“That’s the Thing with Anger” by Tom Schabarum

Photo credit: Tom Schbarum

from The Historical Heart

Were it not for the other mothers, / fathers, families, and grandmother/ that kept it pulsing, my heart would be long dead. / They made it a sea, deep enough to weather storms, / until a day, when love settled home, opened me up,/ and guided my heart’s tempest until it was repaired. / Remembering everything, my heart, at last, broke. / And now? All we feel is gratitude. 

Editor’s Note: This essay contains references to suicide. If you, or anyone you know needs assistance, there are many resources, including the 988 Lifeline.

That’s the Thing with Anger

I wrote a series of poems called See America, each one a drive somewhere both real and imagined. The ones imagined are those of my mother and father and his mother, who took her two sons on an epic trip across America in 1947 shortly after my dad’s father passed away at age forty-eight from a brain aneurism. My goal for these were to illuminate my family, my struggle within it, growing up gay, coming to terms with turning positive, my family life, the AIDS epidemic within my community and the fallout on my psyche from all of it. 

I’d thought about suicide a lot – it’s there in many poems – but I don’t see myself being able to pull it off. Unless backed into a corner by my health, it doesn’t seem to be an option, but this line from my poem, “The Final Drive,” is always there to haunt me: “but there is always the nag wafting through the fog as I call out Z, for the place I really want to be.” The line reflects on an ending, the last letter in the alphabet, the end of words, and nothing left to say.

I’ve been peripheral to suicide by friends and acquaintances, and in particular, J__. It’s been a constant in some way or fashion. Mark, Rob, my MFA program director, and several others I heard about. As I aged, my reaction to them changed from shock to understanding given my own life ladder. I’m fascinated by news stories – Robin Williams comes to mind – where people who seemingly have everything to live for, don’t. Those with health issues that don’t want to drag their loved ones through the long progression of disease I recognize. Those with mental health issues I recognize. When there’s a strong connection of both, I recognized those the most.

My health and family issues drove me to finally seek out professional help. Coming home from my cardiologist with a diagnosis of needing my fifth angiogram, had unexpectedly come at me hard. I thought it was a welcome relief to the pain I was having, but rather it was like a chasm opening beneath my feet, unable to breach the crevasse I was being pulled into with no way out. All my psychic handholds were stripped away. I had nothing to cling to that I’d used as crutches for years – the work and writing, alpine hiking, a dog. I couldn’t dump this on my husband either. He’d withstood my rising anger, shifting moods, and all the medical interventions for six years. I needed a way back.

I’d come home after meeting my cardiologist. I’d had months of angina, and this time had passed the stress test, but he thought since I’d complained so much, it’d be good to go in and look. I had passed several of my stress tests before and then he’d found many things wrong during the four previous angiograms. This time I was feeling a bit like Chicken Little, running around, the sky falling again, and whether people wondered if I were a hypochondriac, me included. I walked through the garden gate where my husband, John, was weeding.

“How’d it go?” he asked. 

“There’s good news and bad news.” I said, “I’m going in for another angiogram.” I never got to the good news because, suddenly, I was a mess, and I disappeared to the front of our home and wept. I was inconsolable, which was a first, and a sign I was spiraling down. In the past, I’ve tried to catch it, sometimes I was successful, but this time felt different. It was as if darkness enveloped me and there was a surface I couldn’t swim up to. On a few occasions, this had happened to me, and, ultimately, I’d break the surface and climb up on to the bank, sleep, wake, sleep some more, and then pull myself up and enter the world again. I’d hid these episodes fairly well, always telling people I was tired, cancel out of meetings, recalibrate my equilibrium and baby-step my way into normalcy. This time, the spiraling down was too slippery and dramatic. My anger bristled at my edges where problems tying a shoe could launch me into a fit, or the start button on the car became a feat of despair. All of this was hidden, some of it even from John, but he’d see it and not react until it got the best of him, too.

During my third stint in Cardiac Rehab, the ladies, having welcomed me back, noticed a lack of desire in me to work hard like I did the last two courses. I let them know I was struggling, that this time just seemed like a forced inclusion in the program. I wasn’t myself. I made inquiries into whether they knew of a therapist who could help me, and they hooked me up with Barbara who is saving my life a week at a time.

