Читать книгу Big Love - Scott Stabile - Страница 10

DIG

I was fourteen when my parents were shot and killed in their Detroit fruit market. Mary’s Market. That’s what the sign said when they bought the store many years before, so they stuck with the name. All their customers called my mom Mary, even though her name was Camille. She never corrected them. My dad, James, was Jimmy to all. Jimmy and Camille Stabile. Fifty-eight and fifty-six years old. Married for thirty-seven years. Parents to seven children. Murdered on a Monday morning in September.

I had spent that weekend at my sister Rose’s house. We had just finished breakfast when my brother Jimmy called to tell her that a neighbor had spotted our parents’ empty navy-blue Camaro parked outside their market. The market’s doors were still closed and locked, hours after they should have been opened. Nobody inside was answering the phone.

I saw my sister’s panic and felt my own. My parents’ store was in a rough neighborhood of Detroit, too familiar with violent crime, and nothing about this situation seemed right. Where are you? I thought. Just answer the phone and tell us you’re okay. I feared the worst but chose to stay hopeful until we knew what had happened. It’s difficult enough to accept a loved one’s death when it’s certain, impossible to do so when there’s any doubt. Without confirmation, my parents stayed alive in my mind. Barely.

Rose and I hurried to her brown Chevy Chevette and headed to her husband, Joe’s, restaurant — the Ham Palace — where he and my sister Kim worked. We would gather there while Jimmy drove to my parents’ store to find out what was going on. I don’t recall what Rose and I talked about, if anything, during the ride. All I remember is the “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire” playing on the radio. Other songs must have played during the twenty-five minutes it took for us to get to the Ham Palace, but I recall only that saxophone-soaked instrumental. It was the soundtrack to those final, hopeful thoughts of a future life with my parents and will forever be the song I associate with losing them.

My brother-in-law closed the restaurant early, and he, Rose, Kim, and I, along with Lori, a family friend who worked there, waited for news about my parents. My mind raced between hope and fear, between possibility and dread, between a simple misunderstanding and a life-changing nightmare. I had just stepped out of the bathroom when my brother Jimmy arrived. I stopped at the bathroom door and watched, from across the restaurant, as he spoke words I couldn’t hear to my sisters. Then came their screams. Those I heard clearly. Rose and Kim collapsed into each other’s arms and wailed. And hope vanished.

I slipped back into the dark bathroom, crouched in the corner beside the urinal, and sobbed to the sound of my sisters’ screams. To this day, I have still never felt as alone as I did that day in the bathroom. I wanted my sisters to hold me, too. I wanted to insert myself into their grip, but I couldn’t make myself go out there. I couldn’t walk into that reality, and so I stayed, on the piss-stained floor, alone. Lost. Shocked and shaking. I heard Rose ask, “Where’s Scott?” just before Lori walked in, knelt down beside me, and wrapped me in her arms. She held me as if I were her son, and she cried along with me.

The police would report that my parents had arrived at the market to find two men inside — their friend and employee, T, who had been stabbed, as well as the man who stabbed him. My father called 911 to get help for T, and when the operator asked my dad if he knew who did it, he replied something to the effect of, “No, but there’s a man here who might.” My parents were shot soon after the 911 call. The homicide inspector would say that the man who stabbed, and ultimately killed, T did so in a “fit of anger” over a money dispute and that he killed my parents because they could identify him. Their killer was a regular customer at the store.

A police cruiser arrived at the market within minutes of my dad’s 911 call, but the officers left because the doors were locked and they believed the store to be empty. Three hours would pass before neighbors called the police again, because the store still hadn’t opened. You can waste a life wondering what might have happened had those first officers gone inside and called an ambulance. Or you can convince yourself that your parents would have died anyway, even if help had arrived, that their injuries were too extreme. One thing you cannot do is erase the image of them bloodied and dead on the floor of their fruit market, the market where you had spent many summer and weekend days working alongside them.

