Daddy’s Dyin’ Who’s Got The Will

I have had three addresses and three jobs in two different states over the last year.  In spite of the fact that I CALLED the companies to notify them of these changes, neither my credit card nor my student loan bills can manage to find their way to my mailbox early enough to spare me their confounded late fees.  Yet somehow, the good old United States Government, more specifically the Department of Veterans Affairs, was able to locate my inconspicuous door without so much as a forward.  Not that I’m dodging or anything.  I’m just marveling.  Marveling at how after 8 years and thousands of dollars of therapy this can of worms, which I have been trying unsuccessfully to close for decades, seems to keep springing open again just when I think that I might be done with the damn thing once and for all.

Most of my overtaxed inner circle has heard the sad sack tale of woe in regards to my late father and my wicked step mother ad nauseum.  If you haven’t I’ll spare you the details.  It’s a pathetic story that makes me feel sorry for myself and draw pity (both of which I hate) and I care not trudge down that dreary path again.  Because the truth is, as I shared with an understanding and mutually experienced friend recently, “I’m over it.”  And as much as my drama lama mama would beg to differ, I truly am.  Of course my past affects my present and shapes my future, but I really don’t have a problem with that.  I often say that I have one regret in my life and that’s letting my ex husband keep my dog.  Honestly.  The rest of it I wouldn’t change because I love me and I wouldn’t be me without the back story, however harrowing.  But the events surrounding the untimely demise of my dad, while incredibly important in that journey, were extraordinarily difficult, and they were very hard to “get over.”  I had to dig deep, clean out a lot of closets, and make some tough decisions to finally meander to a place where I felt I could find solid footing and march on.  And I have.  My memories of him now, miraculously, are mostly pleasant ones, and while I will always miss him and have moments of wondering what our relationship might be like if he were still with me, the anger and sadness and longing that consumed me for so much of my brief time on this planet have vanished.

So when I opened the letter from the DVA and saw the name BERNHARDT, EDWARD S in bold printed above the now too familiar social security number that was my battle ID during the crooked estate review, I expected a Pavlovian reaction to the metaphorical bell that would spiral me back into a drooling state of comfortable, extended angst.  But it didn’t happen.  I just stared at it, confused.  Both by the message and by my notable lack of emotional response.  In fact I read it three or four times before my brain actually registered the implications of the correspondence:       

“…special review of the above veteran’s claims…”  “…retroactive benefits…”   “exposure to certain herbicide agents in Vietnam…” 

And an endless lists of required documentation to be provided by the next of kin.

That’s me.

So here we go again.

But this time, I have no fuel for the fire.  I don’t care this time.  I’m over it.  So what the hell do I do with this information?  Since my father bought the farm I have been harvesting.  How’s that for poetry?  Through the seemingly endless span from his diagnosis until step mommy dearest ultimately sold the house in the valley and skipped town, taking her brand new visage and our would be inheritance with her, my brother and I were consumed by properties and wills and statements and lawyers and bonds and policies and burial plans and government mumbo jumbo, not to mention a warring family that puts the Corleones to shame.  It nearly tore us apart, demolished the remainder of our collective youth, drove him to the brink of addiction and sent me to the verge of a nervous breakdown.  We pressed on for what seemed like centuries, trying over and over again to heal the wounds, only to have them ripped open each time some new piece of the puzzle was discovered and thrown back into the picture box.  We sure as hell didn’t do it for money as we came out of it with virtually nothing.  To cycle back, many of you know why we did it, as well as what the outcome was, and those of you who don’t and actually care can ask me about it sometime off line.  For the rest of you it’s not important.  The point is that it was a lost cause from the beginning and we got screwed out of the opportunity to properly grieve and mourn for our father.  That took some serious “getting over. “

And then opportunity, in the form of a manila military envelope, comes a knockin’.  But opportunity for what, exactly?  To avenge my wronged and fallen father?  To take revenge on the widow who wronged him?  To finally get the compensation to which I’m entitled?  Meh.  Yeah.  I said meh.  Once upon a time, this chance to rise triumphant from the ashes of our terrible loss would have sent me directly back out onto the battlefield with my sword held high and proud.  I would have vowed to make it all right again.  To prove that the good guys do win.  I know that I would have because I did.  Each time I found some new loophole, some new possibility, some new hope of exposing the scam, I pursued it relentlessly.  Over and over and over again.  And you know what?  The good guys were never avenged.  And it didn’t bring him back.  But really, in the end, we did win.  We won because we stuck together and got the fuck over it.  That’s what I have finally, finally learned.  And now.  Now my stability is being tested.  Clever old trickster, pop.  Always getting the last word.

So as I sit here, turning this official document over in my steady hands, trying unsuccessfully to dredge up some sort of emotional reaction to it, the new and improved logical me wonders, “What the hell do I do now?”  Without that beautiful, painful hubris coursing through my veins I simply have no motivation.  If I were alone in this world I wouldn’t have even opened the thing.  It would have hit the circular file on my way to the bathroom never to be thought of again.  But even though the reactionary me has been absolved and lies dormant, I’m NOT the only one to consider here, and my fierce loyalty to my sibling, though no longer full of rage, remains packed tightly in my gut.  In the grand scheme of the whole sordid affair, I have nothing to complain about.  I didn’t want to touch any of it with a ten foot pole.  It was HE who faced it and I who ran.  And HE deserves his just desserts for what he went through, being the only son and heir to our father’s estate. 

So part of me, a logical part even, wants to take action on his behalf.  But to what?  Spend weeks on the phone with California courts trying to collect the necessary files, toss away big bucks on legal fees for processing and representation and then, worst of all, track down the “executor” and have to deal with her face lift and cockatiel haircut, only to collect our $8.37 a piece from the class action civil suit?  Uh, no thanks.  Been there done that.  But then again…what if we’re talking 20 g’s?  There’s always that possibility.  The kid just bought a house and is trying to build the American dream for himself.  The comfort and stability that he’s always wanted.  That would help him a lot.  And I’m not gonna lie.  As a career pauper, I could use the scratch.  After all, there are those aforementioned student loan and credit card bills to contend with. 

But yet, there is no desire.  No passion anymore.  Not when it comes to war, this one in particular.  I pawned that sword long ago, hit the road and pledged eternal peace.  So that old, forgotten instinct to kick it into high gear and mow them all down can’t help me with this.  That’s probably a damn good thing, considering it never got me anywhere but stalled on the roadside or in a mangled wreck.  So I’ll mull it over.  I’ll figure it out.  Or not.  Whatever.  Meh.  I don’t care.  I don’t care!  That’s so weird.  That’s, I guess, the real issue here.  I’m used to my new internal governance, that hokey pokey power of positive thinking shit, giving everything clarity and launching me into infinite successes.  It really does work, by the way, but that’s for a different installment.  When it comes to THIS, however, to dealing with dad, I’m so accustomed to flying off the handle, that I’m really just baffled at my complete lack of concern at the moment.  It leaves me really lost, which is also weird.  I’m a decider.  To sit here locked between the past and the future, with absolutely no response, is very…strange…to say the least.  Wondering where I go from here.  I won’t go back, I know that for certain.  But can I go forward with this complacency?  I guess I have to talk to Cole.  What a concept.

I’m super stoked, though, that I don’t have to worry about not getting my American Legion Auxiliary membership renewal notice in the mail.