All the White Horses Have Gone

My father died in his sleep on Sunday night. He was 68.

I had been at the first morning of an induction for a new role when I got the message from my first cousin to call. I don't know my cousin well, and when my uncle had died, she had texted the news. The absence of detail told me everything I needed to know. I quickly gathered my things and walked out: the knot in my stomach rising.

Everyone knows moments like these: where vision distorts, sound quietens and the air feels sucked of all oxygen, suffocating and still. I wondered briefly if I was being called to a deathbed, or if he was already gone. Somehow, of course, I already knew. 

 My thoughts inevitably turned to our relationship with eachother, and where it stood.

In January 2017, my father's mother, my grandmother, had died. At her funeral, my father sat apart from me and stood with his brothers and sisters at the graveside, while my sister and I stood opposite. I can't explain to you now why it was this and not any other moment that began the ending of the bond between us I once felt could survive anything. I just know that it did.

Those who do not have first hand experience of chronic and severe addiction in someone deeply loved don't understand, as far as I have seen, how ordinary betrayal becomes, so that it becomes almost its own love language. There is the blowout - the shouting at a graduation, failing to turn up because of being thrown in a cell, some shameful public display of one type or another - followed by tears and apologies and promises. Then there is the good day, with all its brightness, hope and  ease and the magical sense it is true, this time will be happily ever after. That this time will be different.

Those who do not have first hand experience of unresolving addiction don't understand how this *is* what love becomes - not just as it is expressed in love for the person, but in what it means to love in life itself. It is so easy to create a life dedicated to magical thinking.  The hope that families of those addicted carry is at once vulnerable and beautiful and unconditional, and also heartwrenching. This is what Fergal Keane meant when he said that his father's drinking made him understand what made love the saddest word in any language.

Therapist after therapist on our family's journey said to me - isn't it amazing, that you still hold hope? But how could I not? They did not know or love this man as I did, even as they presumed to tell me again and again how unacceptable it all was, and how to recognise abuse and fill in laundry lists of our "dysfunction". From an early age, they told me how to "set boundaries" and "detach" and demonstrate "tough love", while intermittently advising me I was "too academic" and that it would be better for me to focus on getting a boyfriend or playing a team sport, because all that book learning was just evidence of how damaged I was by my father's drinking (overcontrol, don'tcha know).

They were well intended, but where was the love?

Where was the recognition for this man, who had stood over my infant head and read from Kahlil Gibran his wishes that I would forge my own course in life? Who occasionally would take me out of school for a day of adventure and exploration, just because? Who helped me load potatoes into a little red pram and beamed at me as I pushed them across the kitchen floor? Who would arrive into the front porch with a crème egg hidden in the cuff of his sleeve, and a glint of mischief in his eye? Who sat at the foot of my bed with a guitar and sang "Halfway up the Stair" in the voice of Kermit the Frog?

And where was the recognition of the trauma of extreme domestic violence my father and all whom he had loved had suffered that made leaning into joy so terribly threatening: too much to carry? Where was the understanding that my father's drinking was a symptom, not a cause, of his overwhelming experience of human suffering?

A whole human being: infinite and precious. My father was astoundingly bright, and his bookshelves heaved with wisdom, and beauty and love - the vast spectrum of expressed human meaning. He was, by all accounts, a talented and gifted psychotherapist: a founder member of the Irish Association for Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy. He was intermittently horrified by my flirtation with behaviourism, thought mindfulness was corporate filly folly but he felt sure I'd come around in the end. Jesus Christ was a hero to him - but the Jesus Christ of Kris Krisoffersten: Jesus as rebel and outcast and voice for the voiceless.

In my teens, we spent hours upon hours discussing Jung and Carl Rogers, Bertrand Russell and Joseph Campbell. He taught me to read Tarot with my aunt in long, exciting nights of exploration of the human condition. He had a fine voice, and especially on long car journeys, we would sing together, in English and in Irish: Danny Boy, Ar nAthair. My father loved dogs almost more than humans and long walks in the country, skipping stones on the sea, and Rumpole of the Bailey, and Frasier and Fawlty Towers.  He once caught a mackerel off a cliff at sunset and had what he described as a transcendent magical cigarette. When I was crippled by public speaking anxiety, my father took me to a field in the middle of nowhere and had me recite my speech over and over and over, and play it to myself on tape, until I had the confidence of all the kings and queens of the world. He also kept a file of all my achievements, so that at 42, I still have the first drawing I ever made in Junior Infants.

