My dad made it really hard to love him. Not only for me, but for a lot of people. He died a year ago today. In honor of him, I write. I loved him, and I will always be haunted by the pain he felt, the pain he caused, and how he died. I carry it with me and hold it close. Sometimes I struggle with the sorrow, other days, anger - but mostly sorrow. I know it's part of the process. He struggled so mightily, and in so many ways. And there was nothing I could do to save him. I finally feel ready to write about it.
A sad fact is: I never really knew Mike Wheeler. He and my mom met, married, had me, and were divorced within 18 months. He had been 18 years old when he volunteered to go Vietnam as a Marine, served his tour and saw major combat, was done when he was 20, and had me at 21. Forty years ago, they didn't know what PTSD was, but he suffered from it. He had also been exposed to Agent Orange. He told me years later that he was absolutely shell-shocked from Vietnam, that he wasn't fit to be in civilized society, that he was absolutely unprepared to be a husband and a father mere months after being discharged. And good god, who could disagree with that? But back then - following the lead of those WWII veterans who came home and did the same - it seemed perfectly normal to come home from war, find a girl, and get married. Only my mom got pregnant first, and they had to get married. They did so in March of 1971, and I was born mid-September. He was gone the following August.
We lived in a small town, and I had both sets of grandparents nearby, so I would often spend time with Mike's folks, Bea and Herb. They had a farm, and it was a great place for a kid. Sometimes, my dad would be there, and I have hazy, vague memories of him reading to me, carrying me on his shoulders. When I was about 4, he moved to California with another woman, and had a baby. Zachary. My half brother. Meanwhile, my mom and I struggled. She worked a multitude of jobs. We were on food stamps, and I was raised by babysitters. My dad did not pay child support. But we survived, and she managed to put herself through college and graduate when I was 8. We moved to a bigger city shortly after that, straight into government housing. I did not see my dad at all during this time. He had left Zach's mom, as well - his second failed marriage. I didn't see him until I was nearly 14, when he called me out of the blue as a part of his AA program. He had married for a third time, and was trying to get sober again.
He wanted me to come visit him in Michigan. I had a long talk with my mom. I didn't really want to go, but I also felt I should go. It was my dad. I had wondered about him all those years, and my mom didn't have many bad things to say about him. I know now, as an adult, that she was holding back all the bad stuff - trying not to poison the well. She was decent enough to let me form my own conclusions. So, I went and visited my dad. My first airplane ride. It was an awkward visit. He was an earnest man, and well meaning, but stubborn and sensitive as well. He taught me how to shoot gun and tried to be a good guy. He was a tidy man, careful with his things, and had a real talent for woodworking. After that first visit, he sent me an occasional letter and called on the holidays.
By the time I was 15, my mom had met a man, and he moved in, and they married a year later. It was during this time that I began to rebel. I had always been left to my own devices, my mom supportive, and exhausted. I had a few ground rules, but was mostly free to roam our suburb and go do stuff that I wanted to do. When my mom remarried, suddenly, I was "being parented". I was skipping school and drinking and just being disrespectful in general. She threatened to do it, and it finally came to pass: she called my dad and told him it was time to step up to the plate and be a parent. And he did. And I was so angry at him - how dare he think he had any rights to me?
He drove the 7 hours and came to get me. They yanked me out of the middle of my Junior year, and I had to start a new school in Michigan. My dad had bought a run down house on a couple of acres of land; he rebuilt that house mostly by hand, and worked hard at his garden and making the whole place comfortable. His wife at the time, Mary, was a nice person, and we got along well enough. I learned a lot from that few months in Michigan with my dad. I learned about Vietnam. I learned how to plant a garden. I learned how to dress a deer. I learned how to survive in a new high school, surrounded by people different from me. I knew my dad grew a stand of marijuana plants in the middle of his blueberry thicket. I ate venison and god knows what other wild game disguised in stew. My dad was pleasant and mostly fair, but he was drinking a fifth of whiskey and a 12 pack every day, and Mary was drunk a lot, too. They had issues. I finished out the school year and convinced my mom to let me come back home.
