what to expect when your abusive parent dies during finals week of college

or a summary of my life for the past week

[tw: abuse, death, alcohol, food]

1. You will send more emails in the next few days than you sent all semester. Many of them will start with, “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but would it be possible to get an extension?” Most will respond, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” and not understand that you don’t know if you’ve actually lost something.
2. You will think of something mundane when you hear the news, like “oh, I don’t have to worry about student loans now” or “I’m glad I had that test this morning and not tomorrow.” You will wonder if this makes you a bad child.
3. Cullen will come over from next door, because you were, of course, in the common room when your mom called. He will buy you chocolate milk and be impressed with Spotify Mobile and sing badly to Wonderwall and make you fall over laughing. You will forget, for a moment, that you are supposed to be sad.
4. You will find out the day after you thought you were getting better. You will spend the last two classes of freshman year numb and staring at the wall of the common room, of your bedroom- let them assume that you’re skipping because you don’t care, wonder if you don’t care (about your father).
5. It’s true what they say, that, in the South, you get food when someone dies. Austin will bring you mac and cheese and kiss your forehead and help you write an email to the professor whose meeting you missed. Cullen, who only left the common room to go to his last class of undergrad and came back almost before you woke up, will use too many food points to make sure you have dinner and read over texts before you send them and ask for an extension on a paper so he can stay longer. You will feel more love in the day after he dies than you remember feeling from him, and wonder if it’s bad to think ill of the dead.
6. You will message the people who became your fathers in high school, the people who incidentally filled that role because there was no one else to. Somehow, it is helpful to get out your feelings to them the way you did months ago even though you are confused about the person they replaced. It is the same old story, again and again; they are providing the person he never was.
7. You will get multiple emails with the subject line “checking in,” as if they assume you do not know what they want to ask about, as if you chat with them on the regular about your life. You won’t know how they found out and decide that it does not matter as they offer their “sincere condolences” and you wonder if they would do the same if you told them about the type of person he was. “is there anything I can do?” and “let me know if you need to talk” will become common phrases and you will wonder if you are supposed to let these adults whom you’ve spoken to maybe once before know all about a man that you still can’t figure out.
8. Your electrical engineering professor will find you in Hudson Hall, frantically finishing a lab report because you spent the last two days nonfunctional. She will sit down and listen to you as you try and figure out what you’re feeling and try to explain, somehow, that you don’t know if you’re upset. She will validate your feelings on surviving the semester, and how it’s okay to not be perfect, and you will feel better about her incoming final. She will open her office doors to you if you need them and you will marvel at the good people in your life and how they got there. You will remind yourself, again and again, that you cut toxic people out of your life easily because if you can do it to your father at sixteen, you can do it to anyone.
9. You will decide, on LDOC, that you are going to enjoy yourself, goddammit. You will dance to Fall Out Boy on the same couch where you got the phone call and feel okay with your body for a few hours. You will not remember until later that it was him who made you feel bad about it in the first place.
10. You will get calls and texts from extended family and high school acquaintances and wonder how some of them found out. Your mother will say that people are coming out of the woodwork to support you; you will wonder where they were when he was still hurting you. You will wonder why there are only certain situations in which people offer help and why everyone is so sorry about his passing when all you are feeling is relief. You will answer some calls, and feel better and worse all at the same time.
11. You will miss the funeral. You will have a physics test two hours later that you will move to after graduation and spend that time sleeping and kissing and cleaning the common room. You will not feel guilt about this until afterwards, when you realize that you were supposed to be wearing black and crying into your mother’s shoulder. You will decide to grieve in your own way, because you don’t want to perform and you want to be around family and so, you stay in Durham. He doesn’t deserve your tears.
12. You will cry, eventually. On the night you find out, you will play “closing time” and make yourself shed tears while drinking chocolate milk the way you’re supposed to drink Scotch and complaining about him. You will realize after a few sobs that this is not you, this is what you feel you have to be. You will throw back another drink the way they do in action movies and call bullshit on yourself and dance around the common room with someone you love because you are alive and you are free of him.
13. You will cry, eventually. On the night you find out, you will play “cinderella” because you feel like you need to cry tonight, somehow you have to care about him, right? You will play something that you know will make you emotional and sob over a man you don’t even know if you loved. You will feel like you are mourning in the right way and you will feel like you are fooling everyone around you, but you will also feel better somehow and it will make you sick.
14. You will cry, eventually. On the last night of reading period, you will remember that he was the person who started your interest in engineering, that he would drive you to soccer practice and explain the world to an eight-year-old who just wanted to explore, that you missed the father/daughter dance ten years ago and still owes you a night out. You will leave your room at midnight and cry behind Coffeehouse over what you could have had, what you deserved to have, what you haven’t let yourself wish for in years.
15. You will think that you have done this already, that you mourned him four years ago when you decided that he could never be what you wanted and stopped paying attention. You will tell your family that, “You mourn two things when someone dies, the person and the position. I mourned the position years ago and I didn’t like the person.” You will think that you have sorted out your feelings. You will think that you have destroyed any possibility in your mind of him getting better. You are wrong; you will cry for the man you wished he was for longer than you care to admit and feel sick for wasting more tears on him, but they are not yours to control and even if he doesn’t deserve them, you still feel them, so you let people hold you tightly and hope that the pieces you glued back together after he hurt you stay put.
16. You will mention the fact that he died casually to strangers when they ask how you got extensions, but you won’t tell your high school friends. You won’t know why you try to keep it a secret except that someone told you that you were allowed to not tell people, you were allowed to want to be treated normally by some people, and you need that right now. You need to have a support system here and people who don’t know there, and you overcategorize your life and your friends and your relationships and you wonder why people you’ve known for three months have seen you shake with tears and people you’ve known for five years still don’t know that your father is fucking dead.
17. You will wonder whether the people sending messages of support actually want to listen to you work through your complicated feelings or just want to feel like they’re helping. You don’t want to tell them that it’s so much effort to read all these messages of possibly-fake support and try to figure out which ones are real, so you just ignore them all.
18. You will take care of people and be taken care of. There will be nights where you lie to your aunt that your phone is dying so that you can go to Cosmic with your overstressed STEM twin and nights where she comes over and brings stim toys and helps you sort through your feelings. She will be the one that you ask Cullen to text when you’re crying over Cinderella and you two will figure out a balance between work and school and taking care of each other and posting bad pictures on Instagram.
19. You will wonder if you are allowed to call him “abusive.” You do not want to take that word away from others, others who deserve it more. You will go to dinner with your best friend who will tell you, “I don’t want you to belittle your own experiences because you think it wasn’t bad enough. If you’re asking yourself that question, it’s bad enough.” You will still feel like you are stealing.
20. You will post this on the day of his funeral, some sort of twisted eulogy to a man you still don’t understand. You will accept that it is okay to be confused, that understanding people is a process, that you are allowed to not know what you are feeling. You will let yourself be loved by those around you, not because you need it, but because you want it. You will laugh and dance and kiss and crack jokes and cry and shake and sob and be held, sometimes in the same day, and you will be okay.
21. He can’t hurt you anymore, and you are allowed to feel relief.

[a sequel of sorts can be found here: linear algebra]