If everyone survives tragedy, why do we feel our own is so important? I find myself avoiding head doctors – as my father might say – knowing a man overpaid to listen to me talk about things I am tired of talking about isn’t worth the prices they charge.
As my memories stretch back, the first is that of me as a baby. I am crawling towards something, a wall of records I suppose. My house was always cluttered with things. While mostly clean in some ways it was dirty in others. Clutter filled every surface you could see and – as a baby – I crawled towards the records. I don’t recall knowing what they were. I just knew many people were there at the time. Bikers, outlaws, rebels, you name a scumbag and they were an uncle or auntie of mine. My father always had to be surrounded by people. My father was the person my world has always revolved around. I suppose for many others it was the same.
While my parents had a marriage where he didn’t value her, my father would spend his life wishing he’d done what he could to keep my mother’s company. She was special, unlike many other foolish girls willing to run away with a man who was old enough to be her father. No, my mother had ambitions, the sort age or poverty wouldn’t restrict her from. I think he knew that. I think he regretted thinking what made her special would make her stay.
God, when I think of my father, so many things come to mind. The sound of Natives at a pow wow singing, the smell of fry bread, offering part of only the best food to the creator, the sting of his anger, the uncertainty a movement would set him off, the strange ability for his smile and love to ease over the abuse, the longing for his approval. My brother, sister, and I all had different experiences with him despite having grown up in the same house at the same time. Something about him made such a deep impression, a man determine to be remembered.
I tell my grandmother, one of the many left behind in his sudden passing, he was too big for this world. Sometimes I say it simply to comfort her, most of the time I feel as if I mean it. While his small minded, tyrannical mind was the sort that would surely be cancelled in today’s culture – and for good reason – I still find myself wondering if I had done the right thing by cutting myself off from him for over a decade when, of all my siblings, I may have been the only one that truly knew him.
My favorite memories of my father come in two bits. You see, growing up on a hill in the middle of nowhere, my father and I had a very close and yet complicated relationship early on. I was told all my life that my father had a daughter before me, one who died in her crib of SIDs. When I was a baby, as a result of his first passing, my dad would sleep by my bed every night just to be sure I was breathing. This was not one of my fond memories but something I think bonded me to him as I heard the story from everyone but him for my entire life. My dad knew how to tell a tall tale, often times making me question his experiences. As an adult I would appreciate this story as it hadn’t come from his mouth. Even later I would realize many stories were not lies but a Big Fish version of the true experiences my father had in his journey.
The first of these memories was one I still think about. Over the flashes of his attacks in my memories or the way he would bite his tongue when he was angry, even how his long hair would somehow grow wild with anger making him look like a buffalo. So many knew of him as Buffalo Hair because of this. There is this memory sitting in an old van with my father. He’s in the driver’s seat, me in the passenger, as I wait for the bus. My father, every morning before school, would tell me the story of Angie the Little Native Girl and the adventures she would go on.
It makes me sad I cannot remember one in particular, only that he would tell them. The part that caused me the most joy was not the story itself, but that he was telling it to me. My love for my father was so deep, he would leave for days on trips in the big truck and I’d bounce up and down waiting for him, waving my hands. This is my other fond memory of being a daddy’s girl. I miss it. These memories are how I became familiar with ignorance is bliss.
As an older sibling, I think this affected how I would treat my brother and sister. As they each grew older and were able to wait with me for the bus, my father took me less and less. Our bond broke the older they became. I felt like I was taken further from the man I saw as a hero.
I was a mean older sister. Part of this was about control. I had none in school, the poor half-Native kid who smelled of cigarettes and had a father half the town feared and half the town loved. My dad had that sort of reputation. It would travel with me like a dark shadow for most of my life causing more harm than good. I would have to leave the state entirely and make friends with strangers just to escape the shadow my father cast. Even then, traces of him would linger all around me.
As my siblings might recall, I helped raise them after things got bad. I don’t remember it that way. I remember never having done enough. I left when it was most important to stay, I fought for help when it was most dangerous for us to speak up. I don’t think I did enough. I was young, I was finding myself. I’m still not sure if it was the right thing, but the fact they still love me means I might have done just the bare minimum to have been a good sister.
All my life my father was a giant. He was so big, so much bigger than anyone in the world. My father was a mountain. Sometimes that was terrifying. Somethings it was beautiful. To see him so small and gray, his kin yellow and his eyes lost tore me apart. It does to this day. They didn’t see me. I regret that I didn’t get to see his beautiful hazel eyes before they no longer could see me. I’m not a person of faith, I don’t think he watches me no matter how badly my father wanted the creator to hold me in his absence. He was so small, his hair and eyes gray. His hair was short when it had been long all my life. I didn’t know him and yet I knew exactly who he was as I walked into that room.
It was the first time in over a decade I’d seen him with my own two eyes. It was the first time I hadn’t wished for his death in over a decade. Now, on the second Father’s Day after his passing, no matter the pain he caused I wonder if I was wrong for separating myself from him and allowing him to leave without an apology he didn’t deserve. I regret waiting for him to do the right thing and reach out to me and say sorry knowing he never would. Was I wrong?
It’s not the sort of question I can ask people. Everyone has an opinion and I happen to be the sort of person that doesn’t give a shit about other’s opinions. Some think I should have, that forgiveness is the key. Other’s like to coddle me and reassure me it was for my own health I didn’t walk back into his life. Neither answer is the right answer. Neither answer can take me back just two years from this point so that I can change my own answer and stop him from self-destructing. I thought I would be relieved when the shadow he cast was gone. I didn’t realize the hope that lived in the potential for an apology would die just like his body leaving me without resolution, just questions that would go unanswered eternally.
Growing up in the house on the hill with that man was a time in my life I’ll never get over. It was like we lived in a different world. That world isn’t real, not anymore. I am thirty-three years old and only lived there for 12 years. It’s like I’ve been floating through life waiting for the ride that takes me back there where my two small siblings play in the sand, my father stands at the edge of the hill looking over the plains and tells me stories of where our ancestors once roamed, how offerings to the creator bring good fortune, and he, like the mountains that engulfed us, was an immovable object.
*all photos provided by the writer
