Postmortem Vignettes

anger, pride, and other sins

My dad passed on Good Friday.

Same day Jesus was crucified. Maybe that’s why I keep having nightmares he’s come back from the dead, resurrected and grey skinned and angry at me, because I have sold so many of his belongings for less than he thought they were worth. Easter came and went, though, and he didn’t rise.

Still, the dreams keep coming. In one, we use electricity and his bony body twitches grotesquely like Frankenstein’s monster. In another, he looks young for his age, big and brown the way he was only a year ago and we embrace in my mom’s childhood home, which burned down in the Eaton Fire. A man who no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists. Both are ashes. I liked that dream, though—in it, he was smiling. He wasn’t mad at me. He forgave me for the things I have had to do.

—-

A week or so before he died, I removed the door to the master bathroom so he could fit his walked through the frame without the wheels catching. He was furious—I can still picture the face he made as we carried it to the garage. Wincing, like it hurt him to imagine fragments of his house being torn off to admit the scope of his illness. A grimace and a groan that said great, another thing for me to fix, because he was imagining a future, still, where he survived this and didn’t need a walker anymore.

That look of disgust is the face he makes at me in my dreams: disappointment.

—-

I know I keep dreaming of my father’s anger for practical reasons:

1. He was angry a lot, and that anger defined my childhood and no matter how much I healed or he grew, you don’t forget the things that happen to you when you’re little

2. Very few people know about that anger and so it has become a my cross to bear in solitude, and that cross has been weighing heavy since he’s died as I’m forced to serve as witness to the collective memory of him, preserved and lauded by people who didn’t know him as well as I did

3. He would be angry to know I am selling his things. He loved his things in the way he loved me. He used to say, without shame of self consciousness, “you are my most prized possession.”

Still, despite these good reasons, I can’t help but feel like my dreams are punishment for my own anger.

—-

People keep asking me how I am doing, what I am feeling. They expect sadness, they expect me to talk about how much I miss him, they expect me to break down crying. Friends from his high school and job find my number and send me stories they think I’ll like about him; they all reiterate what a “great man” he was. I am very polite, but still feel like I’m getting it wrong, every time I answer. Because I am not visibly grieving, I am nowhere near nonfunctional, I don’t cry, I am not performing the picture of loss to their satisfaction.

The real answer to what I am feeling? Anger. I am so, so, so deeply and powerfully angry.

—-

It’s embarrassing, honestly, to be pissed off at a dead person. I keep thinking I should be the bigger person, that I should let go of all of my petty rage and forgive my father’s flaws and do what my mom is doing: willfully erasing his complexity for the sake of venerating the New Patron Saint of Husbands and Fathers, Bob Mendoza.

But the truth is, I don’t have the luxury of perceiving him simply, because I am the one tasked with organizing his absolute shitshow of an estate he refused to get in order prior to his death because he was convinced he would live to put that door back on its hinges. I don’t have the luxury of pretending he was a Great Guy, because I know he was Not a Great Guy, and am currently in the very real throes of protecting my mother from the consequences of him being Not a Great Guy because she couldn’t handle the reality. And she cannot handle the reality because one of his Not Great features was that he took great pride in cultivating life where his wife was completely helpless and entirely reliant on him financially and legally and thus has no life skills or resilience to speak of.

I am angry, because I have to keep his secrets, and clean up his mess, and no one else preaching the port mortem Gospel of Bob Mendoza even knows about it.

___

Sometimes I feel like he did this on purpose— lived in such a way that everyone in the world would think he was amazing and perfect except for me: the only one close enough and kind enough and competent enough to simultaneously deal with the car crash without exposing the carnage to his adoring followers. Like he knew I wouldn’t break my mother’s heart like that way, or deny his friends and family the pleasure of elevating him to Godlike status upon his death. That I wouldn’t let everything fall to ruin.

But that’s me dehumanizing him as much as the people erasing all nuance: I have to keep reminding myself, he was just a guy. Not God, not Machiavelli. I know in my heart he didn’t plan for me to take his place or keep his secrets or clean up his mess, because I know in my heart he thought I couldn’t.

—-

Everyone I talk to about him brings up how much he talked about me. That he was so proud of me, that he loved me so much.

