I Demand a Recount.

Guys, guys, guys! My birthday is coming up. It's a big one and, as usual, I haven't made any plans. Story of my life. No plans.

I mean, there are a couple of big ones I'm working on. Moving back to Philly being the main plan right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been here before. 2 years ago. I think it's all about Wawa. But I've updated my resume (last week), made an application on Penn's website (this week), maybe next week I'll actually start applying for jobs. Five months isn't a long time. You get used to living in PGH and it's hard to get out... you get lazy and used to paying your bills.

But I'm getting old. And I know it's overly dramatic but the other day I literally wrote that if I don't get out of here soon it's going to be a death sentence. I can't die here. I have better things to do.

I'm in a panic about bringing it up to my boss, though, because he's an old man who has told me and everyone else repeatedly that I can't leave him because his dead wife sent me to him and if I leave her ghost will haunt me. He says this. I think he's only half joking. But the thing is, I could really use his help with finding a job. GRR!

And I know I'm kind of PMS-y right now. And I have to pay taxes, another reason Pittsburgh has been fucked up. We've never owed money until we came here. Trying to find a job stresses me the fuck out. Our clothes dryer stopped working. I'm blaming Heather and all the weird shit she puts in there like boots and stuffed animals. No one's called about it being broken, though. Why would we? My birthday, needing a haircut, grocery shopping, driving to Philly at the end of the month, all these things are stressing me out. And I'm tired, very, very tired. Don't even get me started on the drinking, or rather the trying not to drink and the cake and the McDonald's, potato chips...

Yet I'm feeling strangely optimistic right now.

I know. 

I've been wanting to get back into this nonsense for a couple of weeks now. The problem is I don't know how to begin. It's not that I don't have anything to say, I'm just shy about it. So maybe I won't advertise.

I don't feel like there's much going on. I just came back from New Orleans a week ago. Thanksgiving is coming up very soon. But I've never written much about daily life unless I can make it at least seem amusing. Like a year ago when I was still new at my job and thought about lying on the floor of my office every afternoon. A lot has changed in a year. In that time I have toyed with talking to strangers on the interweb which proved to be a failure on almost every front with one, maybe two, meaningful exceptions.

In my experimentation I learned that people are just fucking weird. They're even weirder when they think they have the "protection" of the webz. Whereas I can just be "bleh!" and spew anything personal without care (a lesson hard-learned and hard-earned), other people are strangely closed off and impersonal but more than ecstatic to share their inane opinions. Or pictures of their cocks. But I want to know people, not opinions and not (particularly) the pictures and stories of the women they've fucked with the aforementioned cock. I wanted to know why you fucked them, what drives this compulsion to fuck them. But that's too real.  

And I think it's precisely because of my history, my past, that I want openness instead of secrets and mystery, light instead of darkness. Maybe it's because I like personalities more than opinions. What are your thoughts, your dreams, your fears, your fantasies? Your history? I dare you to shock me, surprise me. Tell me your story. Because we all have stories and they are usually full of disappointment and anger and hurt and betrayal. Because we are human. But because we are also barely removed from animals.

Your darkest secret, your darkest thought, isn't that dark, I swear. I know what it's like to want to hurt and be hurt and abuse and kill and destroy. (And to be someone else.) I know what it's like to try and one-up other people with tales of suicidality. And I also know about the boring aftermath. Of being locked up together playing card games and footsie under the table. Because it's truly rare to want to actually be dead. Self-preservation is a bitch of an instinct.

Oh, but what is this if not an opinion piece?

Ay(e), there's the rub.

Taken from Fuck This Depression Blog

I want to share all these amazing things this girl has on her blog because they're also about me and maybe you.

Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I'm always missing someone or someplace or something, I'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing.   -Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

                                

"Beautiful Suicide"

It's strange how a Kanye West song can remind me of this:

Truthfully, it's not strange at all, he pretty much mentions it in the song.  I'm sorry the dl link there doesn't work any more, it's a good song.  If you like that kinda thing.  That photo, by Robert Wiles, is truly gorgeous.  It's from 1947 and I only first saw it in 2009.  Disappointing since it looks like something that was made for me.

