What we leave behind

It's all stories

Dear Writer,

I remember when I learned that memory isn’t reliable. That every time we go back over a memory, we change it, and then we remember the changed version until finally, who knows if our memories are even real or not? As someone who grew up in a family where reality was whatever my mother decided it was from day to day, I didn’t like the idea of memories being so easily manipulated, so inadvertently altered.

I didn’t like not knowing what was real and what was not.

Today is my father-in-law’s birthday.

Now, when I say “my father-in-law” that’s not entirely accurate. His son is my kids’ father, and to this day my kids’ dad is one of the most treasured people in my life. But the breakup had some rough patches. While my kids’ dad and I managed to repair our relationship, not all things that were broken in that process have been repaired.

Not with his dad, though. This man never had to forgive anything. He was as kind and loving to me after the divorce as he was before. I remained his daughter even though I wasn’t married to his son anymore.

In my family of origin, there wasn’t love, let alone unconditional love. My father-in-law’s unconditional love—not tolerance, but love—was so shocking to me that I’ve never really been sure what to do with it. I have never truly accepted it; I have at every turn expected him to one day stop being so kind, stop including me in family things, stop giving me a place to stay when I was in in town, stop calling me on Christmas and Mother’s Day. He never did, and now that I actually think about it, it was weird of me to expect that, because I knew better. I knew him better. I think that because I grew up with people who weren’t able to love me, I expected everyone to stop loving me, eventually. Not as a poor-me thing, it was just how the world worked from my perspective. If this man had rejected and dumped me, I wouldn't have thought twice.

I had to think twice about him not doing that.

And this is why everyone needs therapy.

Anyway, as you receive this letter, I will be driving to Arizona to visit this wonderful man, for what I hope will not be the last time. I hope that by the time my kids’ dad and I get there, the doctor’s reports will be rosy and we’ll be helping him get out of bed and go home.

I hope for that.

While I sit here in the space between what I hope and what I fear, I’m going to tell you some stories about this man, stories I’ve been telling for years, walking over that terrain with my memory so much that I can’t entirely guarantee their accuracy. But I can tell you this: What I’m about to tell you may not be entirely factual, but I guarantee you… it’s all absolutely true.

Story No. 1: The Gila Monster

My father-in-law is a world-renowned herpetologist. He knows snakes and lizards better than probably anyone else, anywhere. I can almost guarantee that if you’ve ever had a cable package that had a nature channel and you’ve lazily skimmed through the channels, you’ve seen him at some point or another. That happened to me not long after his son and I left Arizona for Alaska. The first day in the new apartment, I skipped through the channels with my infant daughter on my lap, and laughed when I heard my father-in-law’s voice.

“Hey, baby!” I said, bouncing the baby on my lap and pointing at the television. “It’s grandpa!”

Anyway, here is The Gila Monster story as well as I can remember it.

One day, this man was giving a demonstration at an elementary school, and he brought a Gila monster. It’s a very pretty lizard, all black and pink in alternating almost-geometric patterns, and it is one of the only venomous lizards in the world.

As the story goes, he was showing a Gila monster to a bunch of kids, and as he was showing them the teeth, the thing whipped around and bit his hand. One of the things about a Gila monster is that once they bite, that’s it. They’re locked on. He had to get away from the kids so that his graduate student could hit the thing with a rock and kill it so they could pry the jaws open. Meanwhile, the effects of the poison were taking my father-in-law down; he says it’s the most painful thing he’s ever experienced.

As they’re loading him into the ambulance, he looks over and sees that the EMT is flipping through a book to get more information on the injury. EMTs see a lot of things, but they don’t deal with Gila monster bites too regularly, as the lizards are pretty slow and not gonna bite unless you… you know… put your hand in its mouth. My father-in-law tried to talk to the EMT to give him the information he needed, but the EMT kept looking in the book until my father-in-law finally told him, “Hey, I wrote that book. Just listen to me and it’s all gonna be fine.”

