Life Will Be the Death of Me

by Chelsea Handler

  I’ve never woken up feeling in danger. I’ve never woken up feeling like I didn’t belong. I’ve woken up every day of my life thinking, I’ve got the upper hand—that I always had an avenue. I didn’t know that was called privilege. I was too consumed with the things I still didn’t have to think about what other people were missing.

  Someone explained to me that for someone who’s lived with privilege their whole life, equality feels like a loss. That made sense.

  What would I be willing to give away in the name of equality? My house? My car? My career? What is my contribution?

  No one likes to lose anything they’ve gotten comfortable with. Some people are more gracious, and some people have more experience with loss—and those people are usually either poor, of color, or marginalized because of their sexual preference or gender identity. If you’re afraid of loss, you’ll do anything to identify a variant; you’ll seize on any reason to exclude an “other.”

  I was sitting in Dan’s office one October morning telling him about the documentary I had started filming for Netflix on the subject of white privilege. I told him how on the very first day of shooting, I had already managed to offend a black girl by tapping her on the ass.

  “So now Netflix is making me take racial-sensitivity classes,” I said.

  “Why did you tap a girl’s ass?” Dan asked, with a furrowed brow.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “As a sign of affection? That’s how I was intending it anyway. Like a girl thing. Like sisterhood.” I moved my shoulders to demonstrate a shoulder bump, except no one was there to bump with.

  “Okay,” he said, sighing. “Isn’t that what this documentary is all about, though? Pointing out to white people what they’re doing wrong?”

  “Or pointing out to me what I’m doing wrong. Jesus, do I feel stupid. Here I am, thinking I’m going to enlighten white people, and my lightbulb is out. Way out. I don’t even know if I have a lightbulb. I’ve been grabbing people’s asses for years. White and black. It’s total privilege. Why do I think I can touch other people’s bodies?”

  “You’ve said yourself you have a lack of boundaries,” Dan reminded me, and then he added for good measure, “Personally, I don’t think it’s normal to touch other people’s bodies.”

  “Yeah, I got it,” I said, throwing one hand up in the form of a stop sign. “I think that just because I’m a girl, I expect other girls to know I’m not a threat and that I’m not trying to sexually assault anyone—but I’ve never taken into account what it means if you don’t like to be touched, or you’ve been assaulted, or that many black women don’t want to be defined by their hair or their asses. I have to retrain my brain. Just this morning I grabbed my cleaning lady’s ass when she bent over to rub faces with Bert.”

  Dan was confused. “Who’s Bert?”

  “Ugh, it’s not important,” I told him. I wasn’t going to sit there and talk to my therapist about the pangs of jealousy I had toward my cleaning lady and her relationship with my dog. Talk about privilege.

  “It’s the same thing with the #MeToo movement. I had no idea that one in three women have been sexually assaulted. How is it that I didn’t know how rampant that was in the very industry I work in? How rampant it is in every industry. I feel like a member of the Catholic Church who just found out how prevalent child rape is among priests. Why did I assume my privileged experience was the typical experience and not the other way around?”

  “I don’t think you should beat yourself up for asking these questions. You should be grateful that you’re now asking them.”

  “In my world there is no such thing as an invasion of privacy. Nothing’s off-limits. I guess that speaks to my lack of empathy. Maybe I should think for a second about what other people’s limits might be instead of assuming they have the same limits I do.” I looked up. “This song is getting very old. Every time I feel like I’m getting a handle on this empathy thing, it keeps rearing its head.”

  “Well, before, you didn’t even know you were missing it. You’re thinking about it now, so that’s progress. Identification. Awareness. Modification.”

  Feeling spoiled was a good head space for me to live in for a while. But it was also time to turn that feeling into something else.

  “My question, though, is: Am I really interested in helping fight the good fight for the right reasons, or is it because misogyny and racism represent boundaries, and I resent boundaries? What are my motives? Am I really fighting for others, or am I fighting for myself?”

  “Did you apologize to the girl whose ass you grabbed?”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed.

  “How did that feel?” he asked.

  “Awesome,” I told him. “I felt defensive at first, like I hadn’t done anything worth apologizing for, but I recognized that it wasn’t about my intention; it was about how my action was received. That my action was unwelcome. I get that now, and it didn’t take long for it to click this time.”

  “That’s empathy—”

  “Oh!” I blurted out, interrupting Dan.

  “What?”

  “My dad died.” I put down my iced tea and threw up my hands. “I’m sorry. I totally forgot to tell you.”

  Dan very uncharacteristically jolted forward in his chair, with his hands folded, nonplussed. I use the word “nonplussed” because it means two things: very surprised or not surprised at all—almost as if a vet came up with its two definitions. Dan was surprised.

  To be fair, it was quite a predictable reaction for anyone to have, which is probably the reason I forgot to tell him. My plan was to tell no one about my dad dying—except maybe Mary.

  “When did this happen?” he asked, alarmed.

  “Sunday. I was on my way back from canvassing in Orange County.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Dan’s face was filled with so much sympathy, I felt as if I would end up comforting him.

