Learning to Fly

“Blackbird singin' in the dead of night,

Take these broken wings and learn to fly. 

All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Take these sunken eyes and learn to see,

All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free. 

Blackbird, fly.”

-The Beatles

      I still remember my 11-year-old excitement as I pinned and sewed Daddy’s  pilot “wings” and Navy patches onto my L.L. Bean monogrammed backpack before the first day of the sixth grade.  I wore that bedazzled backpack for most of middle school with pride, as if it were a badge of my own honor and glory, rather than the leftover souvenirs of a wilting man who remained a great mystery to me.  Anyone who asked about the adornments of my school bag received eager, lengthy, and somewhat embellished stories about my dad’s history as a Navy fighter pilot.  My peers had fathers who attended every school play, soccer game, and birthday party; I had an absent, much older father in the late stages of severe alcoholism.  These patches were my claim to fame.  These stories of badass heroism and fearlessness in the skies were in the  distant past, and the valiant man starring in them was a stranger to me, but I clung to them nevertheless.  

  By the time I hit high school I knew that the father I had attempted to freeze in time in my mind was melting into a mere illusion.  The effects of the excessive alcohol were no longer easy to ignore, despite my innate gift to block out pieces of life and of people that don’t settle neatly into my personal framework of the world.  Some call this denial, I call it self-preservation.  But the strong and youthful man of his past was now unrecognizable in his hollowed eyes and sick, fragile frame.  I began to doubt the man I had heard about in enchanting war stories, I began to forget the charming father of my early childhood, and the place he held in my heart was replaced with resentment and disgust.  What I found most difficult to accept was his unwillingness to admit to an addiction-- denial must run deep in the Francis genes.  It was only the desperate threats of divorce haphazardly thrown by Mom that coerced him into AA classes and addiction support groups.  Dad’s multiple attempts at AA or rehab left little to no evidence of progress.  In fact, he seemed to experience a major setback every time he even attempted to last a day without alcohol in his system.  

  The day my parents dragged me (and this is not figurative language) to “family night” of his first addiction support group knocked the wind right out of me and left me numb for days.  As I sat in a room filled with desperate and dying young people addicted to methamphetamine, narcotics, and other hardcore drugs, my private school bubble of a world became forever popped, and my naivete was replaced with a large dose of reality.  I was an alien in foreign territory.  Unable to hide my overwhelming fear of the twitching, hardened addicts, and of being the only minor in the room, I spent the hour staring through streams of tears at the colloquial yellowed “Jesus Loves Me” poster, that felt strangely alone and out of place given its surrounding environment.  I have this habit of intensely staring at typically overlooked inanimate objects when I am fighting to mentally escape the world around me or to control the urge to cry, slash vomit.  It’s in these moments of fierce concentration, eyes locked on the tiny holes of a button, a chip in the paint on the door, the sugar content listing on the back of a Poptart wrapper--it’s in these moments that I really see and appreciate their tiny significance, maybe for the first time, and in doing so, I am able to dry up my tear ducts and distract my mind and my heart from the cause of my distress (or my nausea).  As I stared into the penciled face of Jesus and his flock of sheep, unable and unwilling to shift my eyes or attention away from him in my attempt to block out the room around me, I was reminded of the song I had often carelessly sang in Sunday school: “Keep your eyes on Jesus// When the tidal wave of trouble around you rolls// Keep your eyes on Jesus// He will calm the storms of life that toss your soul.”  As I dwelt on the words of this song for the first time, a calm came over my current storm unlike any relief I had ever known.  And in the next few years I would learn to cling to that Heavenly Source of non-circumstantial calm as if my life depended on it, as this was only the beginning of a long and scary journey.  

  After Dad’s completion of several weeks attending the addiction support group, he was awarded a certificate of achievement and given the chance to sign his name to a pledge of sobriety.  I knew that “diploma” was a meaningless sheet of paper, and that Dad’s word of honor was just empty promises, within less than 48 hours when I found a mug of whiskey hidden in the garage-- an undoubtedly more sneaky maneuver than his past efforts.  After multiple incidents of outright and intentional deception regarding his efforts of sobriety, I began to assume that any man’s word was as reliable as the serpent in the Garden: manipulative, meaningless, malevolent.  But I began to accept that sobriety was simply not an option for Dad after his body began to aggressively shut down after a 24-hour period without alcohol in his system.  His body began to contort and convulse, his hands would shake uncontrollably, and he would become violently ill.  The amount of vomit and acids that he produced became so detrimental to his teeth that he was forced to replace their decay with porcelain veneers.  As Dad’s condition worsened and his body continued to fail him, the alcohol paradoxically remained the only substance that could relieve him from his misery: the shakes ceased, his stomach settled, and his nerves were calmed.  And so his fiercest enemy, deceptively playing the role of his only savior, continued to slowly kill him.  This is the tragic irony of addiction.  I began to associate Dad’s episodes of stomach sickness as the path to death, and I developed a very gripping and irrational phobia of vomit.  (I still shudder to even write the word.)  My fear reached an unhealthy level when I began having panic attacks anytime another student coughed too aggressively for my liking in class, or anytime someone hovered too long over a trashcan; I would stare at my ceiling every night too paralyzed to sleep for fear of throwing up in the middle of the night.  I began to build walls of self protection and isolation around myself out of fear...fear of sickness, of pain, of people, of life itself.

