My Dead Parents

by Anya Yurchyshyn

  I said, “Neither am I.”

  She smiled. “Neither was he.”

  When I asked for her take on the car accident she said, “For me, the accident was just that. I never saw or heard anything related to his business dealings at the bank or the venture fund that suggested he had enemies or was afraid of something. Traveling at night was risky because the roads were poorly lit and not properly maintained. Add to that Soviet vehicles with bald tires and worn-out mechanics, and the likelihood of an accident is high.”

  After dinner, Irene and I went for drinks at a bar that we quickly discovered was also a brothel. We took the only available table, ordered two Coronas, and watched women in ill-fitting clothing and sloppy eye makeup circle the room with trays they bopped off their hips. They bent over and talked to the men, sat on their laps, and laughed at their jokes. Sometimes one would lead a customer through a door in the corner.

  “I’ve lived in New York a long time,” I said, “but this is my first brothel.”

  Irene knocked her bottle against mine. “You are like your father,” she said, trying to speak over the music. “You and he share the same quality. We have a word for it in German.” Irene grabbed my notebook and pen and wrote “unternehmungslustig.” “It means ‘very enterprising,’ ” she said, “in the sense of travel and adventure.”

  I looked at the word. “I guess I am pretty unternehmungs-lustig.”

  “Your father was good at creating something out of nothing, and in Ukraine, there was nothing. He always tried to have a good time, and to make sure other people were having a good time.”

  I told her how difficult it was to imagine my father as that person. “It’s hard for children to know their parents, and hard for parents to be themselves around their kids. You’re describing someone I never had the chance to meet.” Irene nodded as I continued. “I guess I’m a lot like my dad. I always thought he was a boring, uptight banker. I had no idea how much risk and flexibility his work required or that when he wasn’t working, he was determined to find or create adventures. And I thought he was the determined one, not me, because I was so unfocused for so much of my life, but now I am crazy determined and bristle when someone or something tries to restrict my freedom. I’ve created a life that allows me to do whatever I want to do so I don’t have to disappoint people the way he did, or resent them. I always thought I took after my mother because I’m really sensitive, and I never wanted to be like my father because I didn’t like him, but now…”

  “Now,” she said, “you know that your father was unternehmungslustig, and that you are, too.”

  As I spent months, then years, going through what my parents had left behind and speaking with those who’d known them, new people emerged, not the parents I’d known but passionate, successful, and curious individuals who tried really hard to get things “right.”

  What was the correct or “true” version of my parents? Was it the one I’d experienced, or the one I was learning about as I read their letters and spoke with their friends and coworkers? Could both exist at once? Was it possible, or wise, to let the things I didn’t know about them, or images I’d never had, overshadow the ones I did? That seemed like a form of magical thinking, one that was seductive but also a little dangerous. Was accepting this new story a denial of my own? Or was my refusal to acknowledge their other personas the ultimate, immature act of disrespect?

  How much could I really understand about even the most basic aspects of their worlds? I valued being able to go wherever I wanted, when I wanted. I didn’t want children. In many ways, my life was more expansive than my parents’ because I had so much freedom. I hadn’t considered that in other ways, perhaps I was stunted. No kids or marriage meant I’d experienced none of the sacrifices, joys, and deep vulnerabilities that accompany each. I’d done many hard things, but I’d never tried to do what they’d done.

  I stopped thinking of my parents as my parents, and began seeing them simply as people. I wondered and worried about their relationship as I read their early letters even though I knew how their young love ended. Often I found myself commiserating with them. How does anyone get this shit right? If my friends and I were constantly talking about our relationships and entanglements, our hang-ups and fears, they must have been talking about the same things with their friends. Did they freak out or falter? Did they see things happening and wish they could stop them, then watch them happen anyway? Of course they did. People don’t “get over” things. They keep living as best they can.

  The questions that sparked my interest in them, in who they were and what happened to them, had been answered. My father had experienced great turmoil as a child, was smart and intense. He took risks and didn’t want to be held back from pursuing what was most important to him. And he loved, really, really loved, my mother. My mother had an equally hard childhood marked by the absence of her father and of the love that she craved. Wildly intelligent, she fell in love with a man whose ambition helped give her a life that was full of adventure, at times better than she’d dreamed it could be.

  It was also full of loss on a scale I hadn’t known and prayed I’d avoid: absent father, dead child, dead husband. Though I wished my mother had tried harder to stop drinking, I no longer thought she was weak for drinking herself to death. When I considered the pain my mother woke up to every day, I thought, “I wouldn’t want to get out of bed, either.” I felt guilty at how dismissive I’d been of her grief. If my sister and I had acknowledged her suffering as she’d wanted us to when she spoke repeatedly of her losses, would she have felt heard and then fought to get sober? What if we’d seen her the way she’d needed to be seen?

