Category Archives: father

Closet Ghosts

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in courage, father, fear, hope., invisible, poem, suicide

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I found the poem below in some old documents the other night while looking for something to read at my writers group.  I wrote it in 2004 and revised it a little more this week.  Daddy’s shoe was the first thing I saw when I found him.  Reading this poem in the group gave me some trouble.  No one said much in the way of helping me make it better except one person.  She told me to put the word “alone” in a line by itself.  

I’ve found it is good to talk about things that trouble me and not hide myself from them.  As I read the poem, I could feel that old shitty fear rising up in my throat, scared of something that had already happened.  Scared of how the people in my group might think. I read it as fast as my heart was beating. Someone said it was “dark,” and I said yes, I wrote it while I was in a dark place.

The same person who offered constructive thoughts on the poems I read that night wrote a note just for me to see.  These are real life experiences, don’t apologize for how you felt or express them.

When I hide away from the things that scare or trouble me, when I don’t speak what I believe or feel, then I make it easy, too easy, for me to fall back into invisibility.  Being invisible is just as terrifying as finding that one left shoe.

 

Closet Ghosts

Peering

into the closet

I found a shoe,

Alone,

resting sideways

containing my father’s foot bones.

Wanting to just close the door,

I stood focused on the one

left behind

shoe. 

 

Memories

shivered up my spine as

I watched him lace up

his one-day-in-my-life

Sunday best. 

Shoe morphed into a boot

fragile now and

cracked from years

walking construction sites.

A hard hat ghosted in,

completing the wardrobe.

 

If I could, like God,

raise up from the essence

of those shoe bones

the image of my father,

I’d ask

“why did you leave

only a shoe?

Why not a note?”

 

Karen Phillips, 2004, revised 2013
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Losing a Father to Suicide

29 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in father, genetic suicide, suicide

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“I just adored him.” 
            Frances Moore (1998)
            Stereotypically, my father was the breadwinner; he was the person my mother used to threaten to tell of my misbehavior when I was a child; he was supposedly the man in control.  I felt he was my protector, too, and even though I am an adult now, that child-like feeling is still within my heart.  I felt he could handle anything.  I loved and adored my father.
            Some may not care for their fathers.  Some fathers are bastards.  Really there’s no easy way to deny that reality.   Either way, the loss of someone so instrumental in getting you into this world is a major event.
            To lose my father to a death of his own decision created a lot of different questions in my mind.  Could suicide be something that I might choose to do because I have his genes?  Did I mean this little to him?  Did I not love him enough?   What the hell was he thinking?
            Your father’s decision to die is not the sum total of his life.  If you adored him; allow yourself to feel the heartbreak.  If you were mixed up by his treatment of you; allow yourself to feel the confusion. 

At First

10 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in blood, bloodstains, dreams, father, grief, PTSD, suicide

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            Pictures of my father entered my mind, uninvited.  Thoughts of his blood invaded everything.  They swept through my every action and camped out in my dreams.  Day or night, asleep or awake, it didn’t matter.  I was suddenly emerged, pre-soaked, and never rinsed clean.  I had bloodstains on my mind.
            I obsessed.  How long had he been thinking of killing himself?  He started clearing away everything around his house nearly a month before.  Had he also planned on killing Moma?  He really could have, you know; I believed it was on his mind.  He had tried to throw away her tomato cages as if she wouldn’t have another growing season.  But Moma gave Daddy a hard time about throwing her gardening supplies away.  So he put them back. 
“What in hell’s name were you thinking?” I cried out in my sleep enough to wake me.  Had he planned on me finding him?  He knew I was coming to visit.  He knew that I usually came looking for him.  Did he have faith that I would take care of things for him?
            How long did I suffer from traumatic stress?  It was a long time.  I longed for just the grief of missing Daddy and not being stuck on how he died.  Counseling helped, although I have had uneasy feelings that tap me on the shoulder still. 
Finally, I could pinpoint when the lessening started.  In a dream, I didn’t raise that garage door; I didn’t go in calling out his name.  In my dream, I chose not to go in.  Waking, the dream left me feeling rested.  Perhaps that one particular dream was the first real scabbing-over of my heart.
            Raw grief hurts so much.  It does get easier.  It takes a while.  Look to your dreams.

Jealousy

03 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in father, feelings, jealousy, love, suicide

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            I was stingy for his love after he died; he was, after all, my father.   But memories of his attention seemed always to be for someone else.
Reacting with sibling competition, I envied that Daddy had once apologized to my older sister.  When she was a child, he had mistreated her.  I guessed the reason was because she had taken all of Mom’s attention.  But I had been his little buddy.  Perhaps he felt there was no reason to apologize for his behavior toward me.  After his death, the thought of his need for my sister’s forgiveness angered me as if lightening had struck white heat through my heart.
Jealousy of Daddy’s love for Mom overpowered me, too.  I felt he loved Mom as if she were the only person in his world.  “Don’t you think your moma has such a good way about her?” he would ask me, grinning, always telling me how pretty she was.  I remembered the times he held my hands out to the light, turning them this way and that, and then with a smile declaring them “just like your moma’s.”
Even the affection he felt toward his dog tore at me.  The sound of Dad’s gentle talk to that dog echoed in my ears after his death.  Every day for years, he had taken it for a walk in the woods on the hunt. “We scout ‘em squirrels out together,” he bragged.  On my visits home, those squirrel hunts were his funny stories.
My family relationships suffered from the resentment that wiggled in and out of me like worms.  But, it seemed that as grief ever-so-slowly abated, my feelings evolved into something more respectful.  I became grateful that Daddy had given my sister a chance to forgive him.   I became thankful that his life was filled with a love that many never find.  And I was glad that he taught me how to be an honest and forthright individual.  That was his attention to me; he was, after all, my father.
Grief turns on the basic emotions like switching on all the lights in the house.  Jealousy is one.  Listen to it.  It is saying you have every right to hurt.  Talk to someone who can help you find a healthy release.