The Dead Parent Society

Welcome to the club. It sucks! Plus, managing the trauma associated with your grief, and we coin a new phrase. It's an action-packed epic this week.

My wife joined in June. 

Me? I got my card back in September 1997. All of our closest friends from college but one are in¹. My father got it rolling for my immediate family back in 1973², four years before I was born. I was three when my mother joined and, of course, she is the one who inducted me into the Dead Parent Society.

Not to be confused with the Dead Poets Society, a movie which bored the absolute shit out of me.

The name was coined one night about 25 years ago. My wife, who teaches at my old high school³, and I were at a retirement party for one of her colleagues where I ran into my high school Spanish teacher. The open bar provided both the setting and social lubrication for us to talk about losing a parent while in college. She’s only about six or seven years older than me, and it was the first time I talked to one of my former teachers where it didn’t feel like were talking teacher-to-student, but as adults.

Cheap well vodka has eroded my memory, but I believe she was studying abroad when her father passed. I was three hours away in my collegiate bubble when I got the call, and four weeks removed from a summer where I bore witness to her wasting away.

We shared stories and talked about the short-term struggle, the long-term coping, and how it gets better, eventually. It was the first time I felt like I was talking to someone that understood. I was 22 or 23 and still trying to figure how who I was, what I was, and what I was feeling (that went on for a few more years). This was before I went into therapy and, it turns out, before I actually mourned my mother’s passing. Grieving and mourning are different concepts, so I would come to learn and experience.

Thus, the Dead Parent Society was born.

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Detour…

I can’t find the piece he wrote for Sports Illustrated (SI’s new corporate overlords have destroyed the archives), but NFL writer Peter King once wrote at length about his mother’s passing and how he felt like an orphan. His father had died years prior, and the death of his mother left him parentless.

There is a helplessness you feel when a parent dies, even if one is still there. I have a vivid memory of my wife’s cousin sitting graveside on a blustery winter day, unwilling to move from her chair. The pallbearers, of which I was one, escaped to the warmth of the limo. Her husband, also a pallbearer, had to leave the limo and convince her to leave. It was as if her walking away represented a surrender and admission that her father was gone.

That said, it gets better but only if you put something into it. I didn’t at first — compartmentalization and heavy doses of Jack Daniels were a short-term solution — and I paid the price with an explosive series of panic attacks from repressed feelings I didn’t even know I was capable of having. It was years of therapy before I could say that it got better, but that’s the thing…it took work. You don’t just flip a switch. You don’t just wash your hands of it and declare yourself fit and ready for duty. Sure, you can get by and distract yourself with enough things to delay a confrontation with reality, but it eventually gets you.

You know why? Please excuse me here for a second, but I want to make sure the people in back can hear me: IT’S BECAUSE YOU JUST SURVIVED A FUCKING TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE WHERE YOUR PARENT⁴ DIED. YOUR BODY DOESN’T JUST BOUNCE BACK FROM TRAUMA, SO WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOUR BRAIN CAN, YOU FUCKING POTATO?

Thank you for attending my TED Talk.

Look, if you don’t believe me, read about what the experts say. Suffering in silence doesn’t work and neither does a lengthy mourning period on Facebook. It takes actual, genuine work from you and it takes longer for some than others to overcome the loss. And, it’s possible you will never get over it, and that’s okay because at least you’re working on it.

Here’s what I didn’t know at 20: I went through a traumatic experience in watching my mother waste away and die. Cut away all the emotions and feelings; being in the room when someone takes their last breath lays a blanket of trauma on your brain. So does being there for the march toward that moment. So does being around others emoting from the loss. So does the funeral and burial and wake and the tray of shitty baked ziti that neighbor you don’t like brought over. All of this weight sits on your brain and impacts how it works⁵:

Trauma can affect one’s beliefs about the future via loss of hope, limited expectations about life, fear that life will end abruptly or early, or anticipation that normal life events won’t occur (e.g., access to education, ability to have a significant and committed relationship, good opportunities for work).

I did nothing with it until I started experiencing a series of panic attacks when I was 23 or 24. My anticipatory grief helped me prepare and rationalize the death, but not necessarily deal with it. Neither did working long hours, hourslong residencies at my favorite bar or ingesting copious amounts of, you guessed it, Jack Daniels⁶. From the same book as above⁷:

Self-medication—namely, substance abuse—is one of the methods that traumatized people use in an attempt to regain emotional control, although ultimately it causes even further emotional dysregulation.

So, you don’t drink excessively or dabble in illicit drugs or manage the pain through other acts of self-harm? That’s cool. You were better than me in that regard, except that the damage is still being done.

