Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) (28 page)

Jodi Meadows

Dear Teen Me,

I know how it is. Your parents are divorced, have been since you were four, and traveling between them is how you grew up. But now you’re a teenager with school, work, and practice, and you don’t have time to go back and forth. The days you used to visit Dad are now days you spend on your own, just doing your thing. Besides, Dad’s changed a lot in the last few years. Visiting him isn’t the same anymore.

Your dad is sick. You know it. You know about the alcoholism, the smoking, the diabetes, and the way he can get hurt by simply walking to the kitchen. You know he hasn’t been
Dad
since he lost his job; he can’t hold a new one, and his house is filthy. You know you don’t enjoy visiting him anymore.

Here’s what you’re not recognizing: He’s given up.

His kids aren’t kids anymore. The adult kids have kids of their own. You and your sister visit Dad sometimes. You clean the house. You hassle him about drinking too much and remind him that smoking will give him lung cancer one day. You complain with your sister that it doesn’t seem like he’s even trying anymore.

He’s not. He’s killing himself, and he doesn’t even care.

In a few years, you’ll get married and move away. You’ll try to talk to Dad on the phone, but you’ll be lucky if he answers. And toward the end—though you won’t realize it’s the end—you won’t be able to get hold of him at all. It’s going to make you angry. You’ll leave a lengthy voicemail about how he should answer the phone for his daughters if he wants to be involved in their lives.

You won’t hear from him until he’s found himself in the hospital, with cancer (yes, lung cancer) and a host of other problems. You won’t even have time to fly back home to see him. Your sister is going to put him on the phone. He’s going to sound heavily medicated (because he is), but you’ll tell him you love him and that he has to get better. All the anger, all the bitterness—it won’t matter anymore. You’ll let it go, because he’s your dad and you love him.

And that will be it. You’ll be on the phone with your dad, and he’ll be dying.

But you don’t know about all that right now. Right now, you’re frustrated. You know you’d rather just avoid the problem, and conveniently, that’s not too hard to do at the moment. You’ve actually got a lot of other very legitimate things taking up your time, like work and school and practice.

But I wish you’d go to see him a little more often. Talk with him. Remind him that you love him. There’s nothing you can do that will change the outcome. What happens to him is not your fault. It’s a horrible collision of depression, addiction, and resignation. You can’t change it, but you can give him a few more moments of happiness.

It may not seem like much right now, but in a few years you’ll understand that those moments of happiness can really make a difference.

Saundra Mitchell

Dear Teen Me,

All right, look. You didn’t kill him.

You’re going to spend tonight in the laundry room, sitting on the dryer. Shuttered doors closed, and phone pulled as far as the cord will go, so you can complain about it to your best friend.

Your idiot brother, who swallows all the energy in the family, who screws up everything, is at the hospital. Again. Last time, he was drunk and passed out and nearly burned his foot off at his makeshift camp in the woods.

And today, you came home from school and he was drunk. Again. You could tell because of all the empty beer cans in the living room. He was passed out, again. You could tell by the way he was sprawled across the living room carpet. With his stupid mouth agape. With his stupid hand on his stupid chest.

Was he going to wake up? You dug your toes into his ribs, way harder than you had to, and pushed. Pushed hard. Later, you’ll think you kicked him, like straight-up soccer-goal kicked him, but you didn’t. Guilt magnifies things, but the truth is, you shoved him, and he didn’t wake up.

So you called mom and bitched, “He’s drunk. Again.”

You called your best friend and bitched, “He’s drunk. Again.”

But there’s a family history with alcohol. You’ve got a bunch of extended relatives who all have an extended relationship to the hooch (it’s funny how we’re all kind of proud of the grandmother who bootlegged during Prohibition). You know that passed out drunks usually wake up. Or move. Or something.

So when you got nervous, and checked to see if he was breathing, he
was
. His heart was beating. And he
did
smell like beer. You
did
call your mother. That’s it. Those are the facts in evidence. As soon as you realized that all the pill bottles in the kitchen window were empty, you did the right thing.

You called Mom. You called Dad. You helped them carry your brother to the car in a green and yellow crocheted blanket so they could take him to the
hospital. You knew better than to call 911, because ambulances are expensive, and nobody in the family can afford them.

And now you’re holed up in the laundry room, air thick and warm and spring fresh, and you’re going to rail about it for a while. How he always does this. How he runs away on the holidays and screws up birthdays, and how he’s so busy destroying everything around him that you may as well not even exist.

After a while, you’ll get scared. You’ll bluster about how you’re going to kill him when he gets home from the hospital. Eventually, you’ll just hope. When the other line rings, you won’t say anything when your mother tells you that your brother is dead.

You won’t hear anything, either. Later, the details will get filled in, passively, randomly. Pumped his stomach, but it was already too late. Took all of his antidepressants, blood alcohol level was negligible.

You’ll go through his room and discover somebody else was in the house that day, because all of his Metallica tapes are missing. There will be a funeral where you walk out on God, and so many people in the house, and for some reason, Mom will bring that yellow and green blanket home.

When you get evicted from public housing—bloodlessly informed that you no longer meet minimum occupation requirements for a three-bedroom apartment—the blanket will go with you. In the new apartment, it’ll be there, on the couch. On the chair. You’ll put it away and wish you could burn it. It’s a shroud, exactly the shape of death; you’ll hate it because sometimes you’ll need a break from hating yourself.

But that afghan didn’t kill him, and neither did you. It doesn’t matter that you tried to OD two years ago, taking pills off that same windowsill. He wasn’t thinking about
you
that day. It wasn’t
your
idea. You didn’t pull the trigger; there wasn’t even a trigger to be pulled. Your brother was mentally ill and couldn’t get the treatment he needed. He self-medicated until he couldn’t self-medicate any more. It had nothing to do with you.

Nevertheless, it’s going to be a while (a couple of decades at least) before you realize all that. Before you realize that we’re
all
dead for longer than we’re ever alive. Before you realize that shoving him with your foot isn’t the same as kicking him with jackboots. Before you understand that you were there that day, you were one of the players, but the story wasn’t about you at all.

Once upon a time, there was a sick little boy, and he killed himself six months before his fifteenth birthday. He had a sister, and she cannot forget.

But know that eventually, you can forgive. Him. Yourself. The world. You’ll write a book and put his name on the dedication page. That’s the best you’ll be able to do, a little bit of immortality catalogued by the Library of Congress.

And today, you did the best that you could. Start the dryer again, because the sound is soothing, and wait for the call that’s coming. It changes everything, but listen to me; this is the truth:

You didn’t kill him. It’s not your fault.