EP2 Shani O'Brien

At 27 years old, Shani's father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Her father was her best friend, but after his death, she uncovered a man she didn't know.  These realizations radically changed her relationship with her mother and forced her to see her father as the human he was rather than the friend she had believed him to be.

Voicemails for the Dead is a podcast centering stories of complex and disenfranchised grief. 

Transcript

(phone ring) (phone ring) 

- Hello friend, you've reached voicemails for the dead. Please leave your message after the tone.

(tone)

 - Hey Dad, it's me. It's been a rough day and I really used your help. I really wish we could talk. It's been a lot of rough days since you died and a lot of good days. And I wish I could talk to you about all of them. 

I don't know, I don't really know. Some days I don't know how to do this life without you still. But sometimes I feel fine. And it's just, on the really, really high highs, and the really, really low lows. Those are the times I wish you were here. I have these two people in my life right now that you would like them. They're both young women who are just trying to figure out how to be adults and they really, really suck at it.

And I just keep thinking about when I was very 18, 19, 20, 21 and I was doing things that you probably hated.

And the number of times you probably didn't say something that you wanted to say or weren't sure what to say, and now I'm in the same position. They're not my kids, but they are these young women who are not so different from how I was when I was their age. And I just feel like I don't know how to do this as well if you did it. It was my temper, I see the wrong thing. I just understand more now why grandparents exist, I guess, to help us parent our kids. And I don't really have that without you and I can really use your help.

It's just, life is really, really complicated and I can use his friend and he or my best friend. So I guess I just calling to tell you that.

And there are so many other things I thought I would say. I guess I just want you to know that I miss you and I love you and I think you'd be proud of me. 

I hope you'd be proud of me.

And I really wish that I could ask you for help still.

I guess that's it for now. Love you, bye.

(gentle music)

- You're listening to "Voicemails for the Dead." I'm your host, Hailey Tamore Brown, and I'm joined this episode by Shani O'Brien. We just heard the voicemail she left for her father who passed nine years ago when she was 27. 

- I'm Shani, I was 27 and I was nine years ago. So people are good at math out there. Can figure out how old I am now, I guess. 

I had a good relationship when he died. He had a heart attack while he was on a run. He had been getting into fitness and running. My dad had this way of getting really into things for a little while until he got really good at them and then leaving that and getting into something else. He had gotten really into motorcycles and that was one of his longest-lasting hobbies, but he bought himself this full-body leather motorcycle suit and he gained some weight and then it didn't fit. And so he was like on this health kick, I think partially for health and fitness in general, but also to fit into his motorcycle suit. I remember one time I was home visiting and he fell asleep on the couch, like squished into this leather motorcycle suit and I came home from visiting friends, woke him up and he was like, "I'm trying to stretch out the suit." And then shortly thereafter started cycling a lot and running a lot. He had gotten an echocardiogram before getting really into cardio because he was in his 50s and he had really high cholesterol, so we wanted to make sure it was safe for him to do these things. The echocardiogram came back perfectly fine. That was in February and that same year in November is when he died while he was running. So it was super unexpected because he had checked to see if it was safe and it clearly wasn't.

- And how did you find out?

- It was November 11th and it was, that year was a really, really horrible snowstorm had blown in that afternoon and it was the day I was buying a new car.

And my phone died because when you're at a dealership negotiating for hours and hours and hours and looking things up on your phone, eventually your phone just kicks it. And so I drove home with my phone off because I wanted to save any battery in case something happened in the snowstorm while I was driving. I got home and I was exhausted and so I just plugged my phone in and went to bed. And somewhere in that timeline, my dad died. 