I had no idea how to process my parents’ deaths, let alone the way they died. How does a fourteen-year-old wrap his mind around such violence, and such loss? How does anyone? After a foggy couple of months punctuated by seesawing shock and devastation, I locked their deaths — and their lives — away, deep within me, out of reach of my day-to-day existence.

I moved in with Rose (who was thirty at the time) and Joe and their son, my nephew Joey. I went from my ethnically diverse westside suburb to her strictly white and Christian eastside neighborhood. I started a new high school, immersed myself in schoolwork, and acted like everything was just fine. Like I didn’t miss my old home and school desperately. Like I was adjusting well to my new reality. Like I wasn’t an orphan whose mom and dad had been murdered just months before. I smiled a lot, made a bunch of new friends, and mastered the art of shifting any discussion about parents to some other topic.

“What does your dad do for work?” a classmate would ask.

“Wait, have you heard the new Tears for Fears song?” I would respond. And just like that, we’d be talking about music.

Like a pro chess player, always several moves ahead, I manipulated most conversations away from family well before they even landed on the subject. This vigilance taxed me, but I refused to let my new classmates know about my parents. I wanted to appear normal at all costs, and ninth-grade orphans weren’t the norm in suburban Detroit.

I kept myself busy throughout high school — as the class president, as the student council vice president, as the school board liaison, as a yearbook editor, as a tennis player, as a swimmer, as a clerk at the local sporting goods store, as a receptionist at an area tennis club, as a popular and smart kid with more than enough school, work, and social distractions to ensure as little parental contemplation as possible. I thought about my parents every day, of course, but I didn’t allow myself to dwell on their absence. I didn’t allow myself to feel them. And I definitely didn’t talk about them. My siblings, like me, never talked about my parents, either, which only made it easier to keep Mom and Dad locked away.

After high school, I leapt into life as a college kid at the University of Michigan. I made lots of new friends, partied a bunch, joined a fraternity, partied even more, worked several jobs, skipped the classes that bored me, excelled in the ones that enthralled me, transitioned from a Republican to a leftist revolutionary, quit the fraternity, tried most drugs for the first time, had a good amount of sex, and generally loved my four years in Ann Arbor.

Through it all, I continued to hide the fact that I was an orphan as much as I could. I eventually told my close friends, of course, but kept it quiet with everyone else. I felt ashamed to have lost my parents the way I did. Like I was deeply flawed, even cursed, because of their murder. Besides, college-aged orphans may have been slightly more common, but the murderous backstory overwhelmed people. And their shocked oh my Gods and sad I’m so sorrys overwhelmed me. Even more than feeling like a freak, I didn’t want to be pitied by my peers, and it’s impossible not to feel pity for someone whose parents were shot to death. So I continued to act like everything was okay. And, for the most part, it was.

About once a year throughout high school and college, triggered by an unexpected conversation or too many drinks or the sheer inability to suppress the grief anymore, I’d sob myself raw for hours and hours and then get back to being fine.

This was how I coped. How I survived. I disconnected from the reality of my parents’ death. I buried the pain. The truth is, I didn’t consciously do anything. It’s as though the pain buried itself to protect me, to keep me from burying myself beneath it.

But the pain didn’t really go away. It stayed hidden but present, like a parasite. Not enough to take me down but enough to weaken me. It entered my body in the form of a regular cough and a nervous stomach. It entered my relationships as controlled distance and an unwillingness to commit too seriously to anyone. It entered my sleep as nightmares, endless scenarios of violence and death. Because I wouldn’t allow for its release, the emotional pain created outlets of its own, however it could.

Still, into my twenties, I acted like I had dealt with my parents’ death and moved on. What else was there to do? I was so good at avoiding my grief, I had convinced myself it no longer existed. I wasn’t pretending I was okay; in my mind, I was healed. I didn’t attribute my nervous stomach or my fear of intimacy to losing my parents. I shook off any suggestion of abandonment issues, even after ending yet another relationship too suddenly and without good reason. Aside from the constant nightmares, in which my parents or I were being chased and murdered, I didn’t believe their death was affecting my life much at all.

