Short Story--First Draft

Bud was a thoughtful person. He was aware that he was dying. The doctors told him that he should take the opportunity to settle his affairs before his cancer progressed to the point that he could not. He did many things to this end. One of them was to stand in his walk-in closet with a brown leather pouch he normally used to deposit cash from his car detailing business. He waited with his hand over the full pouch and stared at his clothing. He knew it would be sent to charity when he died and wanted most of the clothing to go before he did. His hands were dry when he went into the closet to look at his clothes. He didn't notice as they began to leave imprints on the pouch from sweat and couldn't decide what to do next.

The idea came to him quietly, like cancer did. He followed it as if he had no choice. He tucked five dollar and ten dollar and even hundred dollar bills into the pockets of his blue jeans and shirts and after an hour or so he had finished. He was very tired. He laid down on his bed that his wife had made up for him every day since they were married forty three years before and he settled into sleep. His heart failed him and he died.

Weeks later, his wife Lorna gathered his clothing and folded each piece into plastic bins. She gathered the bins into the garage and stacked them and they looked to her for a moment like the Tetris blocks from the video gadget her son used to carry around with him over twenty, maybe even thirty years ago. She shut out the light to the garage and went to sleep.

That night, Lorna slept on her husband's side of the bed. Her house was still and quiet. She wished she could have one more chance to tell him that she loved him. She wished that she could tell him to roll over and stop snoring. She thought of the dozens of meals she prepared for him over the years that may have contributed to his developing cancer but that he loved. She felt she would never eat steak or ribs or barbequed chicken with potatoes covered in butter and cheese ever again. Rather than keep her awake, these thoughts lulled her to sleep.

In the morning, she took the baby seats out of the minivan she drove when she babysat her grandchildren. She folded down the seats and packed the minivan full of the plastic boxes. She took the boxes to the local United Way. Driving from the facility, she stopped and watched the workers gather her husband's belongings and sort them. She felt like she was waving from the shore as an ocean liner departed for an unknown destination. Her hands left prints of perspiration on the steering wheel so she turned up the air conditioner and drove off.

When she arrived home, she saw the mail carriers little truck up the street. She walked to her mailbox and it felt to her like the walk was longer than it had been before or that she hadn't thought about how long the walk was to the mailbox once in all of the years she lived in her home with Bud until that moment. She tried to think of how many times she may have gone to the mailbox before and how it was never an activity that caused her to reflect on it in any way but how it now was one of the many  generic activities in her life that felt odd and slightly more difficult. The box was full of the usual fliers and bills and announcements. She went inside and opened them at her kitchen table. One piece of mail was in a Hallmark envelope.
        "Another sympathy card," she told herself and walked away from the table and to her bedroom where she laid down and took a nap on her side of the bed.

At the United Way, Casey Perkins, a young girl of maybe seventeen stared at Bud's clothes. They were separated from the bins that they arrived in and the bins were stacked on the floor beside them with the lids stacked next to those. It was Casey's first day working for the United Way. Her training hadn't officially begun. Her boss, Ella, a woman of considerable age in Casey's eyes told her to go through the pockets and then fold all of the clothes into stacks on the green laminate table to her left. Casey put her hand into the first pocket and found a five dollar bill. She smiled. She looked up and saw that nobody was watching her. She put the bill into the side pocket of her denim skirt.

Bud stirred. He was dead, he knew that. He tried to make a sound but could not. He tried to look at his hands but they were not there. Still, he was able to see the girl in her denim skirt and the smile on her face. He watched.

Casey left work that day with $872.00 from the clothing that Bud owned when he was alive. Her pockets were fat. She was in a very good mood.

Lorna woke from her nap with a feeling that Bud was there. She walked to the closet and saw that his side was empty. She wondered why the closet never seemed large to her before or why she never told him that she loved their house and that she was grateful that he worked so hard to give them everything they needed. She thought of the many times she told him that they wouldn't have their house if not for the money she earned before they married and that she saved for the down payment and he didn't and so it was every bit as much hers as his. She thought of how he always turned his head like a puppy when she talked this way and how he seemed to laugh off her indignant refusal to think of him as the financial provider of the family.
       
"I am here. Look at the nightstand," Bud thought. He didn't hear a sound. He remembered that he left a letter for her on the nightstand next to the last novel that Lorna was reading before he passed. Lorna didn't see. He couldn't reach her and she didn't see that he was there.    

Early the next morning, Casey walked to church. She knelt in the pew before the statue of the Blessed Virgin. She lit a candle. She folded one of Bud's dollars into the bronze collection box. She thought that in years past, perhaps nuns used to shine the metal in the church. There were no nuns left in her parish. She felt like one was kneeling beside her.

Sister Frances Mary, who was born Katherine Gallagher felt herself present before Casey. She laid her nonexistent hands on Casey's.