As I grew into adulthood, my dad and I had a distant, but steady relationship. I went up to visit him a couple of times. In 1996 he had remarried, for a 4th time. His new wife, Sandy had a young child, a boy named Adam, and my dad thought it was the right thing to do to adopt him. Although I was happy for him to have yet another chance at a normal life, I'll admit the twinges of envy, that this young kid had the dad that I never got. I can only imagine how Zachary felt. But my dad plugged away at it - he stayed sober, and provided a nice life for Sandy and Adam on his little homestead. By this time, in his mid-40's, he was on 75% disability from the VA.
In 2001, when I was in graduate school, Dad told me about what really happened to him in Vietnam. Within his first week of being deployed in country, he had gotten friendly with an older officer over a few drinks. Apparently something happened, and my dad was sexually assaulted by this officer and a few others while he was passed out. Then, he had to live among these men in camp. I worked in a research library, and I found stories of other soldiers who were also 'initiated' in this way, and it made me sick. It sure did explain a lot about my dad. In addition, one of his duties was 'crackerbox' driver, a field ambulance - the guy who goes out after an attack and looks for wounded soldiers, dead soldiers, and body parts. It was a gruesome and depressing job. He retrieved 'floaters' from the rivers, and fetched intestines out of trees. At one point during an ambush, he killed an 8 year old boy. This trauma, these experiences, never left him.
Constant pain and various conditions had my Dad getting all of his medical care through the VA, starting right out of Vietnam with knee injuries and skin cancers. He literally had hundreds of procedures on his skin to remove tumors and melanomas. His feet had the jungle rot and he spent two third of his entire life going to the podiatrist, treating his feet. He was officially diagnosed with PTSD. He lost most of his teeth. He had high blood pressure, then low blood pressure. He had diabetes. He had part of his penis cut into to remove cancer. His spine had begun to fuse, making most movement painful, and he was unable to lie down to sleep, so he slept in a recliner. Carpel Tunnel surgery. Arthritis. Total knee replacement, with another, plus a hip, in his future. Incontanant. Impotent. Depressed. He had medications for every single condition. Morphine for pain. Prozac. High blood pressure medicine. He was on 20-25 pills a day. At one point, two different doctors in the VA system diagnosed him with two different conditions - high blood pressure and low blood pressure, with separate medicines for each. Only after two ambulance rides did the hospital figure out that the medicines were contra-indicated. Two instances in late 2010 he told me after the fact that he had OD’d on his morphine. Were they suicide attempts? I don't know. This is when I began to question a few things. Why was no one looking after him? What did Sandy think of all this? My dad was an alcoholic, and an addict, yet no one thought giving him these highly-addictive substances might be a bad idea.
Sandy, his wife, worked at the local hospital, and had excellent medical coverage for her and Adam. However, my dad blindly followed VA doctors' orders, and it seems that Sandy never questioned any of these diagnoses or treatments, either. Secretly, I think she grew tired of my dad, but liked the money that came in from his 100% disability and his social security checks, because otherwise I can't imagine a wife having absolutely no interest or feeling no responsibility to help him manage his medical care. When a doctor prescribed him testosterone in early 2011, no one questioned it. A few months later, my dad was acting aggressive and crazy. He thought he was being poisoned by Sandy. He thought Adam and his friends were stealing from him. Threats were made. There were guns in the house. Police were called, and my dad was arrested, and put in jail over a long holiday weekend. He proceeded to get dope sick, vomited and shit himself, without any access to a doctor or any of his medications. When he was released from jail, Sandy had put a restraining order against him; he went from jail to homeless overnight. The house he had bought and built long before he met Sandy was now off limits to him. He had no where to go, and refused help from the VA, so he started living out of his truck deep in the Michigan forest. A friend of his had a small hunting cabin, and he set up a base camp there. No electricity or running water. And so there he was - a completely disabled and sick Vietnam Veteran, homeless, and living in the woods like an animal.
