A father struggles with PTSD as he idolizes his daughter in the wake of tragedy and before she changed their name to claim a deeper, truer identity

Being outside in nature can kill you. Or nature can heal you. My family and I needed nature’s medicine. We lived in Edmonds, Washington at the time. Just north of long, skinny Seattle. Been there only three months. Moved in on the 20th of December 2009. Five hectic days before Christmas. Our large, rental house, a temporary abode in the wake of losing our homes and finances in the wake of job losses, embezzlement, and the Great Global Recession, caught on fire and burned down one Saturday morning in March of 2010. My oldest daughter, still called Morgan back then as she hadn’t yet changed their name to Dylan, was celebrating her 16th Birthday with a close circle of friends on the weekend following her actual birthday. I was out and away picking up her two younger sisters, Kate and Talia, from different sleepover parties at their respective friends down south in Seattle. Kristina, my third wife at the time, was at the vet with our dog, Jo. Apparently so much thick, toxic smoke rolled up from the basement rooms no one could get out the front door. Her friends, all high school girls in their mid-teens, had surprisingly expensive belongings downstairs where they had spent the night. The day was warm and sunny for March. Indeed, this Saturday the 20th was the first day of Spring.

The flames spread fast in a big house designed to function like a tipi merged with solar panels and a hot rock room. The home was a gorgeous experiment built on a steep slope near the head of a large ravine. It faced out to look west towards water and mountains, and had been designed by an already deceased husband-and-wife team of architects. Thick, toxic, black smoke billowed up the stairs from the lower levels where the kids had slept. The girls made a flurry of fone calls to 911 and to parents, but began to panic. They were desperate to race downstairs to retrieve personal items such as sleeping bags, clothes, shoes, gifts, smartfones, iPods, toiletries, luggage, school books, papers…when Morgan shouted at all of them they “all need to get out now! We need to get outa here now! That way! NOW!!!”

Following her lead, they raced across the house towards the back, the side facing water and mountains. There the teenagers climbed up over a wooden railing and jumped off the deck. Jumped off wearing a mix of t-shirts, underwear, pajamas, gym shorts, socks, and bare feet. Depending on the incline, the deck was anywhere from one to half-a-story up in the air. They were terrified! Fire and smoke and poisonous stench and crackling, crashing noise seemingly everywhere. Within moments after all of the teens climbed over the wooden railing and jumped off, possibly within seconds, the whole back deck, the one facing down a wide ravine to look out across the Salish Sea and the Olympic Mountains, collapsed in fire and smoke and disintegrated.

The firefighters later declared Morgan’s prompt thinking saved the lives of everyone in the house. One local newspaper made her out to be something of a hero. The fire marshals estimated the temperature of the fire consuming the deck at 1200 °F. The fire investigators arrived at the number by analyzing the shape and characteristics of the nails. The nails were mostly straight. When a house fire burns slower, apparently the norm, the burning structure takes a while to collapse. The wood sags and bends the nails before burning up. When the house burns hotter and faster than normal, the wood incinerates faster than the nails can bend. Thus only straight nails remain.

Needless to say all of this was traumatic back in March 2010. I was hurled into a deep, dark, paralyzing melancholia, later diagnosed as severe episodic depression, altho we were all unaware of such at the time. My illness wasn’t diagnosed until 2012, and the episode finally faded away by the Spring of 2014. Furthermore, the chaos and disruption in the wake of the fire perturbed our family, and exhausted our remaining financial resources. We came to refer to this event as, “the Fire.” It fractured our blended family altho we quickly recombined in a stronger fashion. The ongoing stress of grinding health and financial challenges, however, led ultimately to the unraveling of my marriage to Kristina over the next three years.

All 3 daughters had their other parents to take turns staying with after the Fire, and many people showed up to help our family out. Their response amazed us as they were all so generous. People from all around the world, many we only knew thru social media or by sharing seminars and workshops together, as well as people from across different religions shared resources with us. Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Pagans assisted us in numerous ways. The American Red Cross was particularly exceptional for arriving onsite during the Fire and helping us work thru logistical problems as we were numb with shock and grief. Kudos to the ARC! Their timely and unexpected on-the-go assistance made all the difference in the world to our family during a critical time. It’s sobering to image a large-scale catastrophe such as the PNW’s long-overdue megaquake when one considers this house fire was but one disaster with direct impact on a relative small number of people including our neighbors. 

