Monsters
By Michael Brian O’Keefe
WAKE-UP CALL
One minute I was lying face down in a pool of my own blood after passing out from a massive nosebleed brought on by dry air and the thin atmosphere at our 2-mile-high camp in the San Juan Mountains. The next minute I was my 15-year-old self again, face down in a different pool of blood—waking up not in a tent in the mountains, but on a Welcome Home doormat on the front stoop of my childhood home. Instead of August 2022 on the Colorado Trail, it was a chilly November night in 1971, and my father had just knocked me unconscious there with one volcanic punch for being ten minutes late getting home from my first ever date with a girl.
I’ve never doubted that trauma victims can be triggered to re-experience their trauma, but it had never happened to me. Not until that morning in the San Juans. Lying there, struggling to regain consciousness and stop the nosebleed, I wasn’t just remembering that 1971 assault; I was reliving it.
I couldn’t be sure how long the flashback held me in its grip, or how long it took to control the bleeding. All I knew, once I could stand, was that I had to get away from my friends, who were camping with me. I was a wreck and didn’t want anybody to see me the way I was.
We had planned to hike north out of camp that morning, but I took off south instead, pushing hard across roller-coaster hills for the next few hours through some of the most beautiful alpine views in America. Not that I took in any of the beauty that surrounded me. All I saw for those first several miles were my own footfalls and bitter mental images from my painful past. I sweated profusely, reveling in the burn of the steep elevation gains, all the way to the very exposed Indian Trail Ridge, where I was greeted by a sudden rumble of thunder and an accompanying flash of lightning.
I stopped, downed a liter of water, and let out a monstrous yell that echoed back seconds later. I hadn’t seen another soul since leaving camp and hoped that would continue as I flipped back northbound, still trying to regain my composure. With lightning crashing nearby, I knew I needed to push even harder to get off that exposed ridge and back down to the safety of the tree line. Even so, this time I purposefully tried to take in the beauty around me, while also keeping a wary eye on the angry clouds that alternately doused me with soothing rain and stung my face with pea- size hail.
My daughters had long warned me that trauma heals only through therapy. They’d also cautioned that people with untreated trauma often bleed all over the people they love—a phrase that stuck with me from the first time I heard it, and that I hoped didn’t apply to me. I’d convinced myself that I’d sorted out my issues over the intervening years since those beatings at the hands of my father. Looking back, though, my own frequent advice to others ironically was the one I should have been mindful of as well: that the most damning lies are the ones you tell yourself.
I once wrote a series of essays about my childhood and young adult years so that my children might know me more as a person than just as their dad. I included versions of some of the traumatic events but was dismissive of any lingering long-term effects. That was a lot easier than sifting through the details and dealing straight-up with the resulting fallout, and I honestly thought it was the best way forward, one that also protected my siblings’ more benign memories of my parents.
Clearly, though, I remained haunted by my childhood, and when I found myself in that tent staring at the blood pooling into the palm of my hand—and when a second later I was my teenage self again, looking up at the hate in my father’s eyes—I felt an unbearable ache in my heart. Strikingly, when my nosebleed triggered that violent flashback, I was on vacation doing my favorite thing—hiking in the cathedral of nature. That it happened to me there made me think deeply again about what my daughters had said about trauma.
Acutely aware and genuinely concerned since that day that my forgive-and-forget approach had failed to resolve anything, I’ve been returning to my past, hopeful that remembering, and understanding, might bring resolution and maybe even peace of mind.
THE DAMAGE DONE
I became a Fairfax County police officer on New Year’s Day of 1977 after serving on the Washington, D.C., police force for four years. By September 1980, I was hanging on to the job I loved, not yet accepting that my fate already had been decided on a hot and humid late-August night a few weeks earlier.
On that night, I’d been dispatched to a raucous party that had spilled over from its chain-link fenced front yard origin into the street. Two kegs of beer and a full-makeup Kiss cover band had drawn a crowd of about a hundred and stoked it rowdy. I responded alone because the rest of my squad mates were handling other radio calls. It was a typical full moon summer Saturday night.
