Barely Edited Transcript:

0:00:00.6: There’s this kind of sick one-two punch where I get to go, “Today is my birthday, and tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my dad dying,” and it doesn’t feel great being a part of the Dead Parents Club… Which has incredible members, many of my friends, both online and offline, have lost a parent. And aside from all of the repression I’ve been doing, another reason I haven’t completely lost my goddamn shit in the year since, despite everything, is because I had those friends to look at and model my behavior and my reaction over this. But it is difficult. My dad died the day after my birthday. Like, I’m pretty sure it was midnight or after midnight. And there was this just deep sense of bitterness in me over all of this, that it’s only now after he’s gone that I’ve been able to move out of my mom’s apartment, that I’ve been able to move to kind of a new region, that I’ve been able to travel by myself to places, other places.

0:02:05.5: And I know that when I eventually go to places we were supposed to go… Like, one of our goals, because my dad loved traveling, one of our goals… Oh, and he loved baseball. One of our goals was to go to Japan and check out their baseball games, ’cause I love baseball. I do not understand it, but I love it because my dad raised me to love baseball. He raised me to love cowboy movies, he raised me to love poorly dubbed martial arts movies. And every time I have an experience that I should be having with him, I feel bad. And whenever I tell people, like, “My dad died last year”, and they’re really sad, like I feel compelled to be like, “Oh no, it’s okay. He was born in 1939.” But you know what? It’s not okay. I deserve my dad. I should be able to call my dad and hear his accent as he wishes me happy birthday. I should be able to hold my dad’s hand and walk with him on a beach.

0:03:26.4: And if you’re new here, birthdays have always been a thing that I do a lot for. I mean, this has been for a while… Like, I remember… I think it started, really, with my 21st birthday, where we started with the birth-week, and I think we spent the whole week drunk, my room-mates and I, in college. I went to my Communism and Media, like Red Scare on film class, wasted. To the point where half way through this three-hour, once-a-week class, I had to go, “I’m so sorry, I don’t feel well”, run out of the classroom to the bathroom in the law building and throw the fuck-up because I had over done it.

0:04:10.9: Like, I did a week of birth-week, obviously. And as time went on, I expanded it, and I expanded it because my birthday starts October 1st and it ends October 31st. And I have another friend, her dad died around the same time as her birthday, it was also in October, who I really need to give a gift to. So I gotta remember to do that. And we kind of decided we were gonna celebrate our birthdays in November, and I thought about it… I thought about it, but it is my birthday, my birth month. October is my month, and my dad wouldn’t want me to not do the things I’ve done for a decade. But it is hard. It is incredibly difficult. And this year, I am so much more isolated than I have ever been. My nieces are, like, eight hours away; my mom, eight hours away; my big sister, who I love, eight hours away; my other siblings are physically closer, technically… A matter of like five hours to eight hours, but I haven’t seen or spoken to them since the funeral. And I don’t have Twitter anymore. I don’t have Dreamwidth. I don’t have…

0:05:55.2: I have Bluesky, but it is different. But I don’t have the community that I had before. I don’t have people to be around on my birthday. And… And I’ll get into that… But coupled with the fact that it is not just, “I’m alone on my birthday”, broadly, I am alone on the day of my dad’s death. It doesn’t feel good. And it is so difficult to deal with. And I’m saying, “I’m alone, I’m alone”, but I know that I can go on… I can go on Discord and Meo will be there for me, and Biki, and and Ale, and Spec, and Bree, and Deepa. Like, I have friends, and they are very good friends. And even offline, I have my emotional support college student… And I just will never name him around you guys, just ’cause it’s a little weird ’cause I just like… He’s like almost literally family. I finally made a friend in my apartment complex, and one of my longest, my oldest dearest Fandom friends is coming down to see me and stay with me. And there is still this loud… A large part of my brain, that is, “You’re gonna be alone on your dad’s death anniversary. You’re gonna be alone on your birthday.” I think it’s so wild because I know I will literally have a human being in my apartment with me, but it just feels bad. It just feels different.

