My Mother Slapped Me at Christmas
Booze, Drugs, and Family
Part 1: Thanksgiving
Autumn 1988 was a terrible time for my family, still talked about today for its sheer cruelty.
I was a senior in college, living a couple of hours south of our suburban Chicago home. It was an exciting and vibrant time in my college years, when I was fully engaged in my major field, looking forward to graduation, planning for some graduate work, and trying to determine my next chapter. Meanwhile, back at home, things were challenging, to say the least.
I come from a fucked-up, alcoholic family. That was (and still is) a big part of my identity. I had been the last kid living at home alone with my single mother when she hit her rock bottom and got sober during my high school years. Now she had her sober alcoholic father living with her, trying to care for my ailing grandmother with Alzheimer’s, and I feared every day how the stress of it all would bring her back to the bottle.
I had never known Grandpa as a drinker. I had heard about it, but he had sobered up well before I came along. That autumn he fell off the wagon and became someone I didn’t recognize.
Grandma had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s around my freshman year of high school. Alzheimer’s is an ugly disease, that slowly takes a person away, like bits of a shoreline being dragged away in little waves. After several years of her decline, my grandfather needed help taking care of her, so when I moved to college they moved in, where my mother could lend a hand.
This worked for a few years, but eventually, Grandma’s needs became too great for the two of them. She was moved to a nursing home and Grandpa began driving the 30-minute trip each morning and evening to spend the day with her.
He wouldn’t miss a day. Like clockwork, he got up, shaved, dressed, and headed out the door to see his “Dolly,” as he called her. He was home for dinner.
Before the nursing home she had stopped recognizing people like me, and eventually my siblings and my mom. Grandpa was the only one she still knew and trusted. They had been married for nearly 60 years.
Until, that is, one day when he walked in and she didn’t know who he was. That moment broke him. He got angry, yelled at her, caused a scene, and the staff had to ask him to leave.
Around this time, a little before — perhaps that day? — he started drinking.
And everything changed.
I came home for a weekend in October and it was the first time I’d seen him drunk. I’d heard about how he had started drinking, but seeing it was different. He was not the same person I had known, admired, and looked up to. He was not the same man as the one who had been the father figure in my life.
He was a mean asshole. Bitter. Angry. Irritable. Caustic.
I remember sitting across the front room from him, me on the couch and him in his chair, telling him how he wasn’t helping Grandma by drinking.
“What the hell do you know?”, he barked at me. “Am I drunk? Am I? Am I drunk now?”
I told him how I’ve lived with this before and I’ve vowed I never would again.
“You don’t know anything. Shut up,” he snarled.
My biggest fear was that Mom would lose her grip, and I could already see her struggling. Later, when we were alone, she assured me she was fine. But I really wasn’t fine. Through tears, I told her how I couldn’t deal with the drinking, and said, “If he’s still drinking at Thanksgiving, I’m not coming home. I can’t do it.” Not being home for Thanksgiving would’ve been a big deal, but Mom understood how I felt.
I packed up my things and headed back south to school that afternoon. I don’t recall saying goodbye to Grandpa, but I am certain it was a half-hearted shout from the door. Not the manly handshake, and brief hug, he would normally get.
My challenge about the upcoming holiday and my willingness to come home didn’t play out as I had wished. The Saturday before Thanksgiving he couldn’t get out of bed and was taken to the hospital by ambulance where he died the next day. At age 82, he had finally drunk himself to death.
Mom called me around noon. There was a long pause after I answered, and I could hear her say to someone, “He’s already picked up.” She, or someone, was hesitating because they knew I had a play to perform in that afternoon and thought the news could wait. When she told me he had died that morning I was speechless. I hadn’t really seen it coming, and would only later learn from one of my brothers just how bad he had become in the previous weeks.
The wake and funeral were held a few days later, on Tuesday and Wednesday of Thanksgiving week. It was the traditional open-casket, Catholic kind of wake.