Sandy had seized his bank accounts, so I paid his cell phone bills so he could at least stay in touch. I called the VA. I called a veterans advocate. I called the sherriff's department. I called the local newspaper to see if they'd do a story on about a homeless veteran living in the woods. I was looking for anyone who could help him get through this transition. I urged him to find a small apartment in town and let things settle down. However, once winter set in, and the divorce was finalized, my dad had it in his mind that he wanted to move to Arizona to be closer to me.
He arrived in the middle of a northern Arizona snowstorm in December 2011. He liked the looks of Payson, so he found an old trailer to rent immediately and moved right in. I couldn't bring myself to invite him to stay with us. Even though we had an extra bedroom and room for him - my mama bear instincts kicked in. I just couldn't chance that he might grow violent or irrational around my small children. I did not want to invite crazy into my house or disrupt my household. I can only wonder, if I had just taken a chance on him, would he be alive now?
During his time here, he came down a few times to have dinner with us and to see his grandchildren. He was polite, grateful, and despondent over the loss of his home, his wife and son, and his life in Michigan. He wept like a child at my dinner table, all of his sorrows, pain, loneliness, and memories - all of the chances he had, all of the bad choices he made. He thought he could still make things right, make it all up to me, somehow go back in time and undo his bad choices. I was 40 years old by this point. Old enough to know that our lives are the sum of our choices. Although I always told him I forgave him, that it was just meant to be, the truth is that I could not fathom how he could have left me when I was a baby, how he could live with himself. And he did it with Zachary, too - left his two small children by two different mothers. He left us to be raised in poverty, and he left us vulnerable - Zachary was abused as a child by an older relative, and Dad wasn't there to protect him. As a parent, those thoughts are completely unimaginable to me.
I last saw my Dad alive in June of 2012. He had come down for a Father's Day dinner, and I sent him home with a plate of food. We were in Seattle over the 4th of July holiday, and I texted him a picture of the Space Needle, which he loved. We texted sporadically throughout the month. I was going to invite him down for Olivia's 5th birthday party, but didn't do it - I had this building sense of dread, a sadness and heaviness. I knew I was avoiding him - but forced myself to text him to check in late on a Saturday night, after Olivia's party. He texted me back the next morning that he couldn't feel his legs and couldn't move right. I texted him back a message of concern. He was dead 30 minutes later.
I got the call from the Sheriff's office at 8:40am, Sunday July 29th 2012. Dad had called a neighbor over to help him up out of his chair. He got up, took two steps, and collapsed. The neighbor happened to be a paramedic - he started CPR right away, called 911 - but in talking to him afterward, he said Dad was dead before he hit the floor. We got the call and made it to Payson by 10:30am. There was still fresh blood on the floor. I was shocked at the condition of the trailer. There were gallons of whiskey and vodka and empty bottles. The place was filthy, dusty, weeks worth of dirty dishes in the sink. My dad, so careful with his things, so clean his whole life, had clearly been unable to care for himself. I sobbed my heart out in that filthy trailer. The weight of this still sits with me - I should have helped him more. I should have taken care of him. He should not have had to die this way, alone - drinking again, depressed, crippled.
Yet, I am not sad that he is dead. He was in pain, and I know he's found comfort. I hope he sees me living my life and finds peace in knowing that I am OK, that I beat the odds, and that I am happy and whole, and that I am raising two amazing children. Instead, I am sad at the whole of his life - that he never found what I found. That his instinct was to run away instead of meeting his obligations head-on. That he never found true happiness. I am angry at his former wife and son for abandoning him and kicking him when he was down - although I also understand that they endured his moods, his temper, his struggles, and were just sick of dealing with him. I am angry at the VA for their incompetence. I try not to blame myself, and I try not to feel like the victim, the first victim. Somehow, I think I was his parent, or his elder. At the end of his life, he had no one. His mother was upset with him, his father had died, his sister wasn't speaking with him, his ex-wife and son gave up on him, and Zachary was done with him, too. I was it. I was the last person who loved him, and I'm not sure he knew it. Am I the only one to grieve?
It's been a year now, and I still grieve. It creeps up on me at times, the sadness of his circumstances. I hope he's at peace, and I hope he knows how much I love and miss him. I've missed him my whole life, it seems. Godspeed, Mike. Be at peace.