People were calling me and calling me and calling me and calling me and I wasn't answering because my phone was off. At 3 a.m., someone banged on the door of the house I was living in with some roommates and I'm the one who heard it and I woke up and I looked through the peephole and there was this very generic white lady and I was like, she looks like a social worker and these two cops. And I thought that something had happened with one of my students. I didn't know. I was like, why are the cops at my house? And I opened the door. They asked if I was Shani and I said I was and they said, we got a call from your sister. And I said, "I don't have a sister." They said, well, we got a call from someone in your family claiming to be your sister, which later I learned was my dad's sister-in-law and they told me that my father had died. I still think about that moment. It was so bizarre. It was like freezing cold. They're standing there shivering. They tell me this news. I don't wanna let them in because they just told me horrible things, but I feel bad because it's freezing cold. I screamed, I think, and then invited them in because it was cold outside. I must've made enough of a noise that one of my roommates woke up and then she woke up my other roommates.

And then we were all sitting on the couch and I called my mom. It was like the shortest phone call my mom and I have ever had. She told me he was gone. She told me she was sorry. I said, "I'm coming home. Don't worry, I'm coming home." And then everybody just sort of clicked into action. It was weird. My roommates were around me and they were comforting me and kind of sitting with me and stuff. And this social worker, this generic white lady in her brown coat, I mean, literally if you drew, what does a social worker look like? Like, that's what she looked like. She handed me a brochure about grief and death and said, you clearly have enough support. I'm gonna go and left.

My pastor came over. We got plane tickets for me and two of my friends to go home with me. We got on a plane, the most harrowing drive to the airport because everything was covered in ice and snow. My friend was driving us in her Subaru and her Subaru was sliding out. And I was like, that's how you know that the weather is not great. Probably the weirdest, craziest, scariest, saddest, most unreal, surreal 24 hours of my life. It was so surreal.

- When you got home to California, your mom was there. You have a pretty small family. 

- It's a unique situation. I have a small family, but both of my parents have big families. We just live far away from them. When I got home, I walked into my house with my two friends. And of course, everyone who was there was like, who are these people? And I'm like, they're with me. That's who they are. I walked into the house and my dad's family, my dad's brothers and sisters were there. So my dad's parents had passed away already, but my dad has two brothers and two sisters. So my aunts and uncles were all there in the house. And I walk in the door and I beeline it to my mom. And she beelines it to me. And she says to me, they're trying to take over the funeral. And we sat down and we talked and I said, I was like, you're the only person that matters in this funeral because he was your husband. You're the person he picked in the whole world. 

So this is for you.Fuck them.

My mom and my dad's family had never really been super tight because my dad was the middle child, the glue of the whole family. And so, and he married my mom very young because she had a baby with him. That's me. My dad's family believes that my mom got pregnant in order to manipulate him into marrying her and then steal him from them, which is just classic Irish Catholic narcissism, frankly. The tension really between my mom and my dad's family was at all-time high in those days before the funeral. And so I wasn't surprised at all to come home and have the animosity already stirring about.

- What you said to your mother was basically that her grief was paramount. How did your mom treat your grief? 

- My mom and I have a very different relationship than my dad and I did. And so it was just the three of us. In many years of therapy, I've learned that a group of three people tends to fall into sort of three roles in a really standard dynamic called the villain-victim-hero dynamic, where one person's the villain, one person's the victim, and one person's the hero. But those roles can change. Like you can be the victim in one situation and the hero in another. So having been in a group of three for 27 years, we were pretty good at that particular dynamic. My dad was really good at playing my mom and I off each other so that he was always in that victim role. Then he would complain to me about my mom. And so I became the hero and she became the villain. Or he'd complain to my mom about me. So she became the hero and I became the villain. I don't know if it was subconscious or not.

I think that being a person with a mental illness and also having been the glue in a very large Catholic Irish family, he was really good at manipulating the situation so that he was always safe and secure. And when the two people in your group of three, when the other two people are going at each other, they're not ever going at you. And so my dad was my best friend. I felt the world of him. Like he could do no wrong ever. It was always tension between me and my mom, never tension between me and my dad, except like a few hot moments. So when it came time for him to be gone, I think I slipped into hero role(...) because I couldn't be in victim role because that was always his role. Mom became victim and the rest of our bonkers ass family became the villains. 

