4 Steps To Be A Friend To A Grown-Up Member of the Dead Dads Club

You’re waiting for your kids at pick-up time. Your parents are visiting from Akron for the weekend. You’ve prepped the spare bedroom, shoved toys into the closet, pulled out the “cute” sweater your mom sent a month ago that your daughter thinks is “so ugly it looks like a bug threw up on it.” 

The mood of the day is that blend of excited and stressed that everyone who lives more than a time-zone away from their parents experiences when the family is coming to town.  You start to chat up the other mom waiting for her kids. But it all goes wrong when she says, “Lilly doesn’t know her grandfather. My father died when I was a child.”

You had no idea, did you? That’s because your friend is a member of the Dead Dads (or Moms) Club. It’s the club for kids who lost a parent when they were a kids. She learned early not only that life changes faster than you can say, “stroke,” but also that people hate talking about death. They remember the face everyone gives them when they said they lost their Daddy. It’s not pity, it’s a split second flinch - as if having a death in the family is contagious, like MRSA. Instead of saying, “I’m so sorry ” and pretending your dentist just called to confirm your root canal, try empathy:

1.                    Acknowledge Her Experience – “That must be really hard for you.” You say “be” instead of “been” because she is still sad that her parent is not coming to visit this weekend and never will come to visit. That sadness never goes away. It was hard when she was a child too. But she needs support for the hard and sad now that’s still happening.

2.                    Ask Her Something – “I’d love to hear about him/her.” She wants to remember her Daddy because she’s afraid she’s the only one who does. She may look and sound emotional when she answers you. That’s because she's so touched that you care enough to listen for even a minute.

3.                    Thank Her – She’s so used to holding back her membership in the Dead Dads Club because she knows it makes people uncomfortable. When she was in school, she may have been the only one in the whole school with a dead parent. By telling you this, she’s sharing her vulnerability. She’s taking a risk and trusting you. Surely that’s something to be grateful for.

4.                    Don’t Forget – There will come an event, like “Grandparents and Special Friends Day” at school. She will be there wearing a huge smile. Her kids will be with the living grandparents, or not. This day is killing her. She is faking a smile while she shoves a lifetime of disappointment inside an imaginary the box under her ribs. Give her an extra smile or a hug. Take her out for a drink later. Don't get nervous when she orders a single malt, she can handle it - Dead Dads Club members need the burn. 

What happens next? You have a friend for life. We members of the Dead Dads Club are a loyal lot. We expect very little of the world because the world already took so much from us. If you show us kindness, we’ll be there for you and we will want to be there for you good days and bad.

Chess and Checkers

I snap a photo of Ellie in the midst of an open mouthed laugh, her inexplicably gold-blonde hair and blue eyes beaming joy across the room. Someone told me that parents aren’t happier than non-parents but only parents experience short bursts of sheer bliss. I am grateful and sad. Her grandfather would have been her biggest fan. After all, he was mine until he died on the morning after my eighth birthday.

Ellie grins. She’s wearing her chess tournament t-shirt over her clothes. At five, she still has that confidence I lost so long ago I can’t even remember what it felt like. It seems selfish to be jealous of my own child. Both her parents are here sharing the day that’s all hers. I’m terrified that I’ll die before she can really know me.

While Ellie was practicing for her first tournament with my husband, she lost countless games. 80% of the time, she reached a straight robot arm across the board and said, “Congratulations.” Her father said, “Good game. Play again?” But the rest of the time, games ended in truly spectacular displays of poor sportsmanship. Ellie would flip the board over, run crying and screaming from the board, slam her bedroom door, and wail. She’d flail for the longest ten minutes a parent can endure.

One of these times, after letting her cry just long enough to communicate that “we don’t behave like this,” I slipped into her room, sat on her purple rag rug and pulled her into the space created by my criss-cross-applesauced legs. She curled into a ball, letting me hold her like an infant until the wave of rage flowed out from her amygdala to her toes. The force of her feelings leaves me dumbfounded. As violent as her emotions are, she lets them flow. It’s petrifying to me who has spent well more than the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice required to master squashing emotional reactions.

I waited for her to quiet and then she asked the question she always asks when she’s a little embarrassed. She asked, “Can you tell me about a time you lost a game with your Daddy?”

“Sure. I was about your age and we were playing checkers. He always won at checkers. I got so mad, I crushed my own finger when I slammed the door. Unless I could calm down he wouldn’t play with me anymore.”

“Did you play again later?”

“I learned to calm down and we played again.”

“And your finger got better?”

“Yes, my finger got better.” I stifled a giggle.

“And then you won?”

“Well, no. You see my father was a very good checkers player. I never beat him.”

“Never?”

“Nope. Never.”

“Then he died?”

“Well, not right after a checkers game but, yes he died before I ever got good enough to beat him.”

Ellie stared at me. I wondered what was happening behind her azure gaze. She returned from her lizard brain. Instantly calm and in-charge, her hyper-sense of justice kicked-in.

“Mommy, that’s not fair.”

“No it isn’t. But life isn’t always fair, you just have to do the best you can with what you have.” Every time we talk about how life isn’t fair, I have to shove my own disappointment into the box under my sternum. That’s where I save my feelings for later. Without that box, I don't think I could survive these conversations. I have to be here for her, to be her mother. Feeling whatever comes over me or remembering anything that could awaken grief would be to fail her. It’s easier when we don’t talk. Teaching a child a lesson you never had the chance to finish learning is its own challenge.  She gave me a fast hug and hopped to standing.

“Can I play against you? I think you might not be as good as Daddy.”

“Sure.” I hope she has a chance to beat me before I die. And just like that, I find myself sitting behind a chess board, playing black, losing to a five-year-old.

Memory is Unreliable, But People Shouldn’t Be: What Brian Williams et al. Means For Non-Fiction

photo courtesy: NBC.com

Brian Williams conflates things that happened to him. The James Frey memoir A Million Little Pieces sent waves of fear into publishing houses across the country. Lena Dunham’s book turned a Republican named Barry into the same person as a rapist. What is it about these three stories that is so disturbing?

It's not only that we feel lied to. It's that the person telling the story pulled one over on us and at least partly got away with it. We believed them and now we stand here, feeling stupid for having been moved by the story in the first place. The job of any storyteller is to move the audience. However, it is not the job of a non-fiction storyteller to alter the story so that an otherwise uninteresting story now has sizzle, pathos or some other quality. The viewer and the reader are at a disadvantage. The quality of their emotional response and the validity of their experience comes into question. In short, we've been made to feel something that wasn’t real.

As a creative non-fiction writer, I am constantly dogged by the unreliability of my memory and by it’s astounding clarity. When I interview people, often to make sure I’m not “misremembering”, I often here things like, “But you were so young… I didn’t remember that until you said it…Yes, it was just like that.” Other times, I’m sure I have something wrong as soon as I’ve written it but I’m not sure the detail being wrong takes anything away from the emotional truth I am attempting to convey.

Memory is fickle. The word memory comes from the Greek myths. Mnemosyne was a Titan. She was the daughter of Uranus and Gaia and the mother of the muses. All science and art come from memory. But memories, like mothers, are imperfect. They try their best to convey the truth as our hearts and minds need them conveyed at the time. They hide from us when we need to forget.

           

So why the fuss? The fuss is because we expect truth from “true stories.” Moreover, the contract with the reader and viewer of non-fiction implies that the reporter and author are pulling back the curtain on something real. To discover otherwise is to discover that we are on the receiving end of a breached contract. In breaking the contract with the audience, the purveyors of memory manipulations destroy not only their own credibility but that of the genre as well. As a great writer said, “If you have to make it up, write fiction.”