Filthy beasts, p.24
Filthy Beasts, page 24
On the day of the funeral, my brothers and I gathered at the entrance to the church with five of Robin’s closest friends who had agreed to serve with us as pallbearers. Just as at my grandmother’s service, most of the people who filed into the church were older women who looked familiar, and I started wondering if they attended every funeral regardless of who was being laid to rest. Only one woman came up to us and said that she had grown up with my mother and had loved her and was sorry for our loss. I didn’t recognize her. Robin’s friends stood among themselves and laughed, recounting something that happened the weekend before.
When we dragged the casket out of the hearse, it was heavier than we’d anticipated. The funeral director had suggested that we roll it up the aisle to the altar, but Robin had in his head a more Kennedy-esque send-off, complete with personalized escort to her final resting place. We got her to the entrance of the church, only to discover that the narrow aisle could accommodate the coffin comfortably but not the people conveying it to the altar. As a result, our mother’s journey to the front of the church resembled the maneuvering of an oversized couch up a narrow stairway. As we bumped and weaved our way forward, whispering apologies to the congregants who were pushed back lest their hands get crushed against the pews, the spray of flowers came loose, dangled to one side, and fell to the ground as we heaved the casket onto the platform before the altar. Instead of an array of white lilies, a large strip of white Velcro adorned our mother’s oversized coffin for the rest of the service. My brothers and I took our places in the front pew drenched in sweat.
After the service, we hoisted my mother to make the long trek to the gravesite, which sat at the top of the hill overlooking the rest of the cemetery. The congregants gathered around the burial plot and along the route, creating a path for us to walk. We had made it halfway up the hill, heaving and jostling the casket as we went, when my back and left side numbed. I whispered to the other pallbearers that I couldn’t go on. I let go of part of the weight, which dipped the coffin in my direction and stopped the procession. I was tired of carrying her. She was too heavy.
Just as I was about to let her go, I heard her speak to me in the voice that she had used so many times before when I was ready to give up on something. “Get your skinny white ass up that hill,” she said. “This is the last thing you’re ever going to do for me, so do it.” I flashed back to my NOLS trip eighteen years earlier, when I had sat in a kayak unwilling to move forward. I reclaimed the weight and continued up the hill. We placed our mother on top of the gravesite into which we had lowered her parents just a few months earlier.
That night I lay awake in the guest room of Robin and Charlotte’s house and pondered if my mother could hear what I had said to her as she was dying. I looked at the white chiffon curtains blowing in the window and imagined her materializing before me. I began to regret the invitation I’d extended, realizing that I didn’t want to hear from her again. What would I say? Our conversations when she was alive had deteriorated to detailed recaps of the weather, so what would we talk about now?
Each year of my life, since I was eight years old, a new part of my mother went missing. As I have tried to make sense of who she was, I’ve bumped into walls and windows where I didn’t remember them being. There were happy memories to which I had immediate access, but they’re often the twins of ones whose meanings are more complicated, like the way she laughed joyously, with her full body, but when she watched me parade in front of her friends dressed up like a girl, her joyous laughter could also conceal a warning. I know that I absorbed her sense of justice, and her long memory when it came to those who had slighted her. I remember asking my mother about Jamie a few years before she died, and how she screamed and hung up the phone and called my father to demand that they have him arrested, and how my father told her it was too late and too long ago to do anything about it now. And she hung up on him too, perhaps realizing that Jamie wasn’t the only person who had escaped justice. I remember my mother’s deep affection for me, the warmth of her hugs, and the inevitability of her love; I recall kneeling in front of her chocolate-brown chair and holding on to her to feel the certainty and security that she offered. But the recollection is always paired with the memory of when I turned my back and she showed affection in a way I didn’t recognize and could never forget.
* * *
I DON’T KNOW IF MY family’s troubles began with the divorce, my mother’s drinking, or my father’s infidelity—or if it was all written generations before that, each decision made leading to the next and the next until this was the inevitable outcome. History, it turns out, is easier to transcend when you are building toward something new as opposed to living for what’s already lost.
Over the next ten years after my mother died, Monty’s alcoholism worsened to the point where it was no longer a family joke, except to my father, who never recognized, or perhaps cared, what was happening to his son. The first time I heard he had been admitted to the hospital with pancreatitis was right after he returned from a trip to Bermuda to see friends and visit my mother’s grave on her birthday, though his wife, Tonya, told me then that it wasn’t the first time this had happened. He quit drinking off and on over the next few years, but it never lasted. He refused to seek help until the Tuesday after President’s Day, 2014, when he called and told me that he had taken my father’s handgun and placed it against his temple, not wanting to live anymore. My husband, Dave, and I were driving back from his vacation home on Cape Cod as I listened to Monty cry and say that he needed help, that he wanted his son, Crawford, to have a father. Dave dropped me off in Newark, where I caught a plane to Florida and helped Monty enter a rehab facility in Fort Lauderdale for a thirty-day program.