And that's kind of the role that I held in the immediate months and years after his death. I was sort of in all take care of it mode until one day, maybe a year and a half after he died, mom called me in a rare moment of emotion, freaking out because she lost one of the cats. He got outside and she was freaking out about how it would impact my dad in some sort of ethereal plane. I don't know. I don't know exactly why she thought Dad would care if one of the cats was missing when he's dead, but she's very different about that stuff than I am. Somehow the conversation devolved into her saying, well, it's natural for a child to lose a parent. It's not natural for a wife to lose a husband who's younger than her. I realized in that moment that she had just tangibly stated this sort of underlying dynamic we'd had this whole time where her grief was bigger and more important than mine because my grief was from a natural situation and her grief was from an unnatural situation. 
And that's when I was like, hold on. We can't do that. We can't compete anymore. And that was the moment that really clued me in that dad had sort of been making mom and I compete our whole lives for his attention. 

- In the time that's passed since that conversation with your mother, what's changed in your perception of her grief or even what's changed in your perception of him? It sounds like there was a bit of an aha moment. 

- Yeah, I mean, I certainly wasn't cognizant of this whole triangle thing when he was alive. After my dad died, I learned a lot about him that I didn't know when he was alive. It changed him from being this sort of perfect, untouchable person because even though he was mentally ill, I didn't know he was mentally ill. I thought that's just how men acted, which is a whole other podcast.

I knew he was inconsistent and unreliable and I'd had my fair share of hurt feelings from him. He never lost this place of like my best friend, the best dad. When I started to see things from more of a holistic view about our whole family system and our whole family dynamic, it changed that sort of untouchable quality. He fell off the pedestal and he's not a bad person. I don't hate him or anything, but I think I see him more as a person, like a flawed human being like we all are than I did. And it changed the way I saw my mom. We're still not super close. We're by nature of necessity closer than we used to be because it's just the two of us. I had to reconcile the reality that my mom protected me from a lot of the consequences of my dad's irresponsibility, mental illness, selfishness, brokenness so that I could see him in the way that I saw him as like this superhero. I think she never wanted to interfere with how I saw him. 

And at the same time, at his funeral, she gave this crazy eulogy about how no one really knew him like she did. And he wasn't this perfect rock star everyone thought he was. And he was depressive and suicidal and manipulative. And I was like sitting there like,(...) whoa. 

Cause she had this captive audience of almost 300 people who knew and loved my dad like he was Jesus himself. And she got to tell them all off. And I think she took the opportunity to tell people the truth about him. It was like this whole pedestal knocking-down moment for everyone, I guess. Oh, it was like the game of Clue. It was like every couple weeks or months I'd uncover something about him that I didn't know.

And I'd be like, oh damn, he did what? Oh damn, he said what? It was like this intact view I had of my dad as this amazing man, this inspiring leader, this generous, soft-hearted, kind, loving individual, which are all true things about him. So I learned that he was bipolar, which my parents had never told me. I learned that he would frequently call my mom and threaten to kill himself if she didn't come home from work. I learned that she spent a lot of time in therapy learning how to deal with him.

I learned that he cheated on her multiple times. At one point had a full-on mistress in Thailand. And I learned that myself because I logged into his Facebook so that I could announce his death because a lot of the job when somebody dies when you're their family is calling everyone you guys know and telling everyone over and over and over and over about this horrible thing that you really don't wanna talk about or have to comfort someone else in having just found out about, but guess what, that's the job. I posted it and then I saw this whole string of messages between him and this woman. And I was like, what the fuck is this? And called mom who of course knew about all this stuff and just never told me because she wanted to protect my relationship with him, which is nice, but also I really wish he was alive so that I could have a conversation with him about some of these things. 

- Upon listening to your voicemail, you said it was basically the same exact thing that you would have sent while he was alive. There really wasn't much anger in your voice at all or frustration if you had a day with him, let's say, rather than just a voicemail. 

- Mm, yeah. 

