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| Valerie Anne and her daddy...11/18/1983 |
I had several ideas for what I was going to write about this week, for today’s blog article but none of those ideas came together as I like them to…one article is about “Life Before The Internet” and the other one “Life During Wartime” were both chock full of anger…but it wasn’t anger for the right reasons. In the former article, about life before the on-line realm, my anger was misdirected at this strange media apparatus of the Internet and the latter article was wrongly angered with the state of our culture and society during these troubling times we are living through. The anger inside, the driving force for these articles is my still livid pain for the murder of my oldest daughter. It happened a long time ago, in 2001 and this past week, on Tuesday the 18th of November, was her birthday; she would have been 32 years old if she wasn’t dead since she was only 17 years old; one might hope that after 14 years, I would have moved past this most awful event. I expected me to get over it, but I haven’t, not really, not entirely. I feel selfish too, there are so many others who suffer worse…there are so many very positive things in my life despite this horrendous pain…here I am feeling sorry, a little…but mostly, I’m fucking pissed off!
In therapy over the years I‘ve identified and worked on the sources of this rage, this intense anger I have…I was pissed off at the fucking kids who gave my daughter the date rape drugs, seven doses of GHB which paralyzed and eventually killed her. Those fucking kids then left her alone in a bath tub, they cleaned up their mess and ran off into the night, one of them making a random call to 911. I was pissed at the fuck-head who allowed the condo unit to be rented to under age kids using stolen identifications. I was livid with the cops and their lack of concern, the half assed investigation that revealed nothing. I was done with the whole fucking lot of them when the lame prosecutor slapped the condo owner with a fine…a $250 fine for death of my daughter. That’s a lot of rage, that’s a lot of pissed off feeling…my poor girl never got justice, we never got justice, just ice and heart break. Over time, however, this anger started to feel like a hot coal I was holding, my intention was to throw it somehow, hurt them like I was hurting, punish them for what they had done…but in the end, with nobody to throw the hot coal at, I was the only one who was getting burned. I learned to let that hateful anger go and I know better now.
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| The Family Chalmers, Thanksgiving, 1998 |
In subsequent years, after I untwisted the macabre ball of fury I had for those involved in the murder, my anger turned closer…to my daughter’s mother. I harbored such hate, such disgust and contempt for this woman who I saw as pure evil…she had fucked with Valerie’s life since the day she was born. This psycho chick used our daughter as a decoy in drug deals, she exposed her to an awful lifestyle of drugs, sex and wild, most inappropriate behavior. My daughter’s mother prevented my daughter and I from seeing one another from my daughter’s 2nd birthday until her 15th birthday, telling my daughter all sorts of lies about me…I was in prison, I joined a cult in Nevada, even that I was dead! None of it was true, none of it was real but my daughter, just being a child, didn’t know any better. I was so pissed at her mother for allowing our daughter t go to South Carolina with a bunch of kids our daughter didn’t really know…her mother never even met them once, she didn’t even have a phone number for them! I was beyond livid when, after our daughter was murdered, her mother wanted a $1,000 from my family for the ashes…aside from the fact I had paid for the transportation of her remains back to North Carolina, the cremation process, the memorial service and then was told that I would not allowed to be in attendance at the ceremony in North Carolina. Indeed, this was a volcano of rage that fumed, boiled and exploded from my soul every so often…it was difficult to get it under control.
Eventually, and oddly enough, my anger for her mother started to wane when I started having this reoccurring dream about my daughter coming to me in tears…she was pleading with me, I had to try to save her mother, I had to help Valerie save her mother and so I started looking for her…not easy to do after 8 years, especially when one is looking for somebody who has lived “off the grid”, survived on false identities and moved around every six months or less…I looked for almost a year, searching from North Carolina to Atlanta to Michigan even back to Chicago…she was, at some point, in all those places but I didn’t find her until about 3 years ago; I sent a letter, a letter of peace and love to another random address and unlike almost all the other letters, this one didn’t come back. I thought it was thrown away, I imagined it was another bogus address but not six weeks later, again in a seemingly random way, I ran into a very old mutual friend of ours who recently saw this psycho chick of a mother; she was living in a halfway house for recovering addicts and ex-cons in Richmond, Virginia. The story was she had an awful fight with her lesbian lover of 20 years and one of them ended up dead; the other was in the rehab center. I never heard back from her, but I stopped having the reoccurring dreams too. I also found that my rage, my pissed off anger had dissipated…evaporated when I wasn’t really looking. I felt sympathy, empathy for this woman so evil, I felt sorry for this psycho chick because she was the only other person on Earth who knew exactly what it’s like to lose this particular child. My anger subsided and though I still consider her accountable for her actions (or inaction), I also know she is simply a frail human being with a fucked up life of her own…let the hate go, burn the anger like a candle until the wax of hate is all but gone…when I think of this woman now, it’s with both a tender empathy and a little appreciation even; she did give birth to our amazing child and that’s something I will always be Grateful.