On my first session with her, I outlined my health situation:

-       HIV infection

-       A bad bicycle fall, which took 5 years to repair my teeth and body

-       A triple bypass

-       Pancreatitis and gall bladder removal surgery the following year

-       Six stents placed the following year after that

-       Type 2 Diabetes diagnosis the following year

-       A 7th stent placed a year and a half after the Diabetes diagnosis

-       Immediately following that a cluster of misbehaving capillaries grown off my mammary artery when it was clogged put me in hospital

She looked at me, a bit stunned, and asked if I’d heard the term “Cardiac Cripple.” I had not. She went on to explain that being a “Cardiac Cripple” is a form of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), which is most associated with survivors of war, combat veterans, natural disaster survivors, traumatic childhoods, or personal events. My experience of being a “Cardiac Cripple” was going deeper into depression, living in fear of the next shoe dropping health-wise, giving up the things I loved doing, retiring from a work-life that fulfilled me, placing strains on my marriage through outbursts of fear-based anger, not being able to enjoy the mountains that I loved, or climbing a hill on a bike. From big things to little, my heart compromised everything. It was a sudden stop, and I was only fifty-three. 

It took years to regain my brain after so much anesthesia, beta blockers and the like, and I struggle every day to find words that came easily all my life. Now, I read, do word games on my iPad, and can write again after forcing myself to work through novels and short stories that required longer concentration.

Just as I started therapy, my father died.

Four years before, I had another angiogram. My second of six. It happened to fall on Donald Trump’s inauguration day. It was after my triple bypass, after my bout of pancreatitis and gall bladder removal surgery. I’d woken at 4:30am to make it to the hospital for the early morning procedure. I was sent home at 2pm with no resolution as my cardiologist found too many things wrong and he wanted to consult with the surgeon on whether to go back in for open-heart surgery or if he could accomplish everything with stents. The day before, I’d promised my dad that I’d call him to tell him what the results of the angiogram were, and I did. I was exhausted and recovering from the outpatient procedure at home. At the end of our short conversation, my dad said, “There’s one thing I want you to do for me.”

Not thinking what, if anything I could remotely do for him, I asked, “What’s that?”

“I want you to give Trump a chance.”

I was floored. Here I was in a crazy state of anxiety of what came next for my heart and well-being, and my dad, who’d taken up with this racist, pig of a man, was asking me to give him a chance. My dad knew how I felt about Trump as I made no effort to hide my feelings.

“Oh, you mean how you and all your friends gave Barack Obama a chance?”

“It’s not the same thing,” he said.

“So, it’s okay for you to send me racist articles and cartoons for the past eight years that you forwarded on from all your friends with the line, “food for thought?” My dad had sent me an especially egregious cartoon of the White House with a watermelon patch behind it making fun of Michelle Obama’s gardening. Dad wasn’t savvy enough with his email to not include a long list of recipients in the CC line, so I’d replied all with my response essentially calling all of them racists and how dare they send out these sorts of emails.

Then my dad said, “You put up all kinds of things on Facebook against Trump.”

“How do you know, Dad, you can’t see to read what I put on Facebook.”

“I’ve been told what you post.”

“By whom?” There was a pause by him, and then I asked, “By Laura?” I was sure it was my sister because who else? I wasn’t Facebook friends with any of my dad’s friends.

A pause. “Well, yes.”

What started out as a medical report, turned into a vicious argument where my dad told me I shouldn’t use our surname, should not be a Schabarum, and I recounted the fact of his indictment and guilty verdict regarding his embezzlement of campaign funds and how, indeed, it wasn’t easy being a Schabarum, which was why I left Los Angeles.

And then I hung up on him.

For me, this was the final straw with my sister. If I look back on all that had gone before, I can pinpoint this moment as a time where the final break had happened. During the ensuing four years or so, we talked, but primarily about Dad’s care, particularly in the last year when his ailments escalated, his times in hospital increased, and the nature of COVID. While my trust in her was never solid, at this point it was broken.

Once again, I found myself at odds with dad, and I was ready to let him go as well given my health situation, but he was ninety, and our history was so complicated and wound together, it was too difficult to do so. We’d always had cooling off periods where we didn’t talk, but sooner than later, the calls continued and we’d move on though it was never forgiveness, just another knot in the rope of our relationship. 