0:07:47.5: And I don’t know if my mom feels the same way. We haven’t really talked about this, but even though we didn’t live with my dad because my dad didn’t wanna move up here, ’cause he had a house, why would he wanna live in a fucking apartment, right? Even though he didn’t physically live with us, he was just always there. He would come up and he would visit us. When he went on cruises, he would always send us things. When he traveled… I have so many souvenirs from Europe because he loved Europe. I knew every time he went somewhere, he would get me something. I have a bear from Belarus, I have a T-shirt from Estonia, I have photos of him in Russia. He hated French food.

0:08:40.4: You know what, I always just had this constant presence of my dad. And every year, he’d call me on my birthday, and he called first thing in the morning too. And he would call in his little old man Caribbean voice, and he would wish me happy birthday. And he would ask me what I wanted, because even in my 30s, I was still his baby, as it should be. And you know, he would usually send me a little something.

0:09:20.0: I always remember when he would send me a card with a check, and you would have a note in it. And I remember his handwriting. And my dad’s handwriting was one of my favorites. A running joke in my family is that I can’t read cursive. And it would piss my mom off so much, because whenever she wrote anything for me, she would have to go and re-write it in print. And my dad was just kind of like, “No, it’s okay. I’m gonna write in cursive, you’ll figure it out.” And I keep thinking… I didn’t want pictures of my dad here. My mom has all of the photo albums because I didn’t want to have them, so I just have photos on my phone. And you know… And his voice mails, and I have videos, and it’s just…

0:10:53.1: There were a lot of ways I figured I would lose my dad, but I didn’t expect dementia. Like, when I was in grad school, my dad calls and he goes… Like we’re talking, and he goes, “Oh, I just got back from the hospital.” And I’m like, “Why we’re you at a hospital for daddy?” And he goes, “I’m getting stitches taken out of my head.” And I was like, “What do you mean stitches taken out of your head?” And what had happened was my dad was outside in our yard, the way he usually is… Was. And one of our neighbors was cutting the mango trees and the saw dropped and hit my dad in the goddamn head, and my dad waited until he got the stitches taken out to told us that it had happened. When Hurricane Irma hit the Virgin Islands, and then I think Hurricane Maria hit the Virgin Islands… I don’t know how many of you guys remember… But I was panicking. My mom and I were in a shelter, a hurricane shelter, my sister and the girls were in their apartment, and we were just… We had our eye on the Virgin Islands because we watched the island get decimated, and we were so scared because my dad does not go to hurricane shelters. He rode out a Category 5 under our neighbor’s apartment, the house next door. And you know the second people started doing drones, drone videos of the Virgin Islands, we were like, “Please go to the neighborhood my dad lives”, to see if the house is still there. And the house was still fucking there.

0:12:33.1: And I did not expect this. My dad was brave as hell. He was weird as hell, he was brave as hell. He did so much shit because he could. He did so much wild shit just because of vibes. And I’m his kid, I’m just like him. A lot of us, we look like him, we act like him, we think like him. But the way we lost him was really bad. Like, I covered it with that little thing I wrote about the Ice king & Marceline. Marceline watching Simon lose himself, Simon knowing that he’s losing himself. And that’s what it was like for us.

0:13:36.8: And whenever you… You have a funeral and somebody’s died after illness, it’s like… Like, if you’re doing a religious funeral, the pastor is like, “Well, they’re at peace. They’re not suffering.” And that’s good, you’re supposed to feel happy. But what do you do with the hole that’s left? And it wouldn’t have been any easier if my dad hadn’t died right after my birthday, if he had died in November or December, because that’s my dad. He was the stay-at-home parent for me when I was really little. After my babysitter, I guess, nanny, moved, he’s the one who really took care of me when I was little before we moved out to Florida. It wasn’t in the same way that my mom did; my mom taught me how to read, and she was literally my teacher, but my dad was the one who took me around the island. Like, he loved to go for drives. Parked me in the front seat of his pick-up truck… He had a Mitsubishi from 1975. And we would just go all over the island. And everybody knew that I was my parents’ child, but they really knew that I was my dad’s.

