I attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and graduated with honors.
I got a master’s degree in theater education.
I spent ten years teaching at exceptional schools and cultivating relationships with hundreds of phenomenal students.
I married a wonderful man who is nothing like my shitty, teenage boyfriend. He is extraordinarily nice to me. He is also creative and inventive and funny and patient and wise and supportive and thoughtful and kind. He and I chose to have a child, and now I am a mother.
I gave birth to a magnificent daughter. She is my everything.
Things turned out okay for me, Harris. Maybe if you’d had a uterus and got pregnant at fifteen, you’d have also learned that actions have consequences and ultimately not stuck needles into your arms.
• • •
Dad wears the same face now that he wore back then: expressionless but radiating sadness. When I was a little girl, I would wait and wait at the back door for him to come home from work, and when the knob turned, it was the happiest moment of my day. Where is that man? Is he still in there somewhere or gone forever?
I want to snap him out of it somehow, to say the thing that will make him realize it’s not his fault, that he didn’t make his teen daughter pregnant or his grown son OD. I want to take his hand, walk him out to the car, put him in the passenger seat, drive him to a really good therapist, and sit there with him until his mind is fixed. I want to fly him out to a sweat lodge in the middle of the desert where a shaman can lead him through an intense guided meditation that will exorcize the demons and make him realize he deserves to keep on living.
Instead, I ask if we can talk. He sort of sighs, turns off Fox News, and says, “Okay, let’s talk.” I miss our collective political war with Dad. He always loved to egg us on and spar with his “liberal, commie” offspring. I sometimes think he’s actually a secret liberal who had a master plan all along to make his children liberal by pretending he believed the opposite. Now Mike and I are left to carry the commie torch, and it’s not as fun without you.
Dad avoids eye contact and talks softly, almost in a growl. It’s hard to know where to start. There’s so much to say.
“Dad, I’m worried about you. How are you not talking about this? I don’t understand.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“Um, how devastated and sad you are?”
“I already know that. What do I want to talk to somebody about that for?”
“So you can stop blaming yourself?”
“Eh, it doesn’t happen that way.”
“So, what, you feel like you didn’t do enough to prevent it?”
“We should have had a better relationship.”
“Like from the beginning?”
“Yeah, from the beginning.” He pauses and reaches into his memory. “I was always too busy—working all the time. I remember we went on this camping trip one time. He’d come home from Camp Blue Star one summer, and they’d gone camping while he was there, and he was excited about it. So we decided we’d go camping together one weekend, and we went and swam a little bit and ate but wound up coming home early the next morning.” His voice trails off. “It just didn’t turn out to be fun like he thought it was gonna be.”
“Dad, I don’t think that’s true. Your perception is off. We went on vacations. You did Little League. You did Pinewood Derby. It’s not like you weren’t involved. You were very involved.”
This memory flashes in my mind of me driving our minivan when I was nine years old. We used to go to this dude ranch every year in Bandera, Texas, and I couldn’t ride the horses to breakfast every morning like you could because I was allergic to them. But Dad didn’t want me to feel left out, so he would let me sit on his lap in the minivan and drive it behind the trail ride. I loved driving that minivan.
“Do you still go to the cemetery?” I ask.
“Every Sunday.”
“And do what?”
“Just stand there.”
“Do you talk to him?”
“No. He’s dead.”
“So, you just stand there? Does it comfort you to be there?” I ask.
“No. I think it puts me in touch with how I feel about things.”
“Which is—what?”
“Which is…which is…what it is.”
He can’t articulate it.
“Sad?”
“Of course, it’s sad. For me, it doesn’t get any better.”
“It’s the same amount of shitty as it was from Day One?”
“Yep.”
I flash back to that first conversation after I found out you died, where we sat on the bench outside their building, and I broke the news between sobs. I don’t remember how I said it. I just remember his face going blank and a tear falling out of his eye. It’s like he’s still stuck in that moment, permanently shell-shocked.
“We used to go to Meridian, Mississippi,” he says, “And your mother used to film a lot of stuff there—she lost most of those films—but anyway, there’s just all those people in the films, and such a significant number of them are dead now. Gone. That’s the way things are. That’s the way life is. You just don’t expect to see it in a child.”
“Of course not. It’s a horrible tragedy.”
“No question about that,” he quickly adds.
“So, it’s just sadness from here on out?”
“I just think the effort it would take is not worth it.”
“That’s bleak.”
“I mean, your presence is a positive for me.” he adds. “And I know it’s a positive for your mother. And the baby. And Mike. I like Mike.”
“Don’t you think you should go to a therapist?” I’ve asked him this no less than ten times over the last several months, but the answer remains the same.
“No, I don’t think I should go to a therapist,” he says firmly.
“Just one session. What if I go with you?”
“Good lord, I’m not going, and you’re
