The Job I Never Wanted
by Mary Voiss

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve prepared myself for my brother’s death. I’ve prepared his eulogy in my mind. Which stories would I share from our childhood? We are the only two people who know what it was like growing up in our household. We share the same but different memories. One fills in the gaps for the other. When we were younger, we’d fight non-stop. He has more napkins, she has more tater tots. Our mom always reminded us that we might not get along now, but we’d be great friends when we were older. Yeah right, I’d say, rolling my eyes. Some years later I would learn that she was right all along.

I think of my mom, how it will kill her. I know my mom has prepared herself for this but there could never be enough preparation. How awful. She’s not in great health. Weak and tired from the years of worrying about Dan. I’ll have to be even more of a support to her. I think about having to make the calls to my family. Aunts, uncles, cousins, my friends, his friends, and long time family friends. It would be the only time I’d be thankful my Uncle had already passed. He was like a father figure to us. I imagine this would be really hard for him. I think of how I’ll have to tell everyone over and over what happened and update them on how my mom is doing. “She’s not ok. She’s doing the best she can, under the circumstances. No parent ever wants to lose a child,” I’ll say. Who will come to the funeral? What song will we play to tell the story of a tortured soul, gone too soon? 39 is too young.

I think about telling my son and wonder if he will understand. He loves Uncle Danny, even when he’s acting like a “butt cheek.” (Danny is what our close family and friends have called him since he was little.) Will he be upset? What will he remember about his uncle? His kids. Fuck. Dan’s kids. How will his kids react? I remember my mom and grandma telling us our dad died. Dan screamed. One of us dropped our pudding on the floor. Why did they let us get a snack before telling us? Did we have a snack or is it my memory playing tricks on me? Once my mom said, “The heart attack was too much. His heart wasn’t strong enough,” my hearing went blurry — like in the movies when a character is shell shocked and all but a little of the sound is gone. Everything moved in slow motion. I could hear Dan crying in the distance. But he was right next to me. My grandmother was trying to comfort all of us.

Jeffrey, 12 years old, the third oldest, will be devastated. He adores his father; he is a mini me of Dan. They have the same green eyes with long eyelashes. The same goofy mannerisms. My mom always said that Dan reminded her of Robin Williams. Always over the top looking for a good belly laugh from his audience. He should have been a comedian. Aryanna is only seven. Her relationship with him has been off and on, more recently on. I suppose she’ll be old enough to have strong emotions about it. Bella is the oldest at fifteen. She was my sidekick for the first six years of her life. Knowing how much I loved her, I couldn’t fathom the love I’d have for my own child someday. Due to many circumstances, she’s been estranged from him for years and I haven’t seen her in five. It’s heartbreaking. Contact has been limited to messages through her mother’s sister. I’m grateful she has a stable person raising her, but I miss her terribly. I wonder what her family has told her. I wonder how she’d react. Technically Dan has four children — that we know of. Asandrica is his third oldest. It’s sad to say that with the exception of the first six months of her life, she hasn’t been a part of Dan’s life at all. I used to think her mom’s rigidity of not letting her be around Dan when he was sober and doing well was extreme, but now after all we’ve been through with him, I think maybe she was the smart one.

Dan’s battle with addiction has been going on for well over 10 years and yet it hasn’t gotten any easier. I wish I understood when and why it started. I recall a time when we were in our early 20s. He admitted to me that he’d tried meth. I was horrified. He went on to explain that after he’d tried it, he’d seen a friend’s mom who was deep in her addiction. A gaunt woman, with sores and scabs all over her skin, decaying and missing teeth. The sight of her scared him into never doing it again. “Grandma paid good money for my braces and I don’t want to fuck up my beautiful teeth,” he’d said. I was relieved to hear this from him and thought often of how lucky he was not to get sucked into that wildly addictive drug.