- Do you think some of that other stuff would come out? - I think some of the frustration and anger and feelings of deep betrayal that I felt when I first found out about a lot of these things has faded with time.

There is this sort of accepting of reality that there's nothing you can do about it. And I would say that my dominant emotion toward my dad is fondness. I still am very fond of him and I might even be more fond of him because of his flaws. It's hard to feel super connected, as connected with someone that you idolize as it is to somebody that you feel like you understand as a human.

And so I think there would be capacity for us to actually have a better relationship if he was still here, because I understand more about him as a human and I'm also much older now. You know, so I think nine years makes a difference.

I also think that I would never in a million years call him for marriage advice if I was married. I'd call my mom. She kept that train wreck alive. I think single-handedly kept our family together through a lot of his bullshit behavior. When I think about that, I do feel anger. Like in this moment, I feel a little pissed off at him for the ways that he recklessly endangered my childhood in some ways with the expectation that my mom would clean up after him emotionally. 

- Is there a specific instance that you feel like you just could have or should have been a bigger or better person at the time? 

- I was in my early mid-20s and I called him to talk to him and he said, "I'm on my way to a meeting. I'll call you right back after the meeting." I waited six weeks for him to call me back and he didn't. I'm like his only fucking child. Come on. I'm your whole legacy, bro. Like I'm the only piece of you that exists outside of you. Give her a call. He didn't. My one father didn't call his one child for six weeks when he said, "I'll call you right back." And I called mom and I was like, "Dad said he was gonna call me back six weeks ago and he hasn't called me back and I'm super pissed at him. I don't know what to do, but I don't ever wanna call him again." And she said, "You have to believe that he loves you more than anything and just wait."

So she totally covered for his irresponsible selfish ass and totally excused his behavior.

- In every story you tell, you're alone in a feeling. There were people to show contrast to your emotions, but there was no one to really share that emotion with. And what I'm curious about is if your father was the person who in theory you would have shared some of that emotion with.

- No, 100%.

Without him, when he died, the person I wanted to call was him. The person I wanted to process my grief with was him. The person who I knew would let me feel was him. And he was gone at his viewing, which was the first time I was gonna see his body. And my uncle comes out and my mom says, "You can go in if you want." And she tried to rub my back and I wouldn't let her touch me.

I didn't know how to receive any comfort or connection from her in that moment. And I have no idea how deeply I hurt her feelings in that when she tried to make this emotional gesture and I was like, "Don't fucking touch me." Like I shrugged away from her aggressively and was like, "Ugh."

And then I went in there and I saw him and it just looked like he was sleeping and I was convinced he was playing a giant practical joke on all of us and he was gonna jump out from behind a pole.

 In that moment, not only was I accustomed to being alone in my feelings, but I made myself alone in my feelings because I didn't know how to receive connection from my mom. And to this day, I will try to connect with her and she will shut me down in one way, shape or form.

- You almost died a year ago, a little over a year ago. 

- Yes ma'am. 

- In an accident that I think if you had died, it probably would have felt very similar. We have someone who's healthy, wasn't expecting something like this to happen. And I'm curious how that's changed either your connection to him in death or just your feelings about it in general.

- They seem like such separate incidents to me, except in one connecting point, which is that something that I've always tried to honor about my father's death and my mom and I's relationship is that we both found out the same way. When she got home from work, there were police officers waiting at our house to tell her what happened. What a horrible way to find out anything, from strangers to be with strangers in your moment of greatest vulnerability.

And I'd always tried to connect with my mom on that. And she never quite went, she's never quite gone there with me. And I've blatantly said it like, we have this thing in common that no one else has about dad's death, which is that we were told by cops and she won't go there. She won't connect with me there. I think about how my mom found out about my accident was like a phone, like a random unexpected phone call. But I thought about that a lot in the days after the accident that my mom found out this horrible unexpected thing about the only other person in her family and what it must have felt like in that moment to think that she might be the only one left if I did die. 