He was proud of me, and he did love me. He supported me after I came out, he supported me when I pursued my tattooing career even though it was not the prestigious career he dreamed of, he told everyone about my books and did his best to read them even though he hated to read. He was, materially, about as supportive as any parent could possibly be and I am so grateful for that.

But he also used to lie about and embellish my accomplishments to make them sound more reputable than they were. He invented a daughter who resembled me, but wasn’t me. I believe this is a sort of love, a sort of pride, but it has always felt like he was not proud of me the way a person is proud of another person, but in the way a person is proud of a possession they own. You are my most prized possession.

Possessions don’t keep secrets, or clean up messes. What I think really happened is not that he cast me in this role of caretaker and executor of his estate—he just wasn’t planning on dying when he died. I think he intended to clean up his own mess, and take those secrets to the grave. I think it’s more likely I was supposed to be as protected from the truth as my mother was, but he passed before he could shut me away in the dark. And now, I am tasked with a choice: to drag everyone into the mud with me, or let them keep their shiny memory of a ghost.

—-

I am dreading his memorial. Hours listening to people preach the Bob Mendoza Gospel, share stories about the sort of man they thought he was, the sort of man they knew.

My favorite story about my dad I cannot tell as his Eulogy, because it would require me to betray him by being totally honest about the man he actually, and I have decided, in the interest of protecting people, to keep that mostly private. But, I will tell it here:

My dad was verbally abusive my whole childhood. He was the sort of person who was chronically anxious, and instead of resolving his stress he allowed it to build in a pressure cooker until he eventually exploded, and took it out on me and my mom. Because his anger was rarely related to anything we ever did, we could not control or predict it. I walked on eggshells through my formative years and well into adolescence, terrified something random would set him off and he’d react violently. When I was little, I cried, and he would scream stop crying, which made me cry harder. So I learned to be silent. That silence fermented into resentment, and as I got older I started talking back, fighting back. My mom did not. I was on my own in my resistance against him, and it drove us steadily apart. I became someone who could never trust him, which was hard on him because he wanted desperately to be trusted. An approachable fatherly advisor who people came to with their problems seeking advice. He got this from most people in his life, but never me, the one he most wanted it from.

In 2014, we had our last big fight. He lashed out at me in front of my wife, and suddenly, having an audience for his behavior allowed me to see it in a new light: how unfair it was, how childish, how dangerous. So, after fleeing the house following this fight, I gave him an ultimatum: seek treatment for his anger management, or I would no longer be in his life.

It took a year of no contact and therapy, but he did it. He sought treatment, he figured out the source of his outbursts, and learned tools to notice when they were coming on. He addressed past trauma in his own childhood. True to my word, I allowed him back in my life. I moved closer to him, I worked to forgive him, I got therapy myself to reconcile the abuse in my past and the ways it had taught me maladaptive patterns around my own anger.

Part of me was always braced for the other shoe would drop, convinced he’d revert to old patterns, but he never did. He was true to his word, too. We were increasingly close in the final years of his life, and his ability to truly change his behavior and hold himself accountable for his actions made me have a higher standard for what I expected in other relationships. When people treated me poorly and refused to change, I would remember that my dad never refused—he just buckled down. He followed through. It was an enormous gift to me, and to my self worth, and I admire greatly and love him dearly for it.

—-

I don’t think I need to feel ashamed for my anger— it’s a sign I am grieving him as a whole person. Not as an idea, or as a saint, or as an archetype, but as a real, complex human. I did not love an idea, or a saint, or an archetype. I loved my dad. Flaws, fury, and all. I miss my dad, flaws, fury, and all. I am angry at him for having secrets, and for leaving a mess. I think that’s fair. I don’t think it will last forever.

—-

I do miss him.

The scared, abused child in me keeps dreaming he wakes up and yells at me for not asking more money for his priceless treasures. That child still feels like a possession. She’s learning who she is without an owner. She doesn’t miss the owner.

But the real me? I showed up in that burnt, haunted house last night. I used to be terrified of that house, there was a flashing light on a smoke alarm I was convinced was a demon (I might have been right, jury’s still out on that one) but I came there anyway. It was still standing, empty, unfurnished. He smiled at me, and said nothing, but he smiled big and real. I hugged him, and neither of us angry people were mad at the other, and I think that counts for something.