All Alone

I started watching a movie called The Beaver that I figured would be cheesy. Instead, I found myself with a tear in my eye at the end because it reminded me of something. As the father and son hugged at the end, it made me remember that I will never again be able to hug my dad. He is gone, and has been for several years now. What the movie did was remind me of my own father. There were some similarities.

My father was mentally ill. He was Bi-Polar, and he would go from beyond happy to morbidly depressed. There was seldom an in-between. He did not have good or bad days. He had great or horrific days. I guess that over time it ate at him. Eventually it destroyed him. You can not live long as a Yo-Yo. Eventually your string breaks.

My dad had a habit of coming down from the happy highs and crashing immediately into great depressions, then he would shoot back up to the highs. He cycled like this for years. He would crash into the depression or his high would be so intense that he would have to be institutionalized. While in the hospital, my dad would get stabilized on medication. He would get out and do great on his medication. Life would be great and he would be normal, or at least as normal as a mentally ill Superman can get. After all, to me my dad was Superman!

Every time his world would come crashing down and they would rebuild it with medication and let him out. He always did great for a while. Then he would begin to believe that he did not need the medication, so he would stop taking it. He would do okay for months, then he would start the cycle all over again. Whether up or down, his roller coaster would begin and over the next year or two he would race up just to crash down until eventually he would get institutionalized. There his roller coaster would come to a stop.

Just to start all over again

And again

And again.

His last episode was not very different than all of the previous ones. He was on a manic episode and he came up to see me in Springfield from Florida. He came up for my graduation from college. The first of his kids to graduate and he wanted to see it. Not only was I graduating, but my girlfriend was on the verge of delivering his first grandchild. A grandson. Dad was excited.

Being excited while in the midst of a manic episode is a recipe for disaster. Not just for him, but for every one and everything that he was in contact with. He had bought a car in California after he flew out there to see his brother, and tried to drive it to Springfield. He was oblivious to anything extraneous. All that he knew was to keep gas in the car. He never checked the oil, and the engine blew. He left the car where it died and got a ticket on a Grey Hound. I came to pick him up at the station when he got to Springfield.

As I walked up behind my dad at the terminal to pick him up, he was in a group of 5 or 6 guys talking. The group was black and latino. He was the sole white person. The entire group was laughing as my dad was telling jokes in a fake accent. He turned and saw me, still speaking in this over the top Texas drawl.

He told them it was time to go, and they seemed to hate seeing him leave. All of the guys hugged my dad goodbye. That was my dad, he never met a stranger and everyone liked him. He was not just Superman to me, but to a lot of other people. When he was on his game you felt better just for talking to him. They had.

As we left he told me that he had faked the drawl the whole time he was on the bus, and everyone was convinced that he was from Texas. That was when I knew that I was in for a show. As he proceeded to talk to me in rhymes, I knew that the mania was bad. When it was bad he was always going, always. He stayed with me and my girlfriend, and he was always busy. Shopping and jogging, spending and running. That was my dad manic.

He was also stressful because when he was around he did not know when to stop. He would talk and take everything to far. If he was asked to stop, he would just keep on going. When depressed he would never start. When manic he would go for for eternity, or at least that was how it seemed. And he was manic. Don't get me wrong, not all was bad, though. His visit was a mixed bag.

He was there for my graduation. I was glad.

He was there and I was no longer on drugs. I was glad.

He was there and I was still drinking. He was not very happy about that one.

He was there and I was smoking cigarettes. He was not happy about that either.

He was there and I was still Agnostic. That may have been the worse thing I was doing in his eyes.

He asked if he could stay with me until his grandson was born. I told him okay. After all, we were only 10 weeks away. But he started to get worse. He was up constantly stressing me out. Starting fights with me over absolutely nothing. He would agitate me. That was hard for me to deal with, but he was my dad. I could take almost anything.

Almost.

Then he began to annoy and agitate my girlfriend, who was in her third trimester. I talked to him about not stressing her out, and he continued. Finally, I had enough. I told my dad that he had to go. I let him know that he was stressing out the mother of my unborn child, and I would not stand for that. I told my dad that he was leaving now. His suitcases were packed and waiting at the door.

"You are no longer welcome in my house." That was the last sentence I said to him that day. Today, those words still bounce in my head and ring in my ears. Little did I know, those would be the last words I would every speak face to face to my dad.

He listened.

He left.

He ended up taking a trip around the country. First he went to see his brother. He made him mad enough to tell him to leave. He visited his sisters, who he also enraged and subsequently they told him to go. He visited good friends all over the country, and he made all of them angry enough that he wore out his welcome everywhere. Even his wife divorced him, and she took the dog.

One night I got a call from him. It was February 11th. He sounded really down, but he made sure to let me know that he was proud of me. We talked about his grandson, who was born premature but was doing fine. We talked about his son, his ex-wife that he still talked to a lot and the debt he had amassed over the past year.

I let him know how depressed he sounded, and he told me that he was really down. He never left the house. All he did was lay on the couch and watch the television. He told me that he was having trouble pulling out this depression. He said that he had thought about suicide but that he did not have the means to do it.