Because I think about that. I think about how she will probably die before I do and I'll be the only one left and how scary that is. Especially having now explored together my history of being emotionally alone in my family, to be like tangibly physically alone also is a very, very scary thing to think about. And it for many years would keep me up at night, the idea of being an orphan with no one else who'd known me my whole life on the planet anymore. And how lonely that is to be the only person who carries your earliest memories and no one else carries them with you.

I thought about what that would be like for my mom to be the only one left of our family if I had died as a result of the brain injury and some other complications from my accident. This spring I went through a pretty low episode where I was contemplating what suicide might be for me. And I remember thinking, but then my mom will be alone alone. Like she's already made herself emotionally alone. She's made me emotionally alone. I've made myself emotionally alone in some ways. 

And but she would be alone alone and I would be doing the thing to her that is my greatest fear.

And how terrible that would be.

So I don't know that I necessarily connect with my dad differently because of my near-death experience, but I certainly connect with my mom differently because of it.

(...)

The only other thing I will say about that is when, so I was thrown from a horse and I saw the ground coming and I knew I wouldn't have time to stop what was about to happen. And I remember watching the ground coming and not being afraid and thinking, I guess this is it for me.

(...)

And I wonder if my dad in his last moments when he had a heart attack, if he proverbially saw the ground coming or not. And what his thought process was.

(...)

What were his last thoughts? Was he scared? Did it hurt? Did he pray?

(...)

So I wonder what my dad thought, you know? But you do have a ton of time to think in some ways when you are about to die.

(...)

And so I just wonder what he might've thought about, but I don't know. 

- Do you have any impulses as to what you think it might've been? 

- I could see my dad being a person filled with regret because even though he messed up a lot and he did a lot of selfish, horrible things, he always told me that your integrity is the only thing no one can take from you. They can take your stuff. They can even take your life, but they cannot take your integrity. That is something you freely give away.

That was the thing that pissed me off most about the cheating. So I was like, you freely gave away your integrity. The thing you taught me my whole life not to do. I think that in his final moments, he would remember that your integrity is the only thing no one can take from you. And he gave it away and he would regret that. 

- Do you think that's part of the reason why he never told you? Are you upset he didn't tell you while he was alive? 

- Yeah, I mean, I'm not upset anymore about a lot of things, but I was. Oh yeah, I was upset because I thought we were friends.

And I think that that's something that you also learn as you get older is that you might feel like you're friends with your parent, but at the end of the day, they're your parent first and your friend later, if at all. - You had two losses. You have the loss of your father inhabiting his physical body and that space in your relationship dynamic with your mother, but you also had the loss of the person that he was in your mind.

- Did you ever have one of those moments where you're like, I don't fucking know you at all.

- I went through a whole period where I was so mad at him. So my mom kind of went through this period of being mad at him really early on in the process of the death. And I was like in go mode where I was taking care of her and her feelings and I wasn't really having feelings. I was driving her home when she was super drunk and I was doing all those things. Cause my dad told me once when I first got my license, he was like, this is the whole reason we had you so that you could drive us home. And then it was sort of my turn to be angry. Again, she would really protect him in those conversations. I remember I was walking through the Target in Boulder. I was on the phone with her and I was so mad at him. And I was like, how did you not divorce him? Like this fucking guy.

And she said he wouldn't have survived if I had left him because my mom took care of everything. It wasn't just the emotional labor of the relationship. She did all the bills. She did all the shopping. She did all the cooking. We had a housekeeper that she paid. That was how she did all the cleaning. She didn't say this at the time cause we hadn't talked about the suicidality yet. Looking back, I'm like, oh, he probably would have killed himself if she left him or kicked him out. By constantly rotating around him and orbiting him. We kept him afloat.

(...)

I definitely went through like, fuck this guy phase. And I was so, so mad at him. But again, she squished it. She quelled that and sort of put me back in place. Not in a good place, in a sort of repressed place, but she didn't make space for that anger. She said something like your dad did his best.

And I was like, what?

