Another Wedding. And a Funeral...That Never Happened
Donna Trussell
Contributor
Posted:
07/31/10
All day Friday, I was dragging around the house, and I put this in my Facebook status line: "Starting from zero, got nothin' to lose."
That's from the 1988 hit song "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman. The first time I listened to this tale of poverty and longing, I cried. If ever there was an anthem for my sad, white-trash childhood, this was it.
It would not be appropriate to use a public forum to detail my late father's crimes against humanity, so here's the Cliff Notes version: Today he probably would have gone to jail, but times being what they were, instead he got electroshock treatment.
Leaving home when I was 18 years old, I did feel like I was starting from zero. Even so, I managed to rack up some negative numbers. Apparently I did have something to lose after all.
But I did, six years later, find someone to love. Writing about Chelsea Clinton's lavish wedding in Two Weddings and an E-mail, I was reminded of my father's response to the news I was engaged. He reluctantly contributed 50 dollars toward the nuptials. This from a man who was making about 50 grand a year. In 1977.
My father liked my fiance well enough. He just didn't believe in spending money on his family when he could instead spend it on his hobbies. We lived in a rental house that cost $90 a month. My father was the only one on our block with a college degree.
So tales of dewy-eyed fathers proudly walking their daughters down the aisles are a bit of an arrow through the heart for me.
But I survived. No small thing, I had a phenomenal grandmother. And my mother, kind to a fault, possessed a wicked sense of humor that she passed on to me.
Over my lifetime I've made some nice friends. Too nice, perhaps. There are days when I feel like visiting the local auto salvage yard and making a few friends there. My mom was like that. Both her parents were highly educated professionals, and the strain of mixing with pillars of the community wore her down. But her eyes would light up when conversing with ordinary, blue-collar people.
What put me in such a melancholy mood Friday was not just Chelsea Clinton's wedding. My post was really about the American preference for happy, inspiring tales, even if they're false. That's a topic that always brings me to cancer.
My "cancer-versary" (gag) is fast approaching. It was on my birthday in early August that I learned my abdominal distress was caused by a mass the size of a small grapefruit, which doctors believed was ovarian cancer. Sept. 12 will mark the anniversary of my surgery and the devastating news that my cancer had spread. I was stage III.
I'm used to writing about my cancer with a fair degree of detachment. After all, it's been almost nine years. I'm in remission despite my problematic subtype, which kills ovarian cancer patients with twice the speed and efficiency of regular old (but still highly lethal) ovarian cancer.
Time heals. After nine years, I had to dig a little deeper than usual to relive the despair, isolation and desperation I felt in 2001, and to recall how difficult it was to even try to mask those feelings for my friends and family. In a way, we were at cross purposes. I wanted to survive, and they could not give that to me. They wanted me to be who I was before cancer, and I could not give that to them.
It took me years to fight my way back from devastation to mere sadness.
But things don't always work out that way. Recently I read about Canadian nurse Patricia Van Tigham. In 1983 she and her doctor husband went hiking in Alberta and survived a disfiguring, near-fatal bear mauling. Thereafter she endured multiple surgeries and chronic pain, but she went on to have four kids and publish a bestselling book in 2001, "The Bear's Embrace."
However, despite the book's upbeat ending, four years later Van Tigham committed suicide. An obit revealed she had recurring nightmares of a bear performing surgery on her, and that she was "haunted by the happiness she once knew."
I'm sure that's not how Van Tighem wanted her story to end. But that's what happened. People don't like to believe we are one disaster away from insurmountable misery, but, in fact, we are. Every one of us.
This weekend some will cry tears of joy that Chelsea has triumphed over a fishbowl life among the elite and powerful, a rakish dad and the crushing burden of enormous wealth and privilege.
Others will remember weddings that were not so happy. As much as they would like to be carried away on a fantasy cloud of silk, satin and cake frosting, the misfortunes in their own lives will block the path.
Spare a tear for those who long for a fast car. Or a knight on a horse. Sure, I wanted to be scooped up and carried away when I was a teenager, but that was nothing compared to the miracle I wanted when I sat in my chemo chair: Just to live.
