From Single to Only
by Jane Hammons

My children were six and seven, when I filed for divorce and the court removed their father from the home he refused to leave on his own. Even before that, I often thought of myself as a single parent. My children’s father was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He was not – could not be – a good parent. After the divorce, because he provided so little support (monetary or otherwise) for our two sons, I began to think of myself as their only parent. That was a kind of conceit, something I understand better now that he is dead. I was the only healthy parent my children had. But they had another living and present parent: their father.

My ex-husband and I spent many hours in family court and custody hearings.

My lawyer, his lawyer, my therapist, the children’s therapist, and our court-appointed social worker, all reiterated how important it was that the children have a relationship with their father. I resisted this wisdom. I not only doubted that any good could come from their relationship with a self-destructive, narcissistic father, I feared for their safety.

When his car broke down on a busy street, he told the children, then seven and eight, to get out and push while he steered. Though terrified, they attempted to move his large Mercury Sable to the side of the street. Aware of their father’s chronic back condition, they wanted to spare him any further pain or possible injury. He had successfully trained them to put his welfare before their own. Fortunately, some passers-by stopped to help and escorted the boys safely to the sidewalk. Even after this incident, he was granted a week of summer vacation with them. The first night he left them alone for several hours in a motel near Disneyland, saying he was going to a nearby convenience store and would be right back. When he returned after midnight, he offered no explanation, but chided them for being afraid. And the next night, knowing how frightened they had been the night before, he abandoned them again, this time to teach them a twisted lesson: they should trust him implicitly. He would always return.

My lawyer advised me to keep a log of his behavior and our children’s response to it. When I could gather enough persuasive evidence that his influence on the children was more negative than positive, that he in fact endangered their lives, I would go through the courts and successfully obtain temporary restraining orders or supervised visitation periods. The court would provide guidelines for his behavior – sometimes involving counseling that I paid for since he had no money – my ex would temporarily comply and regain visitation. And the cycle would begin again. Though I had full physical custody, and my children spent 80 percent of their time with me, I nonetheless worried.

As they got older and more able to say no to unreasonable demands and I got more distance from my ex, I began to better understand why our children needed a relationship with their father. I could divorce him, and by doing so, create one safe, nurturing, healthy home, but I could not change who their father was. My therapist explained to me that the better they knew him the less likely they were to create a fantasy father. And so on every other weekend and for one week during the summer, they experienced the reality of their father.

Despite various harrowing events, which they incorporated into their characterization of their father as Crazy Dad, in the first few years of the divorce, they enjoyed much of their time with him. They thought of him as a daffy older brother, someone with whom they could play video games and watch old movies. He provided them with the religious side of their lives, taking them to mass on Sundays, ushering them through their First Communion. But because he was afflicted with gout, pancreatitis, hepatitis and depression, his health declined steadily. Some mornings he was unable to get out of bed, so they cooked and cared for themselves while he slept or simply lay in bed.

When his back was bothering him, or when his feet swelled so that it was painful to walk, they cleaned his house and shopped for groceries at the nearby market, stocking his shelves until their next visit. When they could no longer hold conversations with their father (or even with each other) because he engaged in a continuous monologue about whatever political situation happened to be on his mind or sang for long periods of time at the top of his lungs, they chose to spend less and less time with him. They began to understand that he was unable to care for them, and in fact, that they were taking on the role of caregivers to him. While I wanted to protect them from situations like this, it was because of what they learned through experience that they were able to set the boundaries of their relationship with their father.

No officer of the court, no lawyer, no therapist had promised them a good relationship with their father. The most the court required was that it be safe. Their father was under court orders not to drink during his visitation periods. But because he had prescriptions for Vicodin and other medication such as Valium, Prozac, and Trazodone, no one restricted his use of the drugs beyond “as prescribed by doctor.” Like many addicts, my ex had perfected the routine of seeing different doctors for his various problems and receiving prescriptions from each. The court’s notion of what constituted a safe environment for my children was very low. It did not take into account the fact that by virtue of his addiction, he would not take drugs only as prescribed by his doctor. I fought, unsuccessfully, to restrict his ability to drive the children in his car. When he had a seizure while driving them from my house to his and crashed his car into a fence as he exited the freeway, I didn’t bother to go back to court. I violated our custody agreement and refused to allow our sons to ride in a car with him.

