Sunbeams On A Cloudy Day
I wrote this on April 24, 2023, two days before my stepdad Kerry Mac Con passed away. It was a journal entry, part of an exercise my psychiatrist gave me to help process and release self-directed hostile thoughts and feelings. In the process of addressing things like self-loathing, self-doubt, insecurity, etc, I started writing very openly and honestly about many different things, including Kerry.
For context, my stepdad was an abusive high-functioning addict and alcoholic whose ability to hide his addiction and mask his abusive behavior was genuinely remarkable. He’d been in the hospital for about three months before he died, and we spent that time in a holding pattern, waiting to see if I could travel and what would happen. My husband and I were trying to get my travel permit expedited so I could come home, help my mom and just be there for support, but it didn’t go anywhere. Eventually, we were told about an emergency travel permit which I was approved for. We drove in on April 26. He died early that morning.
Tomorrow at 8:00 am (better known as the ass-crack of dawn) I have an appointment at the Detroit USCIS offices to get an emergency travel pass that’ll be good for 30 days. Jon’s expecting we’ll just be there for the full 30 days, which, in theory, we could do.
I’m listening to The Beatles. Only thing that seemed right. I have to do the dishes so I’m psyching myself up for that. Because I just don’t want to.
I don’t want to deify him. When people die, we have this tendency (we as human beings) to focus on the good and overlook the bad. There’s a lot of bad here, but there was a lot of good once, too. In pieces, anyway. Fragments of a good person that occasionally peeked through like sunbeams on a cloudy day.
There’s a lot of pain. So much pain. For all of us, each in our own way. And no one can take that away from us or alter it. It simply is. An indelible scar we each wear differently.
There were a few moments throughout my life that I saw him. The real him, vulnerable and human and aware of his own fallibility (however terrifying or unimaginable that was for him). I so wish he could have known and realized his true potential as a person. He was one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known, with an encyclopedic knowledge of … everything under the sun. But he never learned how to be a good father or stepfather, to any of us. Or a good partner, by the sounds of it. If he’d tapped into self-improvement with the same zeal he did learning about the history of European conquest, he would have been un-fucking-stopable.
He leaves in his wake the desiccated remains of the people who loved him the most, who just gave until there was nothing left. He deprived so many of us of real, meaningful relationships with each other, irreparably damaging each of us and causing serious harm, and for that, I will never forgive him. I can’t. And frankly, I don’t have to. None of us do. But while I can’t forgive him for such things, and I’ll certainly never forget them, either, I’ll still remember the sunbeams. His love of The Beatles. His sponge-like brain and hunger for knowledge. His fragile soul and occasionally kind heart. Teaching me where the middle finger came from as a swear. Teaching me some invaluable fundamentals about home repairs and construction. Giving me an example other than my parents when it came to ambition, travel, the pursuit of knowledge, and happiness. That last one is more as a cautionary tale.
I don’t honestly think he ever figured that one out, even if he was happy from time to time. Nothing was ever really enough. And as I write that, I just looked up from my book to see Dante, perfectly centered on the sofa, staring at me with his chin propped up on the back. I smile as the sun pokes through the clouds (literally this time).
He was always looking for something else, something more. It was never enough. Nothing was ever enough. He was never sated. He’d look to the past as something to recapture his youth, travel, relationships. He existed in the past and expected the present to just keep pace. But he seldom if ever knew how to see the joy around him. He never saw what was right in front of him because he was always too busy chasing a distant memory or feeling. He missed it. And we were all just standing here, flailing our arms, waiting for him to notice. That helped me learn what not to do, and to see what happiness really was, or what it could be, in all its imperfect chaotic bliss.
