the last call

by Christian Osborne

Death had arrested people I knew before but not like this. Reared by an overbearing mom with an untreated borderline personality disorder, all I ever knew was myself, my mom, and my younger brother — but mostly my mother. Outside relationships were irrelevant, even if I did share blood with the person. It was an isolating life but a life I knew, a life I grew to embrace despite the yearn to combat it.

This death changed that. It came when I was an adult and free to venture out and make outside relationships on my own terms. This death was different — colossal, stagnating, devasting, random, and screwed up. This time, death took my dad, and it stung like perfume being accidentally sprayed in the eyes. It burned like the intense rays of the sun when the car’s sun visor refused to shield your face, no matter how it was adjusted. Death arrested my dad and held him in eternal contempt.

This death sucked.

This death was confusing.

This death rocked my boat, and I don’t know how to swim.

Damn, dad, why did you leave your baby girl so soon?

*****

I didn’t have the luxury of growing up with my dad. My mom and dad’s marriage was toxic and short-lived, and outside of that, my dad wasn’t an active father. There was no proof that he tried to be or that he even knew how. His former wife, my mom, and his mother, my grandmother, were known to make my dad feel small and inadequate from the time he came out of the womb.

“Y’all meet, Piggy,” a cousin once recalled to me.

The cousin shared this memory a few days after my dad passed. I was getting a crash course on the true family dynamics and even some of the family secrets. That, paired with the loss of my dad, was a lot. I found myself at the bottom of wine bottles nightly—it was the only way to cope.

“I always thought it was crazy, even as a kid, that your grandma introduced your dad that way. Mm.. words have power, don’t they?” the cousin said, while hinting that my grandmother’s spoken words about my dad were what made the fat cling to his body. “Piggy.”

According to this cousin, it was his first time meeting my dad, and at the time, my dad was skinny. Only God knew that the nickname Piggy would one day hold true; in his adult years, my dad battled with his weight until he passed.

Speaking negatively, or down, to my dad was his norm. He got it from both sides, his mama, his wife, really anyone. His desire to be loved was so vast. For it, he’d take just about anything, even when it chiseled away at his soul—a cruel metaphor for the last-spent moments of his life.

The red church pews burned like the cotton was made of fire. Tears escaped my eyes and my not-so-soft whimper echoed through the church as a cousin began to say the opening prayer at my father’s memorial. The sound that left my mouth wasn’t pretty. In fact, I think it startled a few people out of its spontaneity. I had been broken, barely holding it together, after I got the news about my dad, but others saw me as put together—because I had to be. The token child and only daughter came with a lot of responsibility and the crown, dinged-up and missing diamonds, was heavy, so darn heavy.

I got the news about my dad’s death from Facebook. My phone rang, the chirping Facebook call rang deep in my pocket as I gathered my 6-year-old out of the door to a birthday party.

“Hey, Chris, are you home? You near your husband?” A distant cousin said over the call.

Sadness was distinct in her voice, but she wasn’t close enough to me to have any ties to anyone I was remotely close to. So, I didn’t take heed to the pain in her voice.

“Your dad passed today,” the cousin said while fighting back tears.

The ability to use my legs escaped me as the shock knocked me to the floor.

“No, no, no!” I screamed hysterically. “No, no, I just spoke to him! No!”

Like a poorly written Tyler Perry movie, my body rolled back and forth on the floor. I imagine to some, it could’ve been a funny moment, but the pain in my voice made it not. Before I could open my eyes to my reality, my husband and kids were by my side, embracing me and crying too. It was a random death. I had in fact, just talked to my dad. We talked so often; this particular call was rushed because we figured we’d have time—time to call again and laugh or vent. But we didn’t. That call, nearly a week before he died, was it.

That was the last call I’d ever receive from him.

The was the last time I’d hear his voice.

The last moment we’d share…

The realization of all the “lasts” hovered over me with guilt so heavy, it rained hell. The golf balls of ice didn’t spare any parts of me, chipping away at what was left now that my daddy was gone. They didn’t call him “Big Joe” for no reason. His personality and heart were ginormous. Life of the party, always with a smile, and a barber with over 20 years of experience with an inclusive chair. Joe was everybody’s friend, even if they weren’t his.

But he wasn’t good at adulting, despite him being five decades deep – this was the thorn in his side and the ones closest to him, too. My dad’s inability to get his crap together became a broken and tired record that no one around wanted to play—a vinyl nobody wanted to clean, but at some point in Joe’s life, everyone in his inner circle had composed a few of the tracks it played. How you gonna get mad at what you wrote? That’s how I felt. My daddy failed me but so did the people around him.

Daddy was a poorly created group project, spearheaded by my grandmother, and now that his mediocrity had doubled, she was tired of carrying the project around. Nah, sis, carry it! Your name is the biggest name on the back of the trifold, and you bossed and neglected every partner who wanted a say in the work. Joe is all you! Own it. I’d never say that, but that’s how I felt, my siblings, too.

I was always caught up in the chaos of my dad and mom. Where I couldn’t escape my mom’s drama because I was around it 24/7, I didn’t always mind my dad’s because I loved him so much. I might’ve met my mom first out of the womb, but I loved my daddy first on Earth.

He was a kid at heart; he’d listen to me ramble all day about the marvelous and mundane, and he saw me – he really saw me, and that mattered to “little” me. But it mattered to “big” me even more. Growing up, my dad’s absence was felt, but his presence was monopolizing.