They agreed with this decision. They understood what the court had not.

Their father was not just somewhat incompetent: he was dangerous. And they knew as well as I did that even though his license was temporarily suspended because of the seizure, he would continue to drive without it. And he did.

In addition to witnessing the seizure, their father’s numerous hospitalizations helped prepare them for his eventual death. Someone would find him passed out and bleeding on the floor of his garage apartment. He would collapse in a public place. Always there were phone calls from police, relatives, hospital personnel, informing us of his hospitalization. After a number of these events, when I would begin a sentence with, “I need to tell you that your father …” my children would finish it with something like, “he’s dead, isn’t he?” Occasionally they would joke about how when he died, they’d have to keep his video game characters alive and continue his games. They hoped they could have his big screen TV. They were not insensitive; they were dealing with the inevitable.

While they had imagined many scenarios in which their father would die, they were, of course, shocked when it happened. On the Friday of their Christmas break my sons were supposed to spend an evening with their father. They were looking forward to watching several versions of  “A Christmas Carol” with him and decorating Christmas cookies. This was a ritual they had maintained over the past eight years. My usual routine was to drop the boys in front of their father’s house and drive off once I saw them open the door to his apartment.

On this particular Friday, they had forgotten the key to their father’s house. They knocked at the door. Waited. Banged on the windows. Waited.

Through the window, we could see that the Christmas tree was lit. We could hear the television. The car was in the driveway. We called his house from my cell phone. The line was busy. Annoyed, I checked my watch. I had plans to meet friends for dinner. We took a short walk down to the San Francisco Bay and admired the view of the Golden Gate Bridge, thinking that perhaps he was in the shower or on the toilet. In all, we waited for over a half-hour for him to open the door.

We decided to go home and wait for him to call. As time passed without a call from him, the boys began to worry. I too worried that he had fallen and hurt himself. While I did not want to put myself in the position of taking care of him, I did have a responsibility to my children and to their father, simply as another human being, to follow through on my suspicions.

So I called his parents. They went to the house and discovered my children’s father dead in his bed.

When our phone rang later that evening, both of my sons looked at me expectantly. They knew the news would be bad; they were just waiting to hear how bad. It was their aunt, their father’s sister, who said simply, “He’s dead.” Like the rest of us, she’d been anticipating this news for years. As I nodded and listened, the children prepared themselves for the worst. The youngest one began to cry; the older one steeled himself. He’d been sketching and continued to do so, slowly and deliberately as I talked. I hung up the phone and pulled both of my sons over to the couch and said, “Your father is dead.” The words were simple, not hard to find. I’d practiced saying them over the years in the same way that my children had practiced hearing them. I was surprised to find myself shaking almost uncontrollably; my mouth was dry, and I was suddenly very cold. My younger son wailed and then ran to the computer, downloaded and burned a Modest Mouse CD. He told me that he was going to listen to music for a while and put his headphones on. His brother deferred much of his own emotion by worrying about his brother. But as he did so, he talked to me about how he had known this was coming. For the first time, he talked in detail about his perception of his father as a crazy person. Off and on, he cried a little.

After the funeral, I began to ask them if they had told any of their friends about their father’s death and was surprised to hear that even though they had talked to many of their friends over winter break, they had not mentioned it. I notified the school, and once the semester began, they both saw school counselors in addition to the therapist the three of us had seen as a family at various times over the past few years. Still they said nothing to their friends. I asked if they wanted to find a special picture of their father to put in their room. They both declined. All of my efforts to help them deal with their father’s death felt clumsy, and I feared that my own sense of relief was an obstacle in my helping them. When my youngest son said to me, “Mom, I think I have more to gain than to lose from this,” I asked him to explain what he meant. He said, “I feel like I can breathe again.” I felt proud of him for being able to articulate this complicated emotion. But I also wondered what it meant to feel relief that one’s father was dead.

