If grief had a name, mine would be Frank. He is the friendly neighborhood pizza man from the Bronx that I visit when I need someone to speak frankly with me about what I am feeling when I can’t talk to anyone else. Frank, however, he has not always been the friendly neighborhood pizza man I know him as today.

I first met Frank in the months leading up to my father’s death. My father was a Staff Sargent in the Marine Corps and served three tours in Iraq. When he came home from his last deployment, he was different; the light that had always twinkled behind his eyes was gone. I learned later that he suffered from something called PTSD.  In the eight months leading up to his death, he would disappear for days on end.  My mom would often have to wake me up in the middle of the night to go pick him up from a bar after the police were called. He would brood in the basement, watching obscene stuff on his computer while drowning himself in alcohol. As a six-year-old, I watched as the shadows from the basement started to shift and form into an entity all its own in those months leading up to his death.

For the longest time, Frank was just a dark Shadow that had finally grown into a monster all its own, content with staying in the darkness of the basement. However, the closer it got to August, the Shadow grew bigger and scarier with every beer bottle I heard crash into pieces against the wall. The Shadow rarely ventured out of the basement, but when he did, he would hover over me, its tendrils running up and down my back to clearly show me that he was there and was not going to leave anytime soon. When I should have been in bed, I would sit at the top of the stairs in my pajamas listening to my parents fight in the living room downstairs. The Shadow would squeeze my lungs tight when I would hear the inevitable sound of glass shattering or a fist hitting the wall as my mom would start to cry. The Shadow would grip me tightly as I watched my father stomp out of the house, as he hissed in my ear, “YOU’RE MINE TOO!”

Breaking away from the Shadow, I would run down the stairs crying, “Mommy, Mommy, are you alright!” Even though I had gotten away from him, I could still hear him growl from the stairs, a reminder that he was still there. This was the first time the Shadow spoke to me, but it certainly was not the last. The Shadow always stayed close to my father like the smoke from his cigarettes, fueled by his anger, drunken violence, and addiction. It was always there, but I never knew what he was waiting for or what he was planning to do. I knew though, through the way he growled at me, that when the time finally came, I would not be able to escape.

Finally, that time came, and on August 15th, 2008, everything changed.  A new chapter of darkness in my life began. My mom and I had gone to Chicago the weekend before to visit my nanny before I started back to school the following week. We were set to head home that day after staying an extra night. Waking up that morning, I padded with bare feet to the kitchen to see that my mom and nanny were already up and were quietly weeping at the table. My mom picked me up and held me close and told me that my dad had died in a car accident and that he would not be coming home again; her words, however, did not fully sink in.  I don’t believe I really understood what that meant; nor would I for a long time to come. The two things I knew for sure that day was one, I would never feel normal again, and two, the Shadow would now be coming after me.

It was not until the funeral two weeks later that I saw the Shadow again. It lurked in the dark corners of the funeral home; instead of constantly telling me that I was his, he began taunting me with a secret that I was still too young to know. I could hear him whispering, “Why is your daddy in a tiny box?  When your papa died, you could freely see him in his big box! Why do all your aunties, uncles, and grandparents not like your mom anymore?” I never understood what caused my father’s family to start treating us differently or why they separated from me in the months and years that followed, but everyone around me made me feel like questions were forbidden, so I was left to wonder why.

In the months that followed, the Shadow seemed to follow me everywhere I went. He was there in the hospital as I watched my nanny fight something called cancer that made her too tired to play with me.  Over time she was barely able to hear me, then slowly, she could no longer recognize me. Finally, at the end of June 2009, at the age of just seven, I sat stoically as the Shadow gripped my soul yet again as I sat at my third funeral in less than 18 months. This time death took my loving, encouraging, kind, and caring nanny. All I wanted was just a little more time with her.  Nan was amazing, and she was the only person besides my mom who ever truly loved me just for who I was, no matter what. Mom and I were now alone and the shadow attached itself to me.

A couple months later when I turned eight, the Shadow started to laugh at me when I began to realize that my daddy’s death was final and he was not just on another deployment.  At that point, all I wanted was for him to come back so that I could say goodbye, but all I was left with was the Shadow. That Christmas, I attended my first Snowball Express, which is a special event put together for kids like me who had lost a parent in military service. When it came time for the “Walk of Gratitude,” where we walked through downtown Dallas, parade-style, as hundreds of people stood on either side cheering with signs saying, “Your daddy is our hero!” The Shadow again gripped my soul, whispering a secret that somehow, I already knew, “Your daddy was not a hero.”  I withered and tried to hide from the crowd though I didn’t completely understand why.

The following year my mom went back to school and hired a nanny so that I would have a regular person caring for me. This was when the Shadow began to change and morph into a mobster-like figure from the Godfather. The Shadow was the ominous darkness that held secrets that I wanted to know, but he would never tell me, yet I never wanted to explore.  When the Shadow turned into the Mobster, he freely shared the secrets with me as if he wanted to force me to face some truth that I didn’t know or understand. He did not have to taunt me like the Shadow did because my family was already beating me down. Whenever my grandmother called to talk to me, she would criticize my mom’s decision to homeschool me, rather than take it up with my mom herself. She would constantly ask me when my mom was going to send me to “real” school.  At the same time, I was struggling through special brain training tutoring to help with my dyslexia and language disorder which made me feel even more stupid.