Entries are going to be a little sporadic over the next few weeks while I jock out about the WORLD CUP.  Maybe you've heard of it.  It's one of my most favorite things in the WORLD.  I'm such a jock about it that one of the faculty members I've been working with gave me a copy of the New Yorker because it has an article about the England/US rivalry and Tim Howard which she wanted me to read and, inexplicably, a recent issue of France Football, which is all in French but has an article about the French national team.  I spent some time reading it this morning.  No, I don't generally claim to know French, I took a few years of it in high school but that's it.  It's day five and I haven't missed a match yet.

As for what's really going on, and to get back to that photo up there, let me just say that June is a bad month for me.  It's always been the month of the year that I think most about death, dying, and wanting to die.  It's the month when I "tried" to die when I was 16 (or was I 15? I don't recall, it was that profound...).  But a lot of people I know have "tried" to die at some point in their lives so it doesn't make me special.   

Another reason I may be sporadic is that when I start a depression cycle it comes on hard and it comes on fast, faster if I'm drinking too much, and I'm entering one of those cycles now.  Monday was a night of nothing is easy, nothing works right, everything's wrong.  At 9:25 I was in bed after I finally found a working, decent quality upload of True Blood around 8.  Then I took a shower and climbed into bed, hoping to retreat into the Henry Darger-esque saga I've been writing for the past 10 years.  Wiki that.

Another reason I may become sporadic is that, as with most things in my life, this will (has already begun to) become like a chore to me, this blog.  Anything that initially excites me, soon, very soon, begins to bore me.  I remember being so angry at my sister when she called me "fickle" when I was 17 years old.  But she was right.  I was then and I am now.  And I get bored so easily or lose interest in things or people (maybe you), jobs, eating right, exercise...  Then I found $5 and  I had a dream and you were in it...

And did you ever notice that summer is never idyllic anymore?  It definitely isn't here, where I live.  It's like summer isn't even an event here as far as I can tell.  I remember having fun summers, I swear.  But I could be making that up.  BTW, Lily Dale opens for the season on 25 June.  Mike, Jeanne, I'm looking at you...   

I'd like to thank the people who have told me in person that they read this blog.  I appreciate it mightily.  You may also feel free to comment here once in a while if the spirit moves you.

C'mon England!  But if not England then Germany... or Brazil!  WORLD CUP 2010!!!

"He did pass away." Pt. III

The thrilling conclusion of the 3-part series "He did pass away."  If it feels a little rushed that's because it is.  I just need to be done with it right now.   

Thursday morning my niece Jessica and I drove out to the house on Fell Road.  My father had literally been dying in there over the previous weekend and so there was an unpleasant odor throughout the house.  My brothers, brother-in-law, and nephews had already loaded up the mattress from his bed and the carpet from the bedroom and taken it away along with some of the other furniture.  The house had been disinfected days ago but the smell still lingered.  There were 13 adults moving around in this small one-story house so while it did take the majority of the day it really didn't take all that long to clean everything out.  Most of the things in the house were not worth much so a lot ended up being sent to the dump.  Dan, one of my nephews from Virginia, climbed up into the attic with me to bring down the few boxes that were still up there.  Most of my mother's glassware collection that had been up there was already gone, my sisters having taken it out last summer.

I don't know what they did with all of it, and I don't care, I was just glad it wasn't still there.  For some reason in her later life my mother became obsessed with collectible glass and then proceeded to buy so much of it, mostly at yard sales, that it filled the attic.  There were some xmas decorations and some boxes of my old toys.  Nothing good, a bunch of Cabbage Patch dolls and other junk toys that my 9-year-old niece Lexi and I dumped out on a bed in one of the spare rooms and went through.  I told her if there was anything she wanted she could take it.  She took a couple of things but we pretty much both decided that it looked like a bunch of trash and threw it away.  I generally am not one to be sentimental about objects but having said that I'm going to share an odd exception with you in a moment.  I ended up bagging up the Cabbage Patch and storing them in my sister's basement but when I looked at them again a couple weeks ago I told her I didn't want them and she could throw them out if she wanted.  

