Dad - Letters 2

I was originally going to go through all the rest of the letters again but the kids aren't going to let me plus I realize that would probably get boring and there's a lot more I need to write about than just what's in those letters. The letters continued somewhat regularly for the next couple months. We discussed graduating high school, going to college, work, his living arrangements, just kept it light. I was able to find out when it happened, the 11 year anniversary is coming up this month. I also found out that my stepmom had some kind of psychological disorder (lawyer told us bipolar) but that her family wouldn't talk about what it was even to my father. Something I started to notice was that his letters were very repetitive and his spelling ability started to decline. We talked about me coming to visit sometime and he talked a lot about things we would do when he got out; like he would look through all of my pictures from big events and we would discuss what happened in more detail. He had also mentioned the biggest mistake of his life was leaving my mother and I, that he should have never done that. Then around the end of my first semester of my freshman year the letters stopped coming. At that point I stopped copying the letters I sent him so I have no idea what I said or how often I wrote. When I would get bored in class I would start writing something and then never finish it or would think the letter was too harsh. I also figured out I could go to the criminal justice website for his state and look him up, it just said where he was, how long his sentence was, his charge and how long he had left. Eventually my mother sent him a letter, kinda of kicking him in the butt to start writing again. I got a letter from him on March 25th 2004, he was very depressed and withdrawn. He hadn't written anyone in a while and promised me he would be better about it. The next letter I received was March 7th 2005, I had written him a letter saying that if I didn't hear from him it would be my last letter. I had so much going on in my life, I couldn't be worried about his condition all the time if he couldn't bother letting me know he was ok. I also couldn't take the feeling of disappointment every time I went to check my mailbox and there wasn't anything from him. He apologized for not writing and promised he would write every other week. He was still very depressed and withdrawn, he stated several times that he was never going to be able to forgive himself in many of the letters I received.

I stopped hearing from him again. At some point after his last letter we had gotten word that the druggy burnout loser had refiled a wrongful death lawsuit against my dad, he had filed one right after it happened but he left didn't pay the lawyer and it disappeared for a while. Instead of fighting it my dad just signed over everything to him. So I wrote him a letter chewing him apart because my mother was left to pay for my college on her own and all druggy burnout loser was going to do was waste all the money on drugs. I sent letters begging him to write back just so I knew he was ok and nothing. I tried not to let it consume my life so there were times I "forgot" about it, but a lot of times I would start writing and stop or forget to send it. I have saved all my college notebooks and I could probably find at least 20 letters I never sent if not more.

One day I was at work, Sunday November 25th 2007 and I had this overwhelming feeling. One of my coworkers was an ex-cop, so I gave him a brief run down of the situation and asked him if I could call the prison to find out what was going on with him. I went home that day and put it out of my mind, I was finishing up my last semester of college and I only had two weeks left of classes. One day during the week I decided to look up him up on that website and for some reason it wasn't working, it displayed nothing when I searched his name, but the site was also having problems loading correctly. The following Friday I decided to call the prison an hour before heading to class, my husband (at the time only my boyfriend) was at work an hour away. The woman I spoke with explained that he had passed away that Sunday before. I immediately broke down, I tried calling my husband and no luck so I sent him numerous text messages and called my mother. She was at the mall with my grandmother (who only thought my father and I had a falling out and that was why he never came to graduation and she never heard me talking about him, my mother's excuse was that my grandmother could not handle something like that), hysterically I tell her what happened, she had really bad service and I had to scream "dad is dead" about 10 times before she figured out what I was saying. Once she got it she said she couldn't talk and would call me back later, who says that to their daughter that just found out their father died?!?!? Oh yeah my mother. As soon as I was able to get a hold of my husband he left work and came home. Once my mother finally called me back she told me she would call my uncle, she was able to get a hold of him rather quickly which is very unusual so part of me thinks she already knew and was just not telling me. Something I learned she did a lot.
Apparently he had gotten up Sunday morning and wasn't feeling well so he laid back down and never woke up. He died of a heart attack which only took over 6 months to find out, it took a very long time to get the death certificate.
My uncle had him cremated and held onto his ashes. He said that when he got time he would try to get his siblings together and me and we would have a like service and spread his ashes. Then he would tell me that he was just gonna spread them the next time he went on one of his jobs, he does something with shipping over water. I had several times asked him for the ashes or at least some of them. I didn't have an opportunity to put either of them to rest the right way or even say goodbye, so if everyone getting together wasn't going to happen then I wanted to do something on my own. I know he didn't make great choices but how his siblings couldn't make time to say goodbye is beyond me. One day in the fall of 2011 I got a message from my aunt asking what my address was, I gave it to her thinking she was gonna send something for my daughter. A few days pass and when I got home from work there was a package waiting. I opened it up and there was this crappy plastic box which was open and a bag of ashes hanging out of it.
The ashes are currently siting in that same box on my windowsill covered up by other things. Part of me wants to go and spread them somewhere (that's not as easy as they make it in the movies, need to get permission and it's not allowed at a lot of places). Then part of me isn't ready, we had so much left unsaid, so much time lost, and letting them go is gonna make it real.

