A eulogy of sorts

[SkinnyLittleTwig]

all right, this post has been a long time in the making and i need to finally get off my ass and finish it. i need an outlet for all of this, and a written one is probably the most appropriate, considering everything.

on june 30th, i visited the helsinki casino for the first time. i wasn't interested in playing because live poker is super gay, but i hung out with a couple of friends while they were on the waitlist. i hated the place -it was full of asian degens- but the company made it bearable; we were planning a trip to my cabin in the countryside in a couple of days, it was going to be awesome. once their seats opened, i walked home and played online for a bit. i took a shot, won a 2k+ pot and waltzed happily to bed at around 6 am.

three hours later, my mom burst into my room and gave me pretty much the rudest awakening ever. my father had been found dead in london a few hours earlier that morning.

this wasn't a massive surprise, as morbid as that may sound. according to the police, he'd been found passed out next to two bottles of gin and some random pills. we still don't know the official COD, but it's pretty obvious.

my parents split up shortly after i was born. dad wasn't at the hospital during my delivery. he said that he was too much of an adventurer type to fit the role of a parent and pretty much ran off.

that makes him sound like a huge irresponsible scumbag, which might be right, but it could have been much worse for me. we still saw each other, and thanks to him, i've already gotten to travel more than most people do during their entire lives.

he was a journalist, and had been for his entire life. you could say that writing was the only thing he was ever good at. he did several correspondence stints abroad, including a four-year stay in DC. during that time i made several trips to the US, which may be to thank for the english in this post being at all legible [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

he got married to a colleague and stayed with her for about eight years. the divorce was devastating.

this was back in 2005. it was when the excessive drinking first started to become noticeable for me; i'd never had any idea it had been some sort of a problem, even though i've recently learned that it had been one of the main reasons for the breakup. we would go out for burgers and he would look like david hasselhoff. he forgot about my sixteenth birthday. my reaction was primarily confused, then pissed off, then worried. i didn't realize that i had reason to be worried. i couldn't grasp that i should be worried about my father slowly killing himself after just turning sixteen.

i'll write up some more later. i'm posting this in parts because otherwise i would never finish it.

[amplify]

Sorry for your loss. I look forward to reading the rest of this.

[SkinnyLittleTwig]

after that entire divorce debacle, things started to look up a bit. we'd go out on runs and he was staying sober most of the time. then he got a job offer as a london correspondant last fall. obviously he accepted, as experiencing the world from all angles was of paramount importance to him. boredom was as good as being dead, i guess.

but moving to live all by yourself in a big suburban house in sleepy new malden with no connections in the city and your only neighbor an 80-year-old widow (although a sweet lady), couldn't have been a good idea, with the mental state he was in. everything was fine, though, he told us, we shouldn't worry. this was standard.

there's an assload of jokes about us nordic forest goblins being as gloomy as ghosts, having the communication skills of a dead fish and proclaiming the most ecstatic of joys with melancholic throat grunts. and drinking a lot. for any reason that may be convenient at the time. they're stereotypes. but the solid, solid basis that i've discovered these stereotypes to have in reality are such amazing examples of fiction being a poor imitation of life that i almost feel the need to believe that all jews really are niggards and all blacks really do rob old women's purses. (emphasis on almost. don't ban me.)

this is more of a guy thing. both of my paternal grandparents are still alive and dealing with this in very different ways (i can't imagine what all this must feel like for them, btw). my grandma has been bawling her eyes out, but his husband has been mostly quiet. hasn't even cried. one night, my grandmother found him just sitting in a corner, staring at pictures of his son. i'm worried about him. this shouldn't just be dismissed as "his way to cope with it" or something. he's just bottling all of this [censored] inside. so, i'm glad they're going to therapy, i hope it helps.

not talking about things is just [censored] up.

[Lurker.]

sorry about your loss.

[SkinnyLittleTwig]

ty guys

the funeral was yesterday. first one i've ever attended. we had a bald priest who played the guitar at the afterparty, or whatever it's called.

my dad was agnostic, so it was kinda stupid in my opinion to have a bunch of hymns and [censored] sung at the event. the general opinion was clear just by looking around the chapel during the ceremony: the old people in the back sung wholeheartedly, while the rows with the closest friends and family in them were mostly quiet with the exception of my grandma.

i'm not gonna protest or anything though, that's too obnoxious for my style. yeah, it's true that my father would have found all the jesus stuff very pretentious and a waste of everyone's time, but to be honest, his opinion doesn't matter anymore. the point of all this is to give my grandparents some sense of closure. funerals are for the living. so whatever, let them pick out the single coffin in the shop that costs twice as much as any other one, i don't care, as long as the insurance covers it.

i first broke down when the violins started playing. i can't even remember when i last cried. funerals seem pretty sick, but i felt a lot better afterwards. it's kind of like puking. feels disgusting at first, but it's very purifying.

i had to walk out alone and place the first rose on top of the casket. i couldn't say anything.

one note about dealing with losses that i feel should be out there is that you need to be there for your friends. not much is needed, just enough that they know you care about them. coping with someting like this is a million times harder when you have to do it alone. you get some ugly, paranoid thoughts. i've really learned to separate the useless a-holes from the reasonable people during all this.

