Louise Erdrich must know me. I have never been able to explain why I love her books, exactly. Now, reading The Painted Drum, I think I must have read all of her other books so I could read this one, now. It's a healing book, but it's a hurting book, too. I'm writing here now because I've had to stop reading for a few minutes. I've had a bit of an anxiety attack, I guess. Melodramatic? Maybe. But this book is singing over deep, old wounds. It's also holding a mirror before me under flourescent lights, and I've needed to give myself an unflinching look for some time, now.
I've stopped to put some powerful passage or other from this book on this page for several days, but haven't yet done it. I am transcribing the following passage. It will probably only resonate with me, but after trying and failing to explain the disconnect I feel from my father, and maybe everyone in the world but my Little Fire, Louise explained it to me...
Shawnee stared briefly at her mother, then looked away. It seemed to Shawnee that she had been on a long trip, that she had gone somewhere far away and her mother was left behind. Her mother was back in a place where nothing had happened to Shawnee, but in truth everything had happened. She had been to the edge of life. Apitchi and Alice had gone there too. Shawnee had dragged her brother and sister back. She hadn't allowed them to die. Or herself, either. Now that she was back on this earth, she was lonely. She wanted someone to say to her, Shawnee, you saved them. Not look at her with eyes that said, You burnt the house down.
Italics are Erdrich's.
I just needed to post this. Maybe I'll be able to make sense of it later. Not now. There is just so much there.
I will not be broken forever.
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I've been reading about The Painted Drum.
This strikes at the heart of what I'm feeling, these days...
WOODROOF: What Erdrich has given us is a picture of Faye's profound solitude and struggle to connect with another person.
Ms. ERDRICH: (Reading) `Perhaps it was easier to live with the longing for Kurt, the uncertainties even to indulge the unnecessary and maybe insulting secretive precautions. To deal with him in the everyday world of sorrow and surprise takes the mythology out of the relationship, but it is more than that. I feel his suffering when he's near as a physical weight, crushing one heartbeat and the next, squeezing my breath. The madness of sorrow emanates from him. It enters and unfurls in me. It revives my own pain, unsolvable, alive.'
But her character learns, in the end...
Ms. ERDRICH: (Reading) `Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You are here to risk your heart.'
Yeah...
I don't know quite what to say here, but I feel as though I should say something.
That's my family, probably sometime around 1977. That's my father, in the dark glasses. I am the oldest child in the picture. The smiling girl behind her father.
My father. Contributor of 50% of my DNA and more than 50% of my emotional baggage. I don't understand him at all, and my feelings toward him are completely inaccessible to me. But I know I don't want him to die. He has been so ill for so long, and he may die. There's nothing I can do about that.
My father is an alcoholic. He will tell you he is not. He will also tell you my mom, who died of alcoholism, didn't really drink that much until the last couple of years of her life.
He is an artist at historical revision.
He is an alcoholic, a serious alcoholic, and has been for as long as I have known him.
He smokes. A lot. He has forever, I think.
Because of these things, his heart is failing. His lungs are failing. He's bleeding internally, they don't know from where, and has required a couple of pints of blood a day for the last several days. He can't go on like this forever, but I don't want him to die.
The only thing that I know for sure about my feelings for him is that. I don't want him to die. I wish he would live, but even if he doesn't die, he probably won't do that. I don't think he knows how. Its not that he doesn't want to, he's just incapable of making the choices and performing the actions that equal living a life. He's always just survived. This is how he taught all of his children to navigate their lives, and we just survive.
I don't want to live that way anymore.
When I think of my father now, I get an image of barely restrained panic. His panic. He's always been afraid, I think. Of course, that's not how I saw him as a child. He was a towering figure. I adored him and I was terrified of him. But even these images aren't fully formed, because my childhood and much of my adulthood has been characterized by barely restrained panic.
I only recognize this now, of course, after having been on this journey of discovery for several years. I entered therapy three years ago, I left my husband three years ago, three years ago I began to feel. The first thing that shot through my saline sub-conscious like the gushing oil geyser at the bottom of the Gulf was panic. Abject. Consuming. Of course, it had been there all along, waiting to erupt. That's when I started seeing a psychiatrist who wrote peaceful words on life saving squares of paper that meant medicine to keep me from shattering into shards of glittering anxiety that could never be pieced back together.