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| Valerie, Cassidy & Julian, July, 1999 |
Thinking I had tamed these demons, I shackled these angry monsters to the dungeon in my mind but when this time of year rolled around, only a few years ago, right there next to the intense sadness and remorse, there was that anger and rage again. I tried to ignore it at first, I thought it was ghost remnants from past years but it was as real as the sadness, it felt as dangerous as the pain. I was no longer seeing a traditional therapist, I started to visit with a Zen master at a nearby temple so I shared this personal event with him. He smiled and said the one I was angry with was not outside myself. That hit like a ton of bricks, it was so dead spot on it nearly crushed me. As angry as I was with the cops for not getting her justice or with the kids who put my daughter in this situation, it was nothing next to this rage. Despite my long time hate, mistrust and painful dealings with my daughter’s psycho mother, she is, after all, a mentally ill person and who am I to call the kettle black? This last stream, this deepest river of disgusting anger was all mine. It was for me, I was pissed at myself for allowing any of this, for allowing ALL of this to happen. It was my fault that I didn’t find this child when she was young, it was my fault that I didn’t just take her when we did at least find one another. It was my fault that I didn’t know enough about her life when she was going away to South Carolina, had I known I would have changed her mind. I was pissed that even in her death I let her fucking mother manipulate the matter, I was so filled with rage that I couldn’t change matters, even in the slightest way, to change the outcome. That anger was bubbling, molten and a hot burning realization that I failed as a father, I couldn’t protect my little girl. I couldn’t live with this, between the sad, painful tragic emotions of the loss and these sharp, bloody, explosive angry feelings of rage, it was too much for me to handle. Four years ago (2011) it got so bad that I almost did myself in, I almost gave up but I didn’t…because my dearly departed daughter would not let me, I averted disaster.
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| The Pain & Sorrow Still Gets Me... |
That anger is the most difficult to let go, the rage I have for myself is unrelenting and strikes when I least expect it…like when I sleep. In a dream, where I don’t have full control, these demons lash out still and it keeps me on my toes, it keeps me angry too. I wake up and I’m angry. Angry and sad. I walk through the day, doing things the typical way but I’m furious inside, my brown eyes red with rage. The best recourse I have is avoiding others and all things, isolation is a good form of protection and preservation. That’s what I’ve been doing, to the best of my ability both on-line and in my real life, I’ve been avoiding most everyone, everything I can…I don’t want to let my accidental anger explode on them, nor myself for that matter…so I am spending time by myself…but I’m not doing much. Not vey productive, no motivation for even domestic chores or watching the silly NetFlix. I try to read and my mind wanders, I catch up on the news and my rage flares so I go for long walks alone and take more naps than normal. This will pass, it always does and I know from both experience and that which I’ve been told…nothing lasts, cloud burst don’t last all day, the night is always followed by the sun and I know this…but while I’m wallowing, it’s like throwing salt on a forest fire. I’ll be better, soon and someday, I’ll feel better and when I do I’ll be sure to let you know…but in the meanwhile, it’s probably best everyone just take a step back and fuck off!
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| Mozzie the one-eyed Rat Dog and Me...11/18/2014 |
These days, however, as I remember her birthday…the 14th one without her, my anger and rage is more under control. I know what to expect and I work to minimize the impact on those around me (and myself) as well, the period for these feelings is getting shorter. I used to feel this way for weeks, now it’s a matter of days. I don’t expect it to ever really vanish, however, nor would I want it to go away; sometimes it’s good to keep a little anger in the belly, one never knows when it might become useful for some reason. I have been hanging out on my own, laying low from everything except that which is directly in front of me and I anticipate this mood to continue a little while longer. It’s finally the weekend and the family is planning a trip up to “Sac-City” (Sacramento, California); my wife is scoping a potential job opportunity up there and we’re going to explore the area. I look forward to relocating from this farmhouse estate, we really don’t like the “greater” Modesto area but it’s not time for us to make the exodus to the mountains yet…a larger city, with more culture and accouterments would be a better fit for our family. In the meanwhile, it’s just me here all alone, wishing I had somebody to get stoned with, cry a little and perhaps have wild abandon sex for while. Alas, it’s the pet animals, house plants and me…big party, eh? I thank you for taking the time to read this pithy article, it’s not all that insightful, but it’s the honest truth about where I am, what I’m feeling…take it or leave it, it’s all I am today.
