And when he gets to heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell, “One more father reporting, Sir. I’ve done my time in Hell.”
I awoke late today. First I thought it was Monday. I drifted off again. When I next woke up, I thought it was Sunday. It was near 13:20 hours. Past noon. The nightmare had continued each time I awoke, a relentless, haunting, vile affair which held me in its vise-like grip, and once asleep again, it took me to places I didn’t want to go, where I saw faces I didn’t wish to see.
NIGHTMARES IN REAL LIFE
These things are not rare for me. It happens all the time. Each time I can, usually, find something to rationalize the ugly and frightful dreams. Like last evening when I was forced to take Benadryl. I was feverish, freezing, every joint, every muscle in different stages of aches and pains. I’ve had my flu shot. It’s just a bad cold, I tell myself. I could have gotten it anywhere.
But then, I’m shaken by the nature of my nightmares. I see my parents. I hear them talking. Talking to me. Teasing, taunting, telling me I’m shit, trash, like they told me all my life. The faces of my children are there. Benign. Silent. Impassive. I don’t know why they don’t save me from the horror. Don’t they know I’m being tortured?
It would be wrong to blame them if they refused to come to my aid. After all, did I not let them die? Was I not able to save them? Is a father’s guilt not inexcusable?
DECEMBER 24, 1994
It was cold. You know, really, really cold. I was delivering pizza for Papa John’s. The store closed early, around dusk.
With nothing to do, I wandered around Dundalk. I worked there but was staying with a younger brother in Pasadena. I didn’t want to go there and sit the rest of the night.
I had been dealing with an eye infection, and since I was recently separated, my heart was broken. I was allowed to see my kids on Christmas, but I had no plan to visit. Working for nothing more than gas for my car, I hadn’t the means to buy even one small gift for each of them. And on this, my first Christmas not living with them, I wasn’t showing up empty-handed. That was unthinkable to me.
THE STORY AND THE CURSE
I went to Bayview Hospital in Baltimore after treating my growling stomach to a Wendy’s triple. Which emptied my wallet of my tips. By 23:00 I walked in from the parking lot to the emergency entrance. My eye had this weird infection that clouded my sight. I would wake up to find a white paste on my left eyelid. It affected my vision, made it hard to see street signs and house addresses at night. So I didn’t care how long I’d be there; it needed care and I had nowhere to go the next morning.
The waiting room was full. Parents with sick children, adults with injuries, probably nothing serious, but pain is pain, and suffering is suffering. I checked in and went back outside to smoke.
I walked to the darkest part of the parking lot and lit a smoke. I jumped when a voice behind me asked, “Can I get a light?”I turned. There stood a black man whose face, in the flare of the Bic lighter, showed age, not chronological, but hard mileage, a difficult life behind him. Life had kicked his ass.
And I will always wonder why he opened up to me: he took a long drag, and as he exhaled he said, “I’m here to get myself committed. I’m tired. I’m tired of being homeless. Tired of the drinking. I want to die but I want to live.”
He held my attention and I was doomed to hear his story. It was more horrible than I could have anticipated.
“I used to have a good job. I liked my work. I made money. I had a family. Two kids. Beautiful wife. We had a house, two cars and a boat. She was coming home one day with the kids. They got hit by a drunk driver. They died.”
Holy shit. I wondered how any man could live after that but I guess I already had my answer. He couldn’t live with it; that’s what had brought him here.
The story continued. “I went in the bottle after that. I never have come out. I lost my job for showing up drunk. Then they came for my boat. I didn’t care. Then they came and popped my car. I still couldn’t care. When the sheriff came to take the house I swung on him. I wound up doing time. Then I had to live on the street.”
As time goes by, I remember fewer details. So it is with old age; time steals from us. But I’ll never forget when he said, his voice so full of pain that I welled up with tears, “I just want my kids back.”
I wanted to hug him, but it wasn’t done back then. And I’ve always regretted not hugging him. I’d never seen a man so beaten in his face and heart by a life and a loss that I could not imagine.
If you’re guessing that I had a change of heart, you’re correct. I thought hard about the last thing he said to me before a security guard yelled at him to get back inside; as a potential suicide, he was supposed to be supervised. The guard was white. He verbally abused this poor man. It made me sick.
Next morning, I called my ex and asked if I could still visit. I said I shouldn’t because I had no gifts. My daughter, aged 11, was handed the phone. “That’s okay, Daddy. Your present can be that you love us.”
With that and the terrible, heart-rending story I’d heard the night before, I decided to go. I don’t remember much. I just know it was a good day.
Over the years there were many good days. More Christmas days would come and go.
Top to bottom: Summer 1994, visitation; Beth and Mike Jr visiting Santa; a proffesional portrait of Beth as a preemie about age 1; two pics of Beth as a toddler, perhaps age 2 or 3; Summer 1986 in better times when we were a family, Mike Jr would come along in two years.
The happiness didn’t last long enough. It never did.
From top to bottom: an Instagram post dated two days before Mike Jr died; myself and Mike Jr Christmas Day 2014; Beth appears not long before she died; Mike Jr Christmas Day 2017, the last time I saw him alive.
My daughter, Elizabeth Renee Smith, died on 5 July 2012. She drowned. She left behind three children.
My son, Michael Jr., Died on 14 February of 2018. He overdosed on fentanyl. His doctor had cut off his pain medicine and forced him to go to the street for what he needed.
And upon his death, the curse of the man I saw on Christmas Eve, 1994, was passed to me. And now it is my fate to post this story every year. I’ve told it almost every year since 2008 on whatever social media I was on. But last year, the story changed. It is a terrible story, one I would give anything to be able to forget. But now, I am that man, telling you, “I just want my kids back.”
And I hope you will heed my warning and go see your estranged kids or family. I hope your vacation plans change to include your children, no matter how old they are. Because the worst thing any dad can ever endure on Earth is to see their children buried. And what’s left behind us up to you. Will you be like me, full of regrets that come from knowing that I couldn’t save them, but wondering what, had I tried harder, might have been?
Will you be like me, missing your children every day, hating the holidays because all those commercials showing families at dinner tables is another knife to a wound you thought could not get any deeper?
Or will you treasure every moment together, help them in any and every way you can, and thereby give your life and soul to their survival, and see them live until your time comes to meet Saint Peter?
No one should have to see their own children die. No one should have that kind of curse weigh on them for the rest of their life.
I’m here to tell you that Hell on Earth does exist, that it is a horrific place, a place of no peace, where only the inconsolable dwell. And I don’t want that to be your destination. Or destiny. Because the things left unsaid, the hugs no longer within reach, the constant pain of a broken heart…are the most awful burdens you’re ever going to be handed your in life.
I wish I could die. I wish I could see them again. I hate this horrible time of year. And every time I see a commercial or hear a Christmas song, I reach for them.
But they’re always gone.
If I survive another year, I will be bound by a curse to tell this story again. And maybe that’s an awesome responsibility, and perhaps the curse will continue with another when I’m gone. But if I help one person to reconnect with family or a loved one, if I help them appreciate everything they can lose, then I’ve carried out my duty. I won’t get to know. That’s not fair. But it is how the curse works.
I leave bidding you the happiest of seasons; I hope you consider my pain and choose what you do next with care, and I thank you sincerely for reading. May you and your family live long, know prosperous times, be healthy and know peace. God bless you.
Memoirs of an American Asshole 