As I approached the party, a beer bottle exploded on the asphalt in front of my scout car. I knew I should just roll on past and wait nearby until backup became available. But I had been fostered into police work by a remarkable D.C. sergeant, and I knew if I just rolled on past, I would be making it harder for the next cop. The unwritten code that my old sarge had inspired in me commanded that I show no fear and do my job. Still, it was strange to feel compelled to do something your brain tells you is unwise, so I hesitated. My brief internal debate ended when I marked 10-97, gave my dispatcher a factual description of the party gone astray, and requested backup, even though I already knew there was no backup available. I asked for it anyway to underscore to my dispatcher and squad mates that I was leaving my comfort zone. Hopefully, that would cue my dispatcher to check in with me every five minutes and prompt my squad mates to try to clear their calls so they could come and help.
I got the effect I was hoping for when I stepped out of my scout car with a smile and an animated wave. The partygoers all froze, even the band. I had everyone’s attention: the baseball-bat- and golf-club-wielding neighbors inside their own chain-link fenced front yards, and the entire cast of intoxicated 20-something blue collar partiers, many of whom I knew and who were about my age. I trusted that my unorthodox strategy had them wondering what I knew that they didn’t.
Unfortunately, they didn’t ponder that riddle quite as long as I had hoped. Just a few minutes later someone called my bluff, as another missile launched and all eyes including mine followed its trajectory. I could see that it was not an empty beer bottle when its carbonated comet-trail shone incandescent on the way up through the streetlight’s mantle. It arced upward quite impressively—someone had a great arm—before disappearing briefly into darkness above the streetlight. Then it canter-wheeled downward once again through the light, this time in an eerie choreography of beauty and threat, before shattering about 30 feet from where I stood next to my scout car. A series of launches followed, and each bottle landed nearer to me, except for one that overshot and eggshell-shattered the windshield of the car parked behind mine.
I could tell just from the look on his face which neighbor owned that car, and I knew he wanted me to do something right that second. But I also knew he was not about to hop over his fence and cover my backside, so I was fine doing nothing except stand there with my back to my car, stalling for time.
Several guys I had arrested previously for various small-time offenses hurled crude insults my way, trying to goad me into wading into the crowd, but I just chuckled. When my dispatcher called my unit number and asked if I was 10-4, I said I was but again asked for backup. There was still none was available.
This uneasy stalemate continued until a young woman staggered up to me and spit in my face. Despite the stench of cigarettes, beer, and bong hits in her spittle, I managed to not react. That seemed to anger her even more, because she balled up a fist and sent a roundhouse punch my way. I sidestepped it and figured I would finesse her into my backseat cage before anyone else could react. But, when I grabbed for her upper arm, I came away with just her tube top, leaving her naked from the waist up.
After an eerie moment of silence, half the crowd surged toward me. The rest scattered at the faint sound of police sirens in the distance. My topless hostess became a human shield as we squeezed into the driver’s seat of my scout car. We only made it about three-quarters in before I found myself fighting off multiple attackers, kicking and punching anyone who came within reach. A capped ice-cold bottle of Michelob zoomed past the topless woman and tagged the left side of my face before landing somehow unbroken in the shotgun seat beside me. I looked at it, and in my concussed state pondered what seemed like a profound question: Why are there so many beer bottles at a keg party?
After that, my mind slowed to about the speed of refrigerated maple syrup, as I slow-danced between consciousness and coma. Luckily, and the irony was not lost on me, I had experience with concussions from all those beatings at the hands of my father. I knew to focus on simple tasks, like aiming my portable radio at every nose that came into view. “See the nose, hit the nose,” I repeated each time I connected with one.
The topless woman took several errant shots intended for me. I knew she was in Neverland because her teeth had unclenched from my left forearm, allowing me to reposition her to maximize her shield value. That unorthodox combination of offensive and defensive strategies got me through until five Mason District Station units finally arrived.
Most of my assailants went to jail on drunk-in-public charges, but not the young woman who had semi-voluntarily served as my shield. I let her boyfriend escort her home.
I wasn’t surprised that no ambulance was available that busy night. So I drove myself punch-drunk to the ER, where they treated me for a minor facial fracture, a medium-to-high-grade concussion and various contusions, and gave me nine stitches and a tetanus shot for the bite on my left forearm. Back at the station house, I told my supervisor that I hadn’t been hurt, and backed up the macho lie by working the next day as though nothing had happened. Ice-bagging overnight brought down the inflammation in my swollen cheek, makeup camouflaged my facial bruising, and a long-sleeve shirt hid my forearm bandage.
I would have a much harder time hiding the strange attacks that started plaguing me a few days later. The injuries I incurred that night triggered an onslaught of strange and unpredictable vertigo attacks and a slew of neurological diagnoses including Meniere’s disease, otolithic crisis of Tumarkin, trigeminal neuralgia, tinnitus, and profound hearing loss.
