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2007-02-02 @ 6:41 p.m.
healing with fire


Now that I got the medical all-clear on my chest pains, I�ve decided that I still have to figure out what is causing them, since I�m still having them to a minor degree. And I�ve come to my un-informed conclusion that a lot of what is wrong with my health, has to do with stress and unresolved feelings. And I�ve got a lot of them. Lots. Like enough to fill up 4500 Super Bowl Stadiums for the next 400 years. Its hard for me to let go of things, which is why, as �A� so delicately puts it, I�m �obsessive�. I actually prefer to think I just need to resolve a few of the things that are bothering me. The biggest? The way things ended with my father. I have immense guilt. I have sorrow. I have anger. And I think I may have just created like the best premise for a reality show ever. Should I call NBC?

So all this stuff has just been wearing the inside of my body down like some extremely acidic fluid. My body constantly hurts from fibromylgia. I�m bitter at times. I�m self-loathing. And other than a a few things that happened in childhood, I would say that most of it is currently tied to when I drove to Virginia in 2001 to try and stop my Dad�s mail order-bride wife from moving him to the Philippines. Because what it boiled down to was, she wanted 1) get him to a foreign country--away from me 2) change his will because he had Alzhemer�s Disease and didn�t know any better 3) wait for him to die 4) inherit a very, very large sum of money. My mistake? Rather than talking to him and telling him his wife was stealing him blind and sending it to the Philippines, I was too passive and wrote him a letter and left it on my bed when I left.

Biggest mistake of my life and one I can�t seem to forgive myself for.


Because slutsky found the letter, read it to my father in an alarming, how-dare-she tone-of-voice, and he started calling my house almost immediately and leaving screaming messages on my answering machine. I was devastated. My Dad and I had a wonderful relationship. We may have been the only father-daughter combo in the history of the world, who didn�t hate each at any point in our lives. We just totally adored each other, but suddenly he was totally buying what this slut was saying and I couldn�t believe it. Yes, its true he had Alzheimer�s and thought the state of Virginia was going to build a Super Highway up over the top of his house on top of a steep mountain, but that was because that was what the slut has told him was going to happen. And he believed everything she said.

So they moved to the Philippines a month later and I never heard from him again. And when he died 9 months later, the slut didn�t even have the decency to call me. Oh no. Course not. I was the horrible child who had ratted on her. Instead she chose to call my cousin in Indiana and then my cousin called me several days later. So I had no idea how he died. I had no idea where he was. I had no idea where he was going to be buried. And the father, who I totally adored was just gone. Poof! And as a minor footnote....when slutsky got over to the Philippines...she had her boyfriend waiting for her. She bought them a house and she used to leave my Dad who had Alzheimer�s unattended to go have play dates with her fuckbuddy. And lets see now, who�s money paid for their secret love nest? Oh yes, the money that my Dad worked really hard for his whole life to make. Bitch.

Naturally my name was conspicuously missing on the Will. I guess. Never saw anything about it. But that really wasn�t the point. The point was, I was so distraught about not knowing where my Dad was or how he died I finally went to Senator Hilary Clinton�s office and they contacted the Philippine Consulate in Manila and at least I got a death certificate. Oh, and rather humorously they accidently included several hospital reports from several visits to the hospital before his death. It seems he just kept showing up at the local hospital with bruises and broken collarbones and stuff. It always kind of made me wonder if Slutsky and her boyfriend weren�t trying to hurry up that pesky death process thingie on my Dad since they really wanted to get dibs on that Big Ol� life insurance check-a-roonie. Yay!!

So I�ve never been able to resolve, literally, any of this. This woman totally bitch slapped both me and my Dad and got away with it. She took my Dad away from me. She took my inheritance away from me. And on the emotional side of the slate, I�ve always been under the impression that my Dad hated me when he left. And having been a Daddy�s Girl, well, I just can�t seem to resolve my sorrow and hurt.

So I came up with this flaky ceremony idea about a week ago. I was going to write down all the things I was angry about, regarding this situation and do some kind of cleansing ceremony. I knew I had felt better after sending Married Guy�s e-mails through a shredder last week, so why not try to do something equally violent to rid myself of all the anger I�ve been feeling for the last six years? I was originally going to do something outside in the snow, but I wanted to light a fire, but I could just see somebody walking up and saying WTF, Lady, did you notice the woods are on fire! So I finally decided to just do it in my fireplace during the Full Moon last night.

Now since I have the attention span of a gnat, I didn�t really plan it all that well. I had a hamburger in a pan cooking. I had �Seinfeld� playing on TV. I had a lot of miscellaneous junk mail and newspapers in the fireplace, so I thought, hey, I better burn those first, but did I mention there was a LOT of them, and when I put a match to them it looked like the frickin� burning of Atlanta in �Gone with the Wind�? Holy shit. I thought I was going to burn Crazy Hilton down! Plus its already 85 degrees in my apartment anyways. And with the fire going, it was so hot I was afraid if Guardcat walked anywhere near the fireplace she might spontaneously combust.

Oy! I�m not very good at solemn holy, spiritual ceremonies, its seems.

So I just stopped for a moment and tried to gather myself. I waited for the fire to die down in the fireplace a little. I turned off �Seinfeld�. I turned down the hamburger. I turned on my new Nora Jones CD and played something called �What am I to you� and laid out strips of pink paper with stuff I wanted to say to my Dad and also sorted out torn up pieces of a painting that the slut had given me. I had torn it up in a fit of rage about 4 year ago and kept the pieces, I guess for this very occasion.


It actually went a little different than I thought it would. I had thought it was going to be steeped in anger and ranting and raving, since my strips of paper had phrases like �I�m angry that I don�t know where you�re buried�. But I mostly wept and said �I love you� to my Dad and said that I hoped that he loved me when he died and that he wasn�t angry at me and that he knew that I loved him very, very much.� It was all very, very draining. And then I threw the pieces of her painting on top of the log and took great pleasure at seeing them burst into flame and then I gently laid all the strips of paper about my Dad around the edges and they just slowly caught fire and kind of smoldered.



Afterwards I was so spent I just sat there in the dark for about 10 minutes with the Nora Jones CD playing. The flames had died down and were just gently licking off the main log. I kinda felt like I had just gone to a funeral. Perhaps I did. The one I never got to earlier.


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