August 21
2007
I don't know how so many people can write memoirs.
I guess it is supposed to be cathartic on some level - a way to get cheap therapy as you dig into your past and analyze all your younger self motivations. That probably works for some people but I'm not finding that at all. I was very ready to write a book about my years working for the Company in Alaska, but getting me there - explaining how I came to be in Fairbanks, means writing about where I come from and that is the first step on roads I did not think I would need to walk in a manuscript.
When I was writing the flying book and I got to the final chapter I planned to write a fictional reaction to the real fatal crash of a guy I had worked with (a really kind good guy). But as it happens he died the same week as my father and just as I started writing about him, the chapter became about my father. It's written as a story but is more truth than anything else.
Here’s one story: eight years ago my father died.
Here’s another story: eight years ago my father was eaten alive by a disease that came to visit and then decided that it wouldn’t leave. We couldn’t make it go away. So he poisoned himself with whatever the doctors said he needed to kill it with and one by one he lost all the things that mattered. He got tired, so he gave up walks on the beach, he lost his sense of taste so he gave up cooking; he lost the ability to concentrate so he gave up his crosswords and books.
It sounds like such a little life when I write it down. A beach and a crossword, homemade bread and the latest issue of the Sporting News. Just a little life, and then it was over.
Did anyone but us really notice when it was gone?
I wanted to be Joan of Arc when I was little which isn't too much of a surprise for any good Catholic girl. (Especially one that was half French Canadian.) God talked to her, she followed his commands and led an army and then she ended up becoming a saint. The dying part wasn't too appealing but to be so good that God chose you - well that was pretty much all that anyone should want. I worked really hard at being good, something I am only now, in retrospect, realizing. Before my parents got divorced I worked hard to reduce tension around the house by being cute and funny. Afterwards I worked hard at making sure neither one of them was lonely for us when my brother and I were with the other (an impossible task but kids try) and then my mother remarried and I worked really hard at being a good girl for yet another parent.
I was set up to fail every step of the way - anyone would be. And going to AK - running away to AK - was really the biggest way possible to fail all of my parents. I told them I would be gone for a year but didn't come back for ten. And even then, I didn't resettle in FL but across the country. And it was all too late for my father by then anyway; he died in 1999 when I was still in Fairbanks.
I did go home when he was dying but I don't think that counts. Nothing makes up for being away so very long.
We really thought we had it beat. After the surgery and chemo and radiation he got better, a lot better. I have a picture of the two of us just six months before he died and he is healthy, he’s completely alive. I keep that picture close so I can remind myself of who he was, and hopefully forget what he looked like when he was dying. It’s been eight years and I’m still working on it, but someday I know I’m going to get lucky and forget that.
I have to forget that.
You know what I wish? I wish I had never fallen for Saint Joan. She was the wrong one for me at the worst possible time. I couldn't do what everyone wanted me to do; I couldn't be who everyone wanted me to be. More importantly though, I shouldn't have even had to try.
And they should have realized that. I was just a little kid; the adults should have known better.
Who I really needed back then, the hero I was blindly looking for, was Powergirl. I needed someone who was brave enough to show me how to tell everyone else that I was not their answer; that I should have been allowed to look for my own answers and not be someone else's. I needed a girl who kicked ass and not one that got burned. And maybe that would have made a difference; maybe I would not have had to go so far away.
Weird how things turn out, isn't it? This memoir stuff - it really makes you think.
[Post title from my Alaska Flying book, first picture of the beach back home, 2nd of Joan of Arc from Pace University, 3rd of Powergirl from the cover of Justice Society of America #9, due out next month..]
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August 22
2007
07:44 AM
Is this an entire essay, or part of a larger piece?
Now I know how people write memoirs -- they do a bit of rummaging around in their psyches and a tremendous amount of what must be exhausting work. And then something beautiful emerges.
When the work is hardest, imagine how these epiphanies will change you -- because they will, and they are. Millions of people go through life, never realizing that they can be someone other than St. Joan. Millions. Imagine how knowing really who you are and who you're not will change the life of your son, as you mother him differently, and impart that knowledge to him... You are so brave, bravo for you.
(And a nicer shot of Powergirl than usual - she's not quite so ridiculously buxom this time.)