Story No. 2: Snake in a clear plastic tub

In every house my father-in-law has lived in since I’ve known him, there have been snakes just… everywhere. In glass terraria around the house, in little plastic bins with holes poked in. If you opened a cabinet in his house, you did so at your own risk. But the dangerous ones, he kept those in a room lined with rows of glass cages, and when you go in that room or turn on the light or even make too much noise from another part of the house, that room rattles.

Because of all the rattlesnakes.

He, of course, knows everything about snakes and is not bothered at all by the rattlers. I am… well… let’s just say I’m not a snake person, and when my kids’ dad first took me in that room, he told me the story about the time he was in there with his dad who was dropping a mouse into the cage for the rattler when the snake went for him. My father-in-law was a hair’s breadth away from being bit, and if my kids’ dad hadn’t called out, he might have been. This is a story that these two wonderful guys find funny, and I find absolutely terrifying. I never went in the rattler rooms if I could avoid it, and the one Thanksgiving that my father-in-law let a Gila monster just roam free throughout the room—the Thanksgiving when I was about five months pregnant—I sat cross-legged on the chair the whole time.

In 2019, when I brought my youngest out to Arizona to get her set up at the university where my father-in-law taught for many years before retiring, I stayed with him and his wife. One afternoon, he walked in and showed me this little plastic tub in which a cute little baby snake with red, white and black stripes was poking its head around. He’d found it somewhere, or someone else found it and brought it to him, and there it was, just sitting on the coffee table between us while we chatted about various things. I kept my eye on it, wary of its escape, but he was nonchalant as always.

I remember him telling me that there was one order of red, white and black stripes that was safe, and one that was venomous. This was the venomous kind.

“Don’t worry, it’s just a baby,” he said. “Even if he tried to bite you, he probably wouldn’t be able to break the skin.”

“I am not comforted by that!” I said with exaggerated tension in my voice, and then we both laughed.

Story No. 3: Unconditional

After I divorced my kids’ dad, I married a bad guy. This guy was charming and smart, but also cruel and controlling, manipulative and emotionally abusive. A lot of what he did was behind closed doors, and he did everything he could to drive a wedge between me and pretty much everyone who loved me. My kids’ dad and his dad, however, were protected, because of their relationship with the girls. My father-in-law was always really nice to that guy, and if he ever saw anything wrong or was worried about us, he never said a word.

But when it all fell apart, at a time when I was judging and blaming myself for letting it happen, my father-in-law called me. He knew that my business was tied up with that dude, and that everything had been destroyed. I had no business, no partner, and I had no idea how I was going to keep a roof over my kids’ heads. I was wandering through the aisles of the little grocery store in town, still heartbroken and in shock, when the phone rang.

“I just want you to know that I’m so sorry about what happened,” he said. “I love you. If you need money, you let me know.”

I cried and thanked him and then continued to zombie my way through the next few months. I got a job. I started a media company. I never took him up on his incredibly kind offer, but neither did I ever forget that he had made it. I also never told him what it meant to me that he had called. Here I had married a Bad Guy who had emotionally abused me, and his granddaughters, and there was never a second of judgment, not a moment of, “Well, that’s what you get for divorcing my son.” My second husband was riddled with red flags, and I was blaming myself hard, but my father-in-law? He was never interested in blame. He was just kind and loving to me, the way he was to everyone. No matter what. His love is truly unconditional; his kindness, inexhaustible.

I hope my father-in-law is going to get well. But the day will come when all of us will not get better. When people leave us, all that’s left are the stories, and my father-in-law left me with these stories, and more, that I get to tell, over and over. They’re a wonderful gift, and I have the honor of carrying them in my heart, and pulling them out from time to time to let my memory run with them as it will, even though I know that each time, I may be changing those memories, bit by bit, from what actually happened.

The only other option is not to remember at all, and that’s not really an option, is it?

Everything,

L