While my two younger kids bounced between the experience of the Fire as a great adventure and as a terrible loss, my oldest remained a mystery. My wife Kristina would collapse in tears as she felt the foundations of her life had evaporated along with the floors of her house. Everything had burned up and collapsed into piles of ash. Morgan, however, remained silent. She did basked briefly in the glory of being called a hero whose quick-thinking actions were responsible for saving the life and limbs of so many friends, but began to repel such acclaim as “embarrassing.” “Stop! I don’t wanna talk about it,” she would say. “It’s all embarrassing. Besides, it’s just what happened, it’s all just stuff, right? We all did what we had to do, OK, and so we just go forward! OK!” Not, “OK?”, but, “OK!!!”

I worried my daughter was busy repressing and suppressing the trauma and material losses of the Fire and the hot, smoky brush with death. I built up a story in my mind she blamed herself for the Fire. In the beginning, a couple of the private fire insurance inspectors, all middle-aged White men who lorded over the ruins like dumbass big bad boss men, behaved like those jerks in those commandeered lifeboat from the R.M.S. Titanic, those rowboats full of people with many from the privileged upper classes. These insurance inspectors accused Morgan and her friends of causing the fire. The insurance inspectors, one in particular, were nasty, accusatory, and aggressive in pushing forth a theme of rowdy teenagers setting the house on fire smoking cigarettes, lighting candles, or using a space heater “the wrong way.” All were lies and falsehoods and were proven so.

We’re grateful to the fire marshals for leadership in determining the truth of the fire’s origins. At first people wondered if the solar heating system of the house including the rock room had somehow malfunctioned. The actual cause of the fire, however, was determined to be faulty wiring in a basement wall where an old, aluminum wire had become unwound from a copper wire. The two arced. The resulting sparks set the surrounding wood afire, and the tipi-style ventilation and heating system generated a volcano effect accelerating the spread of the flames. Aluminum wiring systems are banned from home construction these days, but those built before the bans came into place were often left as they were and forgotten.

I also built up in my mind another story about Morgan: not only did she blame herself for somehow causing the Fire by simply being there, but she projected her anger out onto Kristina and onto me. In addition I wondered if she was mad her birthday party ended in disaster with the loss of all of her presents. In my mind, I felt maybe Morgan blamed us for “losing” our high-paying jobs, our savings & investments, our house in Seattle, and our cabin on the Wenatchee River. I feared she blamed us for being embezzled by white collar thieves and blamed us again for hollowed out further by the Great Recession. These are images and concerns made up within my stressed-out mind, of course. True or false, these thoughts and feelings affected my actions as I found it distressingly difficult to stay focused and present while juggling so many different tasks and challenges.

Even if wrong in my interpretations of events, the multiple interviews these private fire insurance inspectors had with all 3 daughters and with my oldest’s friends were stressful. Left some of them confused, angry, and fearful. Truth is I had very little if any real idea what my eldest child felt or thought. While I revealed nearly everything like an open book with a few pages held shut by removable paper clips, Morgan was, at times, inscrutable silence guarded by a auditory fortress of chatter. She had every right to keep her innermost thoughts and feelings private. I’m an oversharer. She was much more reserved. Fine.

As Father’s Day was a week and a day away, a family day, I wanted us to spend time alone together. Just the two of us, a dad and his oldest daughter. We traveled well together, she and I. Road trips and hikes allowed the two of us to connect in a way we weren’t able to do so otherwise. I can’t hear well in groups of 3 or more, and she gets lost in the adolescent crescendo of chatting with her friends and sisters. So we planned a little day trip by car out to the Darrington area. She had driven thru before and thought the drive a pretty one. So off we went on the morning of the 12th of June 2010. The day was a gorgeous Saturday at the end of Spring. The Summer Solstice was fast approaching, and indeed the weather felt summery already. We needed to get back outside into nature to nurture ourselves. We needed our connection with nature to heal ourselves. Aye, nature heals!