I was wrong.

In my early twenties and living in San Francisco, I had one of my yearly cries. Except it lasted for days. I locked myself in my bedroom and unraveled. All the pain I’d been hiding revealed itself. Rage and devastation and hopelessness swallowed me. I couldn’t stop thinking about my parents, grasping for any memories that my grief hadn’t vanquished. Mom, in her purple terry-cloth jumpsuit and oversize glasses, stirring her pasta sauce, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips. Dad stretched out on the family room sofa, eating popcorn from his favorite aluminum bowl, watching Star Trek. The two weeks every summer we spent at the log cabin in northern Michigan. Hours upon hours of pinochle and poker games.

Along with the memories, I focused on their murders, as though I had been there. I heard the gunshots and my mother’s screams. I saw my parents drop to the floor, as blood pooled around their bodies. I pictured their killer standing over them, his gun still cocked, ready to take another shot just to be sure. These images played like loops in my mind — the screams, the bodies, the blood, their killer — and I couldn’t make them stop. I wondered about their last breaths. Could they see each other at the end? What were their final words to each other? Did Mom think of me at all?

Then came my anger, an impossible rage, and it didn’t target just God, though it hit God hard. It went after my parents, too. Why did my dad have to buy that fucked-up market in that fucked-up neighborhood? How could he ever have allowed my mom to work there? And why didn’t she say no? The week they got killed was to be my mom’s last week at the store. For months I’d been begging her to quit, and she had finally relented. Four more days, and she would have been free. Just ninety-six more hours. Then my anger moved on from my parents and went after me. Why hadn’t I begged her harder? Why hadn’t I made her quit months before? I could have saved her life.

Still locked in my room in San Francisco, I kept mourning. I hated my parents, then loved them, then missed them, then blamed them. More than anything, I just wanted them back. I wanted more time with them. No longer in denial, I had finally woken up — to a nightmare. I couldn’t see a future beyond the pain. I didn’t consider suicide, yet I couldn’t find the point in living with so much anger and sadness. I had no idea how to move forward.

My sobs continued. I started to worry I was losing my mind, that something had cracked inside me and that I wouldn’t be able to stop crying. I’ve never felt closer to a complete mental breakdown. In a panic, or perhaps a moment of clarity, I pulled out the Yellow Pages to find a psychologist. I closed my eyes and pointed blindly at a name, then called the number. She saw me two days later. Once a week for six weeks we talked, mostly about my parents — something I hadn’t done in the nine years since they’d been dead. I shared and cried and raged and cried some more. Those six sessions were all I could afford at the time, but they grounded me again. They marked a beginning. They opened me up to the possibility of talking about my parents without going crazy, something I think I subconsciously feared during all those years in denial.

It took breaking down to open up. Reaching out to go within. Losing my resistance to find my strength. I had finally started digging up the pain I’d buried so deeply, for so long. In fits and spurts, at times casually, at times relentlessly, I’ve been digging ever since.

Not long after I stopped seeing the therapist, I started a job at New Moon, an unapologetically New Age gift shop in the Upper Haight district of San Francisco. New Moon looked like a hippie art show, smelled like Indian incense, sounded like African drums, tasted like free-trade chocolate, and felt like home.

Conversations that reached well below the surface weren’t just welcomed at New Moon, they were expected. I quickly befriended my coworkers, many of whom viewed their spiritual path — especially the pursuit of enlightenment — as the most important part of their lives. I had never even heard of enlightenment or considered my spiritual path at that point, at least not consciously. That changed fast. I adored these new friends, and I couldn’t get enough of their peace-and-love vibe, so I asked them lots of questions about consciousness and enlightenment and what it took to grow spiritually. Among the many responses, one idea stood out consistently: along with a committed focus on love, a necessary component of spiritual growth was a direct and honest confrontation with your pain. You can’t live in denial and expect to grow. Smiling through life only gets you so far.

