Ghosts

readtime ~18min

Most of my problems come from being an Irish Catholic. Being an Irish Catholic means that you’re dealt a specific set of cards at birth, and it isn’t the kind of hand you’d go all in on. One card guarantees you have an overwhelmingly limited emotional capacity, which amounts to a free pass when it comes to dealing with anything or anyone on an emotional level. When confronted with a problem, if you’re Irish, you can ignore it and people will pretty much look the other way. I think my grandfather maxed out on what he could feel as a person by the age of 11, and the apple doesn’t tend to fall too far from the tree.
If there’s anything I’ve learned about Americans, it’s that they deal with most of their problems with escapism usually in the form of television or a chemical inebriant. And it must be the luck of the Irish that I was born here in the States. It’s the part of me that was raised American that is dependent on escapism as a coping mechanism, and it’s the Irish Catholic part of me takes that and runs with it. See, part of your identity is reliant on how much you can drink in a single sitting while watching a sports game. And if you’re a Mick from New England you love the Red Sox more than you love the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit combined. I’ve found this belief to be both truer and more wonderful the older I’ve become; praise the Lord!
My dad couldn’t have been more of a stereotype if he tried. He had this thing he would do where he would come home, drink, and then proceed to watch sports for hours without acknowledging the existence of anyone else. He feared intimacy in a way he probably wouldn’t ever be willing to articulate, and he built walls around himself so high that the only person who could see over them was my mother if she stood on her metaphorical toes. I used to say that my father was a piece of furniture that came with the house when we bought it. My mom found this to be humorous. My father did not.
My dad wasn’t a bad guy. He just wasn’t interested in being a parent. Being a dad who was willing to teach his kids about things just didn’t compute. It wasn’t in his coding. He believed that his fatherly duties began and ended with paying for groceries and the mortgage, and he may have smacked me from time to time for reasons I can’t say were unreasonable. The guy certainly wasn’t in the running for any Father of the Year awards, but he was my father, and he was there ⎼⎼until he wasn’t⎼⎼ and I loved him for that.
Right now I’m sitting in my father’s office thinking on a memory I can barely remember. The calendar reads August 17th, 2012, and my mother is away on vacation. There’s a faint hum of passing cars as they drift off into the night to unknown destinations. The illumination of the television is the only light in our world. A sportscaster informs us that the Red Sox lead the Cubs by two runs here at the bottom of the eighth. We sip scotch on the rocks and smoke indoors. I mirror his posture. Shoes on, feet kicked up resting on the coffee table, we kiss flaming cigarettes, and let thoughts wander to the rhythm of the game. Here, time is irrelevant. Everything and nothing is temporary. Spectral streams of smoke twist and bend in the light as they dissolve into thin clouds making us appear as ghosts.
The tip of his cigarette is a glowing charcoal he offers to the ashtray. He washes smoke down with a drink.
“Hey kid. I want to ask you something,” he says.
“Then ask.”
“You’ll think I’m mad.”
“I already think you’re mad,” I reply.
“Fair enough.” He takes a drag, and caches the ash. “What do you think of the past?”
“What do you mean?
“The past. Your own history. What do you think of it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Not drunk enough.”
“That’s a shame.”
“It is,” he said. “What are your thoughts on the matter? You know, specifically.”
“I don’t know, Dad. What do you want me to say? The past is the past. It’s part of who you are, I guess, and I think sometimes people have a hard time remembering it’s not the present.” I breathe smoke out one side of my mouth. “Hey the Yankees are going to be in town in a couple of weeks. We should see if we can’t get tickets.”
He nods and lets the words pass through either ear.
“Do you think you can change it?” He asks.
“What?”
“The past.”
“We’re still talking about that? Well, no. That’s part of it. Can’t change what’s already taken place. We have a word for it; it’s called history. Now finish your drink.”
My pops stares into his glass like a crystal ball, then finishes what’s inside.
I pour him another.
“Yeah, I figured as much. It’s just after my father passed that meant I was next in line. The world looks a lot different once you’re forced to look at it that way. You wish you could have made better choices, said certain things.”
“We all do. It’s the ninth inning, pops.”