We rolled north up I-5 towards the small town of Arlington. There a small, remote, secret U.S. Navy base, Jim Creek Naval Radio Station, sits back in wooded hills and mountains. Didn’t know of it until local news revealed Jim Creek’s existence in early 2019 as a top target for enemy nuclear missile strikes if another world war erupts. We blissfully drove on by, wherever it is, and peeled off down beautiful Highway 530. Drove thru little village of Oso, where almost 4 years later, in March 2014, a massive mudslide triggered by heavy rains obliterated a settlement, blocked a river, and killed 43 people. Time is a funny thang as it punches thru space warped by gravity and swirling with other unseen energies.

The road is a fun, crooked arrow of time as it weaves thru lush, beautiful countryside. Came upon fields and farms edged by forests and glaciated mountains. Snow in the summertime! We pulled off the road below magnificent Whitehorse Mountain. The old giant massif rose over ramparts of steep hills flanking the Cascade Range on the west side then bending around to face inwards toward the valley of the the Stillaguamish and on out to the Salish Sea. My future Dylan Blair was delighted, jumped out of the car, and dashed off into the grassy field. I just let her be as we played with cameras and allowed ourselves to be swallowed up in the vastness of nature.

Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Days. Nights. Weeks. Months. Years. Decades. Centuries. Millennia. On and on. All artifices of time. Words made up in our minds. We measure this fourth dimension while simultaneously claiming time does not exist. We say time flies while we’re the ones moving at different speeds thru the dimension of time. In the end, however, is only a perception of the end. Everything changes. Yet nothing ever truly does. For nothing remains the same. Yet everything does. Energy cannot be destroyed or created within closed systems per the Laws of Thermodynamics, remember…then we realize no laws actually exist out there in reality, out in the Universe as all laws are made up inside our human minds to help us make sense of what we perceive and interpret. Such is the nature of contradictions and paradoxes troubling the minds of many humans. Except for those magickal mystics, Hegel-addled Marxists, and quirky quantum physicists who delight in embracing paradoxes, reconciling contradictions, and resolving such conflicts via irony. Change, transitions, and transformations amidst the grind of stillness and entropy often demand new labels, shifts in perception, and different terms. And so, too, do we change our names.

Used to make up names for myself as a boy in elementary school as I so disliked being called by “Dudley,” my middle name. Used to make up names or recombine names learned from novels, history books, and even tombstones. Once upon a long time ago a teacher back in First Grade held up one of my papers and demanded to know who in the world was the person who signed it with some made-up name? Decades later I switched to using my first name as my everyday name instead of my middle name. Calling myself “William” was actually Kristina’s suggestion during our first date together. My oldest daughter, however, gradually shed culturally-stamped gender identities of her youth she grew into an adult child. 

Morgan Hannah changed their name to Dylan Blair Bass back in 2018 as they identified as a non-binary person preferring they/them/their pronouns. Dylan Blair was the name Gwen and I had crafted for our firstborn if our child had been born a boy. Instead of a son, however, we were blessed with a daughter, and we both really wanted a daughter. While we also didn’t mind one way or another if our baby had been born male or female, we did seek to break patriarchal traditions of publicly yearning for one or the other to establish social dominance. We also sought to free our firstborn from the shackles of social conventions including naming her after some combination of relatives.

There’s a bit more to the story behind Morgan becoming Dylan with roots in arcane family history, birth name strategies, their use of singular-plural non-binary pronouns and so forth, but details for another tale to tell. I love my child anyway. Parenting changes as children become young adults. They still teach me a lot, humbling me every time I contemplate the intricacies of living the lives we choose, and I know they still learn from me in their own incredible ways. 

We all have names, and we are not our names. There are times, however, while upon certain journeys of initiation or in the wake of such transformation we earn the right to choose our own names. Accept. Forgive. Love. And Hug.

Resilience is a practice. Seeing the beauty all around even when all seems lost is also a practice. Being in the present moment, however, aware of both the past and of future possibilities while living in the now is a practice to develop and practice. To love is to open in the face of suffering, knowing all suffering ultimately resides within our minds. Peace.

Aftermath of writing this initial essay:

Nine years after the Fire I felt an urgency to spend time with my oldest child. This urgency convulsed me as she was the one who escaped a house burning down. The other two kids, thankfully, weren’t even there at the time. She was the one who commanded her teenaged friends to safety. She directed them towards the only way out. This was a house on fire upon a steep bluff whose floors and back deck were about to cave in upon the rooms below where all had slept in for her overnight birthday party. The urgency arose from Morgan and her friends being alive. Without any serious injuries, too, tho they all lost a staggering volume of personal belongings for the offspring of working class folks trained to be busy-busy-busy in an capitalist age of consumerist affluenza.