My family has never been wealthy, or even very financially comfortable.  Some of us live modestly out of necessity, some of us go the other direction people who were raised in a lower income family go and end up hoarding "treasures" from the dollar store.  But almost all of my siblings are tacky.  For some reason my taste in things tends to be a bit more...let's say, discerning, so some of the things my relatives were taking or deciding not to throw away were boggling my mind.  Near the end of the day I went into the bathroom and noticed that on the wall were these white plastic wall decorations (one of the things was holding fake flowers!) and a matching mirror.  I can't even find similar images of them online they're so tacky but let's say they were something akin to this:        

 

And these things had been hanging there since, like, we moved to that house in 1987.  So I grabbed all of these tacky monstrosities off the wall and shoved them in a trash bag and put it in the back of my brother's truck to be taken to the dump.  It was not the first time I had done that with something terribly ugly that day.  Later my sister asked me if I had taken, meaning to keep, the stuff off the bathroom wall and I just smiled and said, "Yup." 

I ended up with some useful things, like a paper shredder, a blood pressure machine thingy, a blender with a real glass container thingy, some other stuff... I claimed all the Pyrex bowls and quickly become annoyed when my oldest sister kept pointing out that they're "collectible."  Then there was the cast iron frying pan.  For years my sister Diane has had a claim on this frying pan which is really old and so it's well-seasoned, which is what you want in a cast iron pan.  Suddenly I was being asked if I wanted this frying pan, which I did, why not? but I was so perplexed by my sister suddenly not wanting something she had wanted so badly for years.  "I bought my own," was her response.  I brought my own as well, assuming I'd never see this one again.  And so it goes.  Now I have two.  Which I will rarely use.  

Speaking of lack of sentimentality: Much earlier in the day I had gone into the laundry room and found an old denim jacket that my father used to wear hanging on a hook next to his winter coat.  It's old and has paint spattered on it and what looks like dried blood in places and it's well-worn.  I found myself putting this jacket on and wearing it for the rest of the day.  I have it at home now and wear it out sometimes.  I find it hard to explain what attracted me to it in the first place or why I want to wear it.  I guess it's because even for all the pain he caused there were a few not so bad moments, too.  And he looked good in this jacket.  And after all, he used to be my daddy.  Listen to me, being a sentimental bastard.

A photo from the mid-80s in the kitchen of the Tony's Road house.

So the big deal of the night was that my father was buying us dinner.  Unfortunately it was at Shady Maple.  Prior to arriving I was super-stoked on going.  Even when I first got there I thought it was hilarious, probably because we were having a good time on the way.  Jessica was driving and I was in the passenger seat with Kenny and Brian in the back.  Brian was telling jokes and Kenny told a story about being arrested at the beach and we were all yelling about "Maple Shady!"  Chris refused to go even though it was free food.  Now I totally understand why.  He had been there before and believe me, once is enough for "Maple Shady."  You walk into this place and it's all fake fancy and huge, it's exactly like a casino except there are no table games or slot machines, just a buffet and a gift shop.  I made the joke but I'm not sure anyone in my family's ever been to a casino so it was greeted with silence.  We were escorted down this long hallway, all 19 of us, and given two tables in a banquet room.  The buffet is in its own huge room and runs for...a while (see the photos in the link) before it repeats on the other side.  It was awful.  There was this thing called "filling" which I kept being told was a bread stuffing but it just looked like a brown shape.  And there were the most massive fried chicken legs I've ever seen.  Then I watched in horror as almost every member of my family ate one of these genetically modified, hormone injected curiosities, including the small (the term is relative) children.  Even though I was eating meat at the time I just could not bring myself to touch those things!  They were that unnatural. 

