2016: Two Deaths, One Election, and a Trip to a Psychiatrist

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 14 Part 3

I did, in a way, end up singing the “Ave Maria” at my father’s funeral.

I felt bad for the way I shut Dad down when he suggested it. Since then, I’d asked an accompanist friend to lay down a track, and I’d been sneaking away to Billings Studio Theater, the community theater where I grew up, to rehearse. When I was ready, I was going to pop over to a friend’s house and use his in-home recording studio. Then they would play the song during Dad’s funeral, fulfilling his wish and leaving me to whatever emotions may come.

My intent was to have it recorded in time to share it with him while he was still with us, but I was running out of time.

Once Dad was in hospice, I think on some level he gave himself permission to go. In part I’m sure because he really hated hospital settings. But more so, in any situation when Dad was ready to go, he went. No stranger to the Irish Goodbye, Dad was never one for long, drawn out departures.

It became clear fairly quickly that we no longer had days, but hours.

The day after we took Dad into hospice care, I called Steve, my friend with the in-home studio, and said, “If it’s gonna happen, it’s got to be now.”

Once we’d finished and I had the recording, I felt I was racing against the clock, against literal death. I desperately needed to play my “Ave Maria” for Dad before he was gone. It was him taking me to Sunday Mass at St. Thomas where I first found the spark for singing. I needed to give him this… this one final performance before …

I did end up playing it for Dad, but it was pretty close to the end. There was no reaction that I could see. Mom said, “I’m sure he heard you.” I don’t know if that’s true, or if that’s something we tell ourselves because the truth would be too crushing. Either way, I felt like I was too late.

Jeff turned the music back to Sons of the Pioneers, one of his favorites.

In the end, we were all with him.

Together as a family.

And I was holding his hand.

I stayed in Montana for two more months after Dad passed. When I’d arrived in April — though I didn’t tell Michael this at the time — I couldn’t see myself going back east. Now it was August and I was ready to go home. My purpose had been fulfilled. It was time to head back to Sharon Springs and figure out what was next.

About a week after returning from Montana, Michael and I were at 204 Main Bistro in Sharon Springs. The bistro in the 100-year-old building was open and modern, with dark stained wood floors, a seating area of industrial-modern furniture up front looking on a dining area of 20 or so tables. The wall behind the bar was lined with large orange circles against a white background on wallpaper that looked like strips woven together. I would call it whimsical, but don’t tell Jim, the owner and professional wallpaper hanger. He hates the word “whimsy” with the fire of a thousand suns.

We were sitting at the bar enjoying a beer, me with a colorful bowl of bibimbap, and Michael with a crispy breaded schnitzel that was bigger than his plate. I was looking out the large front windows at Chalybeate Park across the street: a large green lawn, an old gazebo on one side, a newer covered area on the other. The ground raked up into a bank of trees, the edge of a forest, trunks reaching and branching five or so stories into the sky, the canopy of leaves still summer green.

There was a line, Shakespeare, but I couldn’t remember the play.

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, book in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Come to think of it, the natural structure of the park would lend itself well to performing Shakespeare or something like that. I was musing on the idea when Michael took a phone call.

It was his sister.

His mother was in the hospital, and it wasn’t looking good.

Our appetite lost, we ordered another drink.

I don’t even think we discussed it. We simply silently agreed. The next day, we’d pack and drive out to Illinois.

I looked back out the windows at the park, my musings evaporated. I felt like I was wearing a weighted blanket all around my body. I wasn’t anywhere near emotionally ready to take on the role of supportive spouse, but that didn’t matter. This was happening, ready or not. We were going and I was going to be there for Michael like he’d been there for me. The rest could wait.

Michael's mother passed not long after we arrived in Illinois. Though quick, it wasn’t unexpected. And just like we had been with Dad, Michael’s family were all together with his mother in the end. We weren’t in Illinois a month, I think, before we came home.

That’s all I’m going to share as that’s Michael and his family’s story to tell.

There was another line in a Shakespeare play.

Twelfth Night?

No.

Maybe As You Like It?

Something about the ages of man.

Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans tastes, sans everything.

Back in Sharon Springs — to stay this time — we tried to settle in. I’d found a data-entry job that allowed me to work from home. I wasn’t getting rich by any stretch of the imagination, but it did allow me to contribute at least somewhat to the bills and pay for my own health insurance. Michael, very much the breadwinner, was still working near Boston.

