All the guys laugh.
“Like he hadn’t already sent you ‘Don’t Stop Believing,’” Joey says, looking at me with a grizzled smile. “Your dad just wanted to show off. He had a good voice.”
“He had a terrible voice,” Miguel argues. “You’re tone deaf.”
“Like I said,” Joey says, and we all laugh.
They start piling stories over one another, voices tumbling, laughter mixing with tears, and for the first time in years, it doesn’t feel like I’m on the outside of my dad’s life, looking in. It feels like I’m part of it again. And I realize I was part of his, too. A bigger part than I ever realized.
As I laugh with them, I let my tears break free, but they don’t sting the way they did in the truck. They don’t burn my throat or carve another hole in my chest. They feel clean, like stepping under a waterfall. Because I know now that I’m not holding my dad’s story all by myself, clinging to the good memories of him as if to excuse the bad ones.
Other people knew him—flawed, moody, funny, trying—and they loved him anyway. Like I did.
My uncle’s arm is still around me. My aunt’s hand still rests on my back. My cousins are gathered close, and Dad’s friends are swapping stories like he might walk in at any second.
After so many years giving my heart away to other families, trying to fill their cracks while mine split wider and wider, I finally feel a piece of what I’ve been aching for.
Not fixed, but held.
Not whole, but healing.
An hour later, the party is winding down, and my aunt invites anyone interested to come out to the adjoining graveyard to pay respects to my dad.
Everyone comes.
Uncle Bill walks with me. “How’s your work. You still doing sentencing advocacy?” he asks.
Mike, Joey, and a few of the other guys are close enough to chime in.
“That’s God’s work, right there. Being an advocate,” Joey says, holding the cross that hangs around his neck.
And that makes me feel worse. “Uh, no. I left my job. Earlier this week, actually.”
“Why’d you leave?” Mike asks.
That’s the question, but can he handle the real answer? I quit because it was hard, and I wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t stuff my own issues aside when it mattered, and I hurt another family. I couldn’t save Marcus. He’s the most recent, but my failures haunt me like ghosts in a Dickens tale.
“I …” I don’t know what to say.
“Can’t be easy seeing so many families like yours,” Joey says. “My parole office said he got ‘burnt out’ from all the ‘trauma dumping’. Sounds rough.”
“Yeah, and you were his first case,” Miguel says.
A few of the guys laugh. But what Joey said makes me sniff back tears. That’s exactly how I feel: burnt out. My clients and their families didn’t “trauma dump,” they simply lived a trauma I couldn’t help sharing. And when I finished a case, it’s not like I gave the burden back. They still carried it, but I did, too. Case after case, family after family, the weight kept stacking up on top of me. So many families. So many hurts and disappointments. Even the “successes” felt heavy.
Joey’s throwaway line about burnout and trauma has lodged in my mind.
Is that what happened to me?
Is there a chance I’m not a complete failure, but simply someone who burned out?
“What are you gonna do next?” Miguel asks, pulling me from my thoughts. “Is all that working out gonna make you a prison guard?”
Mike laughs. “Lay off, Mig.” Our feet sink into the snow, but the main paths through the cemetery have been cleared recently, so it doesn’t reach the top of my boots. “You oughta look into the Bridge Initiative. It’s a re-entry program for guys like us. I’m a recovery coach. It’s a good organization.”
I smile and nod. I’ve never considered working anywhere except in sentencing advocacy. Re-entry programs are important, but I can’t get that enmeshed in people’s lives again.
“Nah,” Joey says. “She should fix the program. She’d probably have all sorts of contacts, ways to make things better.”