I often turn to books to help me better understand and talk about difficult situations with my children. As I looked for books about death, I found “A Music I No Longer Heard” (Simon and Drantell, 1998), an oral history containing the stories of people who, like the authors, had experienced the death of a parent before age 18. Represented in this book are all kinds of parents: wonderful and loving; chronically ill; abusive and difficult. The memories vary widely as well. A girl remembers watching her father shave; another describes an abrupt move to a relative’s house after being told her parents had gone away; a boy expresses relief that his cruel father is out of his life; another recalls the way his dying mother’s room smelled. If my children don’t always relate to the details of the story, they never fail to respond to the emotion expressed. The chorus of voices reminds me how important it is to keep stories – the good and the bad – alive.
 
As Father’s Day approached in the year following their father’s death, I found myself in the awkward position of helping my children think of ways they might celebrate their father. I suggested playing some of his favorite music, taking a walk near the Bay close to his house, cooking some of his favorite foods, or spending some time with his family. My children were not interested in doing any of these things, so we drove to Santa Cruz and spent the weekend with my mother and stepfather, everyone a little nervous about how the boys were going to handle the day. My mother talked to me about how they were feeling about Father’s Day, but no one discussed it with them.

When they woke up and came down to the kitchen for breakfast, they wished their grandfather a Happy Father’s Day and gave him a gift they had carefully chosen for him. We all stepped around the issue of their father.

When we got home, I turned to Earl A. Grollman’s “Straight Talk About Death For Teenagers” (1993). In his book Grollman directly addresses the way in which people often find it difficult to talk to teenagers about death. For each of my sons, I made a copy of an exercise, which contains unfinished sentences: “When I hear your name mentioned, I _________, and I always wanted to ask you _______.” I told them that completing some of these sentences might be a good way to talk to their father. And, of course, whatever they wrote would remain absolutely private unless they chose to share it.

To my surprise, my older son became angry when I gave him the exercise. “I’m supposed to be moving past this,” he yelled. “Why should I pretend that he’s still alive?” When I asked him why he thought the exercise asked him to pretend that his father was alive, he waved the paper in my face pointing to the word you. “It says you, like I’m talking right to him.” I asked him to think about assignments he’d had in his English classes, for example, writing a letter to a fictional character. “Dear Huck, When you lied about…” I wanted him to understand that the purpose of the exercise was to help him write from a place he might not otherwise enter, not to pretend that his father was still alive.

While he refused to do the exercise, we continued to talk. He told me that he wanted me to stop bothering him by making him think about his father, saying that he was happy to talk about him in the context of any “normal” conversation. He pointed out that for dessert he had finished off a small carton of ice cream and at the time commented that he and his brother and father would finish off cartons of ice cream as a way of cleaning out the freezer at their father’s house. He said remembering things like that was all he needed to do. But then he abruptly changed the topic and told me that his father had once accused me of stealing all of his record albums. We had recently cleaned out our garage, and apparently my son had seen a carton of albums. He wanted to know if those were the stolen goods. I briefly explained how his father and I divided up property when we got a divorce and admitted that I might have some albums that his father thought he should have. Nonetheless, we had reached an agreement about who would take which records. My son sighed and said, “This is the problem with Dad being dead. Now I only get one side of the story.”

We are in the second year since their father’s death and the challenges are many. They have grown up in two very different households, and honoring the lifestyle of their father’s is sometimes impossible and almost always difficult. But we have learned to negotiate. Whereas we once had only one television, we now have two. Video games were seldom played at my house; now they have three game systems. The TV and the video games are their property, the only things that the boys brought from their father¹s house into ours. I put limits on both television and video game use, as I always have. My older son has decided to continue his father’s game on Animal Crossing, a game he often played with his father. Occasionally he checks in under his father’s name, pulls weeds and stomps on the cockroaches – two things that signal that the game hasn’t been played in a while. He discusses with his brother buying an item – a statue – for the yard of his father’s video game house.

We are in the kitchen making lunches for school when my younger son says to me, “I want a peanut butter sammich.” He smiles. “Sometimes I just want to hear someone say that.”

“Like your father used to.”

He nods and hands me the peanut butter.

Jane Hammons is Senior Editor of Mom Writer's Literary Magazine. She teaches writing at UC Berkeley and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her two sons. She recently published a short story in Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers. Some of her writing can be found online in Natural Bridge, River Walk Journal, Slow Trains, taint and Word Riot.

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