My youngest two, however, were not at the house when the fire broke out but away visiting other friends. Thank goodness! Refused to entertain those what-ifs. They did show up later with the crowds to see the firefighters battling the flames and spraying water thru the roof while the ARC sought to help us. Besides, Father’s Day was 8 days away and we were all going to be together as one Family. I must spend some one-on-one time with Morgan. I couldn’t bear to stand the thought of losing her and her friends, all teenage girls, especially like in those terrifying circumstances.

Had a PTSD attack this morning, altho at the time I was too in it to see it for what it was. In 2005, an amazing medical doctor who spend about 2 and a half hours, a man incredibly detailed, thorough, and methodical, diagnosed me with PTSD, from repetitive childhood violence. He also confirmed another doctor’s diagnosis of ADHD. These were reconfirmed along with a host of learning disabilities in a complete neuropsych evaluation later in 2012. This Tuesday morning on the 16th of July 2019, long after the Fire, old demons rose back up from being chained deep in my id. Demons of fire, smoke, and ash. Should I chain them back up? Or set them all loose? What may the consequences be if I do? Or don’t?

Around and around this earthly, mental, spirit-withering Inferno I go, not dancing, but more as a tortured man grunting and sweating as he pushes the heavy weight of stone around and around in circles for all eternity for if he lets go he gets sucked into the momentum of stones and ground down into wet, gooey meal for ravenous ghosts. To endure PTSD is to roll with the beast of horror riding the inside of your back and shoulders.

Can’t get away from the Fire. Not all the time. Often I do, yes, usually I do, but not this time. Even tho the Fire as an event is long gone. Even tho our bodies and whatever material things we have continue to move forward thru time as entropy degrades everything affected by our reality’s Second Law of Thermodynamics. No wonder things fall apart the longer they last.

At the same time as I write this, my firstborn, the former Morgan Hannah now Dylan Blair, prepares to move across the country to New York City for grad school. I haven’t spent as much time with them as I’d hoped, especially as we both worked retail shifts with odd hours. Haven’t seen much of any of my kids as they not only moving places, but working jobs, in different schools, and have busy social lives. They have already left the nest.

Mind arises from the body, but both are distinct from consciousness which imbues both. All creation spilled out from the mind of whatever we label and mislabel Divine, all algorithms spawned from 1s and 0s as code turned loose thru parallel dimensions of other looped universes to evolve and mutate and create and destroy and recreate and change and transform and, if true, for what, exactly? Ahhh, this is psychobabble after dawn’s psychic break.

In my kitchen this morning I burst into tears as I thought back to the Fire of 2010 and felt once again the magnitude of loss. Initially contemplated the foto essay I crafted yesterday and posted last night of my effort to reconnect with my shut-down but otherwise vibrantly self-expressed daughter Morgan. Today Morgan now goes by Dylan, identifies as nonbinary, and wants all use of her name changed back to the beginning. I won’t change everything prior to 2018 as historically she was Morgan before she became Dylan, and people knew her during those two decades by one name before she chose another. I fully support her right to choose her own name, of course, and note this change in my articles and stories where she/they appears. In my kitchen this morning, however, I burst into deep sobs. I grieved again and again. Then I cried as I imagine just how close my daughter and her friends came to losing their lives as the floors collapsed behind them and the deck they leaped from blaze up in fire and smoke.

My body followed my mind into feeling the intensity of the visualization of my daughter and her friends initially trapped there apparently moments away from incineration. Before running to jump down off a burning back deck. Into pokey shrubbery and wild bushes and soft ferns. In their T-shirts and underwear with one sock on and one sock missing. I felt stuck in a loop. Reliving unexpected trauma in the midst of a series of one unbearable loss after another. I lost more than “stuff.” Lost homes, wives, kids, high-paying jobs, health, investments, reputation, friendships…i.e. relationships I valued were fractured. Partially shoved back together in survival mode. The Fire triggered severe episodic depression lasting until 2014. My dormant PTSD was awaken and worsened.

