You Can’t Handle the Truth

I just got back from a great party, where a small subdivision of the group, including myself, discussed the ethics of non-fiction. OK, we’re dorks, whatever. But it’s important to me, as a non-fiction writer, to be clear about readers’ expectations and my own intentions. My contention is that if you’re promising, as the writer, a true story, you must deliver a true story. No fabrications. No embellishments. Greg Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea, which I’ve read and love, came up. Apparently, some of the events in the book have been exaggerated for the sake of the story. Mortenson’s Website now claims that the book is based on real events. Well, I said to my friends, I don’t think I would call the book non-fiction, in that case. Some of my friends differed with me, giving a writer license if they craft an effective story that resonates with the reader. It is possible, they argue, to write something true, whether or not it’s factual. And to a certain point, I agree. I’ve read many great novels that have been true for me, if not factual. But there’s the rub. They’re novels. Fiction. They don’t pretend to deliver factual information. You know, as a reader, from the get-go, that you’re reading a tale.

And I’m generally fine with memoirs and other works of creative non-fiction imagining a scene or speculating on a history, as long as the writer is up front with the reader about his or her intentions. For example, I doubt that Jeanette Walls could remember in such exact detail conversations that occurred when she was three years old, as she portrays in The Glass Castle. But that doesn’t bother me. I trust that she’s conveying the conversations as reliably as she can, given the slippery substance of memory. Dave Eggars’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius also takes liberties, with scenes from pure fantasy. But he cues the reader to play along, and we know it’s a game of sorts, so we do. But my main problem regarding this issue has to do with transparency. If I feel that a writer is trying to trick me into believing an event actually happened when it didn’t, I feel betrayed, at the end of the day.

Blah, blah, blah. A bunch of literary mumbo-jumbo, right? Well. I’m writing my thesis, which is non-fiction. Part of my story is about my dad, his life and history. According to dozens of conversations and stories over the years, Dad was an operative for the CIA during the 1960s. He flew a two-seater plane in Laos. He monitored Soviet oil shipments from London. He did some kind of arms dealing in the Bahamas. He told me bits and pieces of this history, usually at my urging, over the course of my whole life with him. It is as much a part of him as his limp, which he had since surviving polio in the 1940s. I knew all of this to be part of who my dad is. And as time went by, and after my mother died, and after his work became de-classified, he told me more. He told me about the Laotian bar owner who tricked him into eating a poisonous spider because he liked spicy food: “Oh, you like spicy food? Try this!” Hooo-ee! What kind of pepper was that?! “Oh, that no pepper. That spider!” Until he died, Dad refused to eat any Southeast Asian food because it reminded him of those years in Laos.

Now that he’s gone, I thought I could probably include some of this information in my thesis, acknowledging that I don’t have all the facts and may not have remembered details accurately. Then I talked to my dad’s younger brother, who doesn’t believe any of it ever happened. He has a completely different timeline for my dad’s whereabouts in the 60s. He does remember Dad mentioning the London job was a CIA cover, but he doesn’t believe it. He has a list of other jobs Dad had, other places he was, during those years. He says, as a retired Naval officer himself, that there was no way Dad could have been trained to fly so quickly, and that the Ravens (for whom Dad told me he flew) were all active-duty Air Force pilots. Sure, my uncle was only a teenager when all of this was going on, but I wasn’t even born yet. So, what now?

At first, I felt disillusioned, like my father had been lying to me about this exciting life he never led. Then I rebelled. I have a book of my dad’s, titled The Ravens, in which there is a group photo including someone who looks just like my father, in the lower left corner. I also know a former Air Force pilot who did fly with the Ravens, and he admits that some of the pilots were CIA “contractors.” I can also e-mail an old family friend who worked with Dad in London. There are enough ways to check the story, that I am prone to believe it.

But ultimately, I have come to a place where it doesn’t matter to me if the facts are accurate or not. For me, it is true that my father did all of those things. He has woven them into the tapestry of himself, his life. Whether he borrowed the thread seems irrelevant to me now. I’ve said this before: My dad was a difficult person to know. He was full of contradictions and evasions. Always. Even about stuff I knew really happened. I’m convinced that everyone who ever knew him saw a different person. So, in my uncle’s universe, Dad never flew a plane, had never been to Laos, had never worked for the CIA. My uncle knew another person, another history, and that’s fine, that’s his.

