Tell me in the sunshine
On the logistics of grief and the horrible wonder of feeling it all
My brother is calling.
But he can wait because the bar is loud and I am getting drunk with my best friend. I order another round of Washington Apples as a raspy blonde butchers Alanis on the microphone. Silent ballgames are broadcasted as sweaty twenty-somethings peel their heels from the sticky floor behind us, coming and going between pool tables, bathroom stalls, or oblivion.
I ask “BFF”—a moniker which started as a cutesy homage to grade school but quickly turned into our actual name for each other—if she’d be down to see John Mayer with me soon.
I won’t remember this detail of the night until she tells me years later. And even then, I don’t actually recall it—not the conversation or the artist or the dates or the tour. That’s what trauma does to the brain.
My brother is calling again which can only mean one thing: something is wrong.
Patton Oswalt said that the second worst day of his life was the day he lost his wife. The worst was the day he had to tell his daughter. These events would have happened on the same day had it not been for his daughter’s principal who gave a very distraught father some wise and loving advice. His daughter’s principal said:
“She can’t come home from school and then you tell her and then she has to go to bed. You can’t send her off into sleep and that trauma just hit her. Tomorrow is Friday. Keep her out of school, have a fun daddy daughter morning and then at noon tell her and be there with her while she works through it.
“It’s going to be horrible,” she added, “but just be there. Tell her in the sunshine.”
“Are you sitting down?” Scotty asks. I’m not, but I lie and insist he tell me right now why he’s calling.
“Dad’s been in an accident.”
I try to sound sober as questions spill from my schnapps-stained tongue. “Is he alive? Is he OK? How bad was it? Where is he?”
I’m just outside the dive with the smokers and wails of “You Oughta Know” escaping every door swing.
Someone hit him on his motorcycle. They don’t know if he was wearing a helmet. Airlifted, amputated, comatose.
I’m spinning, hanging up now, ok—call me as soon as you know more. I cross the threshold into the bar and a version of me that will never be the same again. Sticky floors and drunk idiots clinking beer steins and smiling and laughing and fucking off is an obstacle course I am ill equipped to navigate with the spins. I take off into an impossible sprint toward BFF and my purse though tears, through sand. Through blurred vision, I see only shrapnel and ash.
“I have to go?” I state in the form of a question. “My dad was hit? I don’t know.”
I was 22 at the time. Not a little girl in school. But I wish someone had told me in the sunshine. That’s the thing about being an adult. We bear the brunt of life’s most unimaginable pain like we’re not just giant kids. We process trauma like an operator dispatches a call in real time: assess the need, hold for the solution. My dad’s accident was very much a matter of fact. A month later, so was his death.
I didn’t grieve right or often. Nine days after my mom and I watched him die in a cold hospital bed, speaking only in vital signs and morphine, I used bereavement time to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs light up Tempe’s Marquee Theatre. There is a photo of me and my dear friend, Manny, from that show. In it, our arms and mouths are up and open in song—the look of unadulterated joy across our faces.
My drinking ramped up in the weeks, months, and years to follow. Instead of going to therapy or talking to my family, I cried when someone chose Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man” as their karaoke song. A clear sign I needed to leave the bar and yet I wouldn’t. I’d just raise a pint to my dad like an old bar fly would a newcomer drinking down a fresh divorce.
I numbed all of it—the fun and the pathetic. Alcohol, weed, and ecstasy all had their place in my timeline of self destruction. Except I didn’t see it that way at the time. Partying was just something my friends and I did. None of them had lost someone they way I had. Could collective pain have played a role in our wild? I didn’t know. What do you call grief that wears the biggest smile you’ve ever seen?
When I started this Substack, I expected to write about sobriety. It’s even on my About page. But now, five and a half years into the dry life, it feels so normal that my mind often tricks me into thinking it’s insignificant. Like it’s just a thing I did, not a part of who I am. But the truth is it is very much who I am. It is one of the most me parts of me. Identity via normalcy.
This is not a story about getting sober. It’s a nod to what has followed—the beauty amid the shrapnel. It’s been 17 years since my dad’s death and, though he’s been gone a long while, it is not surprising he’s stepping out from the shadows of my subconscious now, as I am learning to call in ancestors and build altars on this yogic journey. As I learn how to be with myself.
The same way grief changes over time in intensity and purpose, so too does sobriety. As I call my dad forward to be with me in this time, I see now why I couldn’t before. There’s a line in Outkast’s ATLiens that says: “No drugs or alcohol so I can get the signal clear as day.” And yeah, it’s exactly that. All drinking did was wrap my sadness in confusion and anxiety, coat it in gasoline, and light the match. Endless roaring fires, always in groups of three. Distress, the only signal I knew to send up.
I reckon there are new worst days ahead, but I don’t fear them like I used to. To keep drinking was to ensure I’d live the most unimaginable nightmare only to be sent off to sleep. At least when things feel horrible now, I know he will be here. I will be here.
I will take myself into the sunshine.
A short list of what I’m into this week.
SZA dropped a new track!!!!!! Ugh. No one can make melancholy an entire vibe quite like her. Plus, this song reminds me of the time my PIC and I bought matching UFO earrings (were we little?, you ask, and the answer is no, we do this shit all the time as adults) only to get home and realize the earrings are, in fact, matching Saturns. Please just send our dumb asses to outer space, I am begging you.
's latest is a must-read for those who bleed.Khruangbin has a new album coming out and, y’all, maybe it’s the easy listening ass decade I’m about to enter into, but I don’t care. Their music is a salve. Special shoutout to “Mariella,” my favorite song of 2022.
This is so painful, so beautiful, so powerful, Heather. Thank you for writing it - it touched something deep and important in me. ❤️
Love all of this. I remember we met shortly after all this happened, had to have been at the Paper Heart. Seems like forever ago, we were babies!