  It was only a matter of months after the failed attempt at AA courses before Mom attempted to set up a more potent method of rehabilitation.  As we drove the two hour distance to drop Dad off at Cumberland Heights, an overnight alcohol and drug treatment center, I fixed the headset of my shiny red portable CD player squarely over my ears, turned the volume to its highest notch, and drowned out the sound of Dad’s pleading efforts for Mom to turn the car around.  By this point I was an expert at all methods of self-numbing.  Mom directed me not to leave the vehicle once we reached the facility (as if there was any chance I was getting out of the safety of our mini-van), because she knew that if we were to accompany Dad into the treatment center, it would be too painful to get back in the car headed home and leave him in the foreboding sterile white walls that trapped the desperate prisoners of addiction.  But as we pulled up to the eery building, I believe that all of our minds began to run wild with thoughts of patients in withdrawal going into crazy fits of physical, mental, and emotional chaos.  I was unable to block out the reality of my dad, a once headstrong and brave fighter pilot-- a decorated Vietnam veteran, whimpering and crying, fearfully begging my mom and me not to leave him at this place.  He turned to the backseat, pulled my headphones of safe haven off my ears, and pleaded with me, “Don’t let her leave me here! Don’t leave me! I promise not to drink anymore, I promise! I can stop!”  I shut my eyes to avoid all the hysteria that’s breaking loose in our mini-van as I yell out to Mom in the driver’s seat, “Mom, just take us home! Let’s go!”  She turns around in her seat with a look of total pain and torment as she asks me whether she thinks we should make Dad go inside and check in, or just take him home.  “I don’t know, Mom, I don’t care, let’s just go!”  I remember being filled with silent fury and disgust that both of my parents would plead for wisdom and safety from their 13-year-old.  The car was silent as the three of us made the two-hour drive back home.  Another unsuccessful attempt.  Another failure on the part of Dad’s two biggest enablers-- his wife and daughter.  But surely this time Dad’s word had intention in it.  Surely he was willing to trade in that moment of fear and desperation at Cumberland Heights for self-governed sobriety.  This time had to be different.  

  The stress of the day and Dad’s rattled nerves led him straight to the liquor cabinet upon our return home.  “One last drink, it’s just one drink,” I heard,  a familiar phrase at this point.   Mom knew it was hopeless by now.  We were all at the end of our quickly unraveling ropes.  I became convinced that I did not belong in this family; I wanted no part in this tragic mess.  After two weeks of refuge and relief on a mission trip to Mexico with my school, I arrived home to a mass chaos of change that would continue to spiral out of control for what would be the most volatile next two years of my life thus far.  Mom picked me up and promptly took me to her new home: she had filed for divorce and bought a house 45-minutes away from where I had grown up, during the short time I was gone.  Within the next year, my life was quickly turned upside down with a divorce, a new town, a transfer from my lifelong private school to a new public school, my mom’s remarriage-- complete with step-brothers and sisters after a life of being an only child in the home, and the dangerous decline in my dad’s physical and emotional health.  Not wanting to lose my mom, Dad made impulsive choices in order to win her attention and in hopes of convincing her to come back home to him.  He became increasingly unstable, and within a matter of months lost his driver’s license and his job due to his increasing reliance on alcohol.  He was quickly merging from a functioning alcoholic to a total train wreck.  His record soon became filled with violations from stalking to restraining orders to DUI’s.  I forgot the man I knew as a child, and I hated the man he had become.  I began to believe that he had intentionally chosen the drink over his wife and me, his own flesh and blood.  He couldn’t really love me.  If he couldn’t choose me, his own daughter, what man could ever find me worth fighting for?  Resentment grew and festered, as it so often does in a troubled heart.  A soon-to-be high school senior, I emotionally divorced myself from my dad; I checked out, left the scene, and left him and all his problems in the dust.  

  My hair stuck to the  back of neck as I sat on the curb on a hot late August day, a week before my 17th birthday.  I had just woken up from an after-school nap, and I was still stuck in that delirious post-nap haze.  The flashing lights of the police squad car and the emergency medical vehicles only added to my state of totally numb shock.  The thermometer read 80 degrees but I felt a deeper cold than I had ever known-- a hollow emptiness down to my core.  Dad was dead.  It was all over.  And it was the alcohol itself that had killed him, after he drunkenly slipped down the stairs in his home and fell to his death.  I cringed with self-hatred as my first gut reaction to this truth was...relief.  The alcoholism, the crazy behavior, the incessant phone calls, the burden of his pain-- were all over.  I never had to watch my broken father cry like a helpless wounded animal, ever again.  The rainy night Mom and I found him lying in our backyard in the pouring rain, drunk and unable to pick himself up, having to drag him into the very house that he had been stalking-- it was over.  I was free from this misery and all of its heavy chains.  I spent the next few weeks hibernating in a cave of physical, mental, and emotional slumber.  The heavy exhaustion of the past few years finally sunk in.  It was all over...and now it was time to rest.  

