When I initially finished Map of My Dead Pilots it started with my life in Alaska and although it included mention of my father's death back in Florida and my trip home when he was dying, it mostly was about Alaska. That's because I thought the book should, well, mostly be about Alaska. (ha!) But my agent said readers would wonder how I got there, especially after discovering that I was from Florida. And then she said they would want to know a little bit more about me. Hearing this made me a bit ill at first because the whole point (to me) was to write about the pilots and not about me - to remove me as much as possible. But I also had to be a reliable narrator and without "knowing" me, I guess it would be difficult for the reader to trust me. So I wrote two chapters about life before AK.
They nearly killed me.
Here is an excerpt - the part about my parents' divorce which was the first significant thing to happen to me and my brother and changed everything - every single moment - that followed:
They got divorced before anyone else did; in 1977 when you might have cheated or drank or smoked dope, but divorce was truly radical. It made things complicated in ways none of us could have known back then, as none of us knew what divorce would do. My mother and father did not come from families that split up and so all of us, and everyone who loved us, flailed around in new uncharted territory after their marriage ended. The easiest thing was just to make a clean break, and so the two sides split right down the middle; my mother’s family never spoke to my father again, my father’s family never spoke to my mother. The only ones still walking the Berlin Wall that divided our world was my brother and I. We were consummate diplomats from the very beginning and over the years that followed, we got even better at it.
We had no choice, really; we were unlucky enough to love them both.
Out of necessity, we moved into a schedule of different parents at school events, of planning so they were never anywhere together; of figuring out who we wanted to see the big moments as they happened, and who we wanted to tell them about afterwards. We learned how to make up for lost moments, to pretend, to lie; to forget. Our family photo albums marked a split the summer I was eight years old; from then on there were pictures with my father and his visiting family or with my mother and hers. The same Disney backgrounds, the same rockets, the same beaches. But always someone missing who we weren’t allowed to talk about, always that frozen moment relived where we knew that everything was not going to be okay ever again.
I didn’t realize in 1977 that I would spend the next twenty years having those same separate conversations and half holidays; or that it would never get easier until my father died. And then that was a whole other kind of impossible difficulty which made everything that came before it seem like foolish pride. There wasn’t enough time then to take anything back, or fill in all the missing moments or ask all the questions children don’t know how to ask. There was just my brother and I, flanking his hospital bed and watching our father be stolen, slowly and painfully, away. Until the very end he knew us though, he knew the ones who had loved him so desperately.
And then it was only the two of us who had all those memories; only the two of us who could remember the details from half of our entire childhood.
I can't believe how long it took me to write just that bit. The two chapters were forever.
My childhood was not rough, not by a long shot. But it was sad sometimes and it was uncomfortable and it was and is difficult to explain. On my shelf I have a framed picture of my mother and father when they were dating and they are sitting on a beach in Spain, laughing at each other and the camera. They are happy.
Even now, so many years after all of it ended, I love that picture. And every time I look at it, I wish for something they never knew; I wish for happily ever after for all of us.
Some parts of you just never grow up.
October 15
2009
10:36 PM
Colleen, that was beautiful and sad and true. Thanks for posting it. I look forward to the rest of the book!!