So the Truth Finally Comes Out

(You may want to get some coffee first .... this is a long one)

For the past two and a half years, a beat-up old Cutlass Supreme has been sitting in the only covered parking space available at my house. From my doorway, it looked like a dusty black, but in fact it has red stripes up the hood (spray painted on, thankyouverymuch) and the opposite side of the care is alternately a baby-ish blue and stripped metal. He never got around to painting the other side.

For the fisrt few months, P worked on the car every weekend, sanding down the paint, attempting to hammer out some of the dings, and laying a dingy blue rug throughout the interior to cover the lack of floor panels and ripped blue leather. The car is an eyesore, although that may really be an understatement. A piece of carpet was placed under it so that the oil oozing from the engine would be somewhat soaked up. Two tires are flat, and I found a hubcap in a bush a few weeks ago. The engine will only start if it's jumped, but otherwise that part at least is in decent shape.

The car was not exactly gifted to P. He sort of inherited it when La Tia threatened to send it to the junk yard. His Tio Toto loved that car, and drove it into the ground. When Tio Toto passed away from a misdiagnosed, God-awful cancer which ravaged his body making him unable to eat or walk, but left his razor-sharp mind intact, he gifted the Cutlass to Julio, who didn't have the money to make it driveable, so he left it in front of La Tia's house in Petaluma. And P claimed it.

So for two years, it has sat untouched in our carport, save the readjustments to the cover when the wind blew more than a single gust. Finally he got frustrated with the cover too, and left the car to blind anyone passing by, with it's degraded glory. For two years we begged foregiveness from the neighbors for leaving such an ugly, inoperable, unregistered vehicle park where they were forced to see it daily. And finally they started complaining to the HOA.

So I saw a note on it a few days ago that it was going to be towed. The note was old though, that's how much attention was paid to the car, and it was supposed to be gone a week before I found it. I finally convinced P that we needed to do something with it before they took it from him, and we decided it would be better to donate it to charity than have it torn apart for scrap metal. I looked online, contacted Marin AIDS Project who agreed to come tow it, and as of about 12:30pm yesterday, it was gone.

P had a really rough day. As he walked back into the house and the tow truck was pulling away from the curb, I could see him fighting back tears. There were people around, so I cracked a joke to give him some composure time, and headed back to work.

Last night I stopped at Safeway to get some beer, knowing he needed to grieve and that he wouldn't allow himself to lose face by doing it sober. We danced around the issue for a few hours, but he refused to discuss it, each time we came close tears welled up in his eyes, and he would angrily wipe them away and change the subject. When he finally had enough to drink to let his guard down, the tears streamed down his face and my heart broke open.

I don't understand. I've lost people before, but none were that closed to me. My great grandmother passed recently, and as heartbroken as I was it was more for the loss of life in general, than any real attachment to her as a person. It sounds cruel, but I didn't know her. We had a blood bond, but that was all. My uncle passed a few months after Tio Toto, and again I cried, but I didn't know him well. I mourned the sudden-ness of it, and the suffering my aunt would endure, and he was a good man, but I'd only met him once and so the grieving was relatively short.

But once the tears started flowing they quickly went from genuine grief to this overly dramatic spilling a sip of beer in his name, kissing his hand and holding it over his heart, asking for forgiveness, and I couldn't take it. I snapped. It was only for 10 minutes or so that he did that, and I'm sure I was a complete a-hole in the moment, but I told him to be real. I told him that if he was going to grieve, he needed to do it for the right reason. I said he didn't give away his uncle, he gave away the car, and I apologized for pressuring him, but told him that he needed to keep his Tio Toto in his heart and mourn his death, not giving away a material object that he once owned.

And I think he got it. He sat quietly for a minute, and then said, yes, I was right. He felt guilty that the day before Tio Toto passed away, he had called P to go visit him and he didn't. He regretted not going to say goodbye, and it felt like a double betrayal that he is now giving away the one thing he had left of him.

I remember at his funeral, P didn't want to say goodbye. I basically forced him to go up to the casket and say a prayer for him. I knew that if he didn't do it, as much as he opposed it in the moment, he would not forgive himself for missing that opportunity. I knew there was something wrong at the funeral, but I was busy taking care of the kids so the adults could say their goodbyes, and I never pressured him to tell me.

So there it is. Guilt is an ugly thing. It makes you irrational, and it sucks that people feel so much shame, so much that they can't face what it really is about in order to work through it. I dont' think I did anything to "solve" his problems, but I'm hoping that when he starts to feel that guilt and shame he can remember that it isn't about the car. And anyway, we did a good thing. Hopefully when they auction the car off they'll get enough to help someone out with medications or doctor's appointments or something. Hopefully.

I know this is long, there is a lot to this. But P also said something that broke my heart and confirmed years-old suspicions that I've had.

He said that one of the reasons he felt so close to Tio Toto was that they both loved women their families hated.

Yeah. He finally admitted what I've known for years. His family hated me. I don't think they do anymore, but he made me out to be this crazy American bitch who broke his heart and trampled his self-worth, turning him into a depressed, angry, alcoholic recluse. And then when we got back together, I was the Golden Child. I saved him from himself.

At Tio Toto's funeral, people were whispering about the "other woman." The mother of his children would not allow her to pay her respects, even though he had been divorced for decades and the "other woman" had been by his side, loving him and caring for him when nobody else would. P said he understood the ostracism, loving an American, choosing a woman over his family.

And on some level, I always knew it, although he denied it up and down for the past 7 years, I knew it, and now I can stop worrying about pleasing them. It's hard to be yourself when you have a suspicion someone doesn't like you, but won't admit it. It's a weird feeling. It doens't change my feelings toward them, I love his family, but I'm glad to finally know why I felt so out of place for so many years.