Casey began to pray and asked God if the money was for the abortion she had considered or if it was to keep the baby no one but her yet knew was with her. She asked God to help guide her. She asked for peace and comfort in making her decision.

Bud stirred and saw Casey. He knelt beside her and if he could have cried, he would have had tears on his cheek. He remembered tears. He saw Casey's tears and remembered verses from his Catholic upbringing that told him God saved every one of our tears. He tried to communicate this to Casey.

Casey walked out of the church feeling less pleased than she did when she was at work. The money she took from the pockets of the clothing might not have been intended for her. She might have been more honest about finding it the way she did. She couldn't decide whether she should tell her boss about it now or stay quiet. Her legs felt heavy and every thought hurt her head except thoughts of going home to rest and to make her decision later.

Lorna woke that morning from a dream that there was a child who needed her and whom she had agreed to care for but didn't. She dreamt that she was walking in a field and there were fireflies all around and she was young and her hair was blonde again and long. She could feel it on her shoulders. The baby was in a tent nearby and waiting for her. She was listening to music near a band shell like the one called Petrillo Band Shell that her father used to bring her to when they had family picnics before she knew Bud and before she was old enough to stop enjoying family picnics in the park. The baby was there and she could see her. She had beautiful dark eyes and dark hair. Her babies were much lighter. In the dream, she knew this. When she returned to the tent, the baby had passed but was able to put the thought in her head that everything was okay. It wasn't her time. She was not in pain. She was at peace.

Lorna remembered that she hadn't taken her anti-depressant that day. She walked to the bathroom feeling each footstep was heavy and looked at the plastic container with each day of the week's pills separated into little boxes. She took her medication with a sip of water she collected in her hand under the bathroom sink. She knew that if she didn't eat food with her medication that it would not dissolve in her stomach and she would see it floating in the toilet later. She didn't have the energy to cook.

She went to the garage and saw both vehicles. She decided to drive Bud's car to the corner diner and order some eggs. Nothing seemed appetizing to her. The bouncy waitress and the modern music and plastic chairs almost annoyed her. She felt her stomach contents churn.

Casey walked past the diner on her way from church to her home. Lorna saw her and Bud tried to tell her that Casey needed her, but Lorna couldn't hear. Lorna ate her eggs in silence. For the first time in many years, she considered going to mass and lighting a candle.

Hope

“Unless you have suffered and wept, you really don’t understand what compassion is, nor can you give comfort to someone who is suffering. If you haven’t cried, you can’t dry another’s eyes. Unless you’ve walked in darkness, you can’t help wanderers find the way. Unless you’ve looked into the eyes of menacing death and felt its hot breath, you can’t help another rise from the dead and taste anew the joy of being alive.”
—Takashi Nagai. Quoted from the book, “A Song for Nagasaki”.

If I could go back and talk to my younger self, at about age 19 or 20...I'd tell her to stop worrying so much. I'd ask her to look ahead to the future without fear. I'd tell her that all of the things that happened up to that point were what made her ready for the future. I'd tell her that she really didn't need to fight the battle against the priest who took over her family because in time, he was going to self destruct and show those able to see that he was much like the wizard in the wizard of Oz...not actually capable of more than blowing smoke and hiding in a castle. Every time he told me, "I'll break you. You're nothing." I could have had a vision in my head of what was to come for him. I don't mean that I hope he is in hell, but if he is...I wouldn't doubt that God knew what he was doing when he let him go there.

My hope for the next many years of my life is to leave all of that behind. It has been my hope since all of it happened. I find myself running in circles away from as far as I can go, only to find it in front of me again. I want a life free of the shame of being raised in a family where a priest was allowed to hurt me and others. I wish to be free of the shame I feel when I think of the money he diverted from the church to keep my mom in the golden handcuffs she felt made her powerless and that I felt made her blind. It wasn't our money. I had no right to live off of it. I resented so much the part-time jobs and babysitting money I earned while sacrificing any time I might have had for after-school clubs or activities. Looking back, I feel like that was the only honest money that I could actually feel good about having spent. So it was a blessing.

I feel so much shame about the ways that my anger and sadness changed me. I lost the ability to focus on anything that didn't bring me immediate pleasure. Being with friends was fun and so I put everything in to spending as much time as I could with them. I liked being admired by boys and so if one showed me the slightest interest...I gave everything. It never occurred to me to hold back long enough to find out whether I liked him. Doing homework didn't feel fun and so I let my grades slide. I enjoyed feeling thin and so savored the feeling of hunger rather than eating. I liked pushing myself to great lengths to avoid food. I burned myself out and experienced clinical depression which could not have been helped by my refusal to eat. Even though I enjoyed hearing people say that they wished they could be so thin, I didn't like the way I looked. I felt ugly, terrible and out of place all through my teenage and young adult years. The worst of it was that I felt helpless to change these feelings.

