Matthew Praxmarer
I hate and I love. I resent and I forgive, and when on those frigid nights the former occurs most acutely, I wonder, sometimes aloud, if there’s anything to be rescued from this terrible story. I see you for instance at that restaurant staring off with a distant gaze of pleasure and my 19-year-old self asks you what the fuck you’re staring at. But now, with you dead and buried I see in that gaze something of your essential vulnerability and ability to feel something like happiness even as we crew of four drunks bash at one another and Charles, your now dead oldest son, says at one point when things get hot that he can’t wait to put you in a home. And there you stood in the memory unit, your brain a pile of pulp, standing outside your room begging your ex-wife to take you home and we walked away in silence after trying our best to comfort you. And how I fell in mom’s arms when we left and wept, for I hadn’t seen you in months and won’t see you again until I come to the hospital. The woman at the desk knew you were dead before I did, but I presume protocol demanded that she not say anything, but she’s far too nice. How people melt. We die of words. I stand by your bedside and all I can say is “motherfucker;” all I can say is “motherfucker.”
But, despite everything, the rage, the rage, I tell mom in those first few moments that I will do the eulogy, as if I’m punishing myself. But I remember some things that I won’t say I cherish but that I remember somewhat fondly for the sake of honesty and some essential integrity and dignity. I can hear you asking whether I want chocolate milk or plain from over the banister as I watch TV and you prepare chicken patties and a baked potato that you peel and mash up and add margarine to and even salt, the same dinner you prepare unless you decide to make something more laborious like salmon patties or chicken and rice. A scanty repertoire. But how you took care of us when mom was away at work. But how you ridiculed me for watching so much TV, how you ridiculed me for eating too fast and for being fat. “Oh we have to do something,” you say when you see my shirtless physique on that beach when I was nine. But how on that same vacation you were carefree, tipping waitresses as if money were some vague concept with which you were totally unfamiliar. How you rented us those bikes and took us on those little side trips and smiled.
I remember Aunt Jane’s. I remember how you made us kiss her and Judy on the cheek and say, “I love you.” I remember Jimmy Buffett and you taking us out on the lake. I remember you saying on the boat that you felt like an old animal pacing a cage, something that communicated this essential despair. I remember you never letting me drive the boat. I remember you getting too drunk and driving us all home doing ninety and yelling at all the cars. But too do I remember when we would take two cars and you would check to make sure the three of us had enough coins for the tolls and would insist on following us all the way there. You were so protective. Despite everything you yelled at Uncle Fran for calling me fat. Watch us fight but watch us rally around one another when attacked from without.
I think that you killed my brother. I know with certainty that with mom away and him drunk that you ridiculed him like you always did because you were drunk too and hated him because he was you. I watched you cry and holler and you were offered no comfort when you kept saying his face was purple when you found him dead in mom’s room. I would comfort you if allowed to do it again. Would take the high road. But I was sick, sick and young. But when I talked to Mary I recounted how tormented Charles was, how when the cops had him in that mask he kept spitting because in his psychotic mind he thought he could drown himself and be done with you. And I think I killed him too because I couldn’t help him. But I told Mary how depressed I was, how sick myself. But you were sick too. Full of secret anxieties, full of wretched despair, full of Southern Comfort, full of the inescapable memory of an unloving mother who also told you that you were a piece of shit. Because we were sick, I can forgive you; I can love what you were: a vulnerable, pitiful, tortured, unloved child.