An Honest Eulogy

CW: parental death, childhood sexual assault, emotional abuse

The biggest problem I have had since I was born is being a liar. You might think that this means lying about things like who ate the last cookie, or some diabolical form of lying like a false abuse accusation. But no, the lies I’ve told in my life are just the silences and secrets I’ve kept when it comes to the ways that my family has failed. The way that my family has harmed each other. The violence and destruction we put upon each other.

Lies of omission have become my specialty because it has been what my family asked me to do to protect my cousin who sexually assaulted me when I was only six years old.

Lies of omission were the name of the game when I was asked by my uncle to write the obituary for my father. I told my best friend, who was the first to read it, that I was as honest and as gracious as I could be. I left out my abuser’s name among the list of non-biological children that my father nurtured. This was a lie of omission. A small attempt to take back some of the power that has pretty much not existed when it comes to my cousin since the day he slithered into the space between my bed and the wall and [OMITTED OMITTED OMITTED].

1

I hate lying. I always have. You could say that stems from both the lies that have been asked of me and also growing up going to church regularly. Lying was a sin and we should never lie.

But my dad’s obituary, as it will be printed, just like the one I wrote some years ago for my grandmother, is filled with lies of omission. It’s hard to determine what is honest when I’ve been gaslit most of my life to accept and nurture abusers as long as they share my blood.

The thing I hate the most about this is how I am starting to feel complicit. Responsible. I know that there’s no way I could really make any active choices as a child. But as an adult, I feel haunted by being forced to comply with the chaos that the men in my family caused.

I hate lying. I acknowledge not every little detail is relevant to funeral processions for the public to mourn who they saw as a nice, funny man. But I just still hate how, even in death, my dad and my family are still asking me to be quiet about my father’s nurturing of my abuser while he emotionally neglected me, degraded me, and gaslit me repeatedly.

2

I knew my dad was dying the moment I had realized that he had spent all of 2019 going to the hospital at least once a month. With the sudden turn of his health from fragile to death’s door, I knew I’d have to finally face my feelings about my father in a way I never had.

I have spent most of my life since I was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 2008 on my 18th birthday trying to figure out what the hell happened. I knew my mother abused me. I knew that I was bullied. I knew that I had trauma surrounding both of those things. I just didn’t know where all the swirling darkness and self-hatred had originated because for 23 years, I was forced to lie about my feelings. I was forced to be okay, even though a child — a girl — knows when she’s been violated.

It’s also just all the research available that shows when you are sexually assaulted as a child, without treatment, you basically turn into a rotting corpse or a ticking time bomb. This population of people end up with all the mental illness, substance abuse, and my favorites, obesity and eating disorders.

I spent so much of my previous therapy attempts talking about my mother. Processing my mother. Thinking about my mother. I could count on just one or two hands the times I felt genuinely mad at my father. I saw him as this refuge from her wrath. I remember watching movies and cartoons with my dad. My dad was my best friend when all my siblings silently distanced themselves due to our age gaps and the fact that I was a crybaby who got them in trouble all the time.

I wasn’t a crybaby. I was depressed, and I sensed that the family had resented me for being born, but that’s another story. I keep digressing. I am sorry.

Anyway, I knew my dad was going to die, and I told my therapist, and she wondered what it was I was wishing so hard for. What did I want from my dad?

A little part of my soul died that November when I realized my dad was dying and he was the exact same as he always was and nothing I could say to him would change that. Once again, I would be left to my own devices to figure things out.

3.

There was a time when I was 15 or 16 and my dad asked me to get in the car with him and my abuser to run errands. I don’t remember where we went. It was some grocery store. I just remember the blue car that my dad had bought for my brother and cousin to drive him around in.

I remember that he was eating imitation crab sticks while driving. I remember how I felt the swirling darkness feeling that often accompanies the anxiety when I know something bad is going to happen. It’s the same visceral reaction I’d have when I knew my mother was going to hit me.

He drove the car with one hand, ate the crab with the other from the plastic container in his lap. He rapped along to some song on the radio. He spoke rapidly as though always in a state of agitation.

I don’t know what was said. I don’t know what I was thinking.

I was made to get in the car and accept his presence. He lived with us again. And there was nothing I could do about it.

And my father had made it so.

4.

I learned to speak up for myself and set boundaries in 2019. I learned that reclaiming my story was important. Reclaiming the truth was the key to healing. I started to tell the truth about how I felt after the nation watched Dr. Ford tell congress that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her, and she believed that to be why he should not be appointed to the Supreme Court.