As the trees of the Catskills exploded in their fall colors, we settled into the final months of 2016, happy to be looking forward to the holiday season.

I mean, after the year that we’d had, what else could 2016 throw at us?

So… yeah.

It feels almost cliché to say today, but that Wednesday morning after the election, it really did feel like we woke up in an entirely different country. A country no longer fueled by hope and optimism but by anger and grievance. Where politics was no longer the art of the possible but a blood sport of the colosseum presided over by the Commedia Dell’arte of cable-news talking heads hiding behind grotesque masks of apologetics, whataboutism, and spin. It was a country where our rights as queer people would be sacrificed on the altar of “religious freedom” by “Christians” for whom the Beatitudes are too liberal and weak.

On Tuesday, we had not feared for our lives.

On Wednesday…

Michael had taken Monday and Tuesday, Election Day, off to vote. As he was driving back to Boston on Wednesday, he came up on a now familiar splitting of the highway. One way on to Boston, the other way…

Montreal.

The rest of his drive, he mulled over the logistics of going to Canada. Because, that morning, the idea that we may have to go to Canada appeared very real.

For my part in catastrophizing, I imagined roaming bands of rural white men with guns — American brownshirts — traveling door to door to threaten all the queers and undesirables to get out.

Of course that didn’t happen.

Today in 2023, the rot has metastasized enough where that fear has been realized, but in 2016, people were still more or less the same people they had been in the days before the election.

But for us, that Wednesday morning in 2016, we woke up in a different country. We woke up in the wrong country.

On Route 20, which runs through Sharon Springs’ one stop light, there’s an agricultural farm equipment and supply business. In the weeks before the election, they had a port-o-potty with “Dem Voting Booth” crudely spray painted on the side. After the election, he had been repainted with “We Flushed the Clinton Turd!!!”

The village of Sharon Springs suddenly seemed absurd on its face. This little hamlet of mostly queer-owned B&B’s, shops, and eateries suddenly seemed out of place. It was a bright blue dot in a sea of “Lock Her Up” red.

Yet there they were, where many of them had been for years, decades. While the country was in a moment where it was ripping at the seams that separated the country mice from the city mice, Sharon Springs was like its own Brigadoon, appearing from the mist, where coexistence was not only possible, it was expected.

I thought of As You Like It again. It was a mix of rural folk and the exiled Duke and his court. Very much like Sharon Springs, where you had rural folk rubbing elbows with Manhattan expats and other city folk who’d found another life in the country.

In fact, wasn’t there a scene between Touchstone, the clown and courtier, and a shepherd?

Sir, I am a true labourer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness; glad of other men’s good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.

It was all too much.

Everything seemed broken.

The country was fractured.

My father, a mooring that had silently stabilized my life even in its most difficult moments, was gone.

I’d sabotaged my career, leaving lifelong dreams abandoned like unwanted furniture on a New York City sidewalk. Did I even want to be an actor anymore?

And, at 38 years old, my brain was still as manic as a fucking Jack Terrier with perpetual zoomies. The stage had been my outlet, the one place where my level of energy seemed normal. Now without the stage, I was constantly chasing after my inner terrier who always remained just out of reach. The chaos of it left me feeling adolescent, clumsy, immature, exhausted.

And I was tired of it.

So tired, I decided to do something about it.

I couldn’t fix the country. I couldn’t bring back my father. I had no earthly idea how I could restart my career.

But this, this hyperactivity, this ADHD, this I could do something about.

So I used my new health insurance, found a psychiatrist in Schenectady, sat down at my first appointment, and said, “I think I’ve been living with ADHD all my life and I’d like to talk about medication.”

To say medication — along with therapy — “changed my life” seems hyperbolic to me. The way I look at it, imagine you’ve gone your whole life with vision that was just slightly out of focus. You’ve lived well into adulthood being able to get through life, but without being able to see a lot of things clearly. Then you put on a pair of glasses.

That’s what medication has been like for me.

Where it had always felt my brain had been three seconds ahead of me for as long as I can remember, now my brain and I are in sync.

I haven’t lost any of my personality or, more importantly, my energy. Only now I have more focus, more ease, and, most importantly, more patience with myself.

With that focus, I thought, “What else can I do? Is there something I can do, however small, to heal the rift in our country?

I picked up my copy of As You Like It, and gave it a read.

When I was finished, I thought, “We can do this. I think…I think we can really do this!”

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