Years later when his behavior became erratic and almost scary, it didn’t even occur to me that it might be because he was on drugs. I simply thought that he was just in a phase of being a huge asshole. He would drink occasionally and other than his first time dabbling in smoking pot or even the meth, I never thought of him as someone who had an addictive personality or who “did drugs.” This period in time was right after he’d been discharged from the Marines.  He’d committed to the standard four years, but Obama was letting people out six months early if they wanted to leave early, so he finished his three and a half years and came home to “be with his kids.” I assumed that he was having a hard time adjusting to civilian life, dealing with baby mama drama (four baby mamas), and re-learning how to be a productive member of society. Maybe he was handling the stress really really poorly. I was naive then. The next ten years taught me more than I ever wanted to know about meth users, drugs, jail and prison systems, the difference between minimum, medium, and maximum security levels of prisons, commissary, requirements for mailing letters to inmates, jail and prison visitation protocol, felony charges and their abbreviations, what level of crime equated to which sentences, patterns and cycles of addiction, the court systems, child guardianship, how to prepare for a custody trial, the immense damage addiction has on the whole family, and where to find Nar-Anon support groups for families. I think I must be considered a professional by now. When do I get a raise? Does anyone know who I can talk to about this? Honestly, I’d rather just quit this job. It sucks.

Because of my professional status in this job, I’m experienced enough to know that there are a myriad of reasons to explain when he “goes dark.” My phone got turned off, I fell asleep and didn’t have my charger, I got arrested and [insert a story about why the jail roster didn’t show him for x amount of days]. The variety and extreme nature of things that are possible explanations are endless. Four days is too long and out of character, even for someone who has such an erratic life as Dan. One thing is for sure, he ALWAYS has his phone and/or a way to contact people if needed. If one phone gets turned off, he’ll get another one. If he doesn’t have means to do so, he’ll use someone else’s.

It was 8:30 in the morning. A Thursday. I was just arriving at the office, hands full with my work bag, lunch, and lukewarm coffee. As I plopped my stuff down on the kitchen floor of our office suite, I pulled out my phone to try one more time. From the recently called list, I selected his number and waited. I didn’t wait long because the call was surprisingly connected. As the phone rang, I was simultaneously relieved and livid. My heart pounded as I tried to quickly collect my thoughts. As I heard a gravelly voice on the other end say something like “Hello,” I hissed “Where the fuck have you been?!” My body was hot and cold at the same time. I was shaking. Dan had been missing for four days.

Hoping no one showed up at the office anytime soon, I listened as he told me a wild and largely unbelievable story about how he was robbed at gunpoint and therefore had no phone, wallet, ID, debit cards, no nothing. After listening for a few more minutes, putting my things away at work, I told him that I needed to let him go because I was at the office. I apologized, explaining I didn’t think the call would even connect. His phone had been going straight to voicemail for the last four days. He huffed, seemingly annoyed and hung up.

I text my boyfriend, mom, and Brittany, Aryanna’s mother, updating them that I’d heard his voice and he was, in fact, alive. Brittany was the one who let me know that something was amiss. She sent me a text message a couple days prior saying that she was supposed to pick Dan up at the airport but he never showed. She’d talked to him the night before and they’d discussed his arrival, the coming days, plans for him to spend time with Aryanna before he headed to Eugene. He “lives’’ in a sober living house there. At first I was annoyed when I saw her text, asking me if I’d heard from Dan recently. We’ve had a strained relationship. Her and my brother met in Narcotics Anonymous, if that tells you anything. As she gave more of what was happening, I couldn’t ignore my growing worry. Against the rules of his probation, Dan had flown to Vegas to “help a friend prepare to go to federal prison.” That’s as insane as it sounds. Dan is not allowed to leave the state. He was out of state and missing for four days. Many people go missing all over the world. Las Vegas is a prime place for people to go missing. More likely, “helping his friend transition to federal prison,” was more like an excuse to party his face off. Now, the only explanation for him having missed his flight home and having his phone off for four days is that he’d overdosed and was dead somewhere in a bathroom. He’s never without his phone. If there was an emergency and he didn’t have his phone, he knows my phone number and our mom’s phone number by heart. There’s no excuse otherwise for him to miss a flight and not communicate. He wouldn’t want us to worry. Right?