Yes, I engaged in psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching. Even took psychiatric medication for a while. I prayed in Christian churches, in Native American Church sweat lodges and all-night tipi ceremonies, and in Neo-Pagan, Wiccan, and Druidic circles. I engaged in regular Buddhist meditation, was active for a few short years in a Buddhist temple, attended dharma talks, and went on meditation retreats. I went out into nature and did solo walkabout backpacking trips into remote wilderness. Refined my nutrition plan and exercised in different ways.

All of these things helped me face my self and my issues. All of these facilitated my own healing. Some were more effective than others. None of them, however, broke me loose. Only I could set myself free. Tho I kept struggling to find tools to leverage and pry my self from the grasp of fear and anxiety and desire. Then after so much progress, after dealing with a host of chronic health issues, each one minor except all together present a somewhat formidable front… then memories of the Fire emerge and both cold, analytical thought and compassionate self-observation crumble before the demons of a long-dead inferno.

Damn! I beat myself up for being so goddamn pathetic and whiny when I know many others are far worse off than me. Far worse off! Right? Left. Too deaf to see myself in the mirror. Am I a selfish narcissist? Prattling on about my own wants rather than on serving others? I want to make sure my daughters are safe and well. That they are dealing with our family crises as best as they are able to, and what can I do to further assist them? Or is being with my daughter more about being with me? To reassure myself life goes no no matter what for life has its own innate drive to spread wherever it can including out into outer space and deep inside our hot planet. I beat myself up again as I cry more tears, trying not to wake sleeping housemates, all lonely, long-divorced, still-single, middle-aged White male artists. Am I frozen in timespace as a hapless, ne’er-do-well? Still making myself a victim of the system? Or welded inside my mental fortress so long I forget I’m 60 and not 6?

Time to stop and forgive myself. Feel compassion. Open to my own lovingkindness. Sharing such craziness in case these words and pictures somehow help to serve other people. Even the Sun is vulnerable to extinction in a Universe filled with gigantic and random apocalyptic drama.

Wrote about that old ass Fire and my crazy kids yesterday. Been wanting to do so for months, now. So I did, too! Felt good. Felt wholesome. Twas good medicine. Woo HOO! Writing is a way for me to heal as much as getting outdoors into the wilderness heals. Then, BAM! BOOM! CLUNK! CLANK! RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE!!! Heavy construction outside in the streets vibrating the house. I don’t even have on my hearing aids, but I can feel the racket. Plus the racket as two buildings go up next door, too. Been going up for months, rain or shine. Giant trucks in the streets. Big, long, shiny ass trucks. Fixing mysteries. Sewers. Lights. Rats. Crap. The activity triggers more PTSD, altho I’m not present to the PTSD at first. Just present to the suffering all made up in my mind feeling so real at the time as I lean over the kitchen sink and sob for a life wasted.

Then in the manner of a long-dead insurance agent who wrote a poem about change while a man plays a blue guitar, an inner darkness gives a loving opening to a soft, glowing inner light as everything changes within the permanence of stillness. I struggle to remember to breath, to open and stretch, to discern rumination from contemplation, to breath again and yet again for tears keep coming.  I am still partially-deaf, I miss being with a lover, miss having a life partner to share sunsets and elbow talk with, it’s been a long time now, and then I turn around and thru my tears I see the tea kettle on the stove spouting steam. Can’t hear it, no, but I smell it. Smell the moist heat. I feel it, too. Feel the air quiver and pulsate with shimmy zimmy steam and chuckle. Am glad to see stove, kettle, and steam! Moved the kettle. Turned off the stove. Wiped away and messes.

Smiled as my heart opens and my mind recognizes my own woke ass awareness. Laugh and chuckle. I am free!

Free to open wide, cut loose, and cry! Free to wail like old women and zealous men whipping themselves insane with loss down in old, cobblestone streets. Can grieve even wider now as I’ve finally, finally hit Bottom of Depth. And don’t need to. Done with tears. For now. Done.

Instead I text two friends I rarely see but am in constant contact with. I text them a tome too much. Too much! Still grateful I can do so, tho. Grateful for the technology keeping us connected so we can stay connected across the inflation of spacetime.

So, hugs, dammit. Ha! Aye, hugs! And coffee. Black. With 3 ice cubes. Then 7 more. 

Please. And thank you. Here. Peace.

What, however, is time? Especially when it’s bent?

 

William Dudley Bass
Monday 15 July 2019
Tuesday 16 July 2019
Seattle, Washington
Cascadia

 

Copyright © 2019, 2020 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.