Ever feel like walking off into the wilderness and howling?
I do. The wolf howl is perhaps one of the most beautiful and mournful sounds
I’ve ever heard. It speaks to me. I want to howl and let my sorrow drift into
the air with it’s mournful sound . . . . then someone can wake me up when
October ends.
This October marks the 23rd anniversary of my
father’s death. I remember it as the day that my perfect little world was
shattered and nothing in life has ever been the same for me since. In the wake
of his death, my grandmother, Patricia, selfless as always, went out of her way
to maintain a sense of normalcy for me. She was ill with advanced and
undiagnosed pancreatic cancer, had just lost her son, and had another son that
was in an assisted living center being treated for schizophrenia. In spite of
all of this, she fought to preserve my childhood and happiness.
I went trick or treating that year. I remember my costume: a
black plastic trash bag and pharmacy store bought witch’s hat. In the aftermath
of my father’s death, this was some much needed fun for five-year-old me. It
wasn’t long after this that my crazy mother took me to Georgia and left me
there with complete strangers. To this day, I still can’t decide if she was
crazy, cruel or some insidious mixture of the two.
It’s not like it was all unhappy, I was just frightened and
feeling very alone. I spent about a year in Georgia before I made a miraculous
return home. I was with a woman named Myrna. According to my birth mother, this
was my grandmother on her side. Myrna, knowing the deceitfulness and destruction
that most often followed in my mother’s footsteps, played close attention to my
chatter about home, losing my father and my longing to be with my grandmother
Patricia.
I remember Myrna going through one phonebook after another,
making phone call after phone call until she located my grandparents. She
bought two plane tickets and accompanied me home. I wish I knew her better.
Myrna is gone now, but I remember her as being the one constant and solid thing
in my life when I was surrounded by turmoil and doubt.
A year after returning home to the west coast, my
grandmother was in the hospital dying of cancer. I lived with whoever would
take me in over the next year until cancer got the better of her. I remember
the day she died as vividly as the day my father died. The air felt heavy and
suffocating and I simply wanted to melt into the earth beneath my feet and
disappear into the essence of the universe.
I look at the approach of this month with dread. I keep my
birthday hidden on my online profile because all of the wishes for happiness
only serve as a reminder of what’s been taken away and the looming sadness that
I know will take over even though I try to keep it at bay. My father’s death
marked the beginning of an immense amount of sadness that entered my life that
I am still trying to process and come to terms with.
I’d like to think that someday all of this won’t make me so
sad. In the meantime, I’ll try to create some happy memories for myself. At
least I know I’ll survive it; I always do.
"And can it be that in a world so full and busy the loss of one creature makes a void so wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth of eternity can fill it" ~ Charles Dickens
