Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(55)
I don’t hide anymore in my everyday life, and I definitely wasn’t going to hide at my wedding.
We got married a year and a half after the proposal, in July, at my parents’ cabin a few hours outside of Seattle. Even though I believe that death is a hard return, I can always feel my dad at the cabin. It was his favorite place. I walked down the aisle to a recording of him playing “Someone to Watch Over Me” on the piano; Aham wore a blue plaid suit; a bald eagle flapped over the ceremony; someone spilled red wine on one of the beds and my mom was in a good enough mood to forgive them; I got my fucking period (will you never leave me be, fell ghoul!?); it poured down rain after a month of uninterrupted sunshine, then abruptly stopped just as we emerged from the tent to dance; Meagan killed everyone with a toast about how Great-Aunt Eleanor died believing Meagan and I were lesbian lovers; a friend of mine, post-late-night-hot-tubbing, got confused about the route to the bathroom and walked into my mom’s bedroom naked. Oh, and Aham’s one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother had a stroke on the way to the wedding, went to the hospital, got better, and still came and partied. It was a gorgeous, chaotic, loving, perfect day.
We scribbled our vows five minutes before the ceremony.
Aham’s read:
You know that thing that I do that you hate? That thing where I talk about how years ago when we were friends and I always wanted to hang out with you and I would always text you, and I would see you and be like, “We should hang out!” and then you’d always cancel on me? I’m never going to stop bringing that thing up, because I like being right. And all those times that I tried so hard to get you to hang out with me, and I just wanted to be around you so much, I’ve never been more right about anything in my life. The only way I can think to say it is that you are better than I thought people could be.
I am happier than I thought people could be.
Slaying the Troll
One ordinary midsummer afternoon in 2013, I got a message from my dead dad. I don’t remember what it said, exactly, and I didn’t keep a copy for my scrapbook, but it was mean. My dad was never mean. It couldn’t really be from him. Also, he was dead—just eighteen months earlier, I’d watched him turn gray and drown in his own magnificent lungs, so I was like 80 percent sure—and I don’t believe in heaven, and even if I did I’d hope to nonexistent-god they don’t have fucking Twitter there. It’s heaven! Go play chocolate badminton on a cloud with Jerry Orbach and your childhood cat.
But there it was. This message.
It was well into the Rape Joke Summer and my armor was thick. I was eating thirty rape threats for breakfast at that point (or, more accurately, “you’re fatter than the girls I usually rape” threats), and I felt fortified and righteous. No one could touch me anymore. There was nothing remarkable about this particular tweet—oh, some white dude thinks I’m ugly/fat/stupid/humorless/boring? Does the Pope fart in Latin?—and by all conceivable logic it shouldn’t have even registered. It certainly shouldn’t have hurt.
The account was called “Paw West Donezo” (Paw West because his name was Paul West, and donezo because he was done being alive, done making up funny songs, done doing crossword puzzles, done not being able to get the printer to work, done getting annoyingly obsessed with certain kinds of Popsicles, done being so strong, done being my dad).
“Embarrassed father of an idiot,” the bio read. “Other two kids are fine though.”
His location: “Dirt hole in Seattle.”
The profile photo was a familiar picture of him. He’s sitting at his piano, smiling, in the living room of the house where I grew up. Some of the keys on that piano still have gray smudges worked into the grain, the ghost of old graphite where he’d penciled in the names of the notes for me when I was small. I never practiced enough; he always pretended not to be disappointed. The day they sold that house, when I was twenty-five, I sat on the stairs and sobbed harder than I ever had, because a place is kind of like a person, you know? It felt like a death, I thought. My family was broken, I thought. I wouldn’t cry that hard again until December 12, 2011, when I learned that a place is not like a person at all. Only a person is a person. Only a death is really a death.
Watching someone die in real life isn’t like in the movies, because you can’t make a movie that’s four days long where the entire “plot” is just three women crying and eating candy while a brusque nurse absentmindedly adjusts a catheter bag and tries to comfort them with cups of room-temperature water.
Saturday afternoon, when we could feel his lucidity slipping, we called my brother in Boston. My dad’s firstborn. “You were such a special little boy,” he said. “I love you very much.” He didn’t say very many things after that.
I would give anything for one more sentence. I would give anything for 140 more characters.
The person who made the “Paw West Donezo” account clearly put some time into it. He researched my father and my family. He found out his name, and then he figured out which Paul West he was among all the thousands of Paul Wests on the Internet. He must have read the obituary, which I wrote two days after my dad’s lungs finally gave out. He knew that Dad died of prostate cancer and that he was treated at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. He knew that I have a brother and a sister. And if he knew all that, he must have known how recently we lost him.