He was upset that he had never gotten to meet DJ, his grandson. He was feeling overwhelmed because he had ran up lots of credit cards on his last manic episode. He was over $100,000 in debt and he was on disability. He would never get it paid off. He did not have a vehicle or the money to get one. He missed his dog, and he missed my little brother Tyler who was living with his ex-wife. He got to see him but not as much as he used to. Finally, he hated that he was living in a trailer. He said that he felt like "white trash."

I tried to cheer him up. I talked to him about getting a puppy. It would give him another dog, and walking it daily would get him out of the house. I reminded him that when my first year of grad school was over in 3 months that we were flying down to Florida and he would get to meet his grandson. I talked about when the next time Tyler was coming over and what they would do. We talked for an hour, and at the end he told me that he would leave the house the next day and get outside for a while.

"I promise."

The next night I was woken up by a county sheriff. He told me that something had happened to my dad. I needed to call a detective in Florida and talk to him. I asked the sheriff if he knew how my dad had killed himself. He said that he had no details, but I knew. I knew my dad had killed himself. I replayed our conversation and wondered what I could have done different. I should have made him promise not to kill himself. Instead, he had promised he would leave the house.

He didn't lie.

He did leave the house. He left and went shopping. He got two different kinds of insecticide and Tang drink mix. He came home and he mixed the two insecticides together with the drink mix. He used it to wash down several bottles of pills that he was prescribed for sleep, depression and to stabilize his mood swings. When the pain became too extreme he slashed his wrist. His game was finished, he was done.

He was ready to die.

You could tell that when the detective showed me the pictures from the security camera. They  were of my dad buying the Tang and insecticide. He was smiling. He knew that the roller coaster ride that had been his life would be over soon. He was retiring his car. He could have peace, and that was all that he ever wanted.

Peace.

Looking back I see that the entire year was orchestrated. He saw everybody that loved him and infuriated them to the point of them telling him to leave. That way, he could justify what he did at the very end. He could feel that he was all alone and no one cared. I tried to screw that up in our last phone call. It didn't work. My little brother loved him and would come over to visit. That did not work either.

It was simply not enough.

My dad forgot something, though. He forgot that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. My baby brother was 13 when he walked into my dad's house and found him dead in the kitchen. That will live with him forever. I have family members that are still angry at my dad for taking his own life. There are still tears cried by a lot of us 4 years later.

Me? I am constantly haunted by the last words I ever said to my dad's face. They pop up with seemingly no provocation. Why? Because YOU NEVER GET A SECOND CHANCE TO MAKE A LAST IMPRESSION. I am jealous of my niece because she got to meet my dad. My son never did. In fact, my son and soon to be born daughter never will. I will never have pictures of them together and they will never get to meet the coolest guy I ever knew.

Plus I am haunted by our last phone conversation. After all, I had a Bachelors in Psychology and Sociology and was in my second semester of grad school for Social Work. I should have known better. If it was a client I would have put him in the hospital for a 96 hour observation.

But he wasn't a client, he was my dad.

I have worked through it. I will never agree with suicide, but if he was that miserable I am glad that he is no longer suffering. I know how I am supposed to act in this situation, and what I would tell friends and clients. In fact, I know what I have told them. But that was them, this is me. It's different.

Over time I have come to see his death as another tool that I can use to help others. It gives me an empathy that I did not have before. I know what loss and horror feel like when you are sober and not doing drugs. I also know how it carves a hole in your heart when you work through intense loss sober.

I realize that I cannot change the past, and beating myself up over it does me no good. Not one time travel movie that I have ever seen impacted the person positively. Real life would be no different. Instead we learn to take those experiences and they make us stronger and wiser. We assimilate them into our very essence and grow.

My dad's death ended in my drinking spiraling out of control. How I stayed in graduate school and still maintained a 3.8 I will never know. I do know that my drinking led me to greater depths. In the end it combined with my break-up to leave me hopeless and void. Being hopeless led me to searching for purpose and meaning.

I found hope in Christ.

I found purpose and meaning in God. Out of my father's suicide I found life. I have been able to use that experience and many of my other past life experiences to help some find hope and to lead others to Christ. Out of his tragedy, great things have and will happen. Life's experiences make us one of two things, bitter or better. I choose better.

But as I watched the movie, the father's sanity returns and he realizes that his children do love him. He is not all alone. Tears of joy roll out of his eyes as he hugs his son. That is the part of the movie that made my eyes well up with tears. It hurts that in the end my dad felt all alone, like no one loved him. Plus, he left casualties. His entire family was forever impacted. From my brother who found him to his wife who divorced him to the son who told him that he was no longer welcome in his house.

He not only hurt us but he hurt himself. The kind of hurt that makes you take your own life. I would say that I cannot imagine that kind of pain, but I have slashed my wrists before too. Luckily, my sister found me passed out in a pool of blood while there was still time to save me. My father was found much too late.

All alone

In a pool of blood

My dad died on his terms.

It  will forever impact my life.