After everyone had gorged themselves, myself included, we all had to wander around the gift shop downstairs for an interminable amount of time.  But that wasn't the end my friends!  No, there's another store to go to!  The Amish (Mennonite?) department store, Good's! which, whoo hoo, is open until 9!  So I guess that means we have to stay til 9?  It sure does!  (Was it only 9?  We must have gone to eat super early...)  At one point I looked around at those of us gathered out front waiting for the serious shoppers and saw Jessica, Kenny and Brian.  Holy Fuck, WHY ARE WE STILL HERE!  This is us!  We're not waiting for anyone!  Jessica, can we please go?!?!  No, we couldn't.  She wanted to say goodbye to my sister's family who were going back to Virginia the next day.  

Eventually we made it back home and to bed and the next day Chris drove me to the train station in Philly, almost taking the exit to the airport until I yelled, "No, TRAIN STATION!"  

I've pretty much come to the end of my story.  I've been dragging my feet on the ending most of the day because I just want to move on.  I will tell you that a disturbing side affect of this trip, and the one Allen and I made a couple weeks ago, has been that I think about moving back, a lot, not necessarily to Cecil County but at least in the general area.  This side of the state has yet to feel like home and I doubt it ever will.  And I'm jealous of what my family has, their jokes and their camaraderie, but I also know that it wouldn't be the same if I saw them every day.  It wouldn't be as funny.  I can see that from listening to the things Chris tells me, he's still too close to it.  I know that time and distance have changed the way I feel about my family and I am grateful for that because it allows me to love them better.  I guess the moral of this story is that [insert cliche about family]...       

By the way, when Allen and I were there last they asked if we wanted to have dinner at Maple Shady.  We declined.               

The quote that is the title of this 3 part series comes directly from the voice mail message Jessica left me when she called to tell me that my father had died. 

[Bonus Material: I asked Chris to sent me any thoughts he had regarding my behavior that week and this was his oddly flattering reply, I doubt I said anything even remotely this eloquent and I hope he won't mind that I'm allowing all of you to read this.]

What I remember most from January was your prediction about our family's behavior at the funeral.  You said that they wouldn't own up to the reality of your father's harsh behavior in the household - specifically his [...] toward your mother - and stated that you would prefer they accept that reality as to promote healing for a family without him rather than do the cutesy funeral thing as a rite of unfulfilled passage and perpetuation of a fairy tale as to fit the mould of some happy Norman Rockwell home.  Naturally, it all unfolded as you had divined.

I'm still glad he is dead but his ghost sort of just lingers in the periphery.

I also remember the funeral home.  You approached his casket and cried and shook like many normal people would.  You were one of the few who decided to grieve openly rather than pretend like everyone else.  One thing you kept saying was "He hurt mom."  Uncle David wanted to console you but he knew that he had accepted this a long time ago. [?]  There was a bit of bravery on his part.  It was eerily reminiscent of what had happened in 1993 just before you went to hospital. [Another story for another time, maybe.]

"He did pass away." Pt. II

Outside the funeral home, the WORST funeral home I've ever been to, where conveniently my mother's funeral is already planned and paid for, I met my 13 year old niece Mariah for the first time.  She's the daughter of my brother Tom, who is the longest hold out from the family implosion of 1993 (another long story).  She looks disturbingly like my ex sister-in-law except with blond hair and feels nothing like an actual member of my family.  She's not awkward and she goes to private school, pretty telling if you ask me.  I was later informed by my brother-in-law Charlie that Mariah's mother Paula has gotten ridiculously fat since I last saw her which pleased me to no end.  We then spent a long while standing outside while those who drove put the vehicles in order by oldest to youngest child at the request of a funeral home employee.  Why that was important I don't know.

Just as a bit of background, my parents have 8 living children, 4 boys and 4 girls.  This was the first time we've all been together since I don't know when.  At least the early 90s but maybe earlier.  And it was incredibly weird how we all just kind of slipped back into things being like they used to be.  I apparently am still the emotional and dramatic youngest child who fits in better with the younger kids, nieces and nephews, who are actually closer in age to me than any of my brothers and sisters.  Rick and Tom are jocks, Ken's the nerd, Janet plays the mom, etc. 