Between these new, deep friendships and my instant obsession with the self-help and spirituality book sections of the store, I opened, for the first time, to working on my healing in an active way. Which basically meant just being honest about my pain and not too afraid to face it some of the time. I welcomed the long-overdue reflection on my parents’ death and how it had impacted my life. I invited a good cry much more often than once a year. I read about self-love and loss, acceptance and surrender, forgiveness and personal responsibility. I talked openly with my closest work friends about my life, my parents, my fears, and my insecurities. We shared everything with each other. I learned how important it is to share your story with those you can trust to listen without judgment, and to listen to the stories of others with compassion and understanding. This open dialogue reminded me that we all have lives marked by struggle, and it helped me to keep digging into my own pockets of pain. My friends supported me as I faced my past and helped me to feel I wasn’t facing it alone.

My experience at New Moon, along with the connection I developed with a local spiritual teacher, opened me up to living my life differently, with compassion and love as primary goals, with spiritual growth as my purpose. I began to long for enlightenment, and enlightenment, as I came to understand it, didn’t happen without diving into your pain. Not keeping it buried, not skirting around it, not denying it’s there, but heading directly into and through it, as courageously as possible. We can’t honestly address what we’re not willing to honestly face. It’s common sense, really. And a hard truth, for sure.

I was interviewed for the Home podcast recently, and one of the hosts asked me if it was still difficult to talk about what happened to my parents, all these years later. I told her, “Usually no, but sometimes, yes.” It depends on the context of the conversation and how I’m feeling right then. Even today, at times, more than thirty years later, I’m heavy with grief over the fact that they’re gone and the way they died. I mourn for the brutality of their deaths and the fear they must have felt in those final moments. I mourn for the relationship I never got to have with them as a teenager and adult, and for everything they never got to experience with me. I mourn being an orphan. I mourn the unfairness of it all.

What’s so much different now that I’m older is that I allow the grief to enter, and stay as long as it needs, even when it’s darkening my mind and ripping at my heart. Even when the pain of it scares me. I don’t pretend I’m not feeling it, and usually (but not always) don’t distract myself to keep from taking in its fullness. Eventually, it moves through me. That’s how emotions are designed. They let go of us when we stop holding on to them. And I don’t live my life anymore as though I’m keeping a big secret or running from a deeper truth. I’m no longer ashamed of my past. That freedom alone makes feeling the pain worth it.

We’re all living with emotional pain — often deep pain — and whether or not we do it consciously, many of us bury much of it inside. Where it feeds freely on our potential for happiness. Where it keeps us from opening up to the breadth of our truth. Where it prevents us from living within the beauty of our freedom. Buried but present. Always present.

Maybe it’s time to dig some of it up?

We all have our reasons for burying our pain, but at the core it comes down to fear. Fear of facing the truth of what we’ve done or endured, the truth of just how dark our darkness is, and the fear that we can’t survive it. That it will destroy us. But it won’t. Whatever it is, we can survive it; we’ve already survived it.

But what if now is the time to do more than simply survive? What if now is the time to live in a more conscious, deliberate way? What if now is the time to let the healing begin, for real?

Healing isn’t possible within denial and fear. It’s only possible within openness and honesty, within our willingness to look at the truth of our reality, past and present, and to accept it for what it is without letting it define who we are right now. We are not our struggles, or our heartbreak. We are not the actions we’ve taken, or the assaults we’ve endured. Yes, our experiences influence how we grow and who we grow into. But ultimately, who we are is who we decide to be, because of and despite everything we’ve been through. Our power lives in choice. We can choose to face our pain without judgment, without letting it shut us down to our growth. If we decide to. And we can commit to loving ourselves through it all. As much as possible, no matter what. Love — self-love — transforms. This is how we create a safe place inside ourselves, to heal.

When I started to allow for the pain of losing my parents, I didn’t just awaken to profound levels of grief that needed to be felt so that it could be released. I was also able to see how their death — by far the most tragic and transformative event in my life — has helped me grow into a more independent, compassionate, and loving man than I might have been otherwise. I’m not at all thankful they died, and I could never view their murders as a blessing, but I am grateful to have grown stronger because of their death. And I hope that my resilience helps others to see that growth and healing are possible, regardless of circumstance. There are gifts in even our greatest sorrows, if we’re willing to acknowledge them. If we’re willing to work at seeing them.