And live I did. That's my fairy tale ending. On days when my fallen friends come to mind (it happens a lot) I can picture my white-trash childhood, my potluck wedding, and even my ignoble father. And smile.
That's from the 1988 hit song "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman. The first time I listened to this tale of poverty and longing, I cried. If ever there was an anthem for my sad, white-trash childhood, this was it.
It would not be appropriate to use a public forum to detail my late father's crimes against humanity, so here's the Cliff Notes version: Today he probably would have gone to jail, but times being what they were, instead he got electroshock treatment.
Leaving home when I was 18 years old, I did feel like I was starting from zero. Even so, I managed to rack up some negative numbers. Apparently I did have something to lose after all.
But I did, six years later, find someone to love. Writing about Chelsea Clinton's lavish wedding in Two Weddings and an E-mail, I was reminded of my father's response to the news I was engaged. He reluctantly contributed 50 dollars toward the nuptials. This from a man who was making about 50 grand a year. In 1977.
My father liked my fiance well enough. He just didn't believe in spending money on his family when he could instead spend it on his hobbies. We lived in a rental house that cost $90 a month. My father was the only one on our block with a college degree.
So tales of dewy-eyed fathers proudly walking their daughters down the aisles are a bit of an arrow through the heart for me.
But I survived. No small thing, I had a phenomenal grandmother. And my mother, kind to a fault, possessed a wicked sense of humor that she passed on to me.
Over my lifetime I've made some nice friends. Too nice, perhaps. There are days when I feel like visiting the local auto salvage yard and making a few friends there. My mom was like that. Both her parents were highly educated professionals, and the strain of mixing with pillars of the community wore her down. But her eyes would light up when conversing with ordinary, blue-collar people.
What put me in such a melancholy mood Friday was not just Chelsea Clinton's wedding. My post was really about the American preference for happy, inspiring tales, even if they're false. That's a topic that always brings me to cancer.
My "cancer-versary" (gag) is fast approaching. It was on my birthday in early August that I learned my abdominal distress was caused by a mass the size of a small grapefruit, which doctors believed was ovarian cancer. Sept. 12 will mark the anniversary of my surgery and the devastating news that my cancer had spread. I was stage III.
I'm used to writing about my cancer with a fair degree of detachment. After all, it's been almost nine years. I'm in remission despite my problematic subtype, which kills ovarian cancer patients with twice the speed and efficiency of regular old (but still highly lethal) ovarian cancer.
Time heals. After nine years, I had to dig a little deeper than usual to relive the despair, isolation and desperation I felt in 2001, and to recall how difficult it was to even try to mask those feelings for my friends and family. In a way, we were at cross purposes. I wanted to survive, and they could not give that to me. They wanted me to be who I was before cancer, and I could not give that to them.
It took me years to fight my way back from devastation to mere sadness.
But things don't always work out that way. Recently I read about Canadian nurse Patricia Van Tigham. In 1983 she and her doctor husband went hiking in Alberta and survived a disfiguring, near-fatal bear mauling. Thereafter she endured multiple surgeries and chronic pain, but she went on to have four kids and publish a bestselling book in 2001, "The Bear's Embrace."
However, despite the book's upbeat ending, four years later Van Tigham committed suicide. An obit revealed she had recurring nightmares of a bear performing surgery on her, and that she was "haunted by the happiness she once knew."
I'm sure that's not how Van Tighem wanted her story to end. But that's what happened. People don't like to believe we are one disaster away from insurmountable misery, but, in fact, we are. Every one of us.
This weekend some will cry tears of joy that Chelsea has triumphed over a fishbowl life among the elite and powerful, a rakish dad and the crushing burden of enormous wealth and privilege.
Others will remember weddings that were not so happy. As much as they would like to be carried away on a fantasy cloud of silk, satin and cake frosting, the misfortunes in their own lives will block the path.
Spare a tear for those who long for a fast car. Or a knight on a horse. Sure, I wanted to be scooped up and carried away when I was a teenager, but that was nothing compared to the miracle I wanted when I sat in my chemo chair: Just to live.
And live I did. That's my fairy tale ending. On days when my fallen friends come to mind (it happens a lot) I can picture my white-trash childhood, my potluck wedding, and even my ignoble father. And smile.