  “It’s okay. I’m okay.” I stared at him. Nothing was going to come out in the way of tears. I felt devoid of feelings, nothing even closely related to grief.

  “I don’t really feel anything,” I told Dan. “I mean, we’re halfway through our session and I just remembered, so…” I looked at him, searching for an answer—preferably from him. He was still leaning forward in his chair, but had relaxed a little.

  “Well, your brain is used to wrapping up death and putting it away.”

  “But after all this work we’ve done, am I just repeating the only way I know? What if I’m not growing at all?” I sat in my chair across from Dan, wondering what to say next.

  “Honestly, I was more upset when Chunk died. That seems fucked-up.”

  “Well, dogs are pretty good at not disappointing you, and loving you unconditionally.”

  “Not Bert.”

  “Who is this Bert?” he asked for the second time, slightly irritated.

  “He’s a stuffed animal I have at home,” I told him, dismissively, and got back to business. “Do you think I’m in denial, because it doesn’t feel that way, but I want to know if this is going to be another case of delayed grief. It feels like I’ve already mourned my father while he was alive. I haven’t told anyone yet. I mean, Molly, Karen, and Brandon know because they know all things, but I haven’t even told Mary.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want that kind of attention.”

  “You may not want it, but what if you are ready to receive it?”

  “I’m not going to use my father’s death to mourn my brother, if that’s what you’re asking.” I felt like I had finally grieved my brother too, and although I felt sad at the finality of my father’s death, I wasn’t sad he was gone. I was relieved.

  * * *

  • • •

  Glen and I had driven to see my dad in Pennsylvania a month before he died, and my dad was a shell of himself—it was
no way for anyone to live. He had shrunk from his king-size, larger-than-life self into a little old man in a wheelchair—white as a ghost, his once gargantuan hands now frail, reduced to half their size, with the veins on his hands so prominent that they looked like the hands of an old lady. We brought him some pizza, which we fed to him slowly in order to prevent him from swallowing it whole, and before we left, I rubbed lotion on his head, something my dad has loved for years—head jobs. My dad was weak and slow to speak, telling us the same thing he had been saying for years—that he was working on a book about my mother. He may have been working on a book about my mother, but it would have been only in his head. He hadn’t picked up a pen in years, and in my father’s mind, typing was for girls.

  “You know,” Glen said, when we were pulling away from my dad’s nursing home, “you only have yourself to thank for forcing him to get that quintuple-bypass surgery years ago.”

  “That’s nice, thank you. I was young and stupid back then. I thought I was saving our family.”

  “At least then he could have gone out on a high note,” Glen added.

  “Yeah, I got it, Glen. Wouldn’t it be so much more humane if we could just put him down?” I said. “You need to put me down when things go south. I don’t want to fight cancer or anything like that. I’m wiped out. I’m fine to leave this life early.”

  Glen’s youngest son was in the backseat and said, “I’ll put you down,” and then asked if we could stop for candy.

  “There’s no reason my life shouldn’t end by the hands of a Russian,” I told little Teddy, as I looked out the window at the bleak New Jersey landscape. “That would make the most sense for me at this current point in time. That would be a complete 360.” We stopped at a 7-Eleven, and Teddy and I went inside to fill up on candy that he could devour before we arrived back at Glen’s home, which everyone in our family refers to as the Russian embassy.

  I was leaving for Bali the next day and asked Glen what the protocol was if my dad died while I was halfway around the world.

  “Well, typically, Chelsea, people come home for their father’s funeral.”

  “Copy that,” I told him, and turned up the music.

  * * *

  • • •

  I told Dan that I didn’t want people calling and telling me how sorry they were about my dad, because I still had a hard time accepting any pity. Especially now, since I wasn’t even that torn up about it.

  “It just feels fraudulent.”

  “Will there be a funeral?” Dan asked me.

  “It’s this Sunday, in New Jersey. We’re keeping it low-key.”

  “Okay, so, just so you know,” Dan explained to me, in a very kindergarten-teacher kind of way, “things may come up for you when you go home.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, you can call me anytime if you need to talk.”

  I couldn’t imagine myself calling Dan from my father’s funeral, but I appreciated the crossing of boundaries. Crossing boundaries meant love.

  * * *

  • • •

  My dad’s funeral was one of those instances when you’re reminded of what it means to show up for people. The tradition. The absolute wretched grayness of a day like that. Why do people show up—if not out of decency, and tradition?

  There were maybe thirty of us, all related in one way or another, gathered at his grave on a cold fall day in New Jersey. Everyone reminisced about what a character he was, how he had such a huge personality, and they all talked about how much he loved my mother. Your father was so in love with Ritala. “Ritala” was the moniker my father gave to my mother, in that singsong kind of way they talked when they were flirting with each other, or when they were being playful with us. Every person at the funeral also sang her name the way my father always did. “Ri-ta-la.”

