Even though they rarely have much practical meaning or staying power, dreams can, on occasion, have a real and lasting impact. The recurring dream that I recount in this memoir section had a profound effect on me, and the images from it are still totally clear well over a year after my last experience with it. My sharing this is not meant to illuminate my own depression or other issues. I’m putting this out there to show what it’s like for those left without any avenue for closure in the wake of suicide. If you’re in need, please get help. If your depression won’t allow you to do so for your own sake, then try to act with consideration for those you will leave behind if you decide to go through with it.
If this impacts you in any meaningful way, please leave feedback, or read the other chapters of my memoir that I’ve published on this page “Coming of Age” and on my other blog, Puncher’s Chance (“My Struggle,” and “Monster.”) Also, please follow here and on my Instagram (seanpatrick623) to stay updated.
Echoes
July, 2016
It happened again. I’m alone in my room, sitting on my bed leaning against the wall, drenched in a cold sweat. I absent-mindedly look over to my phone to check the time. It’s almost four AM, and I know that I won’t be able to sleep after the night I’ve had. All I can do is stare into the blackness around me and try to calm myself down. After a few minutes, I realize how shallow and quick my breathing has become, and that my heart is beating through my chest. I close my eyes and try to focus on taking slower, deeper breaths and calming down.
The dream is always the same. I’m standing in the kitchen of my father’s one-floor rented house; he’s irate and screaming at me, although I can’t make out what he’s saying. It all comes through to my ears like a distant echo. No words. No clarity. I don’t even try to respond. Even in a dream, this sight is all too familiar. It’s something that I was conditioned over many years to accept. When it suited me, I’d often respond with a passive-aggressive remark designed to piss him off even more, if that were possible. It turned into a game; let’s see if I can give the old man a rage-induced heart attack. With all the cigarettes he smoked, it was nothing short of a miracle that it never happened. I was going to get my licks in if he was committed to yelling at me for some trivial or nonexistent issue. It could have been the result of something as inane as my putting a box of pasta on the wrong shelf in the pantry for all he cared. I may as well have drunkenly crashed his car into a jersey barrier. Most “offenses” got the same reaction from him. This was different though. As I stood there, I felt none of the usual anger or spite. Only pity. As I got older and stronger, and eventually took up boxing, he was always sure to be outside of my arm’s reach when he would start these arguments.
The man who I had feared for many years shrank in stature before my eyes when I realized this. He became something feeble and gray. I hadn’t respected my father for years, but when that transformation occurred, I began to hate him. Who knows, I may have begun to respect him again if he had the balls to follow through on one of his threats and hit me. At least then, he’d be a man of his word for once. But, no. He never hit me. A few times, he grabbed me by the shirt, shook me, and threatened to “beat the living shit out of me,” but he never hit me. Psychological beatings were where he drew the line.
—
“You’re so fucking lazy.”
“You’ll never amount to shit if you don’t act this way.” You mean if I don’t stick to getting an MBA and become yet another drone working in a cubicle somewhere? I think the fuck not.
“You’re an antisocial loser. Just like your fucking mother.” I’m an introvert and I know it. You’re an introvert masquerading as an extrovert and it’s quite painful and awkward to watch.
Just a few things that were beat into my head over years and years of conditioning that was meant to make me feel inferior. So I would never surpass him. Narcissism and ego can be a motherfucker, can’t they?
—
After all of that, I can’t help but feel sorry for the man I see before me in my dream. The echoes I hear have no shape or form. They couldn’t be called words. They don’t even have a hint of anger in them as they hit my ears. They’re sad, and sound vaguely apologetic. Maybe he’s reaching out from beyond the grave to tell me that he’s sorry. The facial expression remains just how I remember it though. Red, with veins bulging in the center of his forehead and on his right temple. A drop of saliva flies from his mouth as he screams at me. The melancholy behind his words is still coming through, and all I want to do is walk across the space between us and hug him. Just closure. That’s all I want, but his final act robbed me of ever being able to have it. Jesus, it’s been two years since he took his own life, and this still has an inexorable hold on me.
It’s fitting that my dream has delivered an angry version of my father before me. It’s the only emotion of his I can remember clearly enough for my unconscious to recreate with any clarity. Towards the end, all his emotions came out as anger, no matter how he was actually feeling, so what difference does it make? He continues his simultaneously infuriated and depressed tirade, and I still can’t will myself to bridge the widening gap between us. I try, but my legs remain static and unmoving. My inability to help him see what he’s doing to me is indescribably frustrating. I can feel a knot forming in my throat, as a hollow sensation in my chest begins to expand and engulf me.
