10 years

I have been thinking a lot about my father this week. I think it’s a subconscious thing and of course probably completely normal as our bodies have a way of knowing these things. You see, Sunday February 3 marks the 10 year anniversary of my father’s suicide. I have a hard time even to this day classifying it as a suicide. He was sick, physically so ill that he clearly felt like that was his only way out. But in the grand scheme of things putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger is suicide any way you look at it. I think my denial was an extreme coping mechanism.

It’s funny that ten years later it can still elicit such strong responses in me. I suppose that is completely normal. I suspect the rest of my life I will have strong feelings about the topic. I am actually in complete shock it has been ten years. That honestly means I was 23 when he died. Looking back on it, 23 seems pretty young. I mean, I feel like the majority of my life was lived these past 10 years. That means I’ve spent almost 1/3 of my life without him. That’s a lot. And honestly I feel like they have been the 10 most important years. It’s so strange to me that my husband never knew my father. It’s incredibly sad to me that my father never knew my sister’s children. He would have loved them to death. He was a kid person. He would have lived for those kids.

I am certain of a couple things. There is no way to possibly discuss me, my neurosis and my weight without some part of it being tied to my father. My father was incredibly wonderful and loving. I have incredible memories of my childhood. With all that said, it’s not like he was perfect. No parent ever was. He instilled some of his fears of the world in his children. Neurosis that both me and my older sister carry to this day. My two younger sisters had a different version of my father. I like to look at life with my father in two segments. The young doting father who had two little girls that were his life and he overprotected and loved them. The later father was physically beat down, and mentally suffered. He was much more absent from the world let alone his children.

I loved my father very much. Both versions. But the ladder version was sad and hard to understand. My father was incredibly overweight. I have no idea how to judge his weight other than to say he was large. He was upwards of I’d guess 500 pounds. Let me put it to you this way, eventually he was fired from him job, most likely it is believed amongst my family because of his embarrassing weight. That was never the official reason given because that would be discrimination but that is the generally believed reality. This mentally destroyed him. For some reason he was too far gone mentally to fill out disability paperwork which his doctors told him he would qualify for. This was frustrating for everyone. He was so sick mentally that I think he just didn’t have it in him. Anyway, when he killed himself, he was in the master bathroom and ultimately because of his size the EMT’s called in the fire department to help remove him from the house. I should say he was also a bit of a hoarder and the bedroom was stacked full of shit. Random, useless shit thus making the removal process very sketchy. Ultimately they felt he was too big, too heavy to fit thru the bathroom door. They had to cut a hole in the side of the house. Yes, they used a chainsaw and literally cut a giant hole in the side of our house to remove him.

When you talk about someone having to be cut out of their home, I’ve lived it. I believe there is no way this can’t affect a person mentally, the survivors I think. I was 23 years old, my father whom I loved had just died and he was being cut out of the home. The gun may have ultimately been the tool of his death but his weight killed him. I believe that. He could barely walk. He had horrible gout in his legs and was in constant incredible pain. He physically could no longer function. His weight was his murderer.

I was overweight when my father died. I was not my largest weight that came months after his death when I ate and ate and ate. Ultimately a year after my father’s death was when I first went to weight watchers to change my life. Clearly I still struggle with my weight. I was not genetically blessed with skinny genes. But I still think about my father and his battles with weight all the time. If only he could have done something about it. If only any of us could have/would have tried. Not that there was much we could do. As I’ve proven myself time and time again, you can’t make anyone do this. They have to want it for themselves. He never did.

It was frustrating growing up in a house that was plagued by obesity. It made for an incredibly lonely adolescence. I constantly felt not good enough in my peer settings. I didn’t have any friends really. I can freely admit that now. I was alone in high school. Ultimately my last year of high school I spent my lunch eating along by myself in the library. That is pretty sad. I had huge issues. I wanted to be the pretty skinny popular girl so badly, but I just wasn’t. I wish I had figured everything out then. But hindsight is 20/20. I love my life now so it’s all part of the process of who I am now.

My entire family struggles with weight. We always have. We all have residual issues around my father’s death. Again, think it’s quite impossible not to. I know that I have zero desire to ever be cut out of my house. I lived it, it was horrific. And yet for some reason I always allow myself to gain weight. We are a family of emotional eaters.

I miss my father. I still think about him all the time. I believe part of my deep love for Maui comes from my father. We were not rich growing up. My parents did the best they could and I never completely noticed as a child. They gave us what was needed and I was content. We took some beach trips to the Oregon coast in the summers but we never took a real, get on a plane, family vacation. My mother and father went to Maui thru my mom’s work a few times. My father loved Maui. My senior year of high school, despite the incredible cost, he was set on taking one family trip with everyone. We went to Maui on the one and only trip we ever took. I feel in love with the place and dreamed of one day going back with a loving boyfriend/husband.

My father never stopped talking about Maui. He talked about it up until he died. I had such amazing memories of our family vacation there that I knew one day I would go back. It is not shocking to me that when I finally got Chris to go it became the most magical place ever to me. I stayed at the same hotel we stayed at as a family. I knew how much this place meant to my father and somehow it made me feel closer to him.

Of course I love Maui all on my own and have made my own memories with Chris there, but I can’t help but feel like part of my dad is there too. It makes me smile knowing that I have carried on his love in some way.

We are all completely shaped by the world around us and the events of our lives. Everything is far more inter-connected than we could ever think. I know that there are probably glaring obvious traumas and scars left from this event that affect the person I am. I know that a huge part of my weight struggles probably have to do with my father somehow. I certainly don’t blame him as he is not the one who puts the food in my mouth.

I can’t help but feel sad thinking about ten years of my life without him. My father was alive when my older sister got married. He got to attend her wedding. At some point during the reception he was walking around with a video camera recording people, etc… Somewhere along the way he snuck into the bathroom and turned the video camera on himself. (I think he went to the bathroom to be alone, not because of the bathroom) Anyway, he started talking into the camera about how much he loved his girls, all his girls and how happy he was, etc…. He started crying. I sometimes think about that moment and that recording.

I guess part of my decision to get married on Maui with just me and Chris was that no matter what I did, my father wasn’t going to be there. I would not have the same memory of my sister’s magical wedding and I didn’t even want to try and replicate it. I couldn’t.

I miss my father more than words will ever express. I can’t believe it truly has been 10 years. For all the good, the bad, and everything in between, I’d trade it all for a few more days with him.

My father and uncle at my sister's wedding in 2001...