3/11/20–3/12/21
“I always wanna tell the truth
But it never seems like the right time
To be serious enough
I’m sorry I’m making myself cry”
-Julien Baker, Favor
When the NBA shut down on March 11, 2020, I had already been cancelling some things to stay away and stay safe because of my medical history and being the caretaker/helper of my mom, who is 65 (now 66) and disabled, but it was when the NBA shut down that my partner and I realized this was something a lot more serious than we thought. There were of course the facetimes, the zoom calls, trying to stay creative in a pandemic, but I was feeling like the wind was knocked out of my sails a bit because I had just switched management and was auditioning a lot again and partying with friends and going to concerts with my partner and making plans and volunteering and felt, dare I say it, optimistic? for the first time in a long time about my life, and it all just stopped. The big pause button was pushed.
If you were to ask any of my friends before the pandemic, I was the life of the party. I was the one who showed up 20 minutes early to your house to see if you needed help, and would shut it down at 2am and help take the trash out…if I hadn’t started falling asleep from that last white claw. If I wanted to go out….we were going out, that’s just what was the plan. 7 dollar sports game tickets on seatgeek? A concert day of? Going to the gym and then getting on the train to go to Akbar and end up bar hopping with the pals? That was just a day ending in Y.
And then when we stayed home, we were trying to keep positive, trying to stay connected, stay together even apart, especially during the summer, protesting however we could for Black Lives Matter, racial justice, and social justice in general. It felt weird that for the first time in my life I couldn’t go protest or go to an action because I was so high risk, but with everything prematurely opening back up, all my partner and I did was drive up and down the coast and go home, never leaving the car, but just making sure the world hadn’t moved on without me. And it hadn’t.
And then my dad died.
Six weeks into the pandemic, my dog, Rosie, died. She was a senior we had adopted about three years prior who was riddled with tumors and she left us quietly on a late evening in early May, and to lose a pet in a pandemic was heartbreaking, but up until that summer, it was grief I knew so well. I know what it feels like when dogs die. It’s upsetting and traumatic, but we mourn them and remember them with pictures and framed paw prints around the house and funny videos we take on our phones. People were sick and dying around the world, this was a sad moment but not as sad as what was happening in the world, I kept telling myself. After all, I hadn’t lost a person during this time.
Yet.
My dad didn’t die of covid. In fact, the day before he died, I had to call him about a financial question I had, you know, the kind adult kids ask their parents, while I was cooking dinner and just said a casual “love you, pops” when I hung up. It was normal. I went to bed late that night, upset I accidentally erased years of texts from my partner trying to delete a spam text for something like natural viagra or real estate flipping. “I have them, you’re okay, baby” he said.
I was awoken a little after 7am the morning of August 26th by my mother coming into my bedroom, a few steps from hers, crying and saying “kylie, your daddy died.” And I just kept repeating “what?” and I just remember sitting on the floor in my bathroom sobbing, calling anyone I could because I just needed to hear any voice. The loneliest period of the world had to be the backdrop of the loneliest moment of my life.
I learned more about my dad’s death, and as it turned out, secret life with one of his many mistresses who tried to pass off my mother’s house as hers, my father as her husband, even tackily writing my father’s last name (which wasn’t hers) on invoices we found when at the time of my dad’s passing, my mother was very much married to my father even though they hadn’t been together since I was 12. My dad never even wanted to divorce my mom. The Main Mistress wrote an obituary without our consent and misgendered me in it. She has never wanted to meet me in the supposed 21 years they were together (which, that math doesn’t even make sense if you know the full timeline of my parents’ marriage). I learned we were not even informed when they headed to the emergency room but instead people waited eight hours after he died from a massive heart attack on the table getting a diagnostic test done. I learned so many more things that made sense as my father had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, something I couldn’t articulate in public because of his attitude towards his own mental health, but learning didn’t make the pain easier.