When I walked inside I couldn't go near the open casket at the front of the main room.  I went immediately to the side room and sat in a chair facing the opposite direction where I stayed most of the morning.  It seemed that I was the only one having a rough time with this.  Rick talked to me and was understanding of what I was feeling although I don't remember exactly what we said to each other.  Then Tom was sitting across from me and asking me inappropriate questions while I was visibly upset like, "So, what do you do?"  Are you fucking kidding me you strange person who I used to live with but haven't seen or spoken to in almost two decades?   

After a little while Chris and I went to find a coffee shop on Main St.  We talked as we walked and I felt significantly better being outside but when we came back I was told I couldn't take my coffee inside and I wanted to start screaming.  Janet appeared to be running things, standing by the body and receiving the...guests? visitors?  Then my nephew Dan was doing some sort of sermon and his wife, whom I had never met before yesterday, was singing some hymn, Rock of Ages or something.  I was getting angrier by the second and ended up walking outside, grabbing my coffee off the ledge near the front door and then slamming the door as I exited.  I stood around outside, realized the funeral home was right across the street from the very first place I ever went for psychiatric therapy when I was 14, got a little more angry and started sending Allen text messages about how fucking ridiculous all of this was.  I finished my coffee and went back inside only to realize that I was at a funeral home that didn't provide tissues for the bereaved.  I was forced to go into the bathroom and get some scratchy paper towels.  I went back to my seat off to the side and noticed that my mother's not crazy sister and brother had also sat over here, separating themselves from the fakery which I thought was very telling and it made me wonder how much they knew about what I knew about my father.  At some point, before my outrage took over, I said hello to my cousin Bob and aunt Emily.  They informed me very matter-of-factly that one of my other cousins, Brian, their brother and son respectively, had recently been killed in an auto accident of his own causing, telling me basically that it was for the best in his case.  Apparently he had drug and alcohol problems.  Well, then.

Eventually the service was over and only family was left.  Chris, who cleverly referred to himself as a "Paul" bearer (my father's name was Paul), offered to go up to view the body with me but I never did get too close.  I went as close as I could, which was still about ten feet away.  Standing there staring at this shell that represented so much anger and hatred and pain in my life...I just burst into tears again.  Then my oldest brother David put his arm around my shoulders and comforted me.  "He ruined her life!" I said to him.  As he should, he reminded me that she let him do it, she stayed with him.  While I don't 100% agree with this, it is ultimately true, she did stay with him for over 50 years to the detriment of EVERY ONE of her nine children...  So she's not entirely blameless.

    Last photo I have of my parents together.  This was taken the day Allen and I got married, September 20, 2002.

Soon his body was loaded into the hearse and we all drove to the grave site.  My brother-in-law Don delivered a surprisingly appropriate eulogy.  I think he said something about how some of us had sometimes wished for or dreamed of this day, how he had been a total asshole to his family.  Not in those exact words, obviously,  but he didn't shy away from the truth.  Afterwards, everyone wandered around for a bit, looking at other family graves: My brother Mike, that cousin who was killed in a tractor accident when he was like 12,  Uncle Emory, my father's parents and others.  Each of the daughters took a rose from the flower arrangement lying on top of the casket.  I didn't really want the rose, I just wanted to spit on that damn box.  I ending up throwing it away not long after, once we were at the church for the "wake."

Going to Pleasant Hill church was not what I had wanted to do or what I had planned on doing, Chris and I were supposed to go to lunch at the Howard House but he forgot to drive or something.  So there I was, at this church that had given me so much grief over the years.  Oh, look, it's Mrs. Kramer, who made me sing in front of everyone as a child (with a microphone!) when I knew perfectly well that I couldn't sing.  And there was that time that she made me and Sally Richarts play our flutes for the congregation.  She was a fucking nightmare task master, I definitely want to talk to her for longer than necessary.  There's Mr. Kramer, showing an appropriate lack of interest in both me and what's going on around him, thank christ for old men.  Here's someone named Brenda, remember her?  Um, oh, yes, of course.  I'd love to talk to her for an uncomfortable amount of minutes about her children who were significantly older than me who I didn't hang out with.

