Happy-ish Endings

In July, I left my son at a residential treatment facility. Less than 24 hours later, my stepmother died. Her death was sudden yet unsurprising, leaving my father in need of 24-hour care—a responsibility my brothers and I were not prepared to inherit. The emotional weight of these events landed on top of each other. I staggered through each day, struggling first to face what was happening as a mother, then to process the churn of old memories and unresolved feelings resurfacing from my past. I couldn’t separate the pain of one loss before another pressed in.

My relationship with my step-mother was complicated at best. Before she married my father, she was my best friend’s mom. When we were preteens, we all lived on a dead-end street, nestled in the salt marshes, dotted with tall pines, on an enchanting, once-desolate stretch of the Emerald Coast. Many memories that were dead to me have found their way into the light as I have begun to process her death. My youth mingles with a deep love for the place I grew up in and the ache of loss and reckoning with the truth of what that place actually was to me.

During those teenage years, our houses were connected by a creek filled with snapping turtles and millions of tadpoles, destined to become the frogs that were the soundtrack to many of my late-night summer antics. We would meet on the creek bridge my dad built in the middle of the night, take a few swigs of Jack or Smirnoff, smoke a joint, and then carefully roll my dad’s company vehicle out of the driveway for a 2am joyride. We weren’t worried about not being old enough to drive or getting caught; the risk seemed distant at the time. My dad was usually passed out on the couch, with the TV blaring, so stealing the keys and sneaking out hardly felt like a challenge. That was before the cocaine days, of course. We were careful to plan our nights of joy-riding around my best friend’s mom’s shifts at the bar. It was imperative that she be home early after her shift, or we would risk being caught for sure. My mom always posed a threat of getting caught, too. Many times, she fell for my fake pillow bodies, covered by the pink heart quilt my Mimi had made me when I was a young girl, which I had spilled dark blue nail polish on. Initially, these memories seemed filled with freedom and laughter. But as I look back, the joy is tangled with the sadness that would come later for us. The weight of what my family would endure overshadows those once-lighthearted nights with the girl who was only my best friend at the time.

I liked my stepmother then. She was tough as nails, but also a lot of fun. I spent hours at their house planning out outfits. My best friend was incredibly fashionable, and without her, I would probably never have learned the art of getting dressed or doing more to my hair than shaving the underside and letting the hot, humid air create a frizzed mess. My best friend lived with her mom, her mom’s boyfriend, and his twin boys. The twins were probably the first boys that I ever thought were attractive. Although they were more like brothers to me, I did think they were cute and had a small crush on them. I knew that I was always the girl who was more like a sister to all the boys, so I didn’t stand a chance of calling either of them my boyfriend, but I was lucky enough to snag a ride to school with them every morning on their go-kart. It saddens me to think that one of the twins is gone now, lost to the opioid epidemic, shot over drugs, leaving a child behind—one of many souls I grew up with and loved that would lose their lives.

My best friend and I found a common bond in that our parents were both splitting up with their significant others. After my dad moved out, we set up our parents on a date, hopeful it would be love at first sight. We became sisters, a teenage dream come true, but reality was far from dreamy for us. I can’t fit 30 years into one Substack post, but I can say that things got complicated fast. The love between us grew complex as our circumstances changed. At first, our relationship was marked by teenage camaraderie and fun; gradually, new challenges were revealed, especially once my father’s and her mother’s alcoholism became undeniable. After their marriage, the memories we made as teenagers took on a new light—bittersweet, tinged by the knowledge that the substances at the edges of our youth would destroy our family. The effects of alcohol and addiction touched every relationship, gradually wearing away any illusion of normalcy, destroying our family from the inside out.

When the call came in at 7am on that Monday morning after dropping my son off, I never could have imagined my brother would say she was dead. My eyes were swollen, my skin raw, my heart so very broken from the last week of 24-hour suicide watch. Hearing of her death, grief hit me first, raw and overwhelming, but almost immediately, anger bubbled up, tangled with that grief. I felt battered—moving from heartbreak for my son to a different heartbreak for her, with no clear space to process any of it. The bitterness surprised me; in that moment, I blamed her for leaving, feeling as if she had chosen the worst time. I took her death as a personal jab, and the complicated grief and anger mingled together, leaving me entirely adrift.

It took me a week to call my stepsister. A week. Guilt kept me silent, but so did overwhelm—I barely moved from the couch, mouth empty, mind blank. The girl who was once my best friend, now my sister, felt like a stranger who nevertheless shared all my stories, my parents, my trauma, now marked forever by one of them being gone. It’s not that we hated one another; we had just let each other go over the years, only coming back together in the moments we thought my father was going to die. I wrestled with what to say, or if I should say anything. Would she want to hear from me, as she faced the death of her estranged mother and her own children’s grandmother? How could we talk about celebrating her mother’s life when decades of distance and hurt stood between us? How could I explain what I was dealing with on my home front in the midst of her mother dying? Eventually, I made the call. Words fell away; only 30 years of tears spoke through the line, 3,000 miles apart. An understanding came between us through the tears we shed in silence over the phone. Our story had reached its unhappy ending. Silently, we planned to come together to celebrate the woman we once saw in a different light and still loved.

I have spent the last 6 months trying to sort through this entanglement of traumatic events. All of it has opened a vault of memories, feelings, and stories. It’s allowed me to recognize how incredibly confusing my trauma was and still is; it was all so damaging, but also filled with so much love. It’s also allowed me to understand I am not alone in it. Although my siblings and I have moved on in our own ways, we are still united by our upbringing, the place we were raised, and the way we were raised. There are no other humans I could laugh with about the crazy shit our parents did. No one else would understand the characters our parents were and became to us. And if I tried to tell it, you might ask if I made it all up. They know that it’s a story that couldn’t have been made up, even in how unreal it all sounds when we talk about it. I find that at 44 years old, I needed that validation; I needed to commence with others who were there and experienced it with me. I needed for all of us to say, “That really happened.” In the midst of these horrible events, my siblings and I found validation in each other, a bond that ties us together, and solace as we continue to process her death, our past, and the future that stands before us as we take care of our dad. The shared experience of losing her healed something in the four of us and allowed us to come together for the first time in 25 years.

I have felt alone in my physical detachment from my parents for the last 25 years, especially after my Nana, who was my main family connection, died 9 years ago. I don’t feel alone anymore. I don’t know if this would have been the case had I succumbed to my grief and not made that call. The days I spent in the corner of the Panhandle in August, celebrating my stepmother’s life, were still filled with many dysfunctional family dynamics, drugs and alcohol, lots of drugs and alcohol, with little to no acknowledgment that it was the reason we were all standing there. The only thing that had really changed was me.

As I boarded my plane at the airport, which has grown from a single gate when I was a child to a whopping 12 gates, I felt an immense gratitude for the life I have worked to create in Northern California, for all the healing modalities I have discovered along the way, that I have left the life of drugs and alcohol behind, that I am awake to work on helping my son heal his trauma, that I have raised two incredible women, that I have broken many of the cycles that existed in my bloodline for centuries. If I am being honest, I left feeling more connected to that little town in the South than I have ever felt and grateful for the life I lived there, even though it was painful. As odd as it seems, I am finding so much beauty in my trauma. So much. I am still excavating it daily, but the millions of little pieces that tell some very sad stories also tell some beautiful stories. And not all of them have unhappy endings.

My sister and I, circa 1992, in her room planning outfits in my knee-high socks, before we were sisters.