He was in and out of rehab over the next couple of years, each time waiting until he was close to death before admitting that he needed help. During that time Robin and I received drunken, bitter harangues about how we had ruined his life, and didn’t protect him, and didn’t care about him. I listened and apologized and helped financially with what he and his family needed, until one day I told him that I was no longer available as a receptacle for his endless anger. We didn’t speak for months, after which we agreed that we would try to rekindle our relationship with less anger and more understanding. “I can’t talk to Robin yet,” he said, which I understood. Robin had yet to apologize to him for anything.
Robin and his family moved from Bermuda to Aspen, Colorado, up valley from Lola and Neil’s house in Basalt. The 2008 recession had helped tank the start-up he cofounded, and the wealth that he had accumulated started to dwindle as he struggled to find a job in a part of the country that was more popular with people who had money than with those needing to make it. Somewhere early in the Aspen days, Robin and Charlotte found God, the culmination of the journey of self-discovery they had each been on starting with the Forum. They joined a church that believed gay people were sinners in need of redemption. Long before they ever moved to Aspen, I had been taken out of their will as the guardian of my niece and nephews because, as Charlotte said, “It’s not that I care whether you’re gay, it’s just that I don’t want my children exposed to the revolving door of men in your life, and I really want grandchildren.” She apparently believed my homosexuality was contagious. I didn’t argue, even as their rebuke stung. Robin peppered his emails and phone calls with pledges to pray for me, and even though he meant them as statements of support, they felt like judgments.
Shortly after Robin and Charlotte renewed their wedding vows on their twentieth anniversary, Robin told Charlotte he no longer wanted to be married, just as my father had done to Barb soon after their own lavish twentieth anniversary celebration. He quit drinking for months at a time upon discovering that his liver was in distress, but always started again. He called me one Friday afternoon when I was in Denver officiating Dave’s son’s wedding, and I didn’t pick up the phone. Later that night he sat with a pistol on his lap and sent a suicide text to his three children, telling them he could no longer live with his pain, and that he thought God was ready for him. The police arrived at his apartment before he pulled the trigger. His two older kids flew home from college, and we conducted an intervention that Sunday where he broke down and said he needed help. He went through a thirty-day rehab program but, like Monty, started drinking again soon thereafter. He’s currently sober and living with Dave and me until he decides where on the east coast he wants to relocate.
Charlotte called me a year ago and said that my fifteen-year-old nephew, Sloan, had asked if I would be his guardian should she and Robin both die (his older siblings, Piper and Lyon, were already legally adults). I said I would be happy to be.
The Christmas after my mother died, I was up late one night with my father when he told me he was sorry about my mother, and asked if I was doing okay. I told him yes, and didn’t say anything else until I heard him crying softly. “What’s wrong?” I asked, and he told me that it was his fault, what happened to her, and that he was sorry and wished that he could go back and make better choices. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said, not knowing if I believed what I was saying but needing him to stop crying because I had yet to cry the way that he was now, and there was a part of me that felt he had lost the right to be sad for her, or for himself.
His business started to fail as clients abandoned him one by one—some because of what he had done to Barb and others because they could smell the booze on him when he took them to tour houses. Sometime in 2008, he stopped paying Barb’s alimony, or bills of any kind. He hid his financial situation from us for years, until his credit cards maxed out and his reverse mortgage company threatened foreclosure because of overdue tax payments. A few months after discovering the financial hole he had dug for himself, I received a call from one of his oldest friends—Monty’s godfather—asking how he was. I told him that my father was having a hard time and we were doing our best to figure out how to take care of him. He listened empathetically, and then confessed that he was calling to collect my father’s overdue home owner’s association balance. It was the first I’d heard that one of my father’s closest friends from Cedarhurst, my childhood home on Long Island, lived in the same development. I don’t know if my father even knew he lived there.
My father was held in contempt of court for not paying alimony and thrown in jail in mid-2013. A former colleague of his bailed him out a few days later. We asked him what jail was like, and he said that he enjoyed his roommate and that the “staff couldn’t have been nicer.” My brothers and I joked that jail could be the long-term living solution we had been looking for, and wondered if they might take him back.
When Monty and Tonya lost their house to foreclosure, they moved in with my father to look after him as he was rapidly descending into alcohol-induced dementia. Monty was regularly awoken late at night to the sound of my father turning on the stove’s gas burners to cook himself dinner. He had forgotten that he’d already eaten. My father quit drinking, only because when he asked Tonya to get him a bottle of gin every morning she would respond “Are we out?” and promise to pick one up after work. She never did, and they repeated the same routine each morning until he forgot to ask. Tonya moved out of the house as Monty’s drinking worsened, and checked on my father every now and again, knowing Monty was increasingly incapable of caring for him. She arrived one day to find my father eating cat food out of the can, thinking it was pâté. He had also stopped taking his little Pomeranian (whom he’d named “Pomme Frite”) outside, so the house was peppered with dog feces and yellow carpet stains. The hygiene situation resolved itself when my father rolled over onto Pomme Frite during one of his afternoon naps, and the dog had to be put down because it couldn’t walk properly anymore. That’s the story we heard anyway. Robin and I didn’t discover most of the details of my father’s final years until much later, since we had stopped visiting, and weren’t communicating with Monty. When Monty got sober, he reminded us that my father had a second small dog, Jethro, who had also died young and under sketchy circumstances.