  I didn’t cry at the funeral.  I didn’t miss more than a day of school.  My senior year of high school was filled with the normal trappings of a careless high school student: laughter, football games, and prom dances.  I still had my constant grin and innocent happiness.  And I had everyone fooled.  Unable to expose my own grief even to myself, the shower became the one place I could freely and openly weep on a daily basis.  Not just a casual tear; on your knees kind of crying.  Big drops of warm lava that slowly roll down steaming cheeks: the overflow of volcanic eruptions of the heart.  Tears of loss, tears of exhaustion, tears of hurt, but mostly, tears of guilt.  Guilt that life seems so much less complicated now that Dad is gone.  Guilt that I turned my back on him in his last days.  Guilt that I couldn’t save him from himself.  Guilt that I killed him.  If I had been there, I could have saved him from lying there alone, bleeding to death.  If I had been the one person to stay faithful in his darkest times; to forgive him endlessly like the God I claim to follow forgives me; to cover him in love and bear the weight of his sorrow and addiction alongside him-- if I had been that one person, his life wouldn’t have been cut short.  He could have turned it all around, and I could have known the man he used to be.  These were the thoughts whispered to me when the world got quiet and I found myself alone.  

  I carried this guilt around with me for several difficult years of my life.  I have carried it into relationships, striving to fix the broken-hearted and the alcoholics, striving to be the one constant source of love and forgiveness in their worlds, to the point of my own martyred self-detriment.  I have stuffed, denied, and literally forgotten pieces of my past in attempts at self-preservation.  I have pushed myself to perfection and fallen short of my own expectations consistently.  I have found it difficult to accept love from another human being, in fear of later losing it.  I have obsessively tried to control every detail of my life and others’, in hopes of monitoring life so well that I can carefully prevent its storms from ever hitting again.  I have prayed and cried and driven too fast and changed my hair color and gotten drunk and had my heart broken by a man and broken the hearts of other men and stopped calling my mom and cut off high school friendships and resurrected them and not slept for days and seen a counselor and wrestled with God and begged for forgiveness and confessed everything to complete strangers in writing.  I have grieved deeply. But, “man, when he does not grieve, hardly exists.”  And so I have lived deeply.  

  I believe that everyone has a right to grieve in their own way, and I suppose I discovered mine on accident.  Aching for adventure and an escape from everyday life in my small college town, I applied my sophomore year of college on a whim for a one month travel abroad program to Germany, a country I had never before felt any particular desire to one day see.  This seemingly minor decision is one that has most impacted the future course of my life and has provided extreme growth and relief for my soul.  I instantly fell in love with Europe, and traveling in general.  Thousands of miles away from where I live, I finally felt home.  For maybe the first time ever.  Every moment since, I have been striving and scheming towards my next adventure.  From packing up and moving cross-country to a job in Colorado by myself for a summer, to backpacking Italy and Greece with a group of strangers, I have consistently found therapy and healing in foreign turf.  In leaving the familiar and seeking out risk.  In heading West, following the beautifully lonely mountains that seem to be the bookends of my life.  In replacing the very Southern need and desire to marry young and follow a man in his journey in life, with the need and desire to find my own path first.  In diving into the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, head first.  In the revelry of exploring different cultures and backgrounds and beliefs.  In the journey to healing, life itself has become my lover.  I carry no heavy chains of fear; my motto endures to let life happen to me, both the joys and the sorrow, because the deepest kind of beauty is only revealed in the aftermath of the darkest of tragedies.  As Tagore writes, “Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.”  

  I ache to see and touch and smell and taste every inch of this beautifully broken world, loving others fearlessly but needing nothing in return to find fulfillment.  I find it no accident that flying was my dad’s destiny, and now it is mine; Ironically enough, what Dad left behind to me, materially speaking, has funded my journeys and made it possible for me to realize my passion in life, which looks much like his own, at a very young age. In the beautiful circle of life, it took losing him to find myself, and in finding myself, I have begun to really know and understand him for the first time.  We are cut out of the same cloth, he and I.  I still cling to the young memories of my childhood father: Daddy and his “J-bird” watching Top Gun, and singing Oldies songs on our daily drive to school; spending summers at his work offices building lego mansions as we listen to talk radio (which must account for my loyalty to the “Right Wing conspiracy”); watching Eric Clapton live in concert every Friday night. But as I begin to learn about myself--what makes my heart tick, and my reason for existence in my odyssey of life, I have begun to learn about the man in my father that I never knew.  That vibrant young man “driving up in his red Corvette with his aviator sunglasses to announce that he is defying the family and joining the jet world,” as a family member describes it-- He lives in me.  We know and understand each other in the deepest kind of way, because he will always be my father, and I will always be his daughter.  I have learned to let go, not out of strength, but out of understanding.  His pilot wings are no longer clipped to my backpack, but they will always be clipped proudly on my soul.  And I can hear him laughing, guiding his J-bird now, as I earn my own set of wings and fly off into the sunset.  Into life itself.