But these stories are part of my life, factual or not. They are part of my relationship with my dad. They are, in a very real sense, true. So this is the man I will write about. I’ll be honest. I’ll admit to my own doubts and to conflicting stories. But the story I will tell is mine.

Forgiveness and Ogres

“Ogres are like onions. They have layers.”

Donkey tried so hard to find something more pleasant with layers that Shrek could use as an analogy. But parfaits don’t do the trick. Not for ogres.

And my dad, for sure, was an ogre.

He wasn’t giant and green, but he was tough and difficult and slippery. I was often careless of his feelings, and even occasionally cruel – casually so, which made it all the more cruel. And as many times as I tell myself that I learned these things at his hands, it doesn’t make mine clean. A biting remark, a quick comeback, those were valued in my household, growing up. It was a sign of intelligence. There was the time that a friend of the family had a sick baby who had lost a lot of weight. An overweight kid, I said, stupidly, “Was he even skinnier than me?” And my father answered, “Yes, just skin and blubber.” He laughed at his cleverness. Then there was the time, years later, after my mother had died, that I told him to quit his whining when he wanted to know when we would come out to visit him again.

There were so many of these times. And chronically, just the fact that I always came last in the list of priorities. Work was first, alcohol and related activities second, Mom third, and me last. Not surprising, then, that when he was dying, I focused all of my attention on the baby, moving, and classes. It seems pathetic and corny, but the lyrics to “Cat in the Cradle” pretty much summed up my relationship with my dad. He was too busy for me, and then I was too busy for him. Like, somehow I got even with him. I got my revenge. Very clever of me, eh? So, why don’t I feel better?

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about forgiveness. I think it’s a lot easier to talk about than to do. And I don’t know if it’s all that beneficial, frankly. I mean, if I can’t forgive him, I can’t forgive him. I can’t force myself to ignore the pain and anger and resentment that riddle my relationship with him. I need to work through all of that, or at least acknowledge it, before I can do anything else. One of the meditations I learned at healing school includes the line, “Don’t be too quick to make peace.”

I’m also learning that it’s not a one-time, quick-fix kind of event. I’m thinking now of a line from Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees. After Lily finds out the truth about her mother leaving her, and her own role in her mother’s death, she has a long period of mourning. She says that some days are better than others, but that sometimes, she has to start all over again and forgive them both–herself and her mother.

So I guess that’s where I am, now. I feel like one day I’ll be really close to feeling forgiveness, to understanding my dad’s limitations and my own. And the next day, I’ll be knee deep in the muck again. It’s a process, I guess, of slowly peeling away the dried up layers of bitterness and old grudges to get to the sweet middle of the onion. Not everybody likes onions, Donkey would say. And frankly, I’m not that fond of them, either. They sting my tongue and make me cry. But with ogres, there just can’t be any other way.

Doing It Wrong

Yesterday was my dad’s birthday. He would’ve been 72. But he’s not, because he died nine months ago, yesterday. So on one day, we got a double-whammy: his birthday and the nine-month anniversary since he left the planet. It has just been over the past week or two that I have felt like I’m even grieving. I told my therapist that I must be doing it wrong.

She is kind. She is also a grief specialist. She says, no, no, I’m not doing it wrong, no such thing. But I just read a grief memoir by Meghan O’Rourke, called The Long Goodbye. In it, she talks about her research of grief, and the difference between “normal” grief and “complicated” grief. She says “normal” grief peaks in the first six months. Well, in the first six months after my dad died, I was raising an infant and going to graduate school and trying (and often failing) to resolve my dad’s affairs: debt collectors and lawyers and phone companies and furniture auction houses. I also organized his funeral. I couldn’t have done any of it without tons of help, but during most of it, I felt very alone, because, well, I’m it. No siblings. No parents, anymore. Just me.