In the following days his behavior and communication proved that his story was not only filled with holes and again, was wildy unbelievable (not shocking), but that truly the only person he cared about was himself (shocking, but also not). Duh, of course, one might say. But really? He REALLY didn’t care that we would all be worried sick? Unfortunately, it was clear that this was a new level for him. I don’t think he does caring anymore. We are learning a new lesson in these cycles. When a new lesson is learned, we all have to recalibrate our thoughts, feelings, boundaries, and interactions with him. With each cycle we are closer to losing him, not only in a relational sense but in actuality. He’s not long for this life. We are watching him slip further and further away from us.

It’s hard to believe this is the same person who was so concerned about helping others that he had to have a time limit on saying grace. When Danny said grace it went on and on and on. Bless this person, bless this tripod cat, bless this old person or that homeless man. He’d asked our mom to start making him two lunches because someone at school didn’t have food. It’s hard to believe this person is the same person as the Danny who would entertain us for hours with his comedic antics. The more we laughed the more he kept going. Sometimes he didn’t even know he was being funny.

As a family we’d watch Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman. In one of the episodes there was a woman who was not able to conceive. After further investigation, it was determined this was because she didn’t have a uterus. My brother asked, “What’s a uterus?” My mom explained it to him and that was that. A couple weeks later we were getting ready for school. It was about time to head to the bus stop. The bus stop was just one more house down from ours. We had a handful of friends who lived in the neighborhood, and occasionally one or two would stop at our house before we all headed to the bus stop together. My friend Sheila and I were in a deep discussion of what we wanted for our lives. Marriage, babies, jobs, the works. We were probably 10 to 12 years old at the time. Out of nowhere Danny says, “Well, all I know is that before I get married, I’m going to make sure she has a uterus!” Cue all of us (my friend, our mom, and I) dying of laughter. “What?! You can’t just ask a girl if she has a uterus!!” I exclaimed. My friend said nothing, but her face said everything. Our mom was howling with laughter. He couldn’t have been more serious. He had made his wishes clear and off to the bus stop we went.

Danny has always been fiercely protective of me. Actually, we’d always been protective of each other, even when we fought all the time. It was my 22nd birthday. My mom had just sold our family house and was living in an apartment before purchasing her next home. She lived in an apartment complex that had a pool. The only thing I wanted to do for my birthday was lay by the pool with my boyfriend and relax. Later in the day we would barbecue with my boyfriend, mom, brother, and some friends that would be by later. There was a no drinking,or no glass policy at the pool, I can’t remember which. We hadn’t been at the pool more than an hour when my boyfriend declared that this day was boring and What are we even doing just laying around?! A fight ensued. As we walked back to my mom’s apartment, my boyfriend stormed out just at the moment my brother was arriving. My brother sees me walking toward the apartment, as my boyfriend leaves. I’m in my swimsuit and sunglasses, fighting tears. Danny sees this and sees my chin quivering, trying not to cry. This sets him off. There was a brief exchange of me trying to get Danny not to go after him. At the time the gesture added to my stress. For years after Danny would express his anger at that moment, how my boyfriend made me cry on my birthday, and how he’d seen the proof in the “quiver of my chin.” For Danny, it was an image that was seared in his brain. He will still get mad now if you mention it to him. I love and appreciate this protectiveness about him.

These memories are what makes this so hard. At his core, Danny is a loving, caring, protective person. Where and when did it all go wrong? What could have been different to prevent this outcome? Dan is still here with us but Danny is slowly slipping away. Every now and again Danny will come around. It’s easy to forget all of the terror, heartache, stress, and mistrust when Danny comes around. I hate Dan. I miss Danny. I quit.

May 2024
Oregon, USA