So I learned to panic and not shatter, and I learned that a lifetime of not panicking had cost me dearly. It has, in a sense, cost me my life, because to restrain the panic I dissociated, and lost access to many memories.
Yes, my memory of my life is murky. The memories I can easily retrieve, I'm not sure I want. They are pieces of the puzzle of my personality. A few have sharp edges and are vividly colored. Some are strangely cut and painted with muted impressions. Most are just missing.
I don't feel like writing about the memories I do have tonight.
I just want to say that my dad was not a good father. He was a physical and emotional terrorist. He sat us down solemnly, sometimes, when we were younger than the children in that picture. He said he was sorry, but we were bad children, and he was going to have to send us to the house of correction. He said he was sorry, but we were bad children, and soon he would have to put us up for adoption. He was sorry. It was not his fault. We were bad children.
But he's my Dad, and, in some very damaged part of my heart, he's even my daddy.
He can be charming and funny; a sweet, disarming child. He can be brutal and cruel in his gasping panic.
He is a boy. He has no impulse control. He says what he thinks, and it's usually mean. He throws things. He breaks things. He makes people bleed. He leaves handprints and large bruises.
He's surely mentally ill. Certainly depressed. Maybe bipolar.
I am afraid of him, but I don't want him to die.
I am afraid of him. I hate saying that.
I feel as though I should be there as he declines. More than that, I feel as though I should want to be there. I don't. But I don't want him to die.
We talk on the phone nearly every night. Sometimes I hear, singing from his phone to mine, a yearning for connection. He wants me to tell him things, what I feel and think. He wants me to ask for advice. I have never and would never think of asking him for advice about anything. He wants my heart to be open to him, and it just isn't. He wants to be a father to me. I don't know how to explain to him that he just isn't, not in the way he wants to be. He never will be. That connection is severed and the cord has been carted away.
When I'm physically near him, as I was when he had a health crisis a few months back, he terrorizes me again. He charms, lulls, then attacks. He's merciless. I can't think. I can't remember. I'm the seven year old in the picture. I can't breathe. How can he still do that to me?
But I'm terrified he will die.
I started this post to try to explain this to you, these feelings I have about not wanting my father to die, but I can't. I don't understand. I'm all alone in the world but for my daughter. I feel physically connected to nothing and no one but her. I don't have any "people" to claim as my own, not really. No place I could go and stay if things really go wrong and someone will play with my daughter and make me something to eat and let me put my head in their lap and cry until I'm done. No place to rest. What does it matter if he dies or not? He's no safe place to me.
But please God don't let him die.
I like this word. The space between things. This is where I've been living. I've called it purgatory, but I like this word better. It's not dogmatic. It doesn't suggest punishment or purification. It just is. A space. Between things.
I scribbled this word on a note, folded it as tiny as I could, dropped it in a bottle and set it in the current that still runs between my lately lost love and me. A mea culpa. I fought for a thousand days against this zwischenraum with both fists and both feet. I raged to escape this space. He stayed at a distance safely away from my flailing and made himself a meal. I think he speaks German. He knows where we are.
I look at this space, now, anew. It is peaceful, this zwischenraum. I can float here. I won't drown. Not like Hamlet's Ophelia. I can watch the clouds meet and merge and transform and move along.
Maybe. I'm ferocious. Impatient. It is impatience that makes zwischenraum a purgatory. It's a Chinese finger trap, this space between.
Things swirl here, beyond my reach. They won't be captured. They won't be bent. They won't be told and tamed. I am a teller and a tamer. Failed. Maybe I've been here forever.
I guess I should make myself a meal.
Louise Erdrich must know me. I have never been able to explain why I love her books, exactly. Now, reading The Painted Drum, I think I must have read all of her other books so I could read this one, now. It's a healing book, but it's a hurting book, too. I'm writing here now because I've had to stop reading for a few minutes. I've had a bit of an anxiety attack, I guess. Melodramatic? Maybe. But this book is singing over deep, old wounds. It's also holding a mirror before me under flourescent lights, and I've needed to give myself an unflinching look for some time, now.
