There is a certain peace that can only be experienced after the worst of suffering. There is a peace that only a child has, rooted in innocence. That peace can never fully be recovered because, eventually, you reach a point where you have gained an understanding of life and maybe some concept of why we are living it.
I ran down the hallway, my hands running along with me on the wall, carelessly like a child. I turned into the kitchen; it was small but not to me. It was the only kitchen I had ever known. Those light brown cabinets and the cold tile floor comforted me. Looking back, that little pigtailed four-year-old didn't know anything. Her main concerns involved tea parties and the make-believe kingdom she presided over upstairs in her pink butterfly tent. I walked into the kitchen and sat in my chair, my hands freshly washed, and dinner set out on the table. The whole family sat together, as was routine, my mom, my dad, my baby sister, and me. Together. Through the lens of a four-year-old, everything was perfectly fine.
………
Time moved on, as it always does. Years passed, my youngest sister was born, we grew up. People got older and made mistakes, all things that should be expected.
"He’s moving out, but just for a little while,” my mom said. “Until he can fix some things.” We weren't allowed to go over; that's what daddy told us. He said he didn’t want us to have any memories of this: the time he had to leave. The house he was staying in was only a block away, owned by some old friends who were out of the country. I was eight; I didn't know why he had to leave, and a simple answer from my mom quieted my questions. It just happened: it was normal. The only problem was that I wanted to go over to that house, and there was only one reason—the window seat. I don’t know how I knew it was there, but I did, and what I wanted, more than anything else, was to see the window seat. It's funny the things you remember, the things you cared about, those silly eight-year-old things: like a window seat that I never got to see.
………
One day, everything changed. It was a typical day, facing the hardships of standardized testing. To my fourth-grade mind, that was my biggest trial. I remember the school breakfast was cinnamon rolls with congealed icing; I thought they were gross. Why do we remember these things? Why do we tuck these extraneous memories into our brains? It was a Thursday, March 17. He was sick, but daddy was always sick, so we didn't think much of it. The only Gatorade we had in the garage was the clear Gatorade; when I was little, I used to call it "Alligator Juice," but not anymore. I was ten, old enough to know it was called Gatorade, and I also knew that daddy didn't like clear Gatorade, but he asked me to get him some, so I brought it inside. He told me to leave it outside his door, which was weird, but I did it anyway.
Why do we tuck these extraneous memories into our brains?
"Is daddy, ok?" My mom said yes, but I couldn't help but think otherwise. Minutes later, I knew he wasn't.
That was the first time I ever dialed 911. You always wonder how you will react in emergencies, and you can't know until you live through it. I was calm. I put the dog in her crate, I turned off the TV, and I unlocked the front door. I don’t know if my mom told me to do that or if I just did it instinctively. I didn’t go back there where he was; Mommy was back there with him, on the phone, and I was in the living room with my arms wrapped around my sisters, crying. Our neighbor came to pick us up and took us to her mom’s house about a block away, where her family was having dinnerAs we drove away, I could hear the sirens and see the lights approaching the front of my house. After that moment, my dad couldn’t hide anymore. And somehow, when we were being comforted by our neighbors telling us that “lots of people have seizures during their life and are perfectly fine after," somehow, I knew that this wasn’t just some one-time random occurrence. I knew why without knowing. I asked them if the cause of my dad’s seizure was what I thought it might be, and they told me that “it’s probably not that,” but they didn’t know. We didn’t know. And I was about to see how alcohol could destroy a person.
………
Daddy went away again, but this time he was getting help. He went to lots of doctors, and they helped him get better. He had been gone for a long time; I don’t remember how long. He came back though, and I believed that he was better. I wanted to believe.
One night we went on a daddy-daughter date while my sisters were at their friend's house. I haven’t been to Red Lobster since then, not intentionally, I just haven't. I don't remember the restaurant as much as I remember stopping at the gas station afterward. I was in the passenger seat, and daddy was filling up the tank before we went to pick my sisters up. For some reason, I decided to crawl into the back. I was eleven, and my legs were getting longer, making it more difficult to crawl over the seats.
A couple of years ago, I had seen daddy get something out of the car, but all I could see was his silhouette through the windows. When I could get around to the back of his car, his hands were empty, and when I peeked through the window, there was nothing in the back. Confused, I brushed it off and didn’t think much of it, but I never forgot.