I have spent most of my years since trying to be the opposite of what I was growing up. I have been through years of deep devotion to religion and not always in a healthy way. I went through dozens and dozens of self-help books. I went through years and years of therapy. I have been hospitalized for depression and stayed while knowing that the circles of friends I once had dwindled each time I allowed the shame of my condition to be known. I knew that while getting this help I was becoming less employable. The weight of stigma is heavy. I didn't ask for an abusive home to grow up in or ptsd or a priest to be in my life. Still, my inability to live through those things without making a fool of myself at times earned me a lot of rejection and even more shame. I'm not saying I didn't make a fool of myself many times...I did. I just don't know that other people who didn't go through the same experiences would have known how to do better. I also don't know that the things I did were so greatly different from the things others do. I never got arrested. I never ran through the streets naked claiming that I was Jesus or anything. I wasn't violent or destructive. I just let myself become very sad and lost control of the sadness to the point that I saw no way out. I clung to hard to people who didn't care the way I did for them. Sometimes I got angry and yelled. Sometimes I wrote long emails asking why things were so fucked up. I must have looked exceedingly desperate for affirmation and friendship and love. I was all of those things. I behaved like a person who had no core of feeling that she mattered.

Now that I am a mother whose children are soon going to be entering the middle school and then high school years, I want to know that my past won't bury their futures. I am looking for hope. I want to find a way to feel that everything I have learned will in some way be of benefit to them and not a noose around their necks. I don't want them to feel the kind of pressure I did to be pretty, to be accepted. I will be happy if they are those things...but I don't want them to feel I wouldn't love them unless they were those things. They are smart, kind and loving. I couldn't ask for more from them.

My hope is that whatever my struggles were growing up...they will help me attend to the needs of my daughters as they grow. My hope is that the crazy in my family will be able to skip over their generation. If I had kept everything inside, I don't know that this would have been possible even this long in their lives. I didn't have others telling me that there is no reason to blame yourself for your genetics, but there are ways to deal with mental illness effectively if you face it head on. I had people in my life who told me to not embarrass them by showing signs of being defective and to keep secrets hidden no matter how they poisoned my life. My hope is that even if my daughters inherit from me the worst of the demons my family seems to be afflicted with, my husband's acceptance and love and my own will be enough to help them go further in life than I have been able to go. I don't think that would be possible if I kept all of this a secret. I wouldn't be helping anyone if I did that. All of this has always been bigger than me in my mind. My only weapon for getting out from under the shame of it has been to accept that it is real and go on building the other parts of my life. Yes, I am crazy. However, I also really like to read. Yes, I can go through bouts of deep depression. However, I have created a loving home for my family. Yes, I have been what my mom calls a terrible daughter. My sisters say I am a terrible sister. That's true. At the same time, I am also a faithful, loving wife. My children say I am a good mom. Those relationships that I failed in as a daughter, sister or others...they would have been so wonderful to keep forever. Still, they never would have meant more to me than being a good wife and mother. So I have hope.

Public Shame versus Private Shame

Recently I began reading an autobiographical novel by Mary Karr called, "Lit". I won't go in to the details of the book, although I will say I have been enjoying reading it very much. I will say that the great effort she puts in to telling the reader that her perspective is simply her own and that every one of us who goes through life experiences things in their own way made reading her work palatable. If she had not made this effort to expressly tell the reader that she was speaking of things relating to others but in a way that was personal and unique to her--it may not have been a book I could continue to read.


When I began to write this blog, I came to it with the same idea. My experiences of family are what interest me and plague my thoughts more than anything else in life. I can't help but write about relationships because they are all I think about and I realize that I think about them in ways that maybe other people wouldn't. Sometimes this works out well. Other times, it causes others and me some embarrassment and even pain. That's not my goal. My goal is to find ways to work out the kinks that make the relationships that mean the world to me feel difficult.


I don't like secrets. I don't like living like there is an elephant in the room that nobody will talk about. When I have found myself in the kind of environment where the unspoken rule among many seems to be to not talk about one thing or another--I tend to be completely unable to stay quiet. I'm almost compulsive about talking about the things nobody wants to mention.


While others find ways to tell themselves that a situation is none of their business or that it will work itself out if given time, I tend to demand that the elephant be given a spotlight and a bath and some food and water before we send it back to the safari where it belongs. Usually I find that the reason people don't want to do this is that they are afraid of the elephant. It might raise itself up on its hind legs and bring itself down upon all of us or thrash around the room. My feeling is that if we don't, we will end up knee deep in elephant dung. Not acknowledging a thing does not make the thing go away.


My interest in exposing and dealing with secrets is not to hurt people. It's not to embarrass anyone. It's to find a way toward living without the secrets and the shame. I don't find that the private shame is tolerable but temporary public shame fades. Shame can be replaced by the feeling of pride that comes from dealing with a problem and putting it in the past, where it belongs.