10 years...

Someone I loved once gave me

A box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

That this too, was a gift. -Mary Oliver-

It’s been ten years since my father passed away and until recently I have been extremely guarded about my emotions and even talking about my dad. When he died I was 18 and I didn’t know how to cope with the trauma that was going on around me so I chose the unhealthy route of delaying my grieving and instead tucking my emotions away behind a veil of projected self strength and confidence. I have lived behind this front, so perfectly sculpted that no one even knew the deep seeded pain that I had yet to let out and deal with. Anyway, this post is not like anything else I have ever written, for the first time in my life I am seeing that it’s ok to vent and talk about things that for so long I buried in a place I though I would eventually just forget about. Being a writer, this is the best way I know how to manage my thoughts, and I am not embarrassed to share them anymore, but it’s taken me 10 years to get to this point. Maybe there is an 18 year old man out there, or any age, dealing with the same thing and knowing that others have lived through it and made it out the other side may help, it has for me. So I am warning you to walk away now if you’re not ready to see Ronto’s Folly in a new light, but this is my life and currently my folly. Thanks again for reading if you stay the course.

It was March of 2002, I was in the second semester of my first year of college out here at Colorado State University. I had fled the flat lands of my childhood as soon as I graduated high school in search of higher ground. My family had always had a condo at Keystone and one of the perks of living in Fort Collins was I got to go up there and stay for free for weekend ski adventures. I remember I was skiing with my friends, actually I had brought this girl with curly read hair I liked with for the weekend and when we got back after a beautiful blue bird day with fresh powder all over the mountain I noticed I had 17 missed calls. I froze as my friends were opening beers and knew exactly what those missed calls were about. Before I could really react my best friend Rob walked through the door, who was supposed to be two hours away back in Fort Collins. I don’t remember why he didn’t come skiing with us that day but there he was saying something about how he had packed my bag and how his dad got us plane tickets and we were leaving, NOW. It’s all pretty fuzzy what happened between then and when we got on the plane in Denver, but I feel like I didn’t talk much, and sitting on the plane I began to shut down. I had only talked to my mom for a few seconds, to let her know I was on my way, and on my own sitting there I decided I was going to be the rock my family needed. That plane ride flashed by and all I remember was not crying when I saw my mom. I don’t have a clue how I got home from the airport or where we went. I just remember floating around not really feeling anything. I didn’t cry, I was just frozen, suspended in what I guess would be called shock. I think it helped my mom and sisters, I remember them being a mess but I was solid. I wrote a poem that night, ha ya back then I wrote poetry, to read at the funeral, and I remember reading it to everyone, and there were what seemed like thousands at the funeral. I remember my mom and sisters standing up with me bawling and I knew I couldn’t shed a tear, I had to say what they couldn’t, I had to eulogize my dad.

Something to understand about my dad was he was a hero, well my hero! He was bigger than life, had a huge heart, and knew everyone. One of the odd memories I have from that day at the funeral was shaking everyone’s hands, and there was this line out around the building and down the street. I was in awe at how many people my dad’s life had touched, and the most amazing part about this memory is that I feel like I knew every one of the people I was shaking hands with. Like at some point, everyone in my dad’s life had been to the house, or on a trip with us, somehow he had involved me in every aspect of his world, so much so that I knew the seemingly 2000 people close enough to him to show up at his funeral. I don’t really have any other memories about that time though. I have no clue how long I was home for, or even going back to school in Colorado. I do remember though calling the girl that lived across the hall from me in the dorms, she was someone I knew from high school, and I asked her to tell everyone back at CSU, my group of friends that is, to specifically not ask me how I was doing. I told her I didn’t want to talk about it, so to please have everyone keep it off the conversational radar. She must have succeeded because no one ever brought it up, and I appreciated that at the time.

Memories start to come back once I got back to CSU, but by that point I had somehow found a spot deep in my mind to house my grief and I trapped it there, covered it, and forgot about it. I went on with my life and anytime any emotion would start to boil up I would avoid it, leave the situation, and push it out of my world, out of my mind, and out of my heart. I was training my mind to control my life, and soon there were less and less attempts by my emotions to regain the upper hand. I opted not to go home after my first year of college and stayed out here in Colorado to become a raft guide, and live as much as possible in the mountains. My life seemed easier, to concentrate on playing and becoming a mountain man of sorts. None of the decisions I was making were based on emotions or feelings, and as the years passed I forgot, honestly forgot about the pain that I never dealt with. I became callous and careless. I was a lot of fun to be around but it was all just a surface show. I lived my life pretty loosely, but my mind was disciplined like a monk’s, never faltering or letting on to irrationality. I cut fear and jealousy out of my life. I cut love out of my life. I cut anything out of my life that seemed to be a weakness that I saw in others. I believed I was happy, and I thought my life was about me. I constructed ridiculous systems to stay emotionally safe, and I believed I could keep pain out of my life for good if I stuck to my rules.

