the misfit west

Tag: personal essay

  • one for sorrow

    When I was younger, I used to keep a running list of questions in my head that I wanted to ask God. I think my parents had started that trend: if I asked something one of them couldn’t answer, they would direct me to God. Pretty sneaky on their part, because then I had to be sure to get to heaven, and I would try to perform all the tasks that I thought would get me to heaven, storing every last treasure in a memory cache.

    One of the questions was where carrot seeds come from. Another one was where birds sleep. And then, I had a more complicated question that I had tucked away for church camp, where I could hopefully find an answer. Earlier that year, my dad had brought us to McDonald’s and let us each get a combo meal, and I knew something was very, very wrong, because generally we were only allowed two hamburgers and one fry.

    Our brother had gone on a stealing spree. He had broken into car after car in Gillette stealing car stereos (had to have been like ’94, so verrrrrry beginning of CDs and things), Gameboys, whatever anyone had left in their vehicle, while he and a buddy ran the loot home, and I messed up the whole thing telling Mom I had beat Gameboy. The allure of the McDonald’s combo went away quickly when Dad hissed “What the fuck were you thinking?!” and we were all at attention. Dad didn’t cuss.

    To get to church camp, we would start driving north from Gillette in the 1987 Dodge Caravan straight into the wasteland of Montana. Piles of dust followed us like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown and I saw a lone magpie on a fencepole. One for sorrow, two for joy. Three for a girl and four for a boy. Five for silver, and six for gold. Seven for a secret never to be told. We pulled into the tiny town of Broadus, MT, where Mom took us to eat at the historic “Judges Chamber,” built in 1902. We thought it was just about the fanciest thing we had ever seen, and they served us a pasta dish with pine nuts, which tasted like the trees. This was special to us, as Mom was the one to sneak us into experiences like this.

    I stared out the window, wondering if the van was going to die here on this dirt road and if I wouldn’t get to ask my questions about God. We finally arrived, and it was church camp motif to the max. There were horses, zip lines, cabins for boys and girls, shower houses, and then the main bunkhouse with a bell. I was very eager to get my questions answered, because I had to give up my obsession with the 15,000 shot club at home, where the neighbor always managed to come out at the exact moment I was shooting hoops.

    A few days went by with the normal church camp activities, and then one evening as the birds began to roost we crowded in our room around our counselor in the middle of the bunks. I looked over to the eaves of the bunkhouse to see a single bird preening for sleep. Fluffing his feathers, tucking his bill, lifting his leg, and locking his grip. Latched on the branch, I watched him sway back and forth, finally landing still, and it was time to ask my question: “Is my brother going to heaven? But before you answer, you need to know he’s done really bad things.” She was quick to answer, “Well, did he ask God into his heart?” My brows started to furrow, and I thought about the benign process of just stating that you accept God and then change is invoked. And I thought about my brother, who I don’t think I had ever heard say “I’m sorry.” I didn’t buy it.

    I kept trying to press the issue further because it didn’t seem right, it didn’t seem valid. I was obsessed with his salvation, but it never made sense to me that he could announce God into his heart and all that he’d stolen would just reappear, all that trust undone in a single sentence. I didn’t know if there was supposed to be some penance first. I only knew I wanted my family whole again, and his antics kept ripping us apart. I wanted some kind of process where he, too, would end up at church camp with me doing his homework and telling Mom thank you for buying us pasta. And so I did what any young girl who couldn’t get her questions answered about God would do: I walked away from religion.

    Besides the unanswered questions, I also ended up breaking my foot playing basketball at camp, and that stopped my basketball dreams straightaway. I was supposed to be Division I. I was supposed to get scholarships. I was going to marry someone. I was going to get away from my family, get away from the violence. My ideas of God were always challenged the most in my own family. My dad’s beatings, my sister holding the table hostage at the Chinese restaurant, refusing anything on the menu, ordering a cheeseburger and fries and eating the fries one at a time, as slow as she could, to stay the center of it, my brother’s lies, my own addictions.

    It wasn’t until around a decade later that things fragmented. Things blew apart, and the shrapnel became images of church camp, the smell of the pews, the feel of the little clay baby Jesus I would sculpt in the afternoons. And my dad died. The event has gotten so mixed up in my brain that some years I can’t call up his face at all, only the shirts, a different color pocket tee every day, always tucked into the same pair of Wrangler jeans. He was simple and steady in a way I didn’t have language for at ten. If I let myself remember exactly how much he loved me, I’d have to feel exactly how much I lost. I aligned with him without meaning to, and I think that alignment is what kept me alive.

    I was incarcerated within months of his accidental death and learned about the boundaries of the mind. My mother had wanted me to succeed for as long as I can remember. It was only once the drugs took hold that she started to pull away, looking for a name for what she was seeing instead of the thing itself. I was still making straight A’s. I just wasn’t the same girl underneath them anymore. My uncle would always practice Buddhism in an ornamental way, and I, alone in my cell for months, came to a new understanding of how to quiet the clutter of the mind. Rid yourself of one set of shackles, slap on another. God didn’t speak loudly in that little camp cabin in Ekalaka. God didn’t speak at all. During the final game, when I felt the familiar pain start to shoot up my foot again, I ran to the locker room where no one could see me cry, and all I could think of was that bird on the branch, how it just locked its grip and went still. I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know how to stop anything, not the pain, not the tears, not what was coming for my foot and my whole Division I plan. Not even the birds.

    I finally went to church on the fifth year of the death day (am I to say anniversary?) and picked the Unitarian Church, and lucky for me, they had a candle-lighting ceremony. I sang the hymns, and I lit that candle. Realizing God is here amongst the atheists, the Christians, the pagans. And here we were lighting candles for the suffering of the world, our own suffering, for the suffering yet to come. My brother didn’t come as often into my mind now. I no longer cared about his salvation, I just wanted him happy enough to stop stealing. Stop hurting others. That became the running joke in the family: that I was obsessed with my brother. I was obsessed with whatever was supposed to be on the other side of it. I didn’t know what. I just wanted it.

    Now, the family is gone. My sweet Buddhist uncle passed away young at 69 in his bed of a heart attack. Now I worry about my own heart and how many beats I’ve got left. My stern father is so distant to me now that I question his love for me. I question whether anyone in that family cared, and if they only knew my obsession with getting them all to heaven, getting us back together, maybe I would matter. I knew in heaven my mom’s pain would stop, my brother would apologize, my sister would stop being so squishy, my dad and uncle would say “I love you.” The birds would sleep with us instead of disappearing into the night, dogs would never die, pasta would always have the option of pine nuts. And now when I have a question for God, I ask a machine instead, and it answers. But for today, I’m going to keep wondering where carrot seeds come from.

  • the inventory

    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 my sister 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 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. My sister 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 my sister 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.