The Path To Self Destruction

Sally Goodloe

Christmas and the New Year is a time of reflection. In truth it is simply an artificial line in the sand yet for some reason, it serves as a bookmark, the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one.  A book is a wonderful parable for life.  It has a beginning and an end, a start and a conclusion. When it comes to an end we place it on a shelf where it eventually becomes forgotten.  Perhaps someday, someone will pull the book down and re-read the story, bringing the characters to life once again.

We all change in life.  Day by day, hour by our we age and the exterior shape we once occupied ceases to exist.  Despite this fact, sometimes things in life are hard to accept, even hard to look at.  They can be things we love or things we hate.  Either way, there are times when the healing process is so slow the reintroduction of them into our lives takes time.  Sometimes it never happens and we end up dying with the ghosts of our past. 

Sally Goodloe

When my mother passed away in 1999 it took me years before I could look at a photo of her on the wall.  This was not because of anger or displeasure.  No the reason was more a result of still coming to grips with her loss.  Of knowing I could see her face but could never pick up the phone again.  It was a result of knowing deep inside, my mother was gone and would never come back.  Over time my mind focused on the memories of good things.  Now I can look at her picture once again.  Now I think about the ways she cared for me or made me feel loved.   Now that image hanging on the wall serves as a reminder, a starting point for memories still held within me.

I had two fathers in life, one biological and one adopted.  The adopted father taught me that blood means nothing in the face of love.  He did this by raising me and treating me as if I was his own.  People that don't know we share the same blood often never doubt it.  While we may look different, the circumstances of life have led our personalities and senses of humor to shadow each other to such an extent, you would swear there was a genetic link.  

Ed Raymer

The other father was a shadow.  He left when I was young perhaps to escape or in pursuit of a job.  My mother always said he could never make a decision in life and that was why she left him.   I guess by leaving him she ultimately made the decision for him.  After their divorce he was employed by the State of Alaska as a social worker and had a child with a native Alaskan woman.  While maintaining a small presence in my life, he gradually slipped away.  He never paid any child support and I suppose as time passed his obligation felt less and less.  For my mother it was just as well, she was content that he become as disconnected as possible.  Younger than I am today he moved from Anchorage, Alaska, my home town, to a village in rural Alaska.  It is a life most Americans can hardly comprehend.  Sewers link houses above ground in a strange maze of pipes.  You can't bury them because the heat would melt the frozen permafrost and everything would sink.  Water was delivered and stored in large trash cans.  Roads were dirt and went no where.  It never seemed warm leaving the cheeks permanently rosy in summer and in winter.    Sled dogs were scattered about attached to ropes held by stakes driven into the ground.

Ed Raymer

Ed, Sally -wife, Dad & Mom

The snowmobile was the customary winter transport and summers were filled with drinking expensive liquor smuggled in to town circumventing the supposedly dry status,  smoking fish and mosquitoes.   As you moved out of my father's town of Bethel to even more rural areas things became substantially more rustic.  Roads were replaced by trails and indoor plumbing was rare.  Honey buckets were used as toilets avoiding the need to venture to an outhouse in the winter.  In all my youth only twice I boarded an old DC9 prop driven plane and visited my father in his village home.  They were often lonely and painful visits when I felt as if I was quite out of place.  I occupied my time listening to old record albums or taking pictures.

I don't know when it began but at some point the life of a social worker seemed to conflate with his own life to such an extent that he began to more resemble the client than the provider.  In retrospect I think it was simply the culmination of the man that he was.  The legacy of his own father and of a childhood of neglect. His mother loved him as I am sure his father did but his father apparently never had much time.  His father was a heavy drinker and a smoker and combined with the chemicals from a paint factory where he worked ultimately ended his life with brain cancer.  I guess somewhere deep within the dark corridors of his mind,  for Ed, his father must have been a model as his own life he followed the same course.  He was a pack a day smoker and in a town that was supposedly dry had no trouble in feeding his alcoholism.  The other day I came across a medical report that was faxed to me by a doctor near the end of his life.  It detailed his advanced cirrhosis and end stage liver disease.  It told him explicitly to stop drinking or he would be dead.  He chose not to stop and died less then a year later.  He was 69.  My mom died from pancreatic cancer at 60 and from the untimely deaths of my grandmother and grandfather I began to wonder if I was cursed with a horribly short genetic lifespan.  It was only after learning of the extended life of the generation before them I came to hope I was in fact not destined for an early demise.  Besides, if a man could abuse his body as much as he did and still live to be 69, maybe there was hope.

Ed Raymer and Half Sister Sarah.

My father came to visit me a few years before his death.  He was trying to find a person within me that would welcome him and care for him until his end.  He had almost no means at that point and was solidly in debt.  When I learned he had purchased a one way ticket I refused to allow him to visit until he could show me a return reservation.  My family and I met him at the airport and I barely recognized him.  He hobbled and barely held his balance.  He was a shell of who he had once been.  When I look back at the old pictures I see a handsome man.  I still wonder where that man went.  I suppose the answer was in every cigarette and every drink.

With my encouragement and a cane I bought for him he decided he wanted to live in Florida and made arrangements to buy a trailer in a retirement park.  In a final act of indecision he failed to meet a down payment deadline and lost his deposit.  In 69 years I wonder if he ever did make a decision.  Instead he fell upon my half sister that he raised while her mother was more an alcoholic than he.  She did her best to provide for him when his own home became unlivable.  He failed to pay for heating oil and burst pipes destroyed what little he had left.  This was a final act of love and compassion for a man incapable of caring for himself.  Most assuredly, it was no easy task for a young single girl working a minimum wage job and trying to get by.  Sarah his daughter was with him when his final page was written and the Greek tragedy of his life came to an end.  In my mind, I can still hear his voice and still feel the pain I felt every time I begged him to stop drinking and knew in my heart there was another bottle hidden in the closet.  I suppose in some way I cared for him yet he made it so difficult.

When we first open our book of life the page is blank.  Bit by bit it is written on as we record our journey.  Sometimes it is terribly short and sometimes it is a novel the likes of Michener.  For most of us it falls somewhere in between.  Life is filled with memories, some are hard to recall.  Some still stab us as if they were yesterday.  Some leave us with more questions than can ever be answered.  Every time I look at the picture of Ed as a baby or as a young man I wonder why he took the course he did.  I mean it didn't have to be that way, did it?   Sometimes I wonder if our book is written before we ever come to write it ourselves.  Yet this simplistic conclusion seems to abrogate all personal responsibility.  It pardons us for all our mistakes and misgivings.

Every day when I look in the mirror I think how fast life seems to be passing by.  I remember where I was and wonder where I will go.  I take a breath and realize how much I love living.  How much I relish the chance to exist.  It is hard for me to understand those that don't share my emotion.    When you scratch away all else, life is love.  It is the people we adore and those that adore us.  These people in my life are my strength, they are my gift.  They are the truest form of treasure I shall ever enjoy in my short years of living.  I hope in my own way I have told each one how much I love them, how much I care.  Words that my own father never seemed to earn.  I did learn one very important lesson through him.  It was a lesson that blood is insignificant.  While family can be a treasure love is defined by something so much more profound.  For all my friends those close and those far from me as this year draws to a close.  I love you more than you could ever know.