COMPLEX GRIEF: my dad, alcoholism, and generational trauma.
I lost my father this weekend.
There is rarely a time when I tell someone who my father is and their response is not "he is a dick". I grew up knowing that my father was an asshole, a drunken asshole. I myself became a drunken asshole by 14. I am very much like my father. Unlike him, I got sober.
I met my father maybe four or five times in my life. My father was an abuser of people around him, including me. He was also a talented musician, whip-smart to a fault, and genuinely happy for others when he was capable. He felt things deeply. He drank to quiet those feelings. I’ve never seen someone more proud of me when I said "I write poetry". He was more enamoured with my creative pursuits than he was of my starting a business. He glowed at every word I said, the way a parent should. He was also selfish. He was deeply pained by a painful life and a painful childhood. I see his illness because I have the same illness, alcoholism. Unlike him, I take my medicine and have been for almost 8 years. I don’t know why the medicine worked for me and did not work for him.
He did not reach the age of 60 and died alone in a home in the care of service workers with a frail and failing body, riddled from years of substance abuse.
Grief is complex, especially when it is a parent and an abuser who dies. It is not just grief you make space for, relief and abandonment and fear and sadness become your bedmates.
I don’t have much restrospection on this, I don’t even have photos of myself with him. My relationship with my father is an empty, dusty hallway. Sometimes, the dust gets kicked up. I only know that I never saw myself in someone elses eyes the way I saw myself in his, and that this only happened for us once.