Still, the grief has come in sharp, short stabs. One night I’ll sob for an hour, and then I won’t cry or even really think about it that much for a couple of weeks. Maybe what I am experiencing isn’t “normal” grief. Maybe it’s “complicated” grief. That would make sense. My relationship with my dad was a lot more complicated than that with my mom. And my life is a lot more complicated now than it was when she died. I don’t know. Then last Wednesday, Brian said something about how good it was that we kept all of these old pictures of my dad, because I can show them to Jack and tell him about his grandfather.

I wept. I sobbed. I exploded. “I HATE that I have pictures. I HATE that I’ll have to tell him stories. I HATE that that’s the only way Jack will ever know anything about either of my parents.” I cried for a long time. And for the first time in a long time, I let Brian hold me. It was, frankly, one of the sweetest experiences of my life.

And speaking of sweet experiences, I now have a toddler who’s starting to talk: juice, ‘nana, outside (which he says as “tide”). Last night, after dinner, Jack and I were in his sandbox, playing. At exactly 6 pm, when friends in Virginia were releasing birthday balloons and bottle rockets in my dad’s honor, Jack looked up at the sky and reached out his hand.

Procrastination

Today is February 28, the last day of the month. My monthly goal for working on my novel is thirty (30) pages. As of 9:43 pm, I have written exactly three (3). In other news, my son is turning one year old this week. The six-month anniversary of my father’s death was Saturday, and the ten-year anniversary of my mother’s death was February 7. I hate February. Oh, yeah, and I turned 39 on the 11th. For those of you playing the home game, that’s the last birthday before 40.

On the bright side, Brian is sick with some mysterious malady that could be just the flu or could be his entire endocrine system shutting down and calling it a life. We are confused and scared, and hey, look! It’s spring.

I spent almost an hour up here this afternoon playing a computer game. Am I trying to miss my life? Actually, no. I think it’s the opposite. I think part of me thinks (and hopes) that if I waste time, procrastinate, and play stupid games, that I can somehow stop time, live in a suspended animation where no one else will die, nothing will change, and Jack will never grow up and just stay little and adorable and clingy forever. I’ve had that fear about my work, my writing. If I actually write it, people will die. But you know what? They’re going to die, anyway. And I can’t stop it. Dammit.

Maybe that’s what some people call “writer’s block.” Maybe it really is the existential dread of death. I feel like Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck. She knows her husband is cheating on her, and she keeps asking people, “Why do men chase women?” Danny Aiello is the only one who has the right answer: “Because they fear death.” Join the club. (Just for the record, I don’t think Brian’s cheating on me. I just wish his thyroid or hypothalamus or pituitary gland or whatever’s wreaking havoc in his body would cut it the hell out.)

But life keeps coming. I took Jack for a walk today. The tulip poplars are blooming. New birds are setting up housekeeping in the sweet gum trees out front. Bulbs are sprouting up through last fall’s dead leaves – including the daffodils and crocus bulbs I planted in my dad’s memory. We can’t stop it, no matter how many games of Word Bubble we play online.

On Thanksgiving day of 2003, Brian and I drove to Danville so I could meet his family. We’d been engaged less than two months. On the way, a deer bounded across our side of the highway, its coat gleaming in the morning light, a fleet and golden beauty. I gasped. I thought, “Oh, how beautiful!” Then it leaped across the median and got smashed by a Mack truck coming the other way. The shock threw me: for life to be so radiant, flying, and the next moment gone.

But that, I believe, is the way of things. We can’t stop life – or death. We can only see it, gasp, say, “How beautiful!” Zip. There really isn’t time for anything else.

Letting Go (Lucky Post #13)

I nursed Jack for the last time yesterday morning, November 30.

He’ll be nine months old on Friday. I’ve always said that I’d want to breastfeed until about six months, and we have been gradually moving toward an all-formula-and-solids diet. For the last few weeks I was really just nursing him in the morning. In the last two weeks, we’ve even had to supplement that feeding with a bottle. So none of this was a great surprise. But when he didn’t want to nurse anymore and we were only halfway done yesterday, I knew it was time.

He’s crawling now. He’s interested in everything. He wants to look around, go places, explore. I get it. But it was (is) still hard not to feel rejected and hurt when he doesn’t “need” me in that way anymore.