Barb died of alcohol-induced dementia in 2014. We had lost touch with her the last few years of her life, partly because of her illness, and partly because her son was aggressively going after my father for $50,000 in unpaid alimony, to the point of threatening to have him thrown back in jail if he didn’t pay. We were fortunate that my father’s south Florida condo, hit hard by the economic downturn, increased enough in value for us to sell it. It was weeks from being foreclosed on. We used the small amount of money that was left after paying off Barb’s estate to place him in a five-bedroom retirement home in Port St. Lucie, Florida. He slept in a single bed next to a stranger.
He would escape the facility often, be picked up by the local police, and I would receive a late-night call asking to calm him down. He would tell me that he had been “shanghaied,” was being held captive, and beg me to rescue him. He believed he lived with Robin in Colorado. I told him he was already home, which confused him, and made me feel guilty. I loved him, but I didn’t want him to live with me, and I didn’t want to spend my own money to put him into a nicer facility. I had already given him more than I wanted to.
After two years, the care home’s proprietor called to tell me my father couldn’t breathe and they were taking him to the emergency room, where they discovered he had stage-four lung cancer. My brothers and I gathered together in his hospice room and said goodbye to him over the course of a week in mid-July 2017. On his last night, I slept next to his bed and listened to the rhythmic rattle of his breathing, until the nurse told me that it was almost time for him to go. I held his hand and watched as he took his last breath, peacefully unaware, leaving the world as nonchalantly as he had lived in it.
My brothers and I never learned if there was a trust fund set up by my grandfather to take care of us, or who won control of it, or how it was used. I graduated from college with student debt that took fifteen years to pay off. Andover forgave my loan when I explained that I’d had no knowledge of it being taken out in my name. I never asked my parents for money. I stumbled into a career as a nonprofit fundraiser because it was the one skill my upbringing had prepared me for. I felt comfortable around wealthy people. I spoke their language, and knew their rhythms. My job taught me that there were rich people who found joy in giving and viewed their wealth as an opportunity to make the world a better place. My family lost what we never learned to share.
I moved to Washington, DC, from Maine a year after my mother died. I met Dave in the summer of 2010, five years after her death and right when my father began descending into poverty and dementia. I dated a lot of men in the years after I came out, but nobody longer than three months. The last man I was with before Dave was driving me home from a movie one night when he turned to me and said, “I’m not sure that you’re good enough for me.” I felt something in my psyche shift, as viscerally as if I had been struck by a closed fist. I asked him to stop the car. I walked the rest of the way home, deciding that I would never again let somebody make me feel unworthy—a feeling I had struggled with in my love relationships, even as I had lived assertively in other aspects of my life.
I shared my life story with Dave over time and in small chunks, watching as his face registered more disbelief, concern, and eventually horror with the unspooling of each harrowing tale. “I wish I knew your mother,” he told me recently, a sentiment shared by many of my newer friends. “She would have loved you,” I told him, “but she would have hated you first.” We moved to Baltimore, and split our off time between his vacation house on the Cape and the Adirondack preserve where my brothers and I had spent our childhood summers, though my father sold our family camp decades ago. We rented small cottages now.
During one of the early dinners I had with Dave’s family, the conversation turned to the dashboard of the new Toyota Corolla, which ignited a half-hour-long conversation about car dashboards—past and present. They prayed before dinner, as observant Catholics do, and it was all I could do not to run screaming from the room in protest over how ordinary my life had become. “This is how normal family conversations go sometimes,” Dave said to me when I complained about it later, and I wondered if that could be true.
I stopped thinking about my mother soon after she died. I don’t acknowledge her birthday, or her deathday. I don’t post heartfelt remembrances of her on my Facebook feed or make my friends indulge me in long conversations about how much I miss her. Dave and I recently went to Bermuda and visited my mother’s grave, although I wasn’t sure she would still be in it. The church had called a few months prior to say that rent was due, and if we didn’t pay, her site would be assigned to somebody else. I didn’t know that burial plots were rented. I told them no. Her grave marker was still there when we visited, but apparently it’s only a matter of time before she won’t be. I didn’t ask where she would be going.
I was present for Monty as he navigated his nightmare journey through alcoholism. I became a resource for Tonya when Monty was absent, or Crawford needed new sneakers. I became Robin’s confidant as his life crumbled. I was the liaison between Barb’s estate and my father as we tried to keep him from going back to jail. There were nights I would get quiet, and Dave would ask what was wrong, and I told him nothing, because every version of the conversation that I played out in my head ended up in the same place. I felt like I was, in many ways, the last survivor of a family system that had disintegrated little by little until there was nothing left. But somewhere along the line my joy had disappeared, and now it seemed coping was all that remained.
