Anger versus Pain

Sometimes anger is empowering. When it gets me off my butt and on the phone to set a problem right (generally a consumer type problem, like my daughter's replacement phone arriving broken), then it is a good thing. When it pulls me out of a really bad headspace, like when I was feeling very victimized and sexually harassed by a student at work, then it is a good thing.

But when I am angry at someone who died, who technically isn't around to argue with, it can be very frustrating and painful. Not such a good thing.

Last night I felt my bio-dad very strongly. Before he died, I believed that I could reach out my emotional feelings and touch base with him, even though we weren't speaking and hadn't in many years. We didn't have conversations when I put out those feelers, I just kind of touched base, checked to see if he was still there, or maybe wished him a happy birthday. I admit, I rarely if ever felt him reach back, or reach for me on his own. Although when he did, I generally rejected it, so who knows how often he may have tried.

Shortly before he and my bio-mom died (see the posting from last summer for the details), I stopped feeling either parent. They left a strange kind of empty place, and actually took some negative stuff with them (like my very strong aversion to tattoos). I felt a bit lighter, but I also knew that it meant they were either dead or dying. A few days later we got the call that my bio-mom was indeed about to succumb to lung cancer.

Once they were both dead, however, they came back into my consciousness stronger than ever before, save for maybe when I lived with them both as an infant. It felt as though they planted themselves on my chest, wishing to stay closer than ever in what I believe is an attempt to be with me in a way they couldn't when they were alive. They didn't want to leave me in death. And this made me angry. Where the hell had they been for the last $)+ years? Why, now that I can finally be free of the head trips that they could take me on with little or no effort, did they insist on hanging around? It quickly became clear that they wanted to prove something. Perhaps now that the physical restraints of this world have let them go they can finally be with me. To hell with that.

This is where feeling anger isn't terribly empowering. It feels like a constant fight, a constant attempt on my part to stand my personal moral ground, to insist that they stop wanting forgiveness and acceptance from me. I don't feel like they have given me what I need in return. They haven't taken away my pain, they haven't reversed the feelings of abandonment that have plagued me my whole life, and the resulting feelings of worthlessness and inherent badness that too often reduce me to a mess.

So when I felt my dad last night, so strongly, it hurt because I kind of miss him. He may have been a sporadic presence in my adult life, but we had our moments. We had a handful of really nice moments. If I miss anything about him, the real him, I miss those moments. And while he was asserting himself so strongly last night, it felt as though he was making a case for me to forgive. To forgive both himself and my mom. Talk about pissing me off! I am not ready to forgive her. Or him. They hurt me in ways that I can't begin to describe. I carry around these buttons and triggers that get tripped on all the time, buttons and triggers that they helped me construct, but haven't been around to help me dismantle. So I spent an evening arguing with him in my head. (yes, it may be all in my head, but that is beside the point)

I feel that if I forgive, then I am negating the value of my own feelings, that I am letting go of the right to feel pain, of the right to acknowledge that what they did was wrong. If I forgive, my pain no longer matters. I am not ready to devalue my feelings like that just yet.

This post is entitled anger versus pain. Sometimes they are mutually exclusive, sometimes they are two sides of the same issue. Sometimes anger can empower and reduce or soothe the pain.

Today, at least, they are battling it out inside me.

And then there were none

In just under 2 months, a span of 51 days to be exact, the last parents in my life died. The woman I called my aunt who was more of a mother to me went first. Thirty-one days later my bio-mother died. Twenty days after her death, and 41 years after they divorced, my bio-dad died.

All three deaths were caused by cigarettes. None was older than 65.

Miriam had stopped smoking nearly 20 years before she was diagnosed with lung cancer. The fact that she stopped when she did likely lengthened her life considerably. Less than a year after the diagnosis she was gone.

Mary, the bio-mom, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2004. She had surgery to remove the cancerous lung and was told that it had not spread. Apparently it hid from the surgeons because a few months ago they found that it had spread throughout her body. She died July 10.

Jack, the bio-dad, had been in failing health for a few years. The circulation in his legs was poor, he had endured a mild heart attack several years ago, and 3 strokes that the doctors were aware of (but they suspected there had been several more) . According to my step-sister, he had stopped smoking several years ago. On July 26th he suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns over 75% of his body after falling asleep next to a burning cigarette. (His wife and step-sister claim that his electric chair shorted out, the authorities claim it was a burning cigarette.) On July 30 he succumbed to his wounds and died alone in a hospital bed.

With the exception of a maybe 4 excursions to the dark side in my twenties during my experimental phase, I have never been a smoker. I always thought that they were disgusting. As a child when it was time to wash dishes I always saved the ashtrays for last, dipping them into the soapy water and then the rinse water before setting them onto the dish drainer still dirty. Gram didn't give me too hard a time, I think out of guilt that she smoked at all and didn't have the will power to stop.

When I was a kid and my friends would come over the visit, when they returned to their non-smoking homes they had to shower to wash the stench of cigarette smoke off of their bodies and out of their hair. Once in high school a friend commented that he was surprised I had taken up smoking. I hadn't, I had just come from home.

The smoke from a cigarette as it burns between puffs, rising up into the air like ribbons pulled by an invisible hand used to fascinate me as a child. The fascination never got beyond pretending with candy cigarettes. I am grateful that I don't have to spend my days living in a hazy house or that public places (in California at least) are smoke free. I'm grateful that my husband is a former smoker and is not likely to return to a life threatening habit.

I don't need to learn anything more about the ills of cigarettes. I don't feel the need to preach to strangers.

In reality, death is death. I am at an age when we start losing parents, that is a cold fact, but a very real one. I am lucky that I had as many parents as I did for as long as I did. But they are all gone now.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not okay. I suspect, I won't be for awhile.