I told my therapist the details of my assault. The multiple occasions. I didn’t omit the things I had shoved behind a pressurized locked door to keep the menace of being swallowed whole by darkness at bay. I confessed, and then all the pain started spilling everywhere like garbage, oil, and vomit. I kept finding myself telling people about it and then my therapist reminded me that I didn’t need to tell the story to justify my pain.

My pain was my pain whether I chose to explain it or not.

Still, the desire to make people understand lingered. I wanted to make my father understand what he had done to me. The desire lingered all the way until I went home for the first time in two years.

When I got home, my father was in the hospital. He was trying to escape because he was concerned that his garage was open and people might steal things. He was the same as he always was: ornery, nitpicky, and panicked over money and possessions.

I remember being quiet during that time, if a little more willing to push back against his statements than previously. I told him to stay in the hospital and comply with the neurologists who had determined that the weakness in his legs, hips, and lower half was compromising his walking.

He didn’t care. He checked out of the hospital AMA, and then called me hours later needing to go back. His leg had lost all function. He crawled out of the house and into the driveway to wait for my sister and me.

As we pulled up, the image of him sprawled out on the ground haunted me. Estranged. Sick. Dark.

When I got back to New York I had one of the worst colds I ever had in my life. Even my body did not want to comprehend.

5.

I decided that there was no point in having a confrontation with my father around the time of my 29th birthday. That trip home had proved to me that he was not going to change. There was no number of words I could say to him that would make him apologize. If an apology was even what I wanted. Even if by some miracle, my father owned up to the role he played in my trauma, it wouldn’t change who I was now. It wouldn’t bridge the gap.

The gap would always be there. I’d always be unable to get too close to the blast zone of confronting my family about their roles in my trauma. I had to stay away because I knew that my dad cared more about the life and health and safety of my abuser than he did mine. I was “made” to be fine. I was brutalized into being fine.

I was so fine I made it all the way to New York City with a fancy degree and fancy job. It didn’t matter the cost to my mental health. It didn’t matter that I now had social anxiety and severe trouble working with people in power who sent me back to those quiet nights of helplessness that so often plagued my childhood.

I was fine.

I wasn’t fine, and I decided I’d be not fine as much as I wanted and never hide that I wasn’t fine in spaces that mattered.

Still, I feel I’m being made to lie. And I still hate lying.

6.

I moved back home in December 2020, partially because I had been fired, and partially because I knew that my sister needed help taking care of our dad. I wanted to be his caregiver simply because it was in line with my morality.

I wanted to show my father compassion and not seek revenge as he suffered with the pain of an uncooperative body. I recognized that for a man like him, one so obsessed with forward motion, that a lack of mobility was a terror he never fully coped with.

Still, I was fine with this last moment of servitude as it also offered me an opportunity to face the trauma of my childhood home and my family head on. It gave me space to focus on my craft.

My dad reached his final hours one night in the middle of May. It had rained during the day, but otherwise his hospitalization had felt like any other previous one: he went, was treated with medication, and then released a few days later.

I knew it was different when my sister woke me up a little after 1AM telling me that we had to hurry to the hospital. I’ve watched enough Grey’s Anatomy and ER and New Amsterdam to know that they don’t call you back unless it’s serious.

At the hospital, we were alerted that he had gone into cardiac arrest and needed to be transported to a bigger hospital to receive ICU treatments. I watch enough medical dramas to know that cardiac arrest means a person is knocking on death’s door.

A little over 15 hours later, my father passed. I was at home because my abuser came to the hospital.

7.

The final lie my father made me tell was after he died on May 18th, 2021. For some bizarre reason, maybe my occupation as a writer, or because my family expected the same kind of silence and lies of omission I had displayed growing up, I was asked to write my dad’s obituary. What I wrote was the truth. My truth.

Everyone on my dad’s side of the family disapproved of the obituary I wrote. They felt it was disrespectful to his legacy and their memory. After a day of exposing old wounds and memories, they brutalized me again into submission to remember him as not perfect, but still with omissions. No words about his imperfections. Just a clinical explanation.

In a grand cosmic irony, the blank spaces are a perfect representation of all the silences my dad forced upon me about my trauma.

I’m not one to hold on to rage too long. I can’t be sick with rage anymore. I’ve been mourning my dad for years now. Sorrow is more of an old friend than a stranger.

Maybe, I’m just tired. I find it easier to sleep longer and longer, the more time passes.

I’m no longer quiet. And he cannot ask me to be anymore.