By STU CLAMPITT
Chasing Wisdom
Two weeks ago, I was driving my daughter down some miscellaneous midnight road to deliver stacks and packs of The Reporter. She sat beside me with a stuffed Pikachu from Build-A-Bear and she offered some questionable music trivia.
Justin Bieber’s “Ghost” was on the radio. At the line, “If I can’t be close to you, I settle for the ghost of you,” she turned the volume down.
“Did you know this song is about his mom dying?” she asked.
“No,” I replied.
“I didn’t either until I saw the video,” she said. “There are all these scenes with them together and then he’s pouring her ashes in the ocean at the end while he imagines her there. Until I saw that, I kinda thought it was about some guy killing a girl because he couldn’t have her, but it turns out it’s really sweet.”
We laughed together and I said, “I just thought it was about some dude who couldn’t get over the girl who broke up with him and felt haunted by her memory, but I can see how YOU would hear this with some ‘Dexter’ serial killer vibe.”
We laughed again.
“Ghost” is probably not about Justin Bieber’s mom, but my kiddo had a long history of misinterpreting music.
She was convinced AC/DC’s lyrics “Dirty deeds and they’re done dirt cheap” was “Dirty Deeds and the Dunder Chee.”
In her mind, Dirty Deeds was some underworld mercenary and the Dunder Chee was his little sidekick. She had this image of the Dunder Chee as a 40-year-old Gary Coleman if he was a tattooed powerlifter who did stuff like light the fuse on the dynamite or throw the oversized switch on the high voltage lines.
God, I love that girl! She brought more joy and pain and confusion and hope into my life than I thought I could feel.
I never knew I had a daughter until she found me when she was 20. It was the day after my father’s birthday on the year after he took his own life.
The first night she stayed in this old house, thus becoming the fourth generation in my family to do so, an odd feeling of vulnerability and protectiveness washed over me. I told her, “You are going to break my heart, little girl.”
And she did. Over and over.
She frustrated the hell out of me more often than I care to admit. She made me laugh like no one else could. And she broke my heart so many times in so many ways. March 1, she broke it one last time.
A little after midnight she sent a text saying she didn’t feel good. She said she had “a stomach bug.”
I texted back, “How many legs does it have?”
“42.”
That was her go to answer for comedy in questions of quantity. It was, after all, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
How many burritos do you want me to make? 42.
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? 42.
Around 2 a.m. that same night, she called me in a moment of depression and personal struggle.
I cannot count the post-midnight emergency calls from her over these seven years. Some calls ended with her coming home for a few days, a week, a month . . . or just long enough to have me cook a meal and watch half a movie until she was ready to talk.
Some calls ended with redeye flights or train tickets to bring her home from random parts of the country. Often, I’d drive for hours each direction to gather her up from some bad situation and bring her home myself.
There were so many trips to the ER to get her into psych facilities, trying to rebalance her meds when she was suicidal.
The March 1 call ended with her telling me she felt better for hearing my voice and that she’d call me tomorrow. She sent me a text right after we got off the phone, which read, “I’m just going to sleep it off. I’m fine.”
An hour later she took pills and overdosed one last time.
She never woke up.
I am left with that Justin Bieber song playing in my head.
“If I can’t be close to you, I settle for the ghost of you. I miss you more than life.”
Kiddo, I am respecting your oft-spoken wish to not have a gravesite or a funeral.
To my friends and loved ones, I ask that you respect my wishes in the following: Do not ask more about what happened. Everything I have to say today is on this page. When that changes, I will tell you.
P.S. While editing this, I just realized I was 42 years old when she showed up in my life. I think she’d laugh at me for finding that little bit of Code when it’s too late to share it with her.