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This I Believe: We’re All Doing the Best We Can
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It is the eleventh anniversary of my father’s passing, and one of my first memories is riding in the back seat of our family’s Oldsmobile station wagon through southern New Mexico along I-10. We were somewhere between Deming and Lordsburg, and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton were singing about islands in a stream. My mother, my sister, and I were returning home to Sierra Vista, Arizona, after visiting my father at the VA hospital in El Paso, TX. I still remember watching him with the other men, all sitting outside at an old stone patio table in the desert sun, smoking cigarettes in faded blue hospital pajamas. I was five years old, and this was the first time Daddy was hospitalized for a PTSD-induced mental breakdown.
To blame the mental breakdown on Daddy’s service in Vietnam would be a simplistic explanation of his mental health struggles. After all, he only joined the Navy, lying about his age at 17, to escape his physically abusive, mentally ill mother and neglectful father. I’m sure that months in the South China Sea seemed a respite to Daddy, who’d been left by my grandfather in a Mexican jail at 15 years old after my dad ran away from home. His older brother, Larry, had recently died following a routine tonsillectomy, and his mother had reminded him often that the wrong child had died…