“I know I can’t change a thing. I know that. It’s just sometimes I wish I could. Is that bad? I mean, I know it’s impossible, but people are wishing for impossible things all the time aren’t they?”
“Not me. I’m going to live forever. You and me both. Cheers.”
We touch glasses, and swallow what’s inside.
When you’re Irish you learn not to wince.
“Hey kid,” He says.
“Yeah?”
“I like watching these games with you.”
“That’s it,” I say, “I’m cutting you off.”
We watch the rest of the game without saying a word.

The next day I flew coach back to my studio apartment in Illinois. I was going to school at the University of Chicago at the time. I waited tables, consumed shameful amounts alcohol and ingested of a wide array of chemicals. For a while life was more or less one long hangover.
The following spring I received a call from my mother who told me that my dad was driving home from work when he guided his car into the oncoming lane, and then the center divider at 70 miles per hour. I caught a plane back to Boston early the following morning.
Up until that point Alzheimers was just a name to me. A harrowing abstract idea of an illness whose claim to fame was memory loss. That was where my knowledge began and ended. I understood what it meant on an intellectual level, but I don’t think anyone who hasn’t experienced it could be prepared to handle it on an emotional one.
What I learned about Alzheimer's is that it starts with the small things. Short term lapses in memory that happen to all of us, but on a much more frequent basis. His phone, keys, wallet, and other small, but important items were lost with increasing frequency. He’d forget the day of the week or show up to work on holidays. I stayed in Boston as long as I could, but once school started up again it was necessary for me to leave.
I said goodbye to my father, and then said goodbye to him again.
When I returned to Chicago I was in a constant state of psychic pain that I couldn’t express to anyone. There was guilt associated with leaving my mom alone with him. When someone you love gets sick there’s a naive part of you that believes there must be a magic pill to make it all better. And of course, there wasn’t. So I dealt with the pain the only way I knew how: I drank. When that didn’t work, I tried dulling it with magic pills.
Almost an entire season passed before I made it back to Massachusetts. My mom had it bad in my absence. Taking care of my dad had turned into a full time job. She worked long hours and weekends. She looked older, more disengaged, but she was happy to have me home, and perhaps even happier to have someone to share the responsibilities of caring for my father with.
She brought me inside to introduce me to my dad.
The Alzheimer's had seized his brain like the venom of a poisonous snake. It spread its toxins in lethal doses and launched the armadas of his brain against him. Every day was a clone of the day before. It drove me mad. The routine of it all, living each day with this man who raised me and didn’t know my name. We hadn’t lost him, but it felt like we had. I couldn’t or didn’t know how to handle it. And so I drank. I then I drank some more.
As the disease progressed, so did my father’s more reclusive tendencies. My grandfather was an inventor or sorts, and he passed this trait on to his son. My dad would spend hours in his office tinkering with different projects that he wouldn’t allow anyone to see, and because we saw it as a productive way to spend his time we didn’t ask any questions.
I left again, and stayed up north until it was time to come back for the holidays. By that point he was unrecognizable. Watching him was like watching a defective, Irish robot do a really bad impersonation of what he used to be like. No part of him was the same.
On Christmas we talked him into joining us for dinner. Parts of it weren’t so bad. There were even fragments of moments where he almost seemed like himself.
At night, I watched the snow fall out my old bedroom window. There was something hypnotic about it. I like the snow and the change in season it represents. It reminds me of Christmas as a child. Waking my parents up early to open presents, checking stockings, and inspecting a plate with the crumbs of cookies my Dad had devoured in the name of Santa Claus.
Inside was warm, and I liked that too. There’s a strange sense of comfort that accompanies feeling the opposite of whatever the weather tells you you’re supposed to be feeling.
Covers were ripped away from my body. The curtains were split open flooding the room with the radiant light.
“Get up. Now!” My mother said.
“What are you doing?” I asked rubbing sleep from my eyes. I glanced at a clock that read: 5:45 am.
“Your father. He’s gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean gone? Have you checked the backyard?” I rolled out of bed, and slipped into yesterday’s pants.
“Of course I checked the backyard. Get your coat and meet me outside,” she said before bolting out the front door. I gathered my coat and followed her out.