A whole human being: infinite and precious, who no, did not chronically invalidate me, nor leave me with "insecure attachment" or "maladaptively patterned" or whatever other fashionable phrase one might conjure to upend the truth of love.

And yet...

 I told my father once that when he drank it was like he crossed a bridge to another realm, to a world where I had no voice or power to reach him. I told him it left me silent and numb. I told him that this was both veil and comfort to the horror of his pain and how sometimes it was too much for me to bear.

 I told him I saw him, anyway.

 I told him I knew that where he went contained the weight of the whole world in all its inadequacy and cruelty and difficulty. He sat opposite me and told me this was exactly right - this was what it was like for him too, and we sat across from one another and cried at the distance between us, wretched and yet together, understanding that it was not meant, or chosen, and that neither of us had a clue what to do to escape it.  He promised he would change, and I told him I believed him.

 This, too, was love.

 When I moved back to Wicklow, he was having treatment at St. Pats, and we had one glorious overnight stay. He sat with my infant son on the floor while I walked my middle boy to preschool and fed him brown bread. Sunlight streamed on the floor and the coloured wooden blocks and scarves and duplos. I wanted it never to end. It was everything I had ever hoped for - the father of my childhood, back again.

 On his second visit, when he arrived, I knew he had been drinking.

 Ian and I did what I had not had to do for many years, and removed the alcohol from his flask and I hated myself for it. I gave him a blanket and a hot water bottle and sat with him on the decking, and as he sobered up we spoke and cried and watched the stars and made all the familiar promises.

 The third visit, he had consumed a bottle of vodka before he got to the house. He was dark and brooding and full of bitterness and cruel barbs, which exploded into the most unrelenting tirade of verbal abuse I had endured since I had left home. I saw my son, five at the time, stiffening and confused - and for the first time, saw through my little boys' eyes, and knew what I had to do. I knew then we would never all sleep again a night together in the same house.

 The last three years I have grieved my father like I did not know it was possible to grieve. I have cried, and sobbed, and raged and thrown things, and been a brat, and been wild in myself, and shut down, and terrified, and asked why a million times over, and have been so withdrawn and sad.  I have called that all manner of things. OCD. Depression. PTSD. All the labels. Psychological Inflexibility, even. But in truth what I have been suffering is love. Grief is what love becomes when it has nowhere left to go. I ran out of words to express love for my father to him in a way we both could understand. Things were said, on both sides, that could not be unsaid. They were not untrue, but they were also unnecessary.  I felt this was unforgivable, and I imagine he did too. The irony was that I sense both of us struggled more with forgiving ourselves than eachother.

 There are many stories I could tell about my father, but the one that is not true is that he *was* an alcoholic. My father was so much more. On Saturday last, the day before my father breathed his last breath in this realm, I visited the graveyard where his father is buried and I hung blanket squares on St Gobnait's well, and asked that we both be healed. I hope that wherever he is at this moment, that this is what remains: that this is what is true. Deep peace of the shining stars to you, Dad.

Winter (Tori Amos)

Snow can wait, I forgot my mittens

Wipe my nose, get my new boots on

I get a little warm in my heart when I think of winter

I put my hand in my father's glove

I run off where the drifts get deeper

Sleeping beauty trips me with a frown

I hear a voice "You must learn to stand up for yourself"

"'Cause I can't always be around"

He says when you gonna make up your mind

When you gonna love you as much as I do

When you gonna make up your mind

'Cause things are gonna change so fast

All the white horses are still in bed

I tell you that I'll always want you near

You say that things change my dear

Boys get discovered as winter melts

Flowers competing for the sun

Skating around the truth who I am

But I know, dad, the ice is getting thin

When you gonna make up your mind

When you gonna love you as much as I do

When you gonna make up your mind

'Cause things are gonna change so fast

All the white horses are still in bed

I tell you that I'll always want you near

You say that things change my dear

Hair is grey and the fires are burning

So many dreams on the shelf

You say I wanted you to be proud

I always wanted that myself

When you gonna make up your mind

When you gonna love you as much as I do

When you gonna make up your mind

'Cause things are gonna change so fast

All the white horses have gone ahead

I tell you that I'll always want you near

You say that things change my dear

Never change

All the white horses… have gone.