My tally of concussions—from sports, police work, and my father—had reached double digits. The human brain is a wonderful and mysterious organ. My neurologists often remind me that it is medical science’s final frontier. I have had four neurosurgeries and too many neurologists. One of the things they all agree on is that, when it comes to head injuries, more leaves you with less.
GROVETON
Groveton District Station was proudly viewed by most cops who manned it as Fairfax County’s toughest area to police. Those who served there cultivated a reputation for aggressiveness that evoked pride among themselves and stoked fear in many of the people who interacted with them. There were unwritten rules in Groveton, like the one that required any cop who went into a bar to walk out with someone in handcuffs. And if someone fought or resisted arrest, God help them.
I had mixed feelings about Groveton. The unwritten rules struck me as false bravado that flew in the face of fairness. The Groveton tough cop persona also didn’t ring true to me. I didn’t see any glory in picking fights when the odds were stacked heavily in your favor.
Still, shortly after that late-August party, a Groveton sergeant asked me to transfer onto his unit from my abutting station, and I said yes. He had a young squad to which he felt I might add seasoning. He also knew from one of his officers, who was my friend, that I was not happy on the underachieving squad I had landed on two months earlier after an extended undercover assignment hunting a serial rapist.
I hit it off with my new mates at Groveton. They would rescue me several times during what I later learned were vertigo attacks that struck on-duty. This was months before I finally gained a name and diagnosis for what was happening to me from my private doctor. As the attacks continued, I realized that I owed it to my squad mates to disclose that diagnosis to the department’s doctor at my upcoming annual physical—a disclosure that caused me to flunk that physical and, in March 1981, forced my retirement on disability.
Several of my initial vertigo attacks occurred while I was working the midnight shift on my Groveton squad. They hit without warning while I responded to radio calls in my one-man scout car. Twice, I was the first unit to arrive at domestic disputes heated enough that, out of a sense of duty owed to the women under threat, I waded into before backup arrived. Both times, sudden room-spinning vertigo attacks cast me to the floor and brought instant peace to each couple’s relationship, as they turned their attention to helping me. I was fortunate, and I knew it.
Backup units arrived and carried me home. They helped me up set up a makeshift sick bed on my bathroom floor and then left me alone at my request because I knew, once the room started spinning, it would get ugly.
I spent the next several hours acutely nauseated with my head pinned against the floor trying to ride out whatever came next. I kept my head to the floor because raising it amped-up my room-spinning symptoms from intolerable to tornado-like. Soon, I was alternating between seated and kneeling positions at my toilet. This lasted until the contents of my digestive tract had explosively vacated via the two orifices available. The hardest part came when both needs arose simultaneously, while I also struggled to tolerate the tornado-like effect that engaged the moment I raised my head from the floor.
Afterward, I lay in a fetal position on the floor beside the toilet and tried not to have any thoughts or feelings. Just as suddenly as it arrived, vertigo eventually departed, leaving me depleted, distraught, and contemplating, “How am I gonna live with this?”
DARKNESS FALLS
I had been asking myself that same question for as long as I could remember. Since early childhood, I’d had a recurring nightmare that almost always came on after emotionally trying events. The key elements were fear of the dark and claustrophobia. And now, after each attack, my recurrent nightmare was also haunting me.
Immediately after my most recent on-duty attack subsided, hoping to keep that nightmare at bay, I put on my running shorts and shoes and headed out the front door. I raced through darkness to the Mount Vernon running trail and ran hard along the riverside path for 40 minutes to the house where my parents and youngest sister lived.
I circled the block several times, trying to sweat out the agitation I felt upon spotting the front stoop of my childhood home. I had lain unconscious there after my father knocked me out. His fists would find me many more times, but I found that front stoop especially haunting because that long-ago night irrevocably altered my life.
I ran next to the basketball court a block away. I had been exiled there at the start of my sixth-grade summer, after my father decreed that I could no longer play with my best friend. He required, instead, that I spend all my free hours on the basketball court. He placed no value in friendship or in the things my best friend and I did together, like fishing and hunting frogs, snakes, turtles, and crayfish along the creek down the block that fed into the Potomac River.
I did what my father demanded and spent hundreds of hours practicing the sport I liked but could never love, not the way he did. That court was the site of my first concussion at age 13, spurred by my father’s out-of-nowhere white-hot rage. He shoved me head-first into the steel pole that supported the basket because I hadn’t rolled, belly-to-the-ball, quickly enough after I set a pick for him.