  My parents experienced one of life’s worst tragedies: They lost a son. My mother was hobbled by grief that she couldn’t share because it was too hard for my father to listen. My father’s career took him farther and farther from my mother. She detested his absence and the responsibilities it forced onto her. They never had the chance to be reunited, to see if they could work through and past their many problems.

  After years of feeling like my parents owed me something because of how they’d treated me, I now felt like I owed them something. I’d unearthed so much suffering and had nowhere to put it. I couldn’t erase it from their lives or my own. It wasn’t enough to know them better. I couldn’t change how their stories ended, but perhaps I could change our relationship, which was still alive and always would be.

  It was difficult to determine when my mother began drinking seriously, when my father became aware of her problem, and what he’d done—or hadn’t done—to help her.

  I remembered my mother making martinis while I was young. They turned her face pink and loosened her smile. But I didn’t remember ever seeing her drunk. When I asked Alexandra if she remembered our mother drinking, really drinking, while we were young, she could only summon one memory. We were having dinner at a Thai restaurant. Our mom was drinking, and our parents got into an argument. She didn’t come home that night. Alex didn’t know if she went to a hotel, or if she slept at a friend’s. “I remember thinking that she still wasn’t there the next morning, but she was back when I got home from school. She was in bed, and her whole face was swollen. Dad was sitting with her; he hadn’t gone to work. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me she’d had an allergic reaction to a mosquito bite. That probably wasn’t the truth, but I didn’t know any better.”

  “Did that kind of thing happen a lot?” I asked.

  “Not that I remember. But she must have had a drinking problem during our childhood.”

  I reread the psychological assessment I received when I was ten and found something I’d previously missed. Under “family situation,” the therapist had written

  there is some concern on father’s part that mother might drink too much. It is reported that she drinks one to three hard drinks per night, but it is stated that this does not interfere with her ov
erall functioning.

  When I discovered these sentences, an alarm sounded. Though he’d downplayed it, my father, who I’d considered to be a very private person, was bothered enough by my mother’s drinking to mention it to a therapist. He claimed that it didn’t interfere with her life, but my sister and I were convinced that it did. Like me, Alex remembered our mother snoring through our mornings and our father getting us ready for school when he wasn’t traveling. As adults, the only explanation we could find for such behavior was drinking. “I would never let my husband get away with that, and he wouldn’t let me just sleep all morning,” Alex said. How do you handle the kids and then go to work and make the money?

  I didn’t remember the day my father officially left for Ukraine a few years later, which seems strange, because it would have been a happy one for me. But my friend Hillary did because she came over after he departed, and she recalls my mother being wasted. I may have noticed that my mother was drunk at the time, but the memory of that day disappeared. My father’s absence allowed my mother to drink more heavily, and was probably one of the reasons that she did. She started once I was in my room for the evening and slept it off while I was at school. After my father died, she tried to keep herself together for my sake while taking opportunities to drink excessively when she could. Looking back, I realized that she probably went to our cabin in New Hampshire so frequently when I was in high school because she could get as bombed as she wanted to while she was there. I was so thrilled to have the house to myself on the weekends that I didn’t think about why she was going so often or why she never checked in on me, and because I wasn’t sad about my father’s death, I didn’t find her behavior strange. Now I know that instead of leaving their child alone after such a momentous event, most other parents would have tried to be available for them. But I wanted to be away from her, so instead of wondering or worrying about what she was doing, I worried only about what I could get away with.

  As we sorted and swapped memories, Alex told me she’d once had to leave a college formal because one of our mother’s friends called the school to say she needed to be taken to detox. She didn’t have a car, so her date had to drive her two hours to Boston, and he helped her get my mother to the hospital. This sounded so similar to my own experience, when Eli helped me take her to the emergency room.

  “If you were in college, I was in high school. Where was I?” I asked. “How did I not know what was happening?”

  She said she had no idea.

  “We were living in the same house. Even if I was sleeping at a friend’s, how could she have been messed up enough that her friends knew she needed to go to the hospital? Why would they call you and not me?”

  She shrugged.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She thought for a moment. “I guess I figured you knew, and I felt that it was my responsibility to do something about it because I was older.” She was right to assume that I knew. I thought back to when I was in high school and my mother’s friends told me that she was in the hospital for exhaustion. I’d accepted that explanation and moved on, never considering that she might be in detox instead. I’d asked my sister how I could have missed what was happening, but I knew the answer, and it made me ache with shame. My mother was hiding her drinking, but she didn’t have to try very hard because I was so committed to not seeing her. It didn’t seem possible that I could have been as oblivious as I was, that I could have ignored her so successfully, but it had been easy. When problems arose, they fell to Alexandra first, and she took care of them for all of us.

  “Were you trying to protect me back then?”

  “Maybe,” she said. This incident, of which I wasn’t even aware, was one of many that my sister shouldered for me. She constantly tried to shield me from our mother’s drinking and its effects. The summer after my freshman year of college, I’d decided to go to Saint John Island, thinking I’d spend a few months working in a restaurant. I’d never been and had no experience in food service, but it sounded fun, and I didn’t want to return to Boston and live with my mom for even a few months. I thought my sister would think it was a terrible idea, but when I told her about it, she said that I should absolutely go.