I don’t remember August. Or September. Or most of October. Friends, colleagues, people on Twitter sent me gift cards, deliveries at my door. Flowers. Messages and emails I would only return with a “thank you” or a heart emoji. I didn’t know what to say in response to their messages besides that. My partner was the closest to a son-in-law my dad had, and I know he was suffering an immense loss too, and he didn’t get asked to be thrown in the deep end with us. The friends who knew how awful losing a parent is would text and go “I know it’s awful, I’m sorry, I’m here.” And yet I couldn’t say anything back. If it had been any other time in the millennium, I would have been surrounded physically by my beautiful friends, but the distance made everyone feel so far away even if I saw them through a screen. I realized they finally saw the real truth about me that I couldn’t cleverly disguise with charisma or humor or a solid social itinerary I had been able to do my entire life: I’m just fucking sad, man, and I couldn’t hide it anymore. I always spoke of mental health advocacy and my own mental health, but the Sparks Way of “I have depression and anxiety and have had it for my entire life and it sucks but hey we can do it!” turned into the Sparks Way of “turns out, nope, can’t do it” real fast.
We had to drive to Oklahoma three weeks after my dad died because of course, my dad still lived in Tulsa even though my mother and I were in Los Angeles. The Bureaucracy of Death waits for no one-not a pandemic, not distance, you have to do it and answer the calls. So we left. My partner went with us. It was the worst road trip I’ve ever been on. While I had such wonderful friends prep us with maps and charts and PPE and supplies since we had to drive through five states, I was crammed in the back seat of my mom’s SUV with my partner in the front seat, and I was responsible for our three dogs. Two of them were great on the three day drive. The oldest one wasn’t, and during a race to an animal emergency room in Texas to figure out why she was screaming (it turned out she had what we’ll call “butt problems” and was magically fine after that was fixed), she dislocated my wrist when her harness got twisted around my hand and I had to pop it back in. We finally arrived in Tulsa at 5am, with my hand in a splint from a walgreens and an appointment for urgent care, where I would learn the already fragile state of white-knuckling through any creative work, acting or writing, was severely sidelined for 6–8 weeks as my right wrist was completely out of commission. Welcome back, I guess.
I spent three weeks in my childhood home, the most I had spent my entire adult life. I had to take care of some things dealing with his death, but most of the days were spent in bed or laying on an outdoor sofa in a backyard I barely remembered. We’d drive around to go get a soda at the Quiktrip, I’d show my partner places where I grew up, but I felt like I was boring him when he himself felt trapped and suffocated like I was and I felt like I was boring everyone trying to update everybody on what was happening. It was like everyone finally figured out the joke and they were over me because well, I’m sad and I couldn’t even feign happiness or a go-getter anymore. I would notice the views on my IG story kept lowering. I could see the eyes glaze over on FaceTimes. I slowly was no longer invited to zoom parties I’d normally hit most weeks. My partner and I even went to a cabin in the woods the week of Halloween to help repair our relationship because they don’t tell you that when your dad dies, it takes a toll on everything. Even the most solid, long-term relationships.
When we drove back to LA in mid-October, I dropped my partner off at his house and then pulled into an empty house by myself. My mom and our dogs have been stuck in Oklahoma since October because once again, the Bureaucracy of Death has a way of being never ending. Being totally by myself, I would notice things I hadn’t maybe seen before. Some former friends had started going out and partying or just being reckless while we’re still in a pandemic and I finally cut them off because I realized they didn’t give a shit if I got sick and died, so why should I give a shit about them? The world was starting to move on but I’m still left behind, trapped in the suffocating sea of grief in a pandemic. I just stay home, by myself, wanting to call my dad just to say hi and then die a little death to remember that no, you can’t do that anymore.
Christmas and my birthday rolled around and I simply just blew by them with my own steamroller because to have a zoom birthday party in a pandemic would’ve been depressing enough, but to find out your friends you thought had your back were having a zoom party and you weren’t invited three days before your birthday was that nail in the proverbial coffin of just wanting to move on with time. When you learn your friends moved on without you, the idea of celebrating in a pandemic sours. You just have to figure out who you are now since everyone left the station without you, and you believe that it was because the old Kylie couldn’t come to the phone. Why? Because according to everyone, they were dead. And I agree with them. I don’t really remember who that person was. I miss them, but I don’t think I’ll ever see them again.
It was six months since my dad died on February 26. Now it’s March 12 and it’s been a year since the world said everything was shutting down, and with the vaccine progress, maybe later this year, we’ll all emerge and be different.
I just hope you all like who I am now.