We searched for hours, scouring the city for any trace of him. My mom remained optimistic and made desperate phone calls to friends to enlist their help. I prayed to be wrong.
Our search came to an end when we received a call from Tufts Medical Center. They told us that he had arrived there in an ambulance. Someone had called 911 and reported a half frozen man wandering around the Boston Commons in his pajamas. The same man would die of hypothermia before we could make it to the hospital. The nurse who had tended to him would later explain to us that he was out there looking for his son.
On the day of his funeral it was cold. I said some words, we buried him beneath an Alder tree, and then we all went home. And that’s all I really want to say about the matter.
I stuck around for a couple weeks into the spring semester, because I couldn’t bring myself to leave my mother alone. Even though, to some degree, she had seen it coming, she wasn’t prepared for everything to happen in the way that it did. He had no will, so I helped her disperse what few things he had to the few people he cared about. We cleaned out his closet and his things from the garage. All that was left was what remained in the office, which was, of course, the most difficult room to clean because it was the only room that belonged strictly to him. To us, cleaning it meant admitting that he was gone, and my mom and I just weren’t ready to come to terms with the reality of life without him.
Inside the office could only be described as immaculately organized chaos. The walls of the room were concealed by layers of handwritten notes. Leaning towers of notebooks were stacked into fragile columns that leaned against each other to stay upright. Polaroid photographs hung from thumb tacks pinned to the drywall, with names scribbled under the portraits in bright red marker. His office had been remodeled into a museum of memories he didn’t know belonged to him.
Everything was organized in a curved square around a single invention at the center of the room: a chair that looked like the bastard child of a recliner and a torture device. A coil in the back of the chair funneled into a brass headpiece that hovered over the seat. Heart monitors that dangled from the helmet like Christmas ornaments were plugged into a pair of silver goggles. It was ominous, and yet there was something about it at that called to be explored.
I went downstairs and had myself a drink. And then I had another, before deciding to take the bottle with me.
The leather had been made delicate from years of use. It was weathered and soft, and it contoured to the shape of my figure as I reclined into the seat. The bottle called to me to be poured, and I answered accordingly.
“This one’s for you,” I said, maybe to no one. It went down smooth.
The apparatus loomed over me. I pulled it down, and felt it swallow my head. My fingers worked the buttons of my shirt open and attached the heart monitors. The goggles squeezed my temples.
I sat and waited for a long time. Waited for nothing to happen.
I let my thoughts wander back to a time I can barely remember.
Ten flaming candles in a cake tell you it’s a special kind of day. Wax drips and slithers in neon pink and green spheres down the face of the candle forming translucent puddles where the wick plunges down into the cake. Children form a loose wheel around the table. Juveniles, mostly boys, the same age as me. They sing, with smiles full of holes, a song so obvious it doesn’t need to be named.
Mom places the cake down in front of me, the boy at the head of the table. She says make a wish. I close my eyes and wish for superpowers. When I blow out the candles, I spit more than I blow. My mom leans over a corner of the table and cuts the cake into a grid. She’s here. Right now before me. Wisps of renegade hair from the edges of her temples stretch away from her skull, and float motionless in time. I breathe in and can smell the floral scent of her perfume braiding with the warm stale smell of bodies packed in a crowded room.
A small itch forms on the bridge of my nose, and I use a nail to scratch it. I consider my hand. Feel the weight of my own body. A rush of consciousness, a sudden snap back to reality in that same instantaneous surge of energy you experience after falling asleep while sitting up a bit too straight. Breathing becomes manual. My tongue feels too big for my mouth.
I see it.
There. Hanging in the air, arriving on a granite colored ribbon that withers in the breeze, the scent of burning hay. I follow its jet stream out into the living room. There’s a woman on the couch with deep cracks in her skin who looks like she’s been there since the dawn of creation. Beside her are men. Hairy men. Fathers equipped with swollen bellies, cherried cigarettes, dirty jeans and running shoes. They sip black ale in clear glasses, nurse smokes, and look over their shoulders before saying words like fuck.
At the edge of the sofa I see my father. He does not participate in the gossip. His attention belongs to the television. A navy cap stitched with a pair of twin red and white socks rests on his head. He cheers faithfully in silence.
