Since it is only Sunday and still January 2007, this can only mean that it is time we had another installation of dadanation's penultimate haiku diary day.
Last month I posted only my second diary of 2006. it was about the year I taught creative writing to 3rd through 8th graders at an inner-city catholic grade school in West Oakland, CA. Mind you, I did write some haiku for the diary. My November diary looked at my experiences during 2006's Open Studios weekend and even included a picture of one of my paintings.
Today's diary is about suicide.
Last month I was reminded how much I love haiku; inevitably the road of haiku leads me back to May of 1982. Memorial Day 1982 is pretty much responsible for my first poem ever written totally in haiku. And why that Memorial Day? That is when my father killed himself.
I was the one who found him.
There is more after the jump.
Diarist’s Note
Originally there were going to be two haiku poems in today’s diary but so as to not overwhelm everyone (myself included) this diary is officially a "two-part-er."
The first haiku poem – the one in today’s diary – I wrote in 1983, after my father killed himself. The second one, (part 2’s haiku poem) I wrote in 2004 when a friend of mine finally stopped wanting to kill herself.
Last month I was reminded how much I love haiku; inevitably the road of haiku leads me back to May of 1982. Memorial Day 1982 is pretty much responsible for my first poem ever written totally in haiku. And why that Memorial Day? That is when my father killed himself.
I was the one who found him.
How It Unfolds
I was the one who found my father. My mom woke me up (the Sunday right before Memorial Day, May 30, 1982) and asked me to go wake my father because my mom wanted the whole family to go to church. I had to laugh. They were divorcing, we were broke, my parents could not stand to be in the same time zone as each other, and frankly, the entire family was more at ease apart from each other than as a whole unit.
Of the kids, I was my father’s target for his rage. A broken wrist bone here, fat lips, almost being drowned under the sink in the bathroom, a black-and-blue right side of my face – I wore my father’s violence like a second skin. I had just returned home from completing my freshman year at college. Ever since I knew what college was, I dreamt of finally being away from him when I was old enough to attend a university.
Why me? I asked. Just please do it, she responded. And hurry. So, now having had three years of not being beaten senseless all the time, one would think I could be a bit more detached from the past, walk in, wake him up and just go through the motions of the day. Not even remotely. As I tried to wake him, he made no movement to get up. Technically, I came to find out, he was pretty much at that precipice between being just comatose and falling deeply I to a coma when I found him. He had been making this horrible snore-like sound when I came home late the previous night and was still making it as I began raising my voice, trying to wake him. Telling my mom that he was literally not moving, she looked at me and asked "Did you try slapping him to see if that would wake him up?"
For a family with as much dysfunction in it as did ours, and with the abuse never spoken of, ever, for some reason, this was the moment when all the façade just fell, in pieces. I looked at my mom and said "Did you just hear yourself? You want ME to try and hit HIM?"
She looked at me, and actually got how insane the request was. "I know, I know, but please, go do it. I do not want to be late for Mass."
I can not say how hard I hit him trying to wake him up; I know I hit him, I know he did not wake up. The degree or the force or the pent-up desire for revenge behind that slap I will never know. He did not wake up.
1st part of poem
the cemetery haiku
(a dull dance of fi-
(-nality requiring no
(steps ( a voice less tune.
un-visited grave
(of my father). not REALLY his
just some box, a stone.
death, such harsh ballet
too powerful to control,
death leads, we follow.
an act not for the
dying. pain plus silence kill
only the living.
summer movement un-
welcome guest, us unprepared.
never seen leaving.
I had to walk about a mile from our home to the local 7-11 to use the pay-phone to call 9-1-1. I grew up with having no phone when I was in high school – he left us with nothing. No money, no anything – just bills, bill collectors, debt, utter financial ruin, and no phone. My mom’s last words to me out the door to go call the ambulance folks --- "Tell them to not use their sirens. We don’t want to alarm the neighbors."
The paramedics came, ‘paramedicized’ him (bringing him just from that precipice to a more stable, but nevertheless comatose state of a coma) and off he went to the hospital. We all were there, the whole family. Eventually, it dwindled down to my mother and me – my hatred of my father made me a perfect stoic and platform for the medical folks and for her.
He never came out of that coma. By say 8 p.m. Sunday night he was in ICU, on a respirator, trading the machine one its breaths for one of his. I asked the head nurse how it looked to her. She commented that the chances of him pulling out of this coma were slim. My mom and I looked at each other right away, knowing that "slim" meant "none." She went to say her farewell to him first. When she was done, she motioned for me to do likewise. I walked into his room, and this is literally all I said to him:
*"If you survive this, we can’t afford the bill you know.
It is better if you died – otherwise we are fucked.
It would be better if you died. " *
At 5:20 a.m. Memorial Day, we got the call from the hospital – the machine was doing 100% of the breathing. Down we all went. My older brother had the attending doctor walk him through the entire procedure to determine that my father was really dead (brain dead, alive on a machine). He went so far as to literally watch the machine being turned off. Turns out that I got my wish. I gave him my best counsel and he took it. That would haunt me for years and years, the better off if you died demon. It is gone now, but it took years of therapy and drugs and friends and paxil and growing older to finally help me get over the thought that I may have somehow killed him.