He swallowed the Trump Kool-Aid, which was evident in conversation and how he talked. Many of my friends were dismayed at the dismantling of our parent’s beliefs, first by FOX News, and then by the lies and divisiveness of the Trump Presidential campaign. How could they have succumbed to this? How could reasonable people be swayed by a failed businessman, grifter, and family without an iota of a moral code of ethics? Could they not see through any of it? These were parents who were loved, who fell from grace, empathy, compassion for others and sought refuge with one of the worst human beings the world had created?

My family and I were at odds politically all my life, but their embrace of Trump was particularly hard given the hate towards LGBTQ+ folks and people of color he espoused and brought the hate of his followers farther out of the shadows. In fact, most of my family voted for Trump despite the number of LGBTQ family members there are: brothers, sons, transitioning grandchildren and nieces. It was, for me, hard to understand. It is doubly hard to articulate the anger I had at family gatherings which were fraught with brittle conversations, avoidance, and silence when it came to politics.

At Christmas two years ago, this: My dad, brother, and I stood at his home bar having drinks before dinner. Dad said, “All Democrats are assholes.”

Stunned, I said, “So, I’m an asshole. That’s just great.” I left immediately after I said that, but trailing after me was dad saying, “Well, not you.” But the words were out, and I avoided talking to him the rest of the evening.

My heart is full of these slights over many years. Things I believed in excoriated many, many times. And being one to hold onto the slights, they buried themselves deep. Families are supposed to be sanctuaries, but so many are fractured, and the expectations and hope of coming home are lost forever now that my dad has passed.

Luckily, my husband and his family, and our friends on both coasts, lean liberal. It is difficult to straddle the lines between conservative and liberal now. The fences have grown taller, and dialogue has shut down. Real anger stems for me from Republicans in every red state who own their legislatures and are doing damage to the cultural fabric of our country, not to mention our democracy. Laws against LGBTQ+ and Trans folks are proliferating and being passed. Women’s rights and abortion rights are being trampled upon. Our Supreme Court is rife with special interests, Federalist Society members, grifters and blatant ethics lapses by several justices. Billionaires don’t pay taxes and the poor are given less and less. Social programs are defeated before they even have a chance. These Republicans continually threaten social security and programs of which most red states take the lion’s share of. Politics is broken and there seems to be no way back. We are entrenched.

Dad’s last ballot sat on the kitchen table marked for Trump. I wanted to rip it up. He wouldn’t bear the brunt of the January 6th insurrection nor the years following the myriad election denials and lawsuits as a result. We, the living, are left with the detritus of Trump and his ilk, and of the people who bought his vitriol. But one last vote wouldn’t mean anything, really. This country takes voting for granted so that now democracy is on the ropes, torn apart by the few while the apathetic many fall asleep. One vote. My father’s voting against his children and grandchildren. That’s how I look at it. It has nothing to do with personal values anymore, but the entire country. The simple question is this: Do you want democracy to survive? 

I could just have easily said back to him, “All Republicans are assholes,” but I didn’t. There is a particular subset that are, but we also have neighbors and friends with whom we are respectful, wave a hello to, are concerned for their health as they grow older, or lunch with them despite our philosophical differences. Maybe a war will bind us, or another civil war will be the thing that tears us finally apart. Who’s to know? I may not be here to bear witness.

Artist’s Statement

That’s the Thing with Anger, is part of a larger memoir of linked essays called The Historical Heart. In 2015, I suffered a near heart attack and subsequently survived years of health challenges including a triple bypass, 7 stents, and diabetes among others. While healing, memories surfaced of family, abuse, relationships, and love, which took me on a journey of survival.

That’s the Thing with Anger concerns how our parents have changed, and how I’ve dealt with my father through the prism of a dire health outcome and the possibility of more open-heart surgery. Recently, I marked 10 years since my heart surgery. While the challenges have been great, in the words of Raymond Carver, “I’ve been a lucky man. I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

Tom Schabarum is recipient of the 2010 Creekwalker Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge, Flights, Cathexis Northwest, pifmagazine, K’in and The Breakfast District among others. His essays, Speech Therapy in Cold Mountain Review and Diorama in Microlit Almanac were recently published.

He’s published three novels: Airstreaming, The Palisades (Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and The Narrows, Miles Deep, which was selected as a best book by Felice Picano for 2011 in Lambda Literary.

Tom Schabarum holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College, Vermont. He lives with his husband in Seattle, WA. Connect with him here: www.tomschabarum.com