My Stepmom

She was a little kooky at times. I remember getting a Muppet Babies cassette tape from her when I was a preteen. When she walked her dog she always carried something with her, afraid another dog might attack her, whether it was a stick or an empty gallon milk container she had to have something. When I went to visit them after they moved and I was 15, she wouldn't let me sit in the locked car while she ran into the store to grab milk, afraid something might happen to me. I couldn't sit near the window and look out to watch a far off thunderstorm. She always gave me socks. She had these notebooks all over with little notes scribbled in them and she would continually trace over some of the words. My dad had a sailboat and when we would go out on it, I would fall asleep on the deck and wake up covered in towels, she didn't want me to get sunburned not realizing she could have given me a heat stroke. After all that I knew she meant well. She was good to me, and clearly cared about me. When they lived by me we would cook special meals together, like lasagna and cookies and cakes.
Sometimes I wasn't always the nicest to her, I felt like she would get in the way of my time with my dad. I was resentful of her moving across the country with him and getting him all to herself.
The last time she came up to visit, the February before she died, she seemed off. Aside from her usual kookiness, there was something not right. She kept over and over again asking me if I was afraid to live in NY after 9-11. She was very focused on it.

Druggy Burnout Loser 

I swear I have many reasons to be as hard on him as I have been throughout my blog. Again trying to stay as anonymous as I can I won't use names and I have such a confusing family as it is (I have two other stepbrothers) that just calling him stepbrother wouldn't work. When my dad and stepmom first got married DBL was away at boarding school. He was a trouble maker and kept getting kicked out of schools. Even managed to get kicked out of the boarding school. So he was back and forth living with them and living with his father and was absolutely out of control. My dad was from a strict background so he didn't tolerate it but my stepmom just let DBL run all over her. He would only come around if he needed money and would steal from their home. He was usually nice to me, however I ran into him shortly after our parents moved and he didn't even recognize me.
Part of the reason I decided to make the changes in my life was because of him. We moved back to my hometown a little over a year ago and just shy of a year ago I was reading the newspaper one night and came across this article. It was about a body being found in the woods and that the boyfriend confessed to dumping the body, which was his girlfriend, after she ODed on drugs he gave her... Yup you got it DBL killed his girlfriend then dumped her body. I almost stopped breathing when I read his name in the paper. I was so angry with him, one because my fear of him using my father's money on drugs was right, two because he sued my father for doing almost the same thing and three because he wasn't even getting charged with more than a littering charge.
So I started going back to therapy and realized I never dealt with everything else. Being that my insurance sucks I had to stop therapy, but I decided I needed to do something still. I wasted too much time of my life in and out of depression; gaining weight, not doing things, being in physical and emotional pain, feeling sick all the time... Not all of that comes from what my father did, I went through bouts of depression long before that, and I will continue to write about those things.
I may not have always made the right choices and I did go through a very short party period in college but despite everything I went through I did the right thing, I went down the right path in life. I never did anything to harm myself (except my eating habits) or anyone else. Someone had commented on a news article online about DBL, that he had a rough time in life, kinda went into a little more detail than I was comfortable with, and thats why he's so messed up. Everyone has gone through shit in their lives but that doesn't make you who you are, you have a choice to either learn and grow from those experiences or allow those experiences to run your life. I choose to grow.

*I am going to try to add some pictures to the other posts so check them out in a little.