That's not anybody's best. But again, I've come around to that he was a flawed human. He really messed up a lot. And he also did a lot of things really well. He was a complicated person. And I'm thankful that I feel like if I can see him that way, it makes it easier to see myself that way. Oh, I can have mercy on this person for being very complicated. Maybe I can also have mercy on myself for being very complicated. 

- You reference your father being proud of you. 

- Oh yeah. 

- In your voicemail. 

- Yes. 

- Which is a loaded concept, I think for any child. Are you proud of you?

(...)

- Fuck.

(...)

Sometimes in the context of that voicemail, I had just lost my shit on a young woman who was staying with me. And I got pretty mad at her. I said some things I regret. And I wasn't proud of that in that moment.

(...)

- I never met your father. 

- I wish you had. 

- I have met your mother. 

- You sure have.

 - My curiosity is if she had died and not him, how would that change your perception of their pride of you now? 

- Hmm. When my dad first died, I wished it was my mom and not him
because I felt like I lost the person that really loved me and that really knew me and really cared about me. And I felt in these, in the early months and years, felt like I had had more of a chance with my dad. Again, looking back on the way my mom laid her life down in many ways to keep our house running, to pay the bills, to protect my emotional relationship with my dad by hiding a lot of parts of him from me, I think that is a demonstration of deep, selfless love. So I can't say now that my dad loved me more than my mom, but I thought that for a long time after he first died and for a long time when he was alive. For most of my childhood, I thought that my dad just liked me better. I think that my mom is proud of me. She just wants more from me.

I think that my dad is more likely to be proud of who I am and less accomplishment-based. If she had died and he hadn't, I don't think he would have made it very long without her.

And I don't think that our relationship would have made it very long without her. She's sort of a moderating variable of the intensity of his brokenness. And I don't know what we would have been like without her. I imagine it would have been hard, but that's not something I've ever really thought about before beyond just the initial really ugly, ugly thought of wishing it had been her instead. 

And gosh, mom, if you're listening to this, it was a dark time and I'm really sorry.  I don't think that now. I don't wish that either of you were dead. 

- I definitely feel like that's really normal actually. Especially when you're a child in a two-parent household where one parent dies fairly early. 

- One of the things that really impacted me was going to a support group for the first time seven years after my dad died and being with all of these people of different ages and stages who had just lost their loved one was really fresh in the process.

I think there was a moment where I felt sort of embarrassed like I'm like seven years into this and I'm just starting grief support. I'm like, I should be over this or something. But what I found was that whether you've just lost someone or you lost them many, many years ago, you have so much to give each other in grief.

Because until you've lost someone really, really close to you, you don't really know how to relate to another person who's going through a loss.

Society has taught us that we should minimize people's grief and help them feel better. That not in a mean way, in a really helpful, loving way. I'm gonna make this person feel better because they're sad.

And until you go through grief like this, I never really thought that being sad was a good thing. And I don't necessarily think that it's like, yay, the greatest. My grief was how my dad stayed alive in my brain and how I stayed connected to him and how we continued to have a relationship in some weird existential psychological way. That was how he and I stayed connected was through my grieving of him and the memories and the struggle and the anger and the learning about him and everything.

And when people tried to take away my grief by making me feel better, it was deeply offensive because it was them trying to intervene or interfere with my relationship with him.

When you go through grief and then you walk alongside someone else who's in grief, you finally realize that trying to make somebody feel better is the absolute last thing you should do. Going through this loss has made me a better person in so many ways.

Do I wish I could undo it? Sure.

But if this is the life I have to live and this is the grief I have to carry, I'm glad for the impact it's had on me as a person. There's a lot to be gained in loss.

(soft music)

- Thank you for listening to Voicemails for the Dead, a special thanks this episode to Shani O'Brien. Our music is provided by SubOctave out of North Carolina. And if you would like to record a voicemail please call our hotline at 720-828-2023 or check out our website, voicemailsforthedead.com. 

(soft music)