Before I could catch my breath in the church, another sound escaped my mouth at the memorial. This time, the sound was followed by more. They wouldn’t stop. My husband gave me loving squeezes to the shoulder, and my kiddos rested their heads on my arms, hopeless to provide some type of comfort, while holding their own grief. My thoughts were interrupted when my mother squeezed beside me on the pew. This confused me and interrupted my grieving. After the news about my dad, I lifted my no-contact with my mother to notify her of the news. I admittedly felt too guilty to block her again because, cruelly, she was my only parent left.

No messages of comfort came from my mom. Instead, self-centered messages about how hard the death was on her and mile-long texts about her feelings and possible health ailments were wrapped in condescending messages left on my phone. It was all so overwhelming that it angered me. I ignorantly hoped my mother would show up as the mom I needed—when she didn’t, I felt silly for having hope. My mom had gone back and forth about whether she was coming to the memorial. So, it caught me off guard that she was now sitting front-row and consoling me. My body was stiff and in shock. This woman was my mother by blood, but a stranger, and the grief that consumed me felt too intimate to share with someone I had no relationship with.

A few days after the funeral, the cloud of grief was still residing within me. I was trying my best to heal through therapy and allowing my grief to flow freely when I got a call that would change my life. It was a call from my dad. (Well, at least that’s how it felt). I got a call from a woman. She said she got my number from Google. I don’t recall how she said she was related to me, outside of being yet another cousin, but she spoke to me for over three hours.

“Your dad loved you so much,” she began. “He was so proud of you, he talked about you all the time.”

That was refreshing to hear, but those words weren’t what gave me chills. As she spoke and spoke, trying to get me to remember her at the memorial service, all that occupied my mind was that I sat in a church with at least 50 people, and I only knew fewer than 10. All that family, and they all felt like strangers, which was no stranger to me. I didn’t know these people, and they didn’t know me. Yet they all knew my dad.

The cousin shared family secrets from my dad’s childhood, unknowingly answering my age-old questions about why he was the way he was. She spoke of the family he grew up in, even provided insights into adult things that never made sense to me. It was a lot. The information she shared, heavy like a sack of potatoes, sat me down in a seat where my temples met my hands for massages.

What this cousin didn’t know was that the day of my father’s death, I had to speak to an investigator. My dad collapsed outside of his apartment, and because of that, his death was ruled suspicious until an autopsy and toxicology report ruled otherwise. Sure, I had known my dad was a partier and liked to have a good time, but I didn’t realize addiction was part of his story. I had to interrupt the investigator, as he spoke, to clarify that he hadn’t actually just used the words cocaine and my father in the same sentence—he couldn’t have. Not my dad. No way. That devastated me, and all my mind did afterward was replay the many times that I had missed the signs—apparently the blatant signs.

What hurt the most, the news that really changed the way my daddy died, was that he was with people whom he thought he was safe with. The same ol’ same people that had written, produced, composed, and sang on his broken record of a life: those people—those faux-dressed incognito as friends—gave him the line of coke that stopped his heart. That cruel metaphor I mentioned before was this, and it gave me a nasty preview of what was to come in my own life if I kept forcing relationships and things that God had clearly removed from my life for a greater purpose. I didn’t have a problem with addiction, but like my dad, I craved to be loved. It drove my every decision, working me to the bone for half hugs and misspelled texts. My dad kept a posse around him, and I wanted that. His family ties went back further than the first star in the sky, and all I had ever complained about was wanting that too—needing that.

“You have a family, baby. You, your husband, and your kids,” he said during our last “serious” phone call, “that’s all you need.”

“You don’t get it,” I snapped.

And my dad left the conversation alone.

Unbeknownst to me, my dad had been through so much—so much. And all along, we were more than alike. My dad, a reflection of succumbing to the abuse he endured, and I, juxtaposing similar abuse I fought.

After the funeral, I was so angry. So angry that I knew no one in that church. So angry that I planned my daddy’s memorial by myself. So angry that everyone had the luxury to arrive at the service late and drunk, but I, I had to hold it together. I was furious. So furious that all I could see was red. All I could feel was heat.

But as this cousin continued to speak, these chains fell at my feet. This family, this unit, these people that I so desperately wanted to be a part of weren’t good people, and my dad, finally free and at peace, was free enough to let me know the truth. We said goodbye to my dad at 56; his dad died the same age. I looked at myself, ironically saying goodbye to my dad forever during my 32nd birthday weekend, and realized I was free, too.

I don’t know what that cousin meant when she called me that day, but she spoke on behalf of my dad. That talk woke something inside of me.

I no longer cared to over-explain, earn love, be seen, or even heard. I looked around at the people who had lifted me during my dad’s passing and realized, though self-curated, God had never left me without family. This burden, a burden I often talked to my dad about, was lifted – gone.

A few weeks later, I got my dad’s ashes. The funeral home sent them to me free of charge. My childhood best friend, my sister, happened to be in town the day the ashes were left at my doorstep. She opened them with me and let me be still. Then, she and I took turns holding my father, and we danced.

Photo of Christian Osborne

BIO: Christian Osborne is a proud wearer of many hats: air force wife, mom, writer, marketer, digital creative and 2nd year writing graduate student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She's always been a bender of words and a woman with a vast imagination. Making words dance on paper is her happy thing — happy place. When she's not writing, you can find her snapping behind a camera, playing with her kiddos or dancing in the dark so God won't laugh. Once, she had a professor tell her that words move. Osborne hopes to continue to move others with her works. “Last Call,” while emotional to write, is what she calls her “last gift” from her late father, Joseph. Osborne identifies as a logophile.