As a guy who posts lots of pretty pictures with quotes about being yourself and seeking happiness and love, love, love, I need to be clear about something: it’s easy to say just be or just love, and my experience with those realities — though still more limited than I would like — is powerful beyond measure, but getting there is difficult. One of the hardest things we’re likely to attempt in our lifetime. Staying there is even harder. It takes more than just wanting to be blissed out on peace and love, or we’d all be gurus. It takes work. Hard, important, necessary work.

Much of that work begins and ends with our pain. It begins and ends in those painful truths we try to ignore, the ones so many of us have masterfully buried. The sooner we take out our shovels and start to dig, the sooner we invite into our lives a new kind of hope, a new taste of freedom. It’s not easy. It hurts, but it’s worth it. It’s so worth it.

What does that work look like? It looks like whatever it takes to get us to feel, reflect on, and accept whatever we’ve seen, done, or experienced, as well as the reality of our lives in the present. For some, meditation works, or therapy, or yoga, or self-help books, or art. For others, it’s support groups, or ayahuasca journeys, or music, or a combination of several or all these things, and so much more. It comes down to figuring out what works for us and giving our intention and energy to it.

I use writing as a tool to process my pain. The act of spilling my thoughts and feelings onto a page, whether or not that page is to be seen by others, offers me a powerful and important outlet for my darkness. I read books, listen to podcasts, and watch talks that inspire me to open up a little more, to dig a little deeper. I dance my ass off all the time in my apartment to release energy. I engage in difficult conversations with my partner and family and friends to work through issues and to grow both personally and interpersonally. I connect with my social media communities, especially on Facebook, to share my experiences in an honest way with others who want to share their stories and work at creating the possibility of healing themselves. Others who want to dig rather than keep things buried.

I don’t do all these things all the time. Who wants to have difficult conversations every day? Not me. Sometimes I just melt into the sofa, lose myself in TV, and shovel chips and ice cream into my mouth. Sometimes I hide, or escape, or numb myself for a bit. But I always resurface and get back to work, because I’m dedicated to my spiritual growth, and to my happiness. I’m dedicated to myself.

Beyond everything else, growth requires dedication. Healing demands commitment. No number of books or podcasts or workshops will make a difference if we’re not committed to healing ourselves. And when we open ourselves to look at our pain for real, our pain will present itself. For real. It’s usually not a very pretty picture. I continue to learn things about myself that I wish weren’t true. I see new depths to my anger, and envy, and sadness. New proof all the time that I can be much less kind and generous than I desire and a much bigger asshole than I’d ever want to be. The work of awareness and consciousness is a process, and it’s endless.

I’m certain I still haven’t unburied all the pain around my parents’ death, or the pain I carry regarding my relationship with them while they were alive. I never liked my dad, and though I loved my mom, I resented both my parents for their lack of interest in my life. I wanted them to care more about me. I wanted them to see me. I may never expose all the wounds I’ve got around them, and that’s okay. I’m making progress. I’m opening. I’m growing. This book is another exercise in digging, in sharing my story so that it might support deeper healing for myself, and maybe, if I’m lucky, inspire it in others. That’s one of the many beautiful benefits of facing your pain: whether or not you intend to, you’re likely to inspire others to look at their own pain more openly and courageously. Along with digging yourself into a more fully realized life, you end up passing out shovels to others, too.

I’ve been digging for a while now, and I’ll continue to dig, because I want to invite any opportunity for deeper healing. I want to face the full expression of myself, past to present, with acceptance and love. Always more love. I need only to look at how far I’ve come to know it’s possible. I need only to consider my life right now to understand the transformational power of this kind of work. I will continue to explore all the possibilities of my growth, and to live as truthfully as possible. Because I want, more than anything, to be free.