There are exchanges, of course. He can hug me, reach for me, crawl to me. He even says, “ma-ma-ma-ma” when he wants me to pick him up. (Who knows if he’s actually saying “Mama”? Probably not. But still.) And I feel like a sap saying this, but my little baby is growing up so fast!

The heartbreaking thing about parenthood is that if we do the job right, eventually our kids don’t need us anymore. I see the anxiety of my mother-in-law, whose children are all in their 30s and very independent minded people. I see her still trying to mother them. And to me, raised by very laissez-faire parents (who are both dead now), it’s frustrating and saddening to watch. But now I can, at least partly, get it.

I want Jack to always need me. But I also know that would be a very unhealthy and destructive road to go. I want him to be happy and healthy and independent and functional in the world. To accomplish that end, I’ll need to not only let him go, but keep my mouth shut about my own feelings. Those of you who know me at all well know how hard it is to keep my mouth shut about anything. But I don’t want to burden him with my losses as he grows into the world and becomes a man. (Another reason to have a good therapist!)

I wouldn’t want him to be afraid to take chances and go it alone. That’s how he’ll grow and learn. I’m not advocating packing his bags for him tomorrow, but one day, I will watch him pack his own bags and move away. And this is just the first step toward that goodbye. It breaks my heart and makes me proud, all at once.

So this morning I got up and fixed him a bottle. I’ll cry about it later.

Death

I haven’t posted in a while. Life and death have turned me upside down and backwards. It will be a while before I can walk again, and as Anne Lamott says, even then, I will limp.

My dad died on August 26. It was quick, as he would have wanted. Much quicker than any of us had expected, even him, I think. On Saturday the 21st, I got a message from a good friend of his, saying, “You need to see your father as soon as possible.” I thought maybe she was exaggerating. I called my dad right then, asked how he was doing.

“I had a really bad night last night,” he told me. “Really bad.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, I think it’s this pain medication I’ve been on. I had a really bad reaction to it. So I’m just not going to take that anymore. I have some less narcotic stuff I can take instead.”

“Is there anything I can do, Pop?”

Pause. “No.”

I wrote back to his friend, and she insisted that I needed to go see him. “He’s not telling you the truth,” she wrote.

The next day, I called my “adopted sister” Cindy, a dear family friend. She said that Dad had been having hallucinations, but that like he’d told me, he assumed it was a side effect of the pain medication for the tumor on his pelvic bone. (I had only recently learned that there were tumors in places other than one of his lungs.) She and I also conjectured that he could be experiencing alcohol withdrawal, as he told the Hospice nurse who visited that his usual intake was 6 to 8 drinks a night.

By Monday, he wasn’t getting out of bed. By Tuesday, Cindy was answering his phone for him. Brian and I had already planned to go up that weekend. But on Wednesday morning, Cindy said she wanted me up there. I talked to the Hospice nurse as we left town. She said, “Sometimes people surprise me. This could go on for as long as a week.”

A week? Shit. “Do we need to fly up there, or do you think we’ll have enough time to drive. We live seven hours away.”

“No, that should be fine. Don’t rush. Be careful.”

We arrived at about 9 pm on Wednesday night. Jack squeezed his grandfather’s face. We could tell that Dad was trying to smile. He could hear us talking, and we even made him laugh a few times. I told him Jack was stubborn: “I wonder where he got that.” And we all saw his face respond.

His breathing was labored, and he moaned with each exhale. “That’s new,” said Cindy.

“Is he in pain?”

Cindy nodded. “You guys talk to him first. Then I’ll give him the morphine. It will knock him out.” She teared up. I hugged her, and she took Jack out to the living room.

We told him over and over again that it was OK, that we would be all right. Brian promised to take care of Jack and me. Later, after Brian and Jack were in bed, Dad had some agitation, where he tried to get out of bed. He told us to go away, but his words were slurred. I asked, “Do you want us to go away?” He nodded violently.

“Too bad. You’re not getting rid of us,” said Cindy.

