Deconstructing My Father – Part Nine
Deconstructing My Father is a linear narrative about a weird point in my life – late 2018 / early 2019 (I’m not entirely sure) – where my estranged father developed dementia and I had to take over running his life and the lives of both of my little brothers. I started documenting it in a weird journal using pseudonyms for my brothers and family. It was probably the most stressful time of my life.
You should probably start with part one if you want this to make any sort of sense.
Stuck In One Place
“It’s the wrong god damned key,” I tell the manager of the storage unit, “it doesn’t fit the lock.”
“I can’t cut it off without talking to my boss.”
I was searching through a box of mail in my father’s living room when I found an envelope labeled “Storage unit gate card and key”. It was happenstance. Luck.
If my life was an actual movie, like I’ve often thought it is, this would be the inciting incident. The finding of One-Eyed Willie’s map. Discovering that vampires are real. Seeing the delorean for the first time.
I will openly admit that my brain is a batch of bad wiring formed around a nucleus of tightly wound pop-culture. Movies, music and comic books have been my coping mechanism for decades. I sometimes watch the same movies over and over again because they are like comfort food to me. Like a visit from an old friend.
Seeing the bill for the storage unit was like Chekov’s gun.
Finding the keys was like slowly placing rounds into the chamber. Then setting it on the mantle and just waiting for things to play out.
I feel like now may be an appropriate time to provide some background on my father. To set the stage, if you will.
My stepmother, DeeJay, was my father’s fifth wife. My third step-mom.
Wife One: Vietnam. She was Vietnamese and killed in a train bombing – according to the stories I’ve been told.
Wife Two: My mother. We’re not talking about her. One childhood trauma at a time.
Wife Three: Karen. I don’t remember much about her but when my mother went into labor – my father was at her house.
Wife Four: Virginia. If ever a Disney branded evil step-mother came to life…my father married her. This was the woman he was married to when I, at ten, requested visitation with my father. She, and her children, are the reason I requested that visitation be stopped.
At one point everything my father owned could be packed up and moved in the back of his truck in one night.
Wife Five: DeeJay. She was probably the best, most stabilizing, positive force that my father encountered.
It should come as no surprise, then, that when she died in January of 2007 my father was in a bad way. DeeJay had been the productive and driving force in his life. She got him to go dancing, work out, be sociable. With her gone there was no more safety net. He pulled through for a few key moments of the year; her funeral. My wedding.
In January of 2007, when their mother died, my brothers were 11 and 7. They were both ring bearers in our wedding.
By 2008, despite all of my step-mom’s positive influence, my father began to stagnate. To freeze his life in a time where things made sense.
And there he stayed. For him nothing grew beyond that year.
Ryan, Patrick and I scoured the house. Our treasure hunt to find all of dad’s keys. God only knows how many mystery boxes we were going to encounter. We put every key we could find into a ziplock bag, which went into the backpack that I’ve started carrying for dad stuff.
My DadBag.
As Patrick headed off to work Ryan and I headed towards the storage unit.
I’m not sure what Ryan was expecting; but I was hoping for a satisfying answer to my ‘80s adventure movie. Maybe a treasure trove of family gold. A map to classified documents revealing the reason our father had been to Area 51 (yes, that’s real). An explanation for why a man who clearly never wanted children had three that he ended up despising.
There were no answers. Just…a time capsule of the period of my father’s life that he couldn’t let go.
A spare hood to the Mustang.
The dining set that my stepmom owned when they moved into the house, in 1994. A Dining set that, even if she were alive, she would say is far beyond dated and time to retire.
The racks and bins that held my brother’s toys, in the living room, when they were still young enough for that to be a concern.
The remnants of an ikea like breakfast nook that he and I built.
Just junk; but junk that he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of. Just in case, I guess, time is cyclical and it all comes back around again. This time with a better outcome for him.
My father has been paying to store what is, essentially, trash, for eleven years. At the cost of almost $64 dollars a month.
I was hoping for something more. Something less…sad.
