The three letters
Tags: Memoir, Mental Health, Letters, Complex Ptsd

The last letter, written 3 years ago, was to my father. I had recently received a very distressed call from him, which put me into tears. His birthday was approaching, the day after Christmas, and he is always at his lowest on this day. My father was born at the beginning of the war. He was preceded by an older brother, a baby born just 11 months before him, who sadly died just a few months after his birth. The times were hard, my grandparents were very poor and food was rationed. So when this older sibling died, my grandmother did not declare the death to the authorities. They could use all the food they could get. She was pregnant again, and the new baby, my father, got his dead brother’s name and essentially his identity. Eventually he was also declared with his real birth date and since then he, in front of the law, has two identities. The official one, for all bureaucratic purposes, as in for getting his pension, is the one of his lost brother. Greek bureaucratic chaos is so large that he once went to the civil office to get his birth certificate, and then asked for his death certificate, and the clerk was very happy to issue a copy of that for him as well, completely unfazed by the fact that the person in that death certificate was for all practical purposes standing right in front of him. So yes, it is a complicated story. It hunts my father, and in the labyrinth of fear and obsession that is his head he cannot stop thinking that this story will burden his children after his death. He comes up with crazy scenarios according to which the Greek state realizes their errors throughout the years and come to us, his children, to collect debts that have been created due to this birth date discrepancies. All nonsense if you ask me, but to tell a person who is obsessing that their thoughts are nonsense does not particularly help at all.

I always tried to rationalize with my father though. He is a logical person and he can be urged to fight his bottomless fears. So I would challenge his logic and most of all — what he needed the most — I would describe to him all the possible outcomes, none of them all that bad or even slightly disturbing, how we would handle things in the far-off chance when the state would indeed come to collect after his death. So that day, when he was feeling really bad, he gave me a call. He said “I call you, because I am not well. My brain is not working properly and is always playing tricks on me”. On the first sentence my blood froze. I actually thought my father was sick. The stern tone of his voice, these dooming four words “I am not well” I thought he was dying. But then, as he continued, I realized what he was talking about. I didn’t manage to say a single word. I bursted out crying, as soon as I knew he was talking about his depression. Until then, he had never directly asked to talk to me about that. He had never turned to me for help. His depression was never discussed at home, and by the time my father first mentioned it to me out of his own initiative I was in my twenties and living abroad. That time I avoided the subject. A friend of mine was going through very bad depression, threatening to kill herself and her entire family, and my father was asking about her. He then said “The same thing like I have”. The words stung so hard. I had never until then heard him say that. I had discovered his antidepressants in his drawers and that’s how I knew for sure what had been going on for all these years. But no one had ever told me, no-one had ever actually sat down and explain this to me until that moment. I think that until today my father has not realized that that was the first time he ever mentioned his depression to me. I said nothing. I felt a sharp pain and I felt anger and tears welling up behind my eyes but I held them back and said nothing. At that moment I could not go there.

So when he called me and asked to talk to me about it, I completely collapsed. I could not utter a single word that made sense. He kept saying, “why are you crying? I don’t want you to cry”, and I kept saying “no, no, I don’t want to cry, I’m ok, I want to talk to you, I want you to tell me what’s wrong”. We talked a bit, but really did not get that far all things considered. We hang up after a few minutes but then I could cry a bit more and regain my composure and then, prepared, I could call him again. We talked and I want to believe that I was able to ease his fear. But for sure my first reaction was a shock to him. I think this shock alone, pushed him a bit out of his ever-devouring state of mind. Maybe for the first time he saw that all that, what’s in his head, is actually not just in his own head. It is on all of us. Always has been. It has been on all of us, year after year after goddamned year…

Shortly after that call I wrote him the letter. In it I describe all the ways in which I am lucky to have him. All the reasons why I am so so happy that he was born on the day after Christmas, and not any other day of that or any other year. Because if he hadn’t been born then, he wouldn’t be who he is. He wouldn’t have had us. And he wouldn’t have striven to provide for us, to educate us, to make sure we are successful and safe and strong. I told him that if he wants to necessarily obsess and fret about something he can find a thousand other reasons — just check the news for fuck’s sake — but he should never, ever again fear that in some obscure way he has hurt us by having been born.

I do believe that. I do cherish all the ways in which I am lucky to have him as my dad. But in light of all my thoughts and realizations in this last year, it is very very hard. I could never ever tell him how much he hurt me, how much he scared me. I could never tell him how much I am struggling right now. He recently read one of my posts, a little poem that I attached to one of my photographs, and he called me, very concerned, to ask if I am ok. He said “what you wrote, reminded me of the things that I was writing when all this started with me… I really worry. Are you ok?”. I had to swallow back tears and smile — because you can hear a smile over the phone — and tell him that no, I am fine, this is just a poem, it’s art, but I am absolutely ok. But despite it all, I am now happy to have found that letter from 3 years ago. I am so happy I have told him these words. I am so happy he knows how grateful I am for him. This is the only thing that I could and will ever say to my father — how much I love him. And how glad I am of his existence. And I will leave all the pain and hurt and sorrow he has caused me behind. Because he already had too much of that. He does not need more.