She and our friend Terri, a nurse, rolled Dad on his side and inserted a suppository, per the night-call nurse’s instructions over the phone. By the time she arrived, around 1 am, he was out cold. She explained to us that it’s normal for some patients to go through what they call “terminal agitation,” and it’s caused by anxiety about death. (I later found a note Dad had written, saying he had never feared death, but that he was very frightened of the process of dying. “Make it quick!” he wrote.)

The next morning, he wasn’t responding to verbal questions at all: no nods, no moaning. His beard had grown out to a soft gray sandpaper on his jaw. We took turns sitting with him and watching Rachel Ray pet exotic animals on the television. He had another fit of agitation, and when the morphine and ativan didn’t calm him, Cindy and I rolled him over for another suppository. There should be a circle in hell where you have to give your father a suppository. And the ranks of heaven are filled with the friends who will help you roll him over to do it.

When we were finished, he mumbled something. Cindy said, “Awesome? Did you say awesome?” He smiled a tiny bit. I stripped the gloves off my hands and said, “Yes, we are!” That made him laugh.

That afternoon, around 3, before the nurse and doctor arrived, Terri called me back into his bedroom. “His breathing has slowed down a lot,” she said. We all sat and stood around him: Brian, Terri, Cindy, Jack, and me. Terri felt for a pulse and found none, but his face was still moving. He took another breath. Quieter. Slower. Quieter. Slower. I asked Cindy to turn off the TV – some court show with a snarky judge. Who would want to die to that? Then Cindy and Terri left with Jack.

I sat on the slipper chair beside his bed, my hands on his arms. Brian stood behind me, his hand on my shoulder. After a while, I said, “Daddy, thank you for everything, even the stuff I didn’t like.” Then we watched the pulse at his neck until it slowed and quieted and became still. And that was all.

Rest in Motion

I’ve been going slightly insane this week, trying to get Jack on some semblance of a daily schedule before I start back to classes next week. We tried the Ferber method for basically a day, and nobody was happy. Then my friend Becky suggested car rides to get him to sleep. So now I’m taking long drives around the county twice a day to let the man take naps.

I was the same way, as a baby, according to my parents. Boat, plane, car, truck, whatever: just get me moving, and I’d zonk out. So now, my son is teaching me to rest in motion. It’s not easy. Driving kills my shoulders. But he also sacks out when we take him for walks, which I could use a few more of in my life. (I’ve lost most of the “baby weight” but now have about 30 or 40 more to lose, to get back to “normal.”)

I used to think I couldn’t get anything done with him. Now I’m learning to take him along with me. It’s harder and more complicated. I keep forgetting the diaper bag. And carrying his car seat is not doing my elbows any favors. But I’ve taken along the Ergo carrier and stroller, and it probably wouldn’t hurt me to do a little weight lifting. He’s still only about 16 or 17 pounds. (Of course, as I write this, Brian is entertaining him downstairs, but Jack will go with me to buy my running shoes later.) We have a jogging stroller. And I want to get one of those baby seats for the back of my bike.

In her book The Artist’s Way, creativity guru Julia Cameron encourages people to write what she calls “morning pages” every day. She says that this daily ritual helps us to “rest in motion.” I started doing morning pages ten years ago, and I’m still at it – though I’ve adjusted my schedule to write at night, after the boo is asleep.

And speaking of sleep, guess what I’m doing more of, these days! I used to have this elaborate and rather rigid bedtime routine, including blow-drying every hair on my head. Seriously, if I missed a spot, I’d go back and blow it dry until it was all warm. Now, when Brian comes to bed, he sees me sacked out with the towel still on my wet head, my arms flung out on both sides, to rest my aching elbows from the carrying of the day.

So maybe staying in motion is the only way for me to rest, right now. Here we go.

Look at Your Feet

I used to work with a former field hockey player. During a difficult time, she told me something her coach taught her during practice. She said, “Look at your feet. If you look at the goal, you’ll trip, or you’ll lose the ball, or your opponent will knock you off balance. But if you look at your feet, you’ll get all the way down the field, a step at a time.”

I talked to a good friend the other night, and she asked me what’s new. I told her that Jack is five months old; we just moved; we’re desperately searching for new tenants in our house in Virginia; my dad’s health and state of mind are in the shitter; and I start back to grad classes next week. I’m feeling overwhelmed. She was sympathetic and encouraging, saying I have a lot on my plate and that I need to take it easy on myself.

