Finding Closure
I spoke with my father’s 4th wife today. We hadn’t spoken since shortly after his death, 18 years ago. She read an article I published the day before about how dad was an early victim of the opioid epidemic, and she reached out to me via Facebook. She said she wanted to send me some pictures. She said she had something to tell me.
We spoke over the phone for about 30 minutes, her voice as chipper as I remembered. I didn’t know what to expect from a phone call like this. But who does? I once stood in her wedding line. She once asked me to call her mom. Now, I don’t know what we are. This is what multiple divorces looks like for children.
She told me she had cancer, and that she was on “the last leg of her life.” I told her I was sorry. I meant it. Then she told me that my father loved me despite all the pills and time in jail and marriages and years we went without speaking. She said it like this was why she called, but I’d heard this before, from his other wives. But I’d never really heard or seen it from him.
She told me that during the four years they were married that he often said, “I wish I could rebuild it. I wish I could fix it,” when talking about his relationship with me. “But he couldn’t because he was so addicted,” she said. “I don’t think that addiction was his fault.”
While this might not seem significant, now that I’m learning more about the opioid epidemic, I’m starting to wonder how much of his damaging decisions he actually had control over, and how much of it had to do with an opioid addiction he stumbled into at the hands of our family doctor.
He left when I was 9, and died when I was 19, and during that time I only once heard him speak of remorse, and it was across a heavy metal county jail telephone.
I sat in my bedroom for some time thinking about my conversation with her. I thought about how much hatred I still harbored. Then I thought about his longing to fix our relationship, but couldn’t, just like how he couldn’t stop visiting doctors to get pills, and for the first time, I started to realize that he was as much a victim in all this as I was.
People often talk about finding closure. But they never really talk about where that begins, or how long it takes. Perhaps it’s different for each situation, but here and now, I feel like I’m finally starting to forgive my father.