You put two tabs in your mouth
In hopes that they would melt away with everything else
Take a trip
Out of town, out of country
While you’re talking to ghosts
In your living room by yourself

In the end, you faced your demons
And I’m left with mine
Oh, teach me to grieve
To be sober
In this life you left me behind
I learnt to grieve from you

It’s really interesting to hear the way that you talk about your dad, because on one hand you say, “He used to make me so angry,” but, you also speak really highly of him.

I think that’s, like, that comes down to having to accept. And having to look at things for what they are, and not… And removing like… I don’t know, like the first year and a half or two years after his death, it was too tough. It was… I couldn’t think of anything, and I would relay everything to myself and “It’s my fault” and this because… I mean… I think that duality also speaks to how fucking nuts it was. Like, and that I was terrified of him and, hated being home, and,

Yeah.

Um, a bunch of shit. And that made me hate him, and not trust him, but… Um… My, my dad never lied to me about anything. Eh… And that, as I’m growing older, and that I literally walked the same road as he did with booze, and eh…

We’ve also had a few screaming matches at the end of his life where, em… I asked him, “Why the fuck are you not helping me with this? You’re the only one who gets it.” And uh… You know, we’d start screaming, “I fucking hate you.” And he was like “I fucking hate you too” and “You don’t have a dad.” “I don’t want a fucking dad.” And “But why the fuck are you doing this? You piece of shit.”

Mhm.

And he broke and screamed at me, he’s like, “Because I fucking, I hate myself, I want to die.” And we connected on that, because I hated myself and wanted to die.

Yeah.

And em… I know he loved me, and it was just tough for him to see me, being who I am, because we’re so alike and he made those same mistakes. And, watching him die literally in my arms; I saw him slowly die, in the hospital bed… And just saying like, go rest… eh… I understand, and that shut my suicides up.

Yeah.

Like after he died I… That door closed for me, so he gave me life with that.

Like self-love is a road… It’s a long road, you know. And I don’t agree with that you have to start doing everything for yourself. I think that’s what you want to get to, of course, but… but it took me more than a year, for me to wake up one day and want to… to stay sober for me.

Absolutely.

Eh… For the first year it was all about my family and my friends.

Right.

And when some- somebody who is dying, or when something that’s- that you love is fleeting. You give it everything, you… you sit with it, you… you listen, you… And then when that… when that, eh, which you love is gone, you don’t stay there. That doesn’t do them any justice, that doesn’t… eh… it’s the dumbest shit you can do. Em, which at the time I didn’t know. I mean I was doing that, I was being a fucking fuckhead.

You know, and in those moments I think of my dad laying in the bed.

Yeah.

And facing his death.

Yeah.

And what happens with cancer, you get eaten from the inside. You just get eaten, like, you get completely demoralized and… that… that my father, in silence, lived that before- at the end of his life… that’s what I think- that’s what I thought in those moments; I can face this, because someone I love so much has faced something ten times greater, and… and, em, accepting that it takes a while.