my love is my battle song, excerpts

05 Jun, 2023

I read some excerpts from the book I'm working on (working title is "My Love Song is My Battle Song") yesterday to a room full of friends and writers and friends in Portland and thought I'd share them here. The book is about losing my Dad to COVID, with major themes of COVID, psychedelics, and grief.

The reading matched a short piece to each of these themes:

First piece is a letter to my Dad, written after his death, about talking him through his death over a Skype call.
Second is written three years later to the day of the first piece, on his death anniversary. I started taking LSD on his death anniversary to mark the occasion. Excerpts from that chapter.
The last piece is a prose poem about the fundamental impossibility of communicating grief.

1. Hi Dad.

I hadn’t known exactly when you were going to die that day when I got the call.

Was your death going to come in an hour? A day?

I had no idea. I had been walking outside, this glorious bright beautiful spring day on Lincoln Ave. in San Francisco, April 24, 2020, and I didn’t know what was coming. I just knew I had to be there.

I got back to my basement sublet and strapped myself in, planting myself on the living room couch with my laptop open, my portal to you, and I was ready to go. No matter how long it took.

So when you closed your eyes, while I was telling you all the variations of “you did it, I love you, you can go!”, well, the significance didn’t land for me at first.

You’d heard me. You trusted me (you always did.) You got the message. I knew what you would have said.

It’s time to go Mikey. I love you Mikey. I’ll see you soon.

But I didn’t understand what was happening in that very moment.

Two nurses came rushing in, calling your name sweetly into the air, waving their hands in front of your face.

“Dennis! Dennis!”

And then it started to dawn.

God how my body longed to be there with you, a visceral, primal, fullbody ache to crash through the Skype window, to compress myself into light, to soar fiberoptic, to re-materialize there, in the hospital, by your side. With you.

Were you still conscious? Could you have heard my voice? Could you have felt me holding your hand one last time? Was there a soul? Was yours in the room?

You had died.

I wanted to stay there with you for as long as I could. But there was a nurse patiently holding up an iPad for in a hospital in fact beset by a raging pandemic, and I couldn’t find the words to say “Could you just leave us here for a minute?” I was waking from the dream of your death into the dream of the pandemic.

So I took a screenshot of you because it seemed like the thing to do and I thanked the nurse and dumbfounded, I closed my laptop’s lid and walked, out of the basement sublet, back to the glorious April springtime day, straight to the ocean.

2. LSD.

11:30 a.m.

I’m pacing around the house. It is supposed to be dead quiet here in. But today?

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR, goes the chainsaw.

I’m pacing from room to room, trying to find a place to hide from the noise. This home, its hardwood floors, its natural light, tucked into the natural NorCar forest, the perfect place to feel, to grieve, to transform, to —

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I’m already a highly sensitive human being. The LSD just amplifies it. I lie on the comfy living room couch. Relax into my body. Sink in. Let the experience crest

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I tense every single muscle in my grumpy body. It’s inescapable. Mentally I reach for a Buddhist aphorism. Is this a chance to work with my reactivity? Eh. No. Really? I just want the fucking chainsaw to stop.

12:00 pm

I’m hiding in the darkest, quietest room I can find, and after the very distinct sense that I’m giving birth, I’m crawling. Left shoulder right hip. Right shoulder left hip. I’m crawling and crawling and crawling. Diagonal to diagonal, I feel the muscles in my back holding me together, as hip and opposite shoulder do their thing.

Why did I need to crawl around for a while? I don’t know. But it was better company than the chainsaws. Some fundamental movement program deep inside of me apparently needed its time on center stage Crawling, crawling, crawling,, and then — my body started to work its way back up. To standing. To walking. To adulthood.

After the trip

I’d never heard Dad talk about the psychological regression part of psychedelics. It’s happened so many times to me, I can’t miss it.Times where I couldn’t understand sentences with more than one clause — or even language itself. But for all of Dad’s tripping, he never talked about that. His trips were things like “My motorcycle turned into a black panther and I loved riding it around town!” or “I made the best art when I spent a month eating of acid that one time.”

His trips weren’t the healing kind, to say the least.

It made me wonder if the family oracle was a reflection of the seeker. My trips were generally about healing, and Dad’s trips were generally about creativity. That’s who Dad was. Fun, joy, creativity, all gas, no brakes. It made sense to me. All he ever wanted to do was build machines at MIT and hang out with me.

3. I can not give this to you.

I can not give this to you —

— and you would not take it from me

There is no detail, no memory,

No brush of whiskers on face

no scent, no cologne,

That I could make into a thing

And even if I could!

I can not give this to you --

and you would not take it from me

For what would you do with them?

More feelings? More memories?

Like a day at the art museum

Me, a teen, discovering Van Gogh

A skeleton with a cigarette lolling out of his mouth

Coming home with us both

I can not give this to you —

and you would not take it from me

I was a child childing

a child being loved

A child belonging

Without knowing

Any other way was even possible.

I was not recording a memory,

I was not watching a scene.

I can’t tell you what his pride looked like

His sureness in me?

His absolute unwavering unshakable faith in me?

Because I can not make them into a thing separate from me

I can not give this to you

And — surely —

— You would not take it from me

What would you do with

His engineer’s handwriting

His big toothed grin

My pet name of Mikey

My loss

is my loss

is me

And your loss

is your loss

is you

I begrudge saying goodbye to my father over Skype

But you? Did you have a father to lose?

I can not give this to you

and you would not take it from me.

You don’t need to lose my father

I can not lose yours

My father was not an archetype for me.

Not a symbol. Not a map.

Not a model

of secure attachment

Or of healthy masculinity

He was just Dad

For me.

But still

you’re listening

And still

I’m talking

And still

we’re here

And I can make a hand out of my words

And you can make a hand out of your listening

And we can clasp them together,

side by side

And make the human way bigger

For us both