I leaned over the back seats, reached for the mat, and lifted the handle underneath. I didn't know much about cars, but I learned that day where the spare tire is stored. I lifted the hatch, and there it was, the spare tire, along with something else-the bottles. Some were empty, and some were full. My throat burned like it does when you're about to cry, a secret always has a feeling. I knew that this was something I wasn't supposed to see, and I knew that it was something that daddy was not supposed to have. I looked out the back window. I saw my dad, and he saw me. He knew that I knew. In silence, we drove the rest of the way to pick up my sisters. I was sitting there in a jumble of emotions, an eleven-year-old mixture of anger, confusion, and fear. My mom was out of town visiting some old girlfriends for the weekend. This big secret was crushing me, and I had no way to tell her.
………
I cried a lot in 5th grade. Sometimes everything was fine; we went through the motions of life, making it through, one day at a time. Then one day, he was gone. I remember the day before he left. I woke up in the middle of the night because somebody was racing; it sounded like they were trying to drive down every street they could, as loudly as possible, oblivious. I remember being scared they would run into our house, so I lay there in silent anticipation as I heard it get closer and closer and louder and louder. Eventually, my fear faded away with the sound of the car disappearing in the distance. Peace, I could go back to sleep. But I didn’t because another sound kept me awake. I lay there, listening to those sounds. The sound of daddy stumbling through the kitchen, knocking over a chair. Sounds I wouldn’t identify until much later: the sound of a father’s last night living with his family.
He had to go away again, except this time he wasn’t coming back. It was January. I can’t remember the last time I saw him because I didn’t think it would be the last time. But it was. I would only get to talk to him a couple more times, and each one is blurred in my memory. Phone calls that I know happened but can’t seem to remember. That’s the funny thing about change: it happens so fast, but it can take a long time to process. I can’t really remember January- all I remember is change.
I grew up more than I should have had to, and learned to value my suffering, because it made me stronger.
Over the next few months, I grew accustomed to this new normal. My parents weren’t together anymore. My dad seemed fine at Christmas, but later I realized he was not fine. I entered this new role as a half-parent, half-kid. I assumed responsibilities that a twelve-year-old shouldn't have. I was more aware of what was going on, always on edge, always trying to protect my sisters from any potential danger. I grew up more than I should have had to, and learned to value my suffering, because it made me stronger.
………
When daddy left, there was always a tiny ounce of hope, deep down, that he might get himself together and once again become an active part of my life. A year and a half after he left, my mom and I sat in my room talking. “Have you heard from daddy?”
This was a question I had grown used to asking. A question that was always sitting in the back of my mind, patiently waiting for an answer. If we had heard from him, that was usually a good sign; he only reached out if he was doing well. Most of the time when I asked, we had not heard from him. But this time was different, because it was the last time I would get to ask that question.
That day we talked about some hard things. We talked about how we didn’t know exactly where he was or how he was doing. We also discussed what would happen if he got better and what would happen if he didn't. Two weeks later, my fear became a reality.
………
We had two funerals—one at my church and one in his hometown in Indiana. I learned how unpredictable grief can be. You never know when you're going to have a good day or a bad day. I had heard people talk about the five stages of grief, but something I hadn’t heard was that they aren’t experienced in order. Grief can only be mapped out to a certain extent, and it's not something that you can control. At some point, it becomes something that only you can navigate, something you must learn to live with. One person's grief is never the same as someone else's, even when you experience some of the same things. Each person sees things through a different lens, colored by their experiences and the influences that fill their lives. Sometimes, years later, you can be hit with a realization, a memory of walks on cool afternoons, golden autumn leaves blowing around at your feet. Memories of lying in a hammock on a Sunday afternoon, or the familiar smell of sawdust and freshly cut wood. These reflections of what once seemed so simple become special in a new way, especially when you have lost someone so close. After each major accomplishment or important event, there is always this: a tiny reminder, a pang of loss, a “Daddy would be proud of you” moment.
I loved my dad. Even in the end, he showed that he wanted to protect us, even if that meant protecting us from himself. Addiction is a terrible thing. Alcoholism is a terrible disease that alters your brain, changes who you are. After walking through suffering, it's important to grieve, but it's also important not to stay there in that puddle of self-pity.
Life is filled with fires that you must walk through. Not everyone's fire is the same; some walk through more than one. Some people don’t make it through to the other side, and the hardest part is watching the flames consume someone you love. Some people walk through their fire and end up on the other side smelling like smoke. The amount of smoke-smell varies from person to person, but my mom taught me to walk around without smelling like smoke. God had sustained us and blessed us beyond what we could have imagined. He set before us a fire so tall that if we had seen its entirety before the start, we would have turned back. But he was there in the fire alongside us when the kitchen chair fell, when daddy drove us to school drunk, when bottles were discovered, when bills were piling up, and even when a four-year-old played upstairs, unaware of the fires that her parents were facing. Unaware of the fire that she would one day have to face, and the person she would become because of those flames.