As all of this was happening, I felt like everyone was abandoning me, both friends and family, because they did not know how to act or what to say around me anymore. They did not know how to talk about my grief, or they were too afraid that they would say the wrong thing, so they thought it would be better to pull away. The thing is, I needed the exact opposite because I was not meant to carry all of this on my own. Eventually, I even felt abandoned by my mom because she was at school every day, and even when she was home, she was always completing assignments. At the time, I couldn’t see that she went back to school to help provide for us. The foreboding Mobster was my constant companion.

As the summer passed and turned into fall, I turned nine and began asking my mom more serious and detailed questions about my dad and his death.  Up until then, she simply omitted specific details she felt I was too young to know and understand.  She was 40, and even she couldn’t wrap her head around the events of that night. This was when the entire truth of my father’s death was revealed.  Knowing she could not lie to me, she finally sat me down and explained the truth about how my father had actually died.  He died by suicide in a self-inflicted, fiery car accident. At that moment, everything I believed about my father forever changed and entirely different emotions began to bubble to the surface.

After discovering the truth, I began to run a race I never wanted to run, a race no nine-year-old should ever have to run, but I had no choice. I started running from the truth. I ran from the haunted memories and the horrible emotions caused by them. I forced myself to run towards unachievable goals I set for myself to prove his family wrong, to prove that I was someone worth loving. The Mobster was always there, constantly chasing after me trying to break me down, yelling, “You think that you can escape? You can’t hide from me; I will ALWAYS be able to find you! I am inevitable!” He was right, I wasn’t always able to escape him, and he tripped me up a lot. He would come out in every angry outburst when it all became too much for me. Then he would go right back to chasing when I started to run again.

By the time I entered high school at thirteen, the Mobster began to mellow down a bit, and he didn’t chase after me as hard as he used to. I found myself looking behind me because it felt like something was missing. I realized the angry Mobster was no longer chasing me. He now just stood back and watched. When I began taking college courses at 15, I faced an abusive Phi Theta Kappa chapter advisor and a psychology teacher who broke me down in ways I had never experienced before. The abuse that I faced at their hands caused my own PTSD to rear its ugly head, and the memories, the hate, the anger, the sadness, the feelings of inadequacy, and the anxiety built up until the pressure became suffocating. In this feeling of suffocation, when I looked behind me, I noticed that neither the Shadow nor the Mobster that had been chasing me for a decade were no longer there as an active presence in my life. Oddly, I realized that I had always counted on their foreboding presence to be there.

In the fall of 2019, for the first time in ten years of brokenness, I embarked on a journey to actively seek out and face the pain of grief and betrayal I had been running from for so long. I attended a Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors event where I was placed with teens who had experienced the same type of loss, and I found our stories often paralleled each other.  I learned that my story was my own and that I had the right to explore it and share it freely.  For the first time since my mom held me on her lap at six years old, I felt no shame in writing about and sharing my story.  It was through this new journey of discovery that I eventually stumbled upon a standalone pizzeria with a sign over the door that said, “Frank’s Pizza.”

When the door opened, a kinder-faced Italian tough guy walked out and greeted me like an old friend, “I told you, kid, you couldn’t run from me forever. Now, get yourself out from that rain cloud you’ve kept yourself under, and let’s get you a slice of pie.”  Walking in, I sat down at Frank’s table, and for the first time, I tell him everything I’ve felt for so long and how the betrayal of those who were supposed to love me made me feel. After pouring my heart out to Frank, I began to feel better. I sometimes get a little too comfortable with Frank and tend to overstay my welcome. When that happens, Frank will gently pull me out of my chair and say, “Alright, kid, it’s time to get back on your way. You can’t stay with me forever; you need to keep moving forward, but I’ll be here the next time you need me, and I will always have a slice of pie with extra mushrooms waiting for you. Now get going!”

That is how grief is. It never goes away. There is no way around it. You can only go through, so now I still visit Frank from time to time, we sit or talk for a little while, then I get up and move forward until our next visit.  I now know that every time I need to visit Frank, he will always greet me like an old friend.

Copyright © 2021 R M McDermott. All Rights Reserved

Works Cited

Athan, Lisa. “Grief Speaks:  Agess and Stages.” Ages and Stages, griefspeaks.com/id28.html.

Busch, Teri, and Cathy S Kimble. “ Grieving Children: Are We Meeting the Challenge? Citation Metadata.” Gale Academic One File, vol. 27, no. 4, July 2001, pp. 414–414. Pediatric Nursing, go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA77813498&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00979805&p=AONE&sw=w.

“Chapter 17 Imaginary Relationships.” The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination, by Marjorie Taylor, Oxford University Press, 2013.

“Dyslexia.” Langsford Learning Acceleration Centers, www.langsfordcenter.com/instruction/dyslexia/.

Schreier, Abi Berwager. “Don’t Panic: Your Child’s Imaginary Friend Is Just Their Creativity At Work.” Romper, Romper, 12 Nov. 2020, www.romper.com/parenting/why-do-children-create-imaginary-friends.

“Snowball Express.” Gary Sinise Foundation, www.garysinisefoundation.org/snowball-express/.

“TAPS Suicide Loss Survivor Assistance.” Taps Tragedy Assistance Program Survivors, www.taps.org/suicide.

Wolfelt, Alan. “The Seesaw of Resilience and Vulnerability: TAPS.” Taps Tragedy Assistance Program Survivors, 30 July 2018, www.taps.org/articles/24-2/seesaw.

©All writing property of R. M. McDermott LLC