The crash of my skull into that hollow steel tube filled with concrete knocked me unconscious for more than five minutes, according to a friend who was playing tennis on an adjacent court. My eyes suffered an immediate muscle imbalance that caused double vision and left me cross-eyed. I had corrective surgery months later, purposely scheduled during the Christmas break so that I wouldn’t miss any games with my Catholic Youth Organization basketball team.
My last detour on that nighttime run was to the baseball field, another hundred yards away, where I had huddled against winter’s cold one night during my senior year, when my parents, angry with me about something, kicked me out of the house, along with the suitcase my mother had prepacked. I had friends in almost all the houses I passed by on my lonely walk to the baseball field where I eventually slept. I could have knocked on any of those doors, and they would have welcomed me inside. But I wasn’t ready. I was still the keeper of secrets, and I could not pry from my psyche the idea that I deserved everything I got.
It was a natural assumption on my part. Throughout my childhood, my parents slapped me and hit me for various minor offenses, like leaving a light on when I left a room, or asking “Why?” The most repeated phrase of my childhood was not a profession of love. I never once heard those words. It was a rhetorical question accompanied by a face slap: “Do you think I shit money?”
I was the best player on my Little League baseball teams, but my father never walked that short block to the field to watch me play even a single inning. He never saw me hit a home run or throw out a runner trying to steal second. Instead, he banned me from playing baseball so that I could devote all my time to basketball.
My father had been an all-star basketball player in college and coached for awhile at the university level. He never missed my basketball games or practices, and no matter how many points I scored or how many games we won, he gave me only harsh criticism.
Not to be outdone, my mother accumulated a secret list of offenses that I committed each day and reported them to my father upon his arrival home. He took me to the basement and disciplined me with his belt until I cried. When I learned to detach from bodily pain and not react, he quit hitting me only after he had exhausted himself to the point of shame. By never lifting a finger in self-defense and refusing to cry, I tried to prove to my father and myself that I was nothing like him. Yet I grew up thinking I was flawed and that I deserved punishment.
After circling the baseball field, I reversed my running route and headed home, taking once more to the dark path that I knew by heart, snaking through woods and riverside clearings four miles to Mount Vernon and another mile and a half to my front door. I slept like the dead, woke up the next day, and went to work. No nightmare.
MONSTERS
I responded to an unusual police radio call during the fall of 1980 and took a report about eerie screams in the night air that originated from the deep woods along the Potomac River near Mount Vernon. The complainant was an Air Force colonel who worked at the Pentagon. He described what he had heard, and his wife confirmed his description, as “the otherworldly scream of a big wild animal.” I listened for about 20 minutes while standing with them silently on their back screened porch, which backed to a hundred wooded acres of undeveloped park land, but we heard nothing.
Over the following weeks, similar reports poured in from other credible homeowners. The department formed a task force, and officers staked out the area nightly for weeks. In the end, nothing was proved or disproved, but the name Mount Vernon Monster was born.
I didn’t buy into the hysteria, but many highly intelligent and accomplished people who lived in the houses bordering those woods did. I continued running the bike path that cut through those woods along the river, and several times a month I did so after my 4 p.m. to midnight shifts. Sometimes the moon lit my way, and on moonless nights my memory guided me.
One unusually warm and foggy moonless night, I took to the running trail around 1 a.m. after a busy shift. About six miles into an out-and-back 10-miler, something fell in behind me. I was startled and reacted by running faster, hoping to leave behind whatever was on my heels. I was a strong runner and trained at about a 6:30 per mile pace. But the footsteps behind me, which I assumed at first were those of a startled deer, didn’t drift away as expected. They drew nearer and were not the slaps of cloven feet on asphalt.
Ahead in the distance, I spotted light cast from several houses south of the forested Dyke Marsh tract I had just run through. When thoughts of the Mount Vernon Monster entered my head, I reminded myself that there had never been sightings or complaints in the area where I was running, but I sped up and activated the illumination button on my Casio running watch. My last mile split time was just above five minutes. I had never run that fast.
The Alexandria Avenue stone bridge over the parkway drew me to it. There was a light pole there, and its mantle formed an oasis of light in the foggy darkness. That mantle called to me like a mythical siren. I raced for it, leaning hard into the hill I was attacking, no more glancing at my running watch.