When I arrived, I couldn’t go up there and see him. I looked from across the room. I greeted family. I didn’t go and stand or kneel there. It wasn’t until I’d been there a while that my oldest brother came and told me how I needed to go pay my respects.
“Mom says you haven’t been up to see him. You need to go up there.”
“I can’t. I don’t want to see him like that.”
I wanted to see him how I remembered him — alive.
“You have to.”
Finally, I made my way there. He was all painted to look life-like. His hands held a rosary. His wedding ring was on his left hand, and his ruby ring which was made from his mother’s wedding band and that he always wore, was on his right hand.
But it all felt fake. I remember putting my hand on his shoulder and noting how hard he felt. I knelt. I prayed. I cried.
And I thought how I never wanted to do that again.
As is tradition in many families, the sons or grandsons are pallbearers, so my three brothers, my three male cousins, and I carried him up the church’s aisle, and later back out of the church to the waiting car, and from that car to his grave.
Losing my grandfather was, at that point, the harshest loss I’d ever felt. He had meant so much to me, taught me so many things, and stepped into the role of father when my own was a complete failure at the job. Losing him from drinking, and having no real goodbye, was a deep cut — and even more so, how our final time together was spent. It all took a long time for me to work through it.
Our family, my broader family with all my cousins — was forever changed. Little did I know that a month later we’d all gather for another funeral.
Part 2: Christmas
I returned to school after Thanksgiving, trying to focus on finishing out the semester, and adjusting to the idea of life without my grandfather, while wrapping my head around the fact that it was his drinking that did him in. The family monster and curse finally scored a point and took someone out.
A few weeks later, I was back home again for the break between semesters, and Christmas was coming. My mom was at work when the phone rang. It was my Aunt Theresa, Mom’s sister. This is my funny aunt, the one who I adore, the one who’s a sassy, quick-witted “broad,” in the old sense of the word. But when I answered the phone, she sounded upset.
“Is your mother home?”
“No, she’s still at work, but she should be home soon.”
She took a pause.
“Well, when she gets home, tell her that Jeffrey is dead.”
She barely got the words out without breaking down. I was stunned. My cousin Jeff, her oldest child, was dead.
I panicked, not knowing what to think or say, except “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry! Are you alone?”
“No. The kids are here. Just let your mom know.” And she hung up.
I didn’t know Jeff all that well. That family and ours were fairly similar — lots of kids, some of the ages line up, and both families were corrupted by alcoholic mothers and absentee fathers and divorce. Each family has kids with their own struggles over drugs or alcohol.
One clear thought I had at the moment was this didn’t feel fair. Less than a month before, days before Thanksgiving, my mom and her sister had sat at their father’s bedside as he died from his own poisoning. Now just a few days before Christmas, my aunt has lost her first child to drugs.
She didn’t say that part to me, but I knew there had to be a connection. Growing up I used to see their family quite a bit, but I always hung out with the younger kids, the ones closer to my age. I couldn’t help but think about having just seen Jeff weeks before, while we carried our grandfather to his grave.
When Mom got home I told her the news. I saw the concern and pain immediately in her eyes. My mother had also once lost her firstborn child, a pain she still carried. With only that pause, she reached for the phone and called her sister. They talked briefly, then she quickly packed a few things in a bag and headed out into the night to be at her sister’s side.
My initial assumptions were right. My cousin Jeff had a drug problem, something he had been trying to beat for a while. It turned out that he had sought professional help — help that got him on some medications to ease the cravings for whatever was his drug of choice. The trouble is, with the anti-drug drugs in your system, actually doing drugs becomes very dangerous. And that’s what happened.
He was out partying with friends, got wasted, and “passed out,” according to his buddies. But did the friends do anything to help him, like take him home or to an emergency room? No. They dropped him at a forest preserve park and then called his younger brother Blake to report what happened and where they left him.
This was not the first time Blake had received such a phone call, and in his own — and justified — frustration and anger at his brother, he chose to not go find Jeff this time.
The next morning, five days before Christmas, Jeff’s body was found. He was 29 years old.