Finally the food was ready.  If you haven't heard me talk about it before, there are four food groups in Cecil County: Meat, Bread, Cake and Diet Soda.  I was actually eating meat at this point in time but I was still freaked out when I looked at the aluminum tray of grocery store fried chicken and saw an actual chicken feather.  On fried chicken.  So naturally I exclaimed, "There's a feather on that piece of fried chicken."  "That's not a feather," my sisters said indignantly as they tried to place it on my aunt Emily's plate.  So I removed the feather and, sticking in their face, simply said, "Look at it.  Feather."  Emily, who is pretty much blind, was grateful that she didn't end up eating a feather.  

My cousin Faye showed up at some point and was awesome and funny, cursing every once in a while.  I noticed for the first time that she has this weird facial tic, which once discovered was hard to stop watching.  Cousin Bob tried talking to me about buying a house and other adult things, he's not too much older than me but was obviously unaware that I'm not really an adult despite my appearance and so I just sorta smiled and nodded as well as I could until I could get away.  When everyone that was not immediate family had left, we had Charlie bring over the box with the hidden house cash in it and we counted it out into eight equal piles.  Then we took photos in the church proper, often waving our individual stacks of cash around.  It was glorious.  And probably for the best that I not publish the photos now that I think about it.  

When we got back to Janet's house later that evening my brother Ken was nearly in insulin shock from taking too much after his blood sugar went through the roof from eating too much so we had to get him some juice and more food.  He's like a genius computer nerd but obviously not so genius about his health.  Me, Janet, Ken, Diane and Charlie sat around talking.  I was able to get Janet to pay me for my train ride from Philly to Newark, DE.  I thought she had thrown a $10 bill in my bag.  Turned out to be a $50 from the petty cash stash.  I was pleased.  Ken had on a Cthulhu t-shirt without realizing it and I was shamed.  Chris and I were planning on going out later because I really needed a drink after all that happened that day.  I was so tired and Chris wanted to take me to some bar in Wilmington but we settled on something closer, Howard House in downtown Elkton.

We sat at the bar and had some drinks and talked about life, my shitty father, shitty friends.  The bartender was clearly ready to close up shop around midnight.  It was a Wednesday night in Elkton, after all.  We went back to Janet's and my nephew Kenny was still up.  I guess I was a little drunker than I thought, even though I'd only had two shots of whiskey and three beers at the bar.  I started going on about how it was all thanks to me that the younger kids had had it so much easier as teenagers.  I paved a path through hell so they could get away with so much more.  I found out recently that my nephews Kenny and Brian are somewhat legendary for their hacking and hijinks at Rising Sun High School.  My sister-in-law's stepson, a soon to be senior at the school, was in awe when I told him I was related to them.  I was so proud.  Then we talked about Sophia Lamar for a while before I absolutely had to get some sleep around 2am.  

The next day the family was going to clean out the house where I had lived off and on with my parents from ages 9-19.  Truckloads of stuff was sent to the dump.  The rest of us loaded up the stuff we wanted to take home with us.  Later that evening was the experience that's come to be referred to as Maple Shady.  It's like a casino where you can only access the buffet and the gift shop.  More on this and the conclusion coming soon in "He did pass away." Pt. III.   

"He did pass away." Pt. I

Since the majority of my relatives behave much like I do, with a general indifference to direct requests for action, I may never receive copies of the pictures I wanted from my father's wake.  I love saying "wake" in reference to my family.  Especially since they're mostly made up of Irish (hence the crazy) and when I think of the words "Irish" and "wake" together I imagine a rockin' good time.  Ha ha ha ha ha.  Yeah but no.  I'm just going to get on with the story.


My father passed away on Sunday, January 17, 2010.  He was 79.  My niece, aka the family whipping girl, called to tell me around 9:30 that evening.  She had been given the task of calling any and everyone who might need to know. 