  It was as pleasant a funeral as I could have ever imagined for my father. I talked to his cousins and other relatives who had known him his whole life, and was reminded that he had a life before I came into it. His cousin Jerry had seen him two weeks earlier at his nursing home, and had brought him a corned beef sandwich. I thanked her for doing that and then realized how strange it was for me to thank her for spending time with the cousin she had known long before I came on the scene. I asked her what it was like to grow up with him.

  “Well, his mother was crazy,” said Jerry, who’d grown up across the street from him. “She must have been bipolar, or something. Your dad was the baby, and she spoiled him rotten. All the girls on Tracy Avenue loved Seymour.”

  Another cousin, Linda, said my dad was the first person to the hospital when she was sick with cancer. That he visited her repeatedly, and would stay for hours. Her daughter told me he was the first person to the hospital when she had a baby. Linda told me about a time ten years earlier when my dad had picked up her sister and her to go to lunch. She said that he pulled over on the side of the road to urinate, and that she and her sister were appalled.

  “After your mom died, that was it for him,” she said. I wanted to tell her that my dad had been urinating on the side of the road long before my mother died, but reminded myself I no longer needed to button every conversation with something funny. I reminded myself to sit, and listen, and not fill the air up with noise just because someone else stopped talking.

  Glen gave a eulogy. He had done this at Chet’s funeral and at my mom’s funeral, but this was the one he had the most difficult time getting through. I had never seen Glen become so undone; he is usually stoic and filled to the brim with sarcasm, so it was painful to see him struggling, and I wondered what it meant for him—all the memories he had of my father that I didn’t know about.

  When everyone was done speaking, Roy, Glen, Simone, Shana, and I were staring over my mom’s and Chet’s headstones and my dad’s freshly dug grave.

  Five against three. The next person who dies, we’ll be even.

  Even in death, I was keeping score.

  That’s when I caught myself. Stop.

  * * *

  • • •

  I reminded myself to focus not on the end of someone’s life but on the whole, and to look at my dad’s life the way he would want me to see it.

  My sisters had put together photo albums of my dad when he was young. Pictures of him as a baby, as a teenager, of him traveling through Europe, or living in Mexico, where he dreamed of becoming a writer. As a young father, always with that great big smile and waving with his great big hands. A reminder to never stop smiling, to hold on to happiness, and to find joy. To always wag your tail. Be playful. To live life with your leg kicked out.

  The funeral was a reminder to look for the youth in a person, rather than their age. To look at their hopes and dreams, and the family they created, and their best moments with that family. To see them when they were filled with hope—not when the rug was pulled out from under them. To remember that death should be a reminder of all the memories of that person at their best, and the best private moments you shared with that person. All the stories and the photographs painted a picture of my father I hadn’t known. Why did I seem surprised at the amount of time he spent with the boys and the pictures of all their road trips and summers on the beach? I had those moments with him too—something I had seemed to have let dim in memory, replaced by yelling and fighting, and all the times when we were broke or he hadn’t sold a car in months, or the times my mother had to work because he had zero financial stability. (Another example of unconscious privilege—assuming that mothers shouldn’t have to work.) There were also good things to hold on to, yet I had been choosing to let the bad outweigh the good and judge someone by how they behaved when they were at their lowest.

  Effusive, smiling bright. He even dressed well before I was born. He was so handsome on the beach with two kids, then three, then four, then five, then six. Then five again. There were pictures of him long after C
het died where he was smiling again. He had aged significantly, he’d let himself go, but there were pictures of us holding hands, hugging, and laughing—I had forgotten about that.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I think my dad was an eight,” I told Dan, the Monday morning after the funeral.

  “Yeah, maybe he was.” Dan smiled. “We can try to figure it out, if you want.”

  I didn’t. Dan and I hadn’t talked about the Enneagram in a while, and at that point it felt like the Enneagram—or Dan’s interpretation of it—was just the framework I needed in order to address my issues head-on.

  “Guess who else is an eight?” I asked Dan.

  “Who?”

  “Donald Trump.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve heard that.” He gave a small laugh.

  “That would have been nice to open with, Dan,” I told him, sternly. “My father, Donald Trump, and I are all number eights. What…a thruple.”

  “What’s a thruple?” Dan asked.

  “Oh, and also…” I remembered. “A lot of eights are sociopaths. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Dan.”

  “You are not a sociopath,” Dan said, very slowly. A little too slowly, if you ask me.

  Dan explained there are self-actualized eights, who are able to identify their weaknesses and growth edges and are very different from unactualized eights.

  “You are becoming self-actualized. Now maybe you can have a little more empathy for your father, knowing he was also in a lot of pain. And that, if he was an eight, maybe he too lacked empathy.” That made sense. My father lacked empathy, for sure.

  I liked the idea of blaming my eightness on my father, but I had come too far with Dan for that to be my mental footprint. Instead, I remembered all the pictures of my father as a young boy, growing up in Newark, New Jersey. Running on the beach with my three brothers, with a football in hand. With his huge smile, and these great big lips—he looked like a hurricane of life. I was going to remember my dad the way he would have wanted to be remembered—at his peaks.