much time lately trying to crack the code of my siblings. Why do they do this, did they do that, how much do they lie, am I a liar, who were our parents, why is this happening? Smack dab in the middle of what happens when rich people (rich in my world) die, I take up to two hours every morning to research trust law imagining the judge yelling at me “you are an ungrateful beneficiary, you are the problem, this is civil court but you can go straight to jail.” That’s how it always goes in uneven matches like this. I learned young about the best justice system money can buy and through the early deaths of two people my sister can purchase her own version of truth. Money seems to act like developer fluid. The image was already there. It just makes it visible. While I’m lonely, I’ve avoided its influence, but when do I stop living my principles and start not giving a shit like them?
My sister wasn’t supposed to get such a big chunk of money yet in a matter of six months, mom killed herself and the money funneled to Janessa and in less than a year she lawyered up and now each morning I ask AI the same questions over and over: will she be surcharged? Can I avoid court? What is probate? Can you please look up case law? What’s going on in the birth chart of Pisces? How can I get her to drop the lawyer? AI, in its glorious fuck ups, tells me slightly different responses every morning and astrology becomes more reliable than the moods of my sister. Mom is finally deceased and yet how she related to me is alive in a trust that’s being withheld just like her affection. Some family lessons become cud to a cow; turned over in the mouth and seven stomachs before they are spit out and consumed again.
Maybe that’s what graduate school gave me. The moments I started to solder together my memories into personal essays in a graduate class that invited me to write in their ranks, I thought I had a pretty good life. What I didn’t understand was that writing would begin changing the value of things. The first essay that came back was about my uncle. For years I remembered him as one of the good ones and in many ways he was. Yet the moment I sat down to write about him, an entirely different memory surfaced: an apple pie cooling on the counter and my finger stealing apples from the filling before he completely lost his shit on me. I wasn’t trying to write about anger, and I certainly wasn’t trying to dismantle my uncle. Yet there it was on the page, an adult man screaming at a child over apples in a pie and once written down I couldn’t quite put the memory back where I found it.
That seems to happen whenever I write. The stories don’t necessarily change but their proportions do. People I thought understood became more complicated. The heroes become human. Villains become humans too. Memories that once sat quietly in their own corners begin introducing themselves to one another. A cast flashes into my mind during workout class. A Samantha doll appeared in my mother’s living room years after I left home. A shoebox with my name on it returns from my aunt’s house. One memory starts pulling on another and before long I find myself wondering whether I am uncovering a pattern or simply creating one.
Yesterday, in workout class, I mused on how Gillette created an athlete out of me and that some of those lessons are never gone. A purple cast flashes in my mind along with a question: I knew my mom had forced the cast on me because she claimed I would walk around in a boot. There is a little tiny voice that questions her decision amongst so many other decisions: Mom hated watching me succeed. I wish I was making that up but it’s not even the stuff of a lyrical essay. It’s the stuff of mental illness unchecked and ignored all the way up to her suicide. Yet I could never say she hated me. I can say assuredly I always questioned love in my family. The ones who loved me most let their anger show in ways that had nothing to do with me, yet somehow I became the catalyst.
First, it was psychological testing that ruined my chances in the military. Then there’s the other truth that I wouldn’t have succeeded at being told what to do anyway. Then, it was the cast. But I ended up breaking my foot again anyway at Christian basketball camp. Then, in little ways. Refusing to cosign student loans. And then, after my dad’s death, I was erased. All my possessions now belong to my mother. Each return home I would see another object that was allegedly mine yet somehow now was my mother’s. My Samantha doll from the American girl’s collection sitting in her living room. All heirlooms now missing according to my sister from “smoke damage.”
I managed to stay in my uncle’s house long enough to see if there was anything left for me. Nothing came directly from my mother and then another shoebox was eventually returned to me by my aunt. Full of sentimental objects and even adorned with my name in my mother’s neat cursive. So, I did exist in some kind of distorted way for my mother. I existed in the form that I was least threatening: the only forms of affection I got from my mother were “I love you” on Facebook. The trust and my mother’s love become the same thing: I must search and search for artifacts that prove I exist, prove I did something, prove my mother loved me.
My sister had come down to Denver at one point and while I wished it was to offer support to one another it started to look like an inventory early on. Janessa looking over every object, deciding if she wanted it or how much it might be worth. I felt like a child at times when I would discover something that she might have wanted. I took all the scraps I could relate to my family and initially I couldn’t look at some of them. The pain was so loud in the beginning I couldn’t sit with an object without thinking how we would ever move on from this. I kept looking for artifacts trying to find meaning while Janessa seemed interested in entirely different things. I only know that by the end of the day I had a pile of objects nobody else seemed to want and somehow those became the things I valued most.
A person probably never moves on from suicide. Right before he died, I told my uncle “Well it was my mom’s choice to die. And there is dignity in death.” He rewarded me saying “this is the clearest I’ve heard you in years” and it was that moment I knew he wasn’t going to sit with the pain that led to her death. My sister wasn’t going to sit with the pain of opting out of a visit that weekend before she died. My brother wasn’t going to own up to the protection order she filed against him. I wasn’t going to show anyone the text she sent the day before she died asking if I could be her counselor. None of us were going to save her. None of us could.
That text sits in my mind the same way the trust does. A piece of evidence that refuses to stay in its assigned place. The mother who erased me after my father’s death. The mother who saved articles about me. The mother who left photographs and keepsakes in a shoebox with my name written across it. The mother who asked me to be her counselor the day before she died. Every time I think I have arrived at a conclusion another artifact appears and the inventory changes again.
And so I write yet another version of a court filing knowing that I might not even be ready to look at the full accounting. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along. Not researching trust law. Not fighting over distributions. Not trying to understand my sister. Conducting an inventory. Looking through the records left behind by the dead and trying to determine what they were worth.
My family loved me in secret. And I kept trying to live out loud and exemplify my value through accomplishments. I never learned my mother’s language.
the misfit west 