At that point in time it was believed that it was a subdural hematoma that caused his death.  I think that still is the main cause of death but you can also get a number of speculative responses from my sisters.  Apparently he had fallen on Friday and had been bleeding since then.  But, you know, he had a doctor's appointment on Monday so it could wait, I suppose.  My cousin Wayne had been looking in on him pretty regularly since he had begun alienating his children again and my siblings who live in the area did not like to visit him often.  My mother, who has Alzheimer's, has had to be in a nursing home for a couple of years now so he was living alone.  Wayne found him that afternoon, actually bleeding, semi-conscious and asking for help.  The details are sketchy but I think Wayne called Rick (my brother) and one of them called 911.  He was taken to the hospital where he lasted a few hours and then passed away peacefully, commenting that he was too tired to stay awake any longer.  He had simply lost too much blood and his organs could not recover no matter how much they gave him.         

I hesitate to give too much back story, it would take much too long.  Let me just say that my father was not a good man to his family.  He did many, many bad things in his life but the worst part is that I, along with most of my brothers and sisters, realize that personality-wise he was a good-time guy, a lot of people liked him.  You just didn't want to be related to him or in a relationship with him.  He was also an alcoholic and he, in combination with her own family, hurt my mother in an almost unspeakable way when she was only 16 years old.

My plan for this piece of writing is not to talk too much about the past but about what happened that week in January when I went home to Cecil County to bury my father.  Get ready to meet an interesting cast of characters.
       
Sunday night I got the call that he was dead and I just didn't know what to do.  It wasn't what I expected.  I expected it to be my mom.  Or that my nephew had done something crazy (take your pick of which one).  By choice I hadn't seen him since September of 2002, and I really didn't know what to do, what to feel.  I just sat on the couch.  Allen asked me what I wanted to do and I just kept saying "I don't know."  Monday was a holiday so I had a little time to think.  I woke up that day and knew I had to go for two reasons.  1: If I didn't go the fact that he was actually gone would never be real to me, and 2: There was cash hidden somewhere in that house.  Turns out I was not the only one who knew about the cash.  We may be from Cecil County but we're not stupid.  Monday is also the day I started to cry.  I cried because I was angry about how things had been, sad about how they hadn't been, and relieved that it was finally over.  Unlike my sister, I have not once experienced any guilt.

I decided to take the train since it was my cheapest option on such short notice and seemed much more pleasant than a bus.  My family is also lackadaisical about providing necessary details (another habit I share) so it was unclear as to whether the funeral would be Wednesday or Thursday.  I made plans to arrive Tuesday evening and stay until Friday.  I requested that Allen not come with me, feeling that this was something I needed to do on my own and also because I didn't want to (wrongly or rightly) feel like I had to keep him entertained or rush back to Pittsburgh too soon.

My sister Ruth and her family from Virginia as well as my brother Ken from out near Seattle also arrived on Tuesday.  Ken, who, like me, is married, chose to come alone as well.  My brother Rick sort of snorted at me and seemed incredulous when I told him that I had purposely asked Allen not to come and his absence was not an indication that our marriage was falling apart like his recently has.  He was just being all around weird that week anyway, not that he's usually normal (big fan of conspiracy theories and aliens, it would seem).  Rick had offered to drive me to the train station in Philly Friday morning but when I ended up telling him Chris (my nephew) would do it he asked me if it was because I was "afraid" to go with him.  Well, when you ask me questions like that, yeah, I kinda am.  I understand that Rick would probably like to talk to me but I also understand that Chris (not sure if he'll read this) REALLY needs to talk to me.  Rick and I have had about 17 years of not talking, a little more time won't hurt.    

The viewing/funeral was on Wednesday.  I'm normally an anxious person so as you can imagine I literally thought I was going to combust.  I am not good at funerals, they're so unnatural and sterile and just weird.  To make it worse, no one at my sister's house drinks coffee so I was coffee-less, anxious, and nearly in a panic but when my sister offered me Ativan I was afraid to take a whole one.  I made her cut it in half because I didn't know what it would do to me.  Control freak.  Turns out I probably could've used a handful. 

End Part I.  To be continued on Monday.