I Choose Life
I Choose Life
If the glass upon which we’re standing is so thin that one step towards truth means it will shatter beneath us, then I’d rather fall.
A few years ago, in an effort to free myself from a quiet and viscous anger, I made peace with who my father is. It no longer made any sense that I would white knuckle this idea of him as he should have been and hold against him his inability to be that. He had done what’s required of a father: I had a roof over my head, I was never hungry and I look both ways before crossing the street. He didn’t give me a role model nor the faintest idea of what to expect from the world, but there would be other men eager to forcibly fill those gaps. What he set out to do he achieved, and there is some honour in that, some respect conferred. Our relationship is better than ever because I have allowed him precisely the space he has earned in my life.
What I did not realise as part of that peacemaking process, a process that hasn’t required anything of him, was that I would be plugging my ears to the screaming within me, warning me to pay attention to how his behaviour and mine overlap. Because my poison is different, wrapped in the pseudo-glamour of a gay man’s life, in the elegance of penthouses and preening among the clouds, I didn’t think too long or too hard about how I learned to cope by watching him. By making peace with who he is, with a shrug and a puff, I disavowed myself of any responsibility to be different than him. I can’t be him as long as I don’t do what he did, but the circumstances surrounding suicide don’t stop it from being one. Our relationship could be better than ever because I accepted our imbricated fates.
I used to take some comfort in reminding myself that he will be his own man. His drinking has nothing to do with me; it is not from me he’s trying to escape, and so what can I do but step back and watch him drown to death? In some way, I admired—and have attempted to replicate—the steadfastness of his commitment to himself and his pain. I aspired to the distance he puts between himself and everyone else, and so I placed an equitable space between him and me, thousands of miles in both distance and expectation.
But even in my escape, I’m tethered to him. His pain and his smell are wrapped up in the arms and sheets of other men. It’s in their bedrooms the morning after the night before, when the smell of our bodies processing the poison of escape hangs in the air, our bodies wheezing and gasping as they pursue a devotion to living to which we’ve explicitly numbed ourselves. As the weight of their bodies and their pain presses into me, deep in a slumber I hope they don’t wake up from before I leave, the rubber band of futile distance-making snaps me back to Saturday mornings standing in my football gear at the side of my father’s piss-soaked bed, trying to wake him up. You promised! To learn, at eight, that it’s pointless, that the kitchen would catch on fire and the fire department would arrive before he woke up, that the terror of his children trying to cook for themselves could not stir him to any action, is a hard truth to bear. One that’s best sunken, best forgotten. I’ve learned the hard way: that type of heartbreak doesn’t go away.
My pain isn’t mine alone; it can’t be. The roar of my disappointment is a brontide from an earlier disaster: my father’s world upended by my grandfather, his own shattered heart crashing down around him. Perhaps that’s a compassion I need to bear. Perhaps I should create space around my own pain to leave some room for his. Perhaps try harder to understand that he did what he could with what he had—that it wasn’t much, but that it was something. It would still require nothing of my father, the backbreaking work of moving these boulders left to me. I’m left wondering if I could have been a better child, a more lovable child. More exciting and magnetic, less forgettable. Something worth choosing. An entertaining child, a humorous child, a child that elicits awe, a prodigal son, an ambitious man, a compelling man—all things I’ve tried to be for a man who can’t see me for his own blindness to himself.
But what right do I have to lament my relationship with my father, to write about him? What right do I have to cast these skeletons tumbling and clacking out into the open? He wasn’t physically absent, didn’t beat me and didn’t kick me out of the house when I came out. Yes, there is a litany of Things He Should Have Done and Didn’t, listed ad absurdum in journals and poems and scribblings, but don’t all fathers let their sons down in some way? Have I not been birthed into a world that breeds men to disappoint? Even here, in this space, rifling through the detritus, trying to make sense of the mess he helped make, I’m inserting caveats for fear of repercussions—putting words and reasons and excuses in a mouth long sewn shut, wedging in compassion to lesson his pain at the expense of my relief. If the glass upon which we’re standing, immobile, is so thin that one step towards truth means it will shatter beneath us, then I’d rather fall. In any case, I haven’t much need for a fear of falling; his death will ensure I do.
That inevitable fall stalks me in my dreams: a helpless child, tears streaming down my face, clasped on the back of my father as he marches into a shit-brown mass of beer and boxed red wine. I cry out, but I make no sound. The deafening wind of his pain—of defeat—is too loud to hear mine, and we’re submerged now anyway.
As my body flops back awake and I lay staring at the ceiling, I realise that to mourn the death of my father, to watch him die while killing myself, would be to mourn the wrong death. Who dies in that dream is the boy clasped on the back of the man who forgot he was there, the boy who drowns because he was sure his father would save him. The boy who, after everything, still believes in the sanctity of fatherhood, who believes his father will change his mind. The boy who believes that when it truly matters, when death is rushing down his throat, his father will instead choose him.
I’m not sure what my life will sound like without the cacophony of his bottles crashing down around me, but I will soon know. If this is what he’s choosing, then let that choice be his alone. Let my choices propel me from his shoulders and to the surface. As I dry out on the shore, watching my father drown in an ocean he filled, I say over and over to myself: I choose life.
I choose life.
I choose life.
I choose life.
I write about his death to interrupt mine, to sever the bond, to free the boy.
I write about this pain to save myself, to choose my life over his secrets, to breathe when he refuses to.
I write to remind myself the next time I want to drown: I’ve made a promise to a little boy that I intend to fucking keep.
I Choose Life is complemented by Tasting Notes, which surfaced a number of years later. Part of me must have felt that I Choose Life is unfair in some way—that it does not allow my father his own glory or that it betrays my devotion to his aliveness. When I experience them together, I feel a sense of completeness, even as each stands complete on its own. A mirror, then, to me and my father, to you and yours, to me and you.