  She bought my ticket even though I’d saved up for one, accompanied me down there, and spent a few days camping on the beach with me and helped me find a job. I figured she wanted a weekend in the islands and for me to have fun, but later she told me that what she’d cared about was making sure I didn’t have to be at home with our mom.

  I heard stories about my mother’s drinking from many of the people I was speaking to, and though I couldn’t pin them to specific years, many took place earlier than I’d expected. My mom told Sylvia that my father once threatened to take my sister and me away when we were younger because she was drinking too much. Sylvia added, “I think it was a threat to shake her up. I don’t think he would have done it. But he did have a temper, and he had the evidence about the drinking to hold against her, so it was possible that he could have gotten the two of you removed. I think she was always a drinker,” she continued. “She never got over Yuri’s death, and she was alone so much after it happened. Knowing her, and knowing how fragile she could be, how much she loved babies, and having to deal with it by herself…” Her voice trailed off.

  A couple who was close to my parents told me that before he started working in Ukraine, my father told them that he was worried about my mom’s alcohol consumption. “We didn’t know how to respond,” they said. “Your dad was worried and aware that there might be a problem, but didn’t know what the answer was. And,” they added, “your mother always denied anything about her drinking.”

  So my dad knew enough, and was worried enough that he’d said he’d take my sister and me away, spoke about it to a therapist, and with my mom’s friends. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t done anything.

  My mother may have wondered what happened to the person she’d fallen in love with; my father may have done the same. I’d only ever considered that she might have resented him, but he had plenty of reasons to resent her as well. My mother drank heavily, caused scenes, and missed her children’s mornings. Though she’d worked hard for the Sierra Club, her career hadn’t turned into what she’d once hoped it might—she’d delivered no fiery speeches at the UN or forceful testimonies before Congress. That may have been because my father prioritized his career over hers; she might never have had the chance to pursue the jobs she’d really wanted because she followed him to Boston, then London, and soon, had to be home with the kids. Or, after graduating from college, she may have realized that she didn’t want to work as hard as she’d thought she did, or felt she wasn’t actually very ambitious when she compared herself to her husband. And how did my father’s temper and treatment of me affect their marriage? He hadn’t wanted to marry a drunk, but she hadn’t wanted to marry someone who would bully their child.

  While talking with my parents’ friend Lili, the woman my father had spoken to about Yuri’s death, I asked if she remembered taking my mother, sister, and me in after my father had been particularly hard on me. I didn’t remember it, I said, but my mom had told me that Lili had provided us refuge. Could she recollect that evening or my mother complaining about my father’s anger?

  She told me that if she had, she didn’t remember it, either, but said she’d once let my mother stay with her after she and my father had a huge fight.

  “I don’t remember them having big arguments,” I said. “They bickered, but they didn’t yell, at least when I was around.”

  I thought she was going to say more about that episode, but then saw her mind was on something else. After a long silence, she said, “You know about the abortion, right?”

  The shock on my face told her that I didn’t. She grimaced and glanced away.

  “No. Was this after I was born?”

  She nodded. “Things were bad
between them at that point; they didn’t feel it was the right time to bring another kid into the family. George went with her to a clinic. They wouldn’t perform it because she’d had problems with pregnancies in the past. They told her she’d have to have it done in a hospital the next day. I remember when they came back, they were both upset. Your mother wanted a drink so she made one for herself and for me. Your father was annoyed. It was two or three in the afternoon, too soon to start drinking. He disapproved and he let it be known.” The following morning, they had the procedure at a hospital.

  We stared at our mugs as I tried to form words. “I’ve had an abortion,” I finally said. “I don’t want kids. The decision was easy. But my mom…” I played with my napkin as my voice faded.

  “Once in a while your mom talked about what it would’ve been like had this child been born,” Lili said, “but I don’t think she had any real regret because the situation was really bad at that point.” She didn’t remember when “this point” was—I could have been three, five, or ten—or what specifically made their relationship so bad that they didn’t want another child.

  I considered what their problems could have been. Their lack of communication, my mother’s affairs—though I didn’t know if my father knew about them—my father’s treatment of me, the imbalance of their careers, and my mother’s drinking. You don’t need to have big problems to not want another child, but both of my parents were so devastated about Yuri, I imagine that the decision was difficult. I trusted that they made the right choice since, as Lili said, they weren’t getting along, but if they had been, I imagined they’d have welcomed another child. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad to hear my parents’ friend say that their marriage was, at least at one point, “really bad.” I thought it had been weak when I was little, but I hadn’t cared about them then the way I’d begun to. I no longer wanted my earliest observation confirmed; I wanted it to be contradicted so I could hear they’d been happy because now, that’s what I wanted for them.