Solid State Electronics

The pathology of my father is impressive.

I didn’t expect to be back in Virginia at this point in time. In fact I skipped Thanksgiving to stay away a bit longer. I’m supposed to be writing my finals from my cozy apartment in Brooklyn right now. Instead I’m on a floral print couch being schooled on rock and roll by my childlike and possibly drunk father while my mom is at the funeral home making last minute adjustments to my grandma’s body before the funeral tomorrow. Life is crazy. Mom called me yesterday when I got to my internship to tell me nana died. I left immediately. Looked like a goddamn mess in front of people who work in my office, cried on the train in front of strangers. It was raining and fucking cold. Appropriate. I booked a crazy expensive flight and came home. How could I not. My mom said she needed me, in so many words. Now I feel guilty for the plans I had for her this weekend. She was coming to visit me in the city, I was going to dump upon her everything I had learned about myself in the recent past and demand some kind of progress in our relationship. Reparations for the damage done in my childhood. Validation. I had all these ideas about how things would go. And now I’m back in my parents’ house watching my mom cry. Driving her to funeral homes and relatives’ houses to eat ham biscuits. I’m entertaining my father, the sickest human being I’ve met, because that’s what my mom needs from me right now. So many messed up emotions and thoughts swimming around in my head right now. Guilt for not coming home on Thanksgiving, not seeing nana one last time. Regret for not having taken her for margaritas like I always said I would. Anger at my stupid family for making me and my mom the only ones who really took care of her. My mom took care of the physical, took her to all of her appointments, I took care of the emotional, talked to her like a person, let her be wherever the fuck she was – pissed off, depressed, excited, happy, done. A weird numbness toward my father. I see his pathology so much more clearly in this context and in the 5 or 6 months it’s been since I’ve seen him. I’ve had a lot of time in therapy in that interim. I’ve figured out a lot of things about him. And now I see them coming to life. We’re in my uncle’s house with the preacher, telling him about nana, what she would want  people to know about her, what we loved about her. It is blindingly obvious my father doesn’t know how to be in these situations. We discuss the song that will be sang at her funeral and he demands, well she liked music a lot right? Shouldn’t there be more music? No, says my mom, she was just kind of indifferent about music. Of course he was fishing for someone to ask him to sing. No one does. So he says, yea you know I would sing but I don’t think I could get through it. We talk about how Nana went to college in Blackstone for a while, he casually drops in to the conversation that that’s where he took his classes to be a layman. To the preacher. See this makes not a lot of sense if you don’t know him. Dropping in these casual comments about himself feeds his disgusting narcissism. It’s not the time or the place. No one else is talking about themselves. Last night, when I first got in. Mom was trying to process the death of her mother. Talking about how Nana wasn’t sick at all. Dad cuts in – did you show her the letter from my brother? And he thrusts an email in my face where his brother details how sick their mother is with Alzheimer’s. It’s a competition for attention for him. No fucking wonder my mom can’t feel her own feelings. He shoots them down whenever they surface. She talks about how she and nana were supposed to get their hair done this morning. He says, well you can go tomorrow. She says, I’m not worried about my hair. He misses the point entirely. Makes everything worse. I can’t accurately convey the disdain I have for this man. You have to have lived my life, or at a bare minimum be my therapist. To most people it makes no sense. He seems like such a harmless creature. Creative. Intelligent. Funny. Fuck that shit. Seriously. All this on top of the grief I feel. This shouldn’t be about him but I’m not being honest if I say he’s not shading my experience. Keen awareness. Vividly appearing in all of the memories I have of this event. He comes downstairs while I’m writing my finals, showing me his new DVDs, like a little kid. He wants to watch one with me. He won’t say this though. I’m the closest thing he’s had to attention in a long time. Clearly. So much hatred for him and at the same time I feel such a pity for him, such a deep sadness for his life and who he is. All of these memories. How I used to call our dog Baby Love, and I’d sing that song to her. How I used to start fires with the candles that are still on the desk. How he used to make me feel stupid for everything I ever said, even the things meant to help him. There’s no room for me around him. Such an awful tension to hold these feelings and have to be around him at the same time. I packed my nana’s estee lauder bath powder to take to the funeral home this morning. Watched my mom cry while she folded nana’s slip on the bed. Strange parallel universes I seem to be existing in today. In New York none of this feels real. I can’t wait to get back. My redneck cousins call me New York now. They balk at the life I live, rather the life they presume I live since they’ve never actually taken the time to get to know me. My mom’s face drops at the sound of a friend’s voice on the phone, but she won’t cry with me. Strange sickness of our relationship. Strange southern discomfort. Awful new reality. I don’t understand it and it’s far too overwhelming to stay in. Yet I have to come back in a couple weeks for Christmas, to help my mom navigate the waters of getting rid of her mother’s things, callous aunts who want to have a yard sale – it’s clear it’s not their mother who died, help her go to the grocery store without nana, do mornings without checking on nana, have feelings while living with the feelings-suck that is my father. I have to take care of her, no one else is. My father is just interested in telling me how Michael Jackson stole everything from Diana and James Brown. What the fuck. "He stole it all, Amanda. Stole it all."