A young boy, who I recognize as myself, rushes up to the man and commits the cardinal sin of telling someone his birthday wish. My dad laughs, removes his cap, and places it on the kid’s head.
“Come with me,” He says.
We follow our father down the hall.
On the walls are sepia toned photos. Captured moments. Relics of a forgotten place in time. My dad pushes over the door and leads me into his bedroom.
My 10-year-old self sits on the edge of the bed. His feet swing off the sides and dangle above the carpet like fragile necklaces.
I kneel down in front of myself, stare into his eyes and long to trade places. To be invited back into his secret world. His reality, a vaguely familiar dreamstate called childhood where problems are solvable and a sense of purpose and meaning are insignificant.
I want to linger here forever.
What I want, is to live infinitely in beautiful moments.
My dad launches clothes and the misplaced contents of his closet into the air as he excavates his wardrobe until he finds the treasure: An ancient bottle of Irish scotch.
“Here we go,” he says. He calls him kid, then tells him to get two glasses. He says if my mom asks he has his permission to lie.
The kid leaves the room and returns with the glasses. My dad pours a half inch pool in each glass. Swirls it. Inhales the aroma. Without words he instruct the kid to do the same.
I watch my younger me twirl the glass, and breathe in what’s inside. What he smells I smell. A harsh scent of smoked vanilla roasted inside of a barrel. Even then, it reminded me of home.
“Happy birthday, kid. One day you’ll be as old as me,” He says. “You’re probably, not ready for this, but I sure as hell am. Been counting down the days since you were born.”
The kid smells the drink again. My dad and I smile. The kid winces.
“I just figure if it’s gotta happen at some point, might as well happen with me first.” He lowers it to the kid. Remnants of the drink, a liquid tree sap, cling to the walls of the glass, and cascade down to the base of the drink. They touch glasses and before disposing of the liquid inside he stops.
“Son,” He says. “Please. Be better than me, okay?”
They drink. The fluid becomes a liquid fire, scorching it’s way down inside of me.
The kid shudders. He tries to act tough and almost succeeds.
My dad laughs.
“Go get a coke.” He says, and pats him off towards the kitchen.
The kid leaves. We both watch him go.
My dad lowers himself to the bed. Fingers spread apart, and pincer back together working to wipe away something in the corner of his eyes.
I miss him. It’s one of those things you couldn’t help if you tried.
Because even when I don’t, I still do.
Here he is. Both living and dead. Alone and not alone. Where I am now is where I want to be.
Fingers shrink the space between us. Stretched out, vibrating, tendrils of flesh that creep closer to the fabric of his shirt.
Closer.
In him I see a reflection of myself.
Here. This is eternal. Because whatever happened, happened.
There’s comfort in surrendering all hope that the past will improve. Because what we choose to love will never be as perfect as we long for it to be.
A descending sun radiates stripes of light through the blinds forming vague halos on the wall.
Closer.
Until I’m hovering over him. His hair a tangled forest of salt and pepper vines. My body follows my arms, lunging forward, closer to the man who put me here, as I attempt to draw him in for a final embrace.
Closer.
Lungs vacuumed air back into my lungs. I collapsed from the chair, soaked in sweat, a drowning man choking in air.
I’m here. Back to where I was.
Back to where you are.
I dust myself off. Listen to the sound of my heart beating..
I consider my hand. Feel the weight of my own body.
The bottle calls to me, and I answer accordingly. I sink back into the chair, and let my mind wander back to a place I barely remember.
Right now I’m sitting in my father’s office thinking on memory I can barely remember. The calendar reads August 17th, 2012, and my mother is away on vacation. There’s a faint hum of passing cars as they drift off into the night to unknown destinations. The illumination of the television is the only light our world. A sportscaster informs us that the Red Sox lead the Cubs by two runs, here, at the bottom of the eighth. We sip scotch on the rocks and smoke indoors. I mirror his posture. Shoes on, feet kicked up resting on the coffee table we kiss flaming cigarettes, and let thoughts wander to the rhythm of the game. Here time is irrelevant. Everything and nothing is temporary. Spectral streams of smoke twist and bend in the light as they dissolve into thin clouds making us appear as ghosts.

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