0:15:21.2: And a lot of stuff has happened in the past year, and a lot of it has been really bad. And I know that there just hasn’t been time for me to cope with a lot of this, and there hasn’t been space for me to cope with a lot of this. Part of why I initially went private on Twitter was because this is all happening with my dad. And I know people are like, “Oh, you know, you could just assume the private quote tweets are nice.” And it’s like, “Well, you can, because you have normal people who dislike you”, or, “People don’t dislike you.” But the idea of people quote tweeting me talking about my dad getting sick, or my dad dying, I couldn’t do it. And so I couldn’t talk to people. My space kept shrinking and shrinking in literally every other aspect, every other event. When I first got rejected from grad school, when I’ve been broken up with, when I got fired from the marketing job, ’cause technically I did get fired from that. You know that plane trip in 2019, I’ve been able to be with people, and I don’t have that, and I don’t have my dad on top of that. And people publicly take great pleasure in the fact that they’ve shrank my world, my Fandom, my support to 10 people on discord and a not-super-used account on Bluesky. At the same time that they talk about how nobody should be fired over Fandom, nobody should be stopped by haters, and people should just leave people they dislike, alone.

0:17:39.6: It’s a lot. It’s a lot. And I hate… I hate it. I hate just the compounding feelings. I hate that I am not… I hate that I don’t get a reprieve. I hate that I didn’t get a reprieve as my father died. I hate that people still found time to harass me about an article they didn’t fucking read while I was at his fucking funeral. I hate that Fandom thinks that me expressing built-up frustration at racists is being mean, but racists stalking me and harassing me for years is justice. I hate that the last thing I read to my dad was a feature about Emmett Till… The movie about Emmett Till. I mean, it was good, but what a fucking thing to read to your dad as he’s fucking dying. I hate that… I hate that I don’t have my dad and I hate that I don’t have a circle, I don’t have support. I hate that my dad died right after my birthday. I hate that… I hate all of it. And I don’t know what to do to stop feeling like this. I don’t think it’s possible to stop feeling like this. I don’t know.

0:19:38.9: And this isn’t supposed to be… Like, there’s no happy ending to this. I’m gonna suck it up and go back to work. I’m going to repress, repress repress, because I don’t know what else there is to do. Nothing I do will bring my dad back. Nothing I do will stop all of the other issues I’m having. There’s nothing I can do that will make my birthday a good, happy day, without the memory of, “And then 12 hours later, last year, you lost your dad.” And a lot of people don’t get it, even if they’re members of the Dead Dad Club, because what they’ve decided I am, and what I have the right to feel, and how I have the right to respond, is so much narrower than anybody else in any of these public spaces; even people who like me, supposedly, will decide that I don’t get to react, that I don’t get to feel anything about any of this, about people laughing at me, rejoicing in my pain, lying about me to other people who couldn’t tell you any serious, significant, truthful detail about me.

0:21:17.6: And I know that everybody’s like, “Just ignore the haters. Just… ” It’s like I try, but all of this is so bound up in my head, that I didn’t deserve a break from years of harassment, even when my dad was dying, even when he did die, even when I was at his funeral, even when I hadn’t updated Teen Vogue, it was just, “Hah, it’s what she gets. I’m sure she’s fired.” “She hasn’t updated.” “She hasn’t posted.” And it’s like… I’m supposed to be the mean one? I’m supposed to be the mean one, when what I am is somebody who is struggling to deal with the fact that my dad, who supported me in literally everything I did… Except for not driving; he really wished that I would learn how to drive… That I lost the parent that supported me completely. Like, my mom loves that I can make money off of writing, but my dad is who read my books. If my dad knew, how to use the internet, he would have read my columns. When people printed out things I wrote and gave them to him, he read them, and he loved them.

0:22:58.2: You know, my dad was not a perfect person, and he may not have been a good dad to my other siblings, but he was a really good dad to me. And the fact that so many people made it really possible… Impossible for me to have space to mourn him, refused to extend empathy to me about what I’m going through, even now, a year later, I hate that too.

0:23:36.1: So yeah, happy birthday to me. I miss you, daddy.