Avoidance is one of the most common reactions to experiencing trauma, regardless of its flavor. It’s defined as any action to prevent the occurrence of uncomfortable emotion(s) such as fear, sadness, or shame. According to an article in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology⁸, avoiding memories or reminders of trauma may slow the natural recovery process, including how you react to memories of the original trauma. It’s triple-stamping a double stamp, which was long rumored to be impossible. Shit, The West Wing devoted an entire fucking episode to this idea⁹.

I, like many others, ended up dealing with a major drawback of avoidance: the backlash. My brain fought back against itself. By compartmentalizing and dousing my thoughts with Tennessee sour mash whiskey, I created a monster in my head that became stronger than what I could control, which led to anxiety and panic becoming a constant companion for a few years to come. And, even better than that:

In addition, using all your energy to avoid certain emotions may make it difficult to manage other experiences, such as frustration and irritation, making you more likely to be “on edge” and angry. Research has also suggested that avoidance coping leads to chronic worry.

We weren’t built as a family, or society in 1997 (if I’m to be honest), to send people to therapy following the loss of a parent. I spent two weeks at home with my father and sister, and went back to college to resume my junior year. I tried going back to my life as it was, never once thinking that I needed to speak with someone. No one had ever suggested it and I never considered it.

I was strong.

I was in control.

I was probably drunk.

Fast forward to my mid-20s, when I started a seven- or eight-year run in therapy working on this. Today I’m in better shape; not fixed, but better.

And I kept getting better because I worked on it and stopped avoiding it.

I stopped being a fucking potato.

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Back on topic…

So, my wife joined the Dead Parent Society at age 46 as I did at age 20. We were inducted drafted into this shitty group where your common bond is the death of a person responsible for your life.

But, it’s not just about the membership card.

It’s about what you do so that you don’t become a victim of your status¹⁰.

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Because I’m a parent and spend most of my day repeating myself…

If you have experienced a death in your world, don’t be a fucking potato. Go talk to someone, preferably a mental health professional, but start with a spouse or friend or someone capable of coherent thought. This newsletter is not intended to replace genuine mental health care from a professional, but I’m happy to yell at you and call you a fucking potato if you think it might help.

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An aside…

I’m going to a wake later today for my Little League coach. Syracuse isn’t a particularly large city, but it’s no hick town either. Sandy Colabufo was first my neighbor and then coached my Little League team where I played with his son. Fast forward about 25 or 30 years and Sandy crossed my path once again as a board member at the nonprofit where I worked.

I grew up in a sort of tight-knit neighborhood. Our street was very much a front porch one; summer nights meant a nightly congregation of people on the stoops and in the driveways along our bend of O’Donnell Street. During the winter, about a dozen of them played bunco. This fraudulent dice game had nothing to do with competition and everything to do with socializing and drinking excessively. Sandy and his wife, Pat, were part of this group, as were my parents.

Sandy isn’t the first one of my former neighbors to die, but he is the first of this crew to pass since I started my own family. We’ll talk mortality in another edition of Dirt Nap, but I am a little older than Sandy was when he was my coach. And, it will be a little weird to go into the funeral home to express condolences to his kids, my contemporaries, who my mother once babysat after school.

This one…this one hit a little too close for comfort.

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Final thoughts about finality

A couple of weeks ago, I shared the words spoken by podcaster Dan LeBatard on the occasion of his brother’s, famed artist David “LEBO” LeBatard, passing. Below is the link to Dan’s euology, which was given Saturday at a memorial service.

For LEBO

1. It was pointed out to me this summer on our annual trip that three of the men have lost mothers and three of the women have lost fathers. Symmetricalish, though we have one husband that lost his father and one wife that has lost none.

2. My father’s mother died well before I was born. My grandfather would remarry a couple of years later.

3. My wife teaches at the high school I attended. I graduated long before she started. Syracuse is a small world sometimes quite often.

4. OR SPOUSE OR SIBLING OR CHILD

5. If time travel were possible, I might consider going back in time and saying this to younger me. I would then board a plane, fly to Las Vegas and bet Syracuse to win the 2003 NCAA Tournament.

6. Why Jack Daniels? Because everyone else in my family drank it. It’s why you probably made a Genny Cream Ale your first beer. Your old man did it and you should too. As an aside, I don’t keep it in the house anymore.

7. Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (US). Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services. Rockville (MD): Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US); 2014. (Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Series, No. 57.) Chapter 3, Understanding the Impact of Trauma. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/

8. Pineles SL, Mostoufi SM, Ready CB, Street AE, Griffin MG, Resick PA. Trauma reactivity, avoidant coping, and PTSD symptoms: a moderating relationship? J Abnorm Psychol. 2011 Feb;120(1):240-6. doi: 10.1037/a0022123. PMID: 21319932; PMCID: PMC3336155.

9. Season 2, Episode 10. Use your free trial of Max to go watch it.

10. Like not being a fucking potato.