Yes. Amen. I do. And the only way I know how to do that is to take my old coworker’s advice and look at my feet.

I’ve had other opportunities to test that advice and find it solid. A few years ago, I took a cross-country driving trip, covering about 10,000 miles, the bulk of it on my own. Whenever I thought about how long I was traveling, as a whole, it freaked me out. But I could drive three hours today, five hours tomorrow, and so on. And in that way, I made it from Maine to Seattle to San Diego to DC. The same is true in my writing. The thought of writing a 200-page novel blows my mind. But I can write two pages today. That’s all I can do. And it’s also the best thing I could do. There’s a lot of wisdom to the twelve-step adage “one day at a time.”

So today I took a walk around the block in a summer shower. The rain spotted my glasses and I couldn’t see to the end of the street. But I could look down and watch my feet moving, one step, another step. Eventually I got to the next street. And eventually I came home.

Poem for Jack, at Five Months

Please don’t rush,
O you of the rose-gold hair.
Your face keen and shining,
You watch every bite I take,
Following fork from
plate to mouth, plate to mouth,
Your eyes a deep blue plea of sky,
begging to be like me.

Please wish for something nobler.

I, for one, will miss
the fat pink spider of your hand
squeezing my nose and pulling my hair
when you have grown into someone
who will no longer fall asleep
on my chest.

O, you loud roaring boy of a man,
stay little
a while longer.
Don’t race the time to heartbreak.
It will come
to you.

Moving

Last week, we left our townhouse in an oppressively run HOA gulag for a lovely single family home in a neighborhood with trees and dogs and swingsets.

The night before we moved, I had pulled in front of the house next-door to load my car with things to take to the new house. In my haste, I pulled about an inch or so over into the neighbor’s grass, but I thought it would go unnoticed. Even though my dear friend was towed the night we brought Jack home from the hospital, I assumed it was because she had parked in a visitor spot without the proper hang-tag. I thought for a second that I might be a target since I was in front of someone else’s house, but it has been vacant for several months, so I figured it was OK.

When I woke up on moving day, my car was gone. Gone. As in “gone.” Full of our stuff. I got dressed in a hurry. Jack was still sleeping, but my movement woke Brian. He gave me a questioning look. “The fuckers towed me,” I whispered. His eyes got wide, and he was silent.

I called the towing company, and the lady told me I was towed because I had parked “on the grass.” My tire had crossed over from the pavement by an inch or so. Really. I’m not exaggerating or trying to get myself off the hook. If I had parked on someone’s lawn, I would hope I’d have the grace to admit it. But I hadn’t. And no one lives there.

I called Elizabeth, who had agreed to come over and watch Jack during the move, and asked her if she could come early, and she agreed cheerfully. Brian drove me by the bank so I could withdraw $100 in cash to get my car out of hock. When I got to the tow lot, the woman in the smoky office told me that she never lives where there’s an HOA because “they’re all like that.” She shook her head. I said, “Well, that’s why we’re moving. Today.” She looked at me blankly. Maybe she thought I was trying to make a joke. I gave her the cash, and she gave me a receipt. Then I walked out to the gravel lot and picked up my fully packed car and drove it to the new house, where choirs of angels sang “Hallelujah! There is no HOA here!”

I unloaded my car and set things up for our friends who were helping us move. I hung signs in every room showing what pieces of furniture went where, because I doubted I’d be there when they arrived. I cleaned up the painting mess in Jack’s room so his furniture could go in there. Then I headed back to the townhouse. I thought along the way how thankful I was to have friends who were helping us move, how hot it was today, and how lucky I am.

When I arrived at the townhouse, our friends and Brian were trotting back and forth up a ramp into a huge Penske truck. I got out of the car and approached my friend Michelle. I even got a little weepy. I said, “I don’t feel like I deserve you guys.”

She hugged me and said, “Pfft! Just because some asshole tows you on moving day doesn’t mean there aren’t other people in the world who love you!” I saw my friend Jessica over Michelle’s shoulder. She smiled and nodded.

Now, that’s moving.