I never grieved, psychologists call it delayed grieving, and there is no length to which people wait to grieve but from what I have read it seems most people think that anywhere between 6 months to a year is the acceptable period for grieving. Well screw that, I’m sorry, I’m on year 10 and I am just starting this process. Everyone has their ways, and this was mine, it allowed me to live through that trauma, instead of shutting down. The crazy part is that all the literature says that people dealing with grief like this, by pushing it away, usually suffer in their career or academics, they withdraw socially, they stop exercising, or they develop eating disorders. I breezed through undergrad with high marks, and walked to straight A’s in grad school, I went out and met new people, I dated, and I was always ready for a good time. I exercised more than most people and ate anything I wanted. On the exterior I seemed fine, and even on the inside I believed I was fine, that’s how good of a job I did masking the pain left by not dealing with the hand life had dealt me, even I believed the façade…

Part of the process that I feel bad about was the fact that our family didn’t grieve together. If you ask my mother, she believes we bonded after my dad died, but I ran, I came back here to Colorado and I didn’t go home after the school year was over. I feel we isolated ourselves, mainly myself I guess, forcing each of us to grieve on our own. For me it seemed no one wanted to bring up the topic of dads death because of fear of upsetting another family member that may be having a hard time with it. So no one ever asked, “How are you doing?” It wasn’t a callous thing, we didn’t want to ignore one another, I just think we were all dealing with it in our own ways and didn’t want to talk about it. Since we didn’t bring it up on our own I think the others assumed each other was doing alright. It’s a mean cycle where no one talked about it and I think that lead to part of why I felt so distanced from my mom and sisters for a long time. I cared about them, but there was distance, and that distance is just now becoming smaller.

Some of the things that have been hardest since he died have been when I see my good friends with their dads, or even just as they talk on the phone with their dads. I used to leave the room when my best friend Rob would be talking to his dad on the phone. His dad is amazing, reminds me a lot of my own dad, and has stepped in where my dad left off, and although there was lots of love there from his dad to me, I still felt anxiety when they would talk because I felt so mad at my dad for dying. I felt robbed of the chance to grow up and have an adult relationship with him, and at times I just wished I could pick up the phone and call him. I never cared if I saw someone with their father that I didn’t know, but when it was my friends it was hard. Even this year, my friend Travis had his dad out here hunting and it filled me with remorse because I would love to hunt with my dad. I never got to do these things with him, and for a long time I was actually mad at him for that. Another real contention was when I was required to walk my sisters down the wedding aisle. Of course I was happy to be there for my sisters, but I felt so angry in those moments because it was not my responsibility. Dads are supposed to walk their daughters down the aisle, not their little brothers. I felt like he let them down, and that’s what pissed me off. I was really mad about that. There were other times too, at first; holidays and birthdays were something I wanted to avoid because I was upset he was missing it all. I’ve even gone to the lengths of not letting anyone know when my birthday is because I didn’t want to celebrate it, and in 10 years most of the people in my life have forgotten when it actually is. Graduations and family get-togethers, or my mom moving were all hard times because he was supposed to be there for all of that. Even getting a job, or going back to school, or buying my house, they were all tough times.

Well with time the anger has passed, and I’m not mad anymore. For a long time I actually believed I was past it, that I was fine, the attitude was this is life and it sucks sometimes but deal with it. Lately I’m actually opening some of those hidden packages of emotions I thought I burnt in my mental incinerator, and what I feel now is sadness. I’m not angry he’s not here, I’m sad. Its been 10 years now since the last time I saw him, it was Christmas break 2001, and I’m still sad he’s not here anymore. I don’t know if that ever goes away to be honest, I hope it doesn’t, because it helps me to remember him, but it’s hard, and even as I write this I am choked up and can feel tears welling. My mom still misses him so much too. They were best friends and so compatible. She is so lonely sometimes and I don’t think she will ever marry again because she doesn’t want to just have someone to spend time with, she wants to spend time with her best friend, her love, and he’s no longer on this planet. It’s hard sometimes to see her when she is sad, because she has also been so strong for the past 10 years, and I know there is still a lot of pain there.

This whole unearthing of these emotions and feelings was brought on by a decision I made in my life that I instantly regretted and it started me down the path of looking back at the last 10 years with an extremely critical lens. I am trying to make up for my past mistakes, and am trying to actually understand the way I feel about the things that have happened in my life. I know there’s been a lot of good in the last 10 years as well, but there are times that I see now as moments of greatness that I let pass by because I was too closed off to accept them. Grieving is hard, and sometimes time doesn’t always help like we hope for it to, but what helps me is to know that life is still going to happen and if we decided to just float around disconnected because of fear, that life will pass us up, and I'm not willing to let that happen anymore. I’ll post more about this I’m sure, so if you made it through this all, thanks, and if this helped anyone else going through the loss of a parent than I’m glad I wrote it even though it was difficult.