I know now I didn't but there were times when I just knew that my rank in life was just a notch above evil. Ultimately the decision to end the cycle was mine to make or not make. I could keep up a life of constantly being imperfect, broken, crazy, and being the one beating me up over it, or I could finally take care of me for me and just literally stop. Just stop beating me up. A formative lifetime was spent being beaten up all the time. It is what I know. Living in a zone unknown, one where terror and pain and fear are not commonplace, well, that is probably my greatest challenge I face to date.
What is not lost on me, in retrospect, is the sense of drama and pageantry here. I mean, he died on Memorial Day, 1982. The likelihood of him being forgotten now, especially picking such a "term-specific" and relevant holiday to die, is not I think not even remotely possible. In the midst of my life he is always in death.
Now What?
His funeral was one bottomless beer keg – at least for me.
Oh and then there was the pall bearer question. And the casket question. And the cemetery question. And the relatives. neighbors, etc. all of whom were so compelled to share my grief, cry while telling me about that wonderful, gentle, funny, hard-working man, and lament the terrible loss. A family member of his had my brothers hold the coffin lid open for him while he took photographs. No joke.
Carrying the casket – it was going to be the four brothers, his four sons. Period. But after drama and threats and crying and what not we finally relinquished and allowed for his brother and other family members to also pall bear.
Arriving at the cemetery, as we were now carrying the casket towards the grave site, my older brother just counted out loud "Three, two, one..." and with that he and I stopped lifting. It was about time for his family to carry some of the weight of my father. My dad's brother could be heard to grunt as the weight suddenly shifted from "not at all" to "very, very heavy."
My sister did not pall bear, did not pick out coffins or even help shop for liquor. She was his shining star, his reason for living. She was what made him smile. And while I was her closest friend in the whole family, she loved my father deeply, unconditionally.
2nd part of the poem
"he never heard me"
she cried, casket closed -- face gone,
"say good-bye to him."
me? the part of him
in me i buried. all gone.
i still have not cried.
(in dying we die
(too. no hope. no answers. we
(get a shut lid, quiet.
The wake service was at a funeral home. We were not about to have keening in our home – the place was jam-packed with relatives and friends and food spreads and alcohol – it was theater enough already. So, all the rituals were at the local funeral home. Frankly, in retrospect as far as theater goes, we made a mistake in not having the keeners at the home and an even bigger mistake not having the traditional Irish wake at the house. We came to find out after he died that the IRS had a lien on our house. Once we finished up with the expenses etc. from his death, and went through a bankruptcy process, we were certain to lose the house.
But had I known, there would have been wailing and gnashing of teeth and keening, keening, keening for days – but not for him, but for what we were all losing now --- a parent, a husband, a source of terror, a source of such stress, as well as a house, a myth, a fortress, a safety zone, an illusion built by dysfunction and solidified by denial. They would have keened for the loss of innocence for me.
But as I said we didn’t know until months later the IRS stuff...
Anyway, at the formal wake, as my sister and I stood at the door as people left to say thank you to them for attending, she turned to me and asked me:
Her: "Why is everyone apologizing?"
Me: "Huh?"
Her: "They keep saying ‘I’m sorry’ but they haven’t done anything wrong."
Me: "And?"
Her: "I want to tell them is that whatever they did, I forgive them but they'd better not do it again."
That was her one and only joke the whole summer.
Follow-up
i keep hearing bloom
talk past me "in the midst of
death we are in life."
he’s gone. i’m safe now.
please don’t resurrect the dead.
not him anyway.
march 1983-august 1983 ©1998
The haiku poem was not written until the following spring/summer. On one occasion I had to drive out to the cemetery to do something about something about him and the grave. I parked the car, and walked to where I knew his grave was. Except that it wasn’t there. I looked everywhere, but could not find his grave.
I forget where I put my father.
The past twelve months of being ice-cold, frozen, the "Ice Prince" as my friends nick-named me, it took a lethal blow at that moment. I forget where I placed my father. The irrational terror of perhaps the whole thing being a bad dream a cruel hoax --- that he was still alive was only bested by the sheer sense of sadness I felt for forgetting where he was buried.
Eventually I found a lawns-keeper who looked up my dad’s site for me. I wasn’t even close to where he was buried where I was searching.
And it was from that sense of absolute disconnect and fractures and of being so taut, stretched, nearly fatigued nerves and emotions and words and faith and terror that the haiku poem emerged. Haiku force me to keep shaving, keep winnowing keep moving toward just the essentials, just the truth, just the syllables allowed per line to express what I feel.
Since his death, I have cried probably three times about him dying. At least consciously about him being the one that I felt sad about dying, I mean. When I re-read the poem, I was struck by how raw and angry and crushed I was by him, his death, the suicide, the drama the whole of the whole of it. Yet, to my credit, I can say that, some 24 years later, I was telling the truth in what I wrote when I wrote that poem.
For me, separate but somehow linked to the economy of words in a haiku is the fact that speaking about feelings in a haiku is really hard. Lying about feelings in a haiku is not. If one wanted, they could just make up what they were feeling – thereby giving you greater leeway in your verb or adjective in that line, etc.). Telling the truth meant struggling to encapsulate the feeling etc. without compromising how I was really feeling r what I really did do or say.
So, there it is, the first poem of mine written totally in haiku. I’ll post part 2 of this probably Tuesday of this week.
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