Suddenly, the echoes change in pitch: rising higher. Something is different. The sadness I was hearing has morphed into full-blown depression. He turns away from me and begins pacing back and forth across the kitchen. He won’t make eye contact. With all the strength that my dream-self can muster, I reach my left hand out to him, but all of my other limbs remain frozen.
Still looking away from me, his pacing slows, and he begins to fumble around in his pocket for something. My hand remains outstretched as he produces that same .38 special revolver from his pocket. The rest all happens in slow motion.
I raise my hand as he raises the .38 to waist level, then to his chest. My hand blocks him out of my field of vision. This is it. I wait an agonizing second for the sound. The ripping of the bullet passing through my hand, then my head.
BANG!!
The sound is deafening, and robs me of my breath. No ripping. No searing pain. As my hand drops, I see a pile of ashes where my father stood. The bullet was never intended for me.
I realize all of this in the half second following the shot, and am jolted awake before I’m able to fully process the scope of it all. I snap straight up in bed, eyes wide, jaw clenched, and fists balled. My ears are ringing from the sound of the imaginary gunshot. The memory of the dream comes back all at once and the lump in my throat overwhelms me. I begin silently sobbing into my hands that still won’t come unclenched.
It is 1:30 AM.
I didn’t think I would fall asleep again that night, but the exhaustion of being so tense for the duration of the dream caused me to slip under again.
BANG!!
It is 2:15 AM.
Same dream again. Those forty-five minutes felt like forty-five hours. The same tension and emotions well up once again
BANG!!
2:55 AM.
Repetition isn’t making this easier.
BANG!!
3:25 AM.
I sat rigidly in my bed for what felt like an eternity. All I could do was think one terrifying thought on loop until my alarm rang, or until I fell asleep.
I remember that he sent me a “happy birthday” text first thing in the morning of August 1st, 2014. I had just turned twenty. I hadn’t spoken to him in a year and a half, and I didn’t know whether or not to respond. Even if I did, what the hell would I say? What could I say? How do you even start a conversation with your father after your last interaction ended with a profane declaration of his failings? Even if I really wanted to, I couldn’t think of how to go about it. I deleted the text.
Three days later, he turned sixty-one.
Two days after that, he was gone.
I felt the guilt of my decision to delete the text for the next six months. It was on my mind every second of every day. After all that time, I read a news story from my hometown about a man who had come home from work, shot his sleeping nineteen-year-old son through the chest with a shotgun and then offed himself with the same gun in his garage. Shit. I remembered playing with the kid a couple times when we were both toddlers.
The age similarities between them and my father and I spooked me for a bit, until I really thought about it. What if I had responded to that text on my birthday? Would I have ended up going over there? Expecting a reunion and…? Jesus, that ending is hard enough to think about, much less write.
I kept telling myself that he wouldn’t have done it, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. No one is ever in their right mind when they take their own life. I did the right thing. His path was already headed to a tragic ending. There was nothing you could have done. No action of yours brought this on. You didn’t put the gun in his hand. Didn’t raise it to his temple. Didn’t…
I push the last image out of my head as quickly as I can. I did the right thing.
But, what if you had gone over there? This plays on a loop in my head until…
BANG!!!!!
3:55 AM.
I’m still tense, but I have no more tears. I’m empty. The years’ worth of tension that was made real again for me in my dream have gutted me. Regardless of how disparate we were as individuals, and of how we never quite saw eye to eye, it would have been nice to have been able to say goodbye the right way.
“But you robbed me of that,” I say aloud, to no one.
There I sat, for the next two hours. I was unable and unwilling to move. I just wanted the alarm to ring so I could go through the motions of my day and at least appear normal. Even if I was anything but. Run a few miles, shower, eat, go to work. Just pretend that I wasn’t losing my grip.
It took a while for me to feel right after that. The irrational fear of my father randomly stepping out at me from around the next corner or from behind a random wall stayed with me for the better part of the next week. Just have to shake it off, I guess.
That wasn’t the first night I’ve had that was lost to my recurring nightmare, but I pray that it’s my last. I can only throw myself into training for my next fight or into writing and hope that it works. I’m still looking for the day when I can sit completely still and be at peace. When I won’t need to occupy myself with constant work and training for the voices from my past to finally fall silent. Then, I can move forward.
End
~Sean Donnelly
Inside the Ropes: My Perspective 