Delirium Fades: A High School English Teacher's Therapeutic Escape

2020 was a very difficult year.?

Not just for me. For all of us.

It began with my father's death. He had the sniffles on Sunday, when I went to see him at his apartment in Watertown, Massachusetts, in early January. I had not spent Christmas with him but rather took my family to Southern California, as we usually did to see my in-laws. That night, I offered to walk over to CVS and buy some cold medicine. He refused. Instead, he told me to go around the corner to a liquor store and get him a six-pack of Bud, which was quite uncharacteristic of him. I complied, brought it back, and my last image of ,my dad, is him sitting in his recliner, drinking a beer, and watching Sunday night football.?He was complacent. He seemed happy.

By Friday morning, he was dead.?

My sister and I kept an all-night vigil by his bedside at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton. It was a hard blow, as we had now lost both of our parents. My father passed on January 10, 2020, at 88 years old. He was my greatest supporter, my biggest fan. We had that father-son relationship of love and devotion, but sometimes anger and criticism. He was the son of an alcoholic and semi-professional athlete, who died when my father was just 11 years old. My father hardly drank alcohol and lectured me to follow suit many times in my life. He was a great dad because he constantly rejected the chaos and disorder that his own father created. It took me a long time to appreciate this fact.

He supported my educational and athletic pursuits. Never missed a game played in or meet that I ran. He even showed up at all the games and meets I coached.?

We had a big Irish wake and funeral. We celebrated his life with massive gathering of family and friends that would make you head spin with the lack of social distancing. I wrote a long obituary, documenting his extraordinary life and gave a tearful eulogy. Then, I took some time away from school and decompressed. Both my parents were dead now; it was me and my younger sister.?

I felt empty, sad, delirious, and lost.?

To shake off some pain, I went ahead and attended my Boston College Track and Field reunion in Boston the next weekend. It was good to catch up with my friends from school. I spend the weekend at the Park Plaza and drank more than a few beers, letting delirium take over. I needed to escape.?

A few years ago, my wife and I had decided to start giving our kids "experiences" for Christmas. Our plan, long before the unexpected loss of my dad, was to take them to Paris. The trip went splendid. We wandered the streets, caught up with friends who lived there, and saw all the sights. We even went to Disneyland Paris. The kids loved it. I loved that my family enjoyed the trip. We flew home from Charles de Gaulle Airport on February 28, 2020. We pushed through crowded security lines and squeezed into trains to take us across the airport to the international terminal.?

That's when we saw all the masks. That's when we saw our future. The vacation was over. Covid was coming.?

You know what came next: the lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, masks, online learning. A restricted existence. Sickness, death, misery. My aunt and uncle passed in 2020 as well.?

With the world being turned upside down, I found I had not been writing. I had a terrible case of writer's block. There was an absence of creativity. It was dead. A year passed and, besides some scribbles in a notebook that I kept, I had no ideas. In 2010, I took eight years’ worth of screenplay ideas and turned them into HiStory of Santa Monica: Stories (Aqueous Books). I queried a literary e-zine publisher at the right time, and she accepted my book. Six years later, I re-published my first book, as my publisher had gone out of business through CreateSpace and released my second collection, HiStory of Santa Monica II: More Stories.?

Delirium Fades

In the story, "The Boarding House", James Joyce spoke these words through the thoughts of the character of Bob Doran, who is entrapped by Polly's mother, Mrs. Mooney into marrying her daughter due to an "inappropriate" relationship.?

"They used to go upstairs together on tiptoe, each with a candle, and on the third landing exchange reluctant goodnights. They used to kiss. He remembered well her eyes, the touch of her hand and his delirium....

But delirium passes. He echoed her phrase, applying it to himself: "What am I to do?" The instinct of the celibate warned him to hold back. But the sin was there; even his sense of honour told him that reparation must be made for such a sin."

I took Latin in high school, so delirium was a word that popped out to me, not so much in the sense of a mental illness, but more in a state that humans fall into and ignore reality. In "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", Ambrose Bierce uses Peyton Farquhar to express the same delusion. As he fantasizes that he has escaped his hanging:?

"Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene--perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him."

In the very next scenes of both stories, the characters must face their realities: for Doran, he is forced into unwanted marriage; for Farquhar .... he departs his daydream, his neck snaps in the noose, and he dies as a traitor.?

The delirium is gone.?

Trying to escape my own pain of the loss of my father, the pandemic, and the massive changes in my career as an educator, I decided to write these stories a form of therapy. I let my imagination run wild. In "AWOL", Brent Fatalier, born a poor orphan, then later, a cowardly deserter, steals his dead lieutenant’s identity, only to be unmasked by an enemy. In "Police on my Back", a woman returns home when her identity as an IRA member is discovered. In "The Pineapple Kid", a teenager becomes unlikely friends with a trucker, who helps him get revenge on a bully. In "The Briefcase", an immigrant picks up the wrong briefcase on The Tube one night, leading to his world being flipped upside down. In "The Con", an aging con woman is caught by her own son, who tries to turn her in. In "Freshman Year", a collegiate runner must overcome his academic failure to realize athletic success.?All the stories have the thread of delirium connecting them together.

Whatever the crime or misgiving, God, fate, or perhaps, the universe demands reparations must be made and whatever pleasure, disillusion, or delirium must fade.

My last discussion with my editor, Elaine including a huge compliment. "Each one of these stories could be a novel, you know. You have to pick one and write it."

For now, I will enjoy the delirium of publishing my third short story collection. It's an accomplishment just to finish one of these manuscripts.?

Give me a moment to catch my breath and enjoy this delirium...until it fades.?

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