A few days later, a couple of days before Christmas, the family gathered again for another open-casket wake and funeral. The scenes I witnessed at that wake are still vivid to me to this day. I had grieved and witnessed grieving over family before, but not like this.
My aunt was a shell of her former self. She sat at the front of the room, next to the casket. Occasionally sobbing loudly. My cousins, Jeff’s six siblings, were zombie-like, although they vacillated between angry zombies and sad, stoic ones.
At one point, Aunt Theresa, after the line of visitors had taken a pause, stood and approached her son’s body one more time. She looked down at him, stroked his hair, and then completely broke down, putting her head down on his chest and wailing.
Immediately her children rushed to her side, surrounded her, trying to comfort her. They formed an impenetrable wall, arms interlocked, sobbing together, over Jeff’s body.
The room of family and friends, which had been appropriately calm and sedate, became even more still and quiet, as we witnessed this heart-wrenching scene of a family torn apart, and settling into an act of choral keening.
That is the picture I can never forget.
Finally, after a few minutes, the now-eldest child started the move to guide their mother back to her chair.
I don’t remember much about the funeral portion of the day itself. The images from the funeral home and that moment have probably blocked out the other things. I felt I had witnessed something deep and powerful and very real. I saw grief and sadness like never before, and in some ways since.
Now, years later, I know how my cousin’s death caused a schism in that family — in some ways torn apart beyond repair, and my aunt never fully recovered.
Part 3: The Slap
So here we are. The height of the holidays, with two family funerals completed. Emotions are running high, feelings of anger and sadness, and regret are flowing. I’m feeling connected to my family in ways I hadn’t before. We’ve been through something together. I’m reminded how much I love them, and how important they are to me.
At one point during the wake, I had asked my cousin Don, Jeff’s and Blake’s brother, “How’s Jeff doing?”, completely misspeaking because I meant to ask “How’s Blake doing?”, referring to the guilt over not going to find Jeff when the friends called.
Talk about awkward! After only a momentary pause, Don’s perfect response was “Jeff’s dead,” pointing to the casket. I immediately felt like an ass, but Don took it all in stride. I still regret that moment.
In the evening after getting home from the wake, my mother and I were talking about the day’s event — how people handled it, and the conversations that were had.
I was struck again by the overwhelming grief that I saw in my Aunt Theresa, and how devastated she was. I began to tell Mom about how sad I was for Aunt Theresa, and how hard it was to watch. Feeling vulnerable, I decided to share a secret.
I tell her: “There was a time, several years ago when I was very depressed, and I didn’t want to go on, and I thought a lot about killing myself. And I’m so glad that I didn’t, because I would never want to hurt you the way I saw Aunt Theresa hurt today.”
Mom immediately slapped me across the face.
Pointing her finger at me, she said, “I never want to hear about that again!” And she walked away. End of conversation. That was the first and only slap I ever received from her.
Like with so many things in our dysfunctional way, we didn’t talk about that moment afterward, or later that evening, or the next day — in fact, what she demanded is what happened. We never spoke about that again in the 30 years that remained of her lifetime. I’ve also never told anyone else about that slap. No one else was around to witness it. It was an unmentionable just between my mother and me.
In a moment when I was trying to express love and connection, I managed only to provide more pain. In a season where my mother was already feeling so much sadness and loss, I could only think about my feelings, and what I wanted to express, not considering hers. I didn’t see that selfishness until my cheek was stinging.
That holiday season, 35 years ago, left a scar on our family, and like a scar, it has faded a bit with time but is still there. It wasn’t the last time we would feel overwhelming grief, have our family dynamic shaken by events, or even have secrets come to light. But, of course, we’ve also had joys.
I suppose that’s just how life works, right? At certain points, the importance of family comes sharply into focus in good ways or bad.
Looking back, that year was a kind of turning point for me. It was then that I realized I had somehow survived the fucked-up, alcoholic family and all the challenges that brings. I could see and feel a need to move forward while valuing the things and people that are important to me.
In the years since I’ve come to understand more fully who I am and why I am who I am, which makes it easier to look at that scar than to hide it.