[inside??]

Sorry for your loss. You write very well. Best wishes and thanks for sharing. It is a very touching and meaningful.

[snoopdawg]

Sorry for your loss. I know it was said but that was very well written.

[SkinnyLittleTwig]

tyty

-----

having lost thousands to party blackjack myself, i can kind of understand compulsive behaviour, but to fall in love with recreational substances deeply enough that the addiction entirely wrecks your life just goes over my head. maybe it's because i'm so young that i haven't yet experienced alcohol to be anything but a tool to have fun. i don't know. my dad had the opportunity to go to a month-long rehab system, but declined and as a result lost his job. drinking severely hurt every one of his relationships. if i ever become such a total [censored] up, you can just put a bullet in my head then and there.

i don't want that to sound too harsh, because he never really hurt anybody. his ex-girlfriends have told me that i was the most important thing in the world to him. he could have expressed that a bit better. (HINT HINT to all the future parents out there)

but i guess he couldn't. those social handicaps are hard to conquer, and cynicism is a real thick wall to hide behind.

what i think was going on there, and from what i've gathered in all the diaries and psychiatric reports that i've been checking out, was that he was really playing the role of a 21st-century dr. jekyll to the max. all the travelling around the world was an escape from the mundane life of a white-collar reporter, and all the booze and self-destructive behaviour was a means to live as much as it was to die.

on that note, he never grew up. never accepted the role of a parent. my mom pointed out that psychologically, he stopped progressing beyond the age where all the drinking began. that might be oversimplifying a bit, but at the end of the day, that's what happened.

we have this proverb that you hear the truth from the mouths of children and infants. about that:

we never really talked. except that one time when he was staying over and forgot about his flight to london until the very last minute. we tossed all the random stuff into the bags, called the cab and ran out. in the elevator, really freaking loaded, he apologised for "being such a bad father".

[4drugmoney]

Well written.Soory for your loss. I know what your going through,My dad died when I was 13, from drinking(liver failure). Yeah be carefull man Addictive genes and whatnot, I know I am a hopeless addict with every possible thing you can be addicted too.

Thats probably the only serious response Ive ever given in BBV.

[SkinnyLittleTwig]

i'm bumping this because of that guy who thought about killing himself. i skimmed through the thread, but i think he wound up reconsidering, which is good.

we still don't know my dad's official cause of death because of bureucracy, but it might have been a suicide. it's not very likely in the sense of jumping off a bridge or something, he was just slowly burning out for years, like i mentioned before.

i don't really feel guilty, like i should have noticed the depression, that i should have done something to prevent this. i don't think that was my role. then again, nobody else really did anything either. i don't know. this [censored] is deep. maybe that feeling of guilt will hit me in the future. probably not, since i'm kinda psychopathic and emotionless like that. i've completely skipped a lot of these "stages" of grief that you hear about.

even worse would be some sort of blame trip where i would run at my grandparents screaming that they did something wrong. i hope not, they've suffered enough. they did nothing "wrong", they just failed to notice (and fight) self-destructive behaviour when it was staring them right in the eye. so did i, i guess.

the funeral wasn't long, but it was long enough to make me realize that i hate those freaking things. i don't want to put my family through all that before it's, and i am, seriously overdue.

about that, anyone who's put a lot of thought into it before they off themselves has probably thought about their closest friends and family and decided that their feelings don't matter enough to stop them... be that as it may, it really does hurt a lot and all the reactions i've seen in the past few months have been really sad.

people love you.

you might not notice all of it, and if you've been running bad at life you might notice very little, and if you're 19 you sure as hell don't know anywhere near how deep all the good stuff is.

communication is key. i can't stress that enough.

my dad was 42. pretty much everyone older than that that i've talked to has been stunned because that's a ridiculously young age to quit. so many plans just simply won't be finished now. he was writing a book. we had plans to visit new york. we should be there right now.

you can't kill yourself at nineteen, that's just dumb as hell.