I felt childish being afraid of the dark. But that was nothing new. I had always been afraid of the dark. It was my big secret, something about which I felt ashamed. The awful darkness in my recurrent nightmare often bled into my everyday life. That was a big part of what drove me to run through the woods at night in the first place. I needed to confirm to myself that I was not afraid; that the light required in my bedroom to sleep was about something else, anything else, but not just childish fear.
I thought to myself, Just stop. Turn around, right now. Free yourself from this damn nightmare!
Instead, I surrendered to panic. And that was when I felt it: hot stinky breath on my shirtless back. The odor was obscene, strangely organic, yet oddly familiar. The footfalls behind me beat almost as one with my own and, as I rounded the last uphill right-turn corner to the stone bridge, just as I broke into the mantle of light downcast from the streetlight, I felt a sharp pain on my inside shoulder blade. In a panicky, wildly contorted motion, I swung around with flailing fists, while screaming as loud as I could.
But I was alone.
I knew I wasn’t truly alone, because I sensed something was out there, waiting in the dark, afraid of the light.
There were no cars traveling on the parkway and none on the side streets near me. It was strange to feel sane and insane simultaneously. Luckily, there were streetlights on the road that paralleled the parkway and along the three connecting side streets that led to my house. I was about three miles from home. So I ran from mantle to mantle, as though I was doing a speed workout designed to cut my 10k racing time. I sprinted the 300 yards between each mantle of light and then rested under each one for a couple minutes. Twenty-two mantles later, I unlocked my front door and went straight for my revolver.
After an hour spent calming my thoughts, I took a long hot shower, as though it might be possible to wash it all away. But there was blood on my towel when I dried off. I twisted in front of my bathroom mirror and saw a long deep cut on my right shoulder blade.
NIGHTMARE
I fell asleep that night with the lights on, and my recurring nightmare found me again. In the dream, I am always in complete darkness—a darkness so dark it permeates my entire being, until I am the darkness. And I feel restrained. I can’t even lift my hand in front of my face, which I desperately need to do. And then I understand. It’s not a dream. I am buried alive in a coffin beneath six feet of stinking organic soil, and I realize it is not my hand that I cannot lift, it is the lid of the coffin. Desperate, I try to scream my mother’s name and then God’s name, but I can’t scream at all. Mine is a silent scream that crests before breaking, like a crashing wave. That is what always awakens me—my death scream.
My first thought on waking up isn’t, “It was just a nightmare.” My very first thought is, “My nightmare is a memory.”
I experienced that nightmare as a toddler and as a child, too many times to count. It is my earliest memory. It found me each time my father beat me, and while I slept at the ballfield after being tossed out by my parents. It came for me the night I said goodbye to my first love when her family moved far away. It came for me after a friend I loved like a brother committed suicide by shooting an armor-piercing bullet through his heart, and I cleaned the blood and flesh from his bedroom wall to spare his family.
My nightmare even found me in the cab of an 18-wheeler, probably somewhere in Georgia, when I was a 17-year-old hitchhiker sleeping in the shotgun seat while the trucker who’d picked me up drove us along I-95 toward Florida. My father had awakened me on a Saturday morning in early November of my senior year and dragged me to his car while beating me into submission. He drove me to his barber shop and demanded that his barber eviscerate my long hair. I walked out of my house the following Monday morning with a large duffel bag slung over my shoulder while my mother watched but said nothing. While my classmates were heading for school, I walked down Duke Street to the interstate so I could hitch a ride to Florida. I don’t remember many details from those rides, but I do remember waking up to my death scream in the cab of that truck and being comforted by that Vietnam-vet driver who just said, “I’ve been there, brother.”
When I returned home six weeks later, after promises were made over long distance calls, my father beat me one last time while my mother once again watched in silence. My nightmare played again, and it felt like an apt coda that night to the deteriorating state of my well-being.
Vertigo attacks and a stacked deck of other neurological tarot cards would eventually chase me from police work and torment me throughout college and law school. They eventually forced me into my early disability retirement. But those vertigo attacks weren’t alone in their pursuit of me. My own memories, nightmares, fears, and trauma kept pace too.
FAILURE TO FORGET
Middle age allowed me the introspection to reconsider my relationship with my parents. I had rationed my time with them for decades, and even decided never again to leave my children in their care after my then-toddler son returned from his first and only overnight stay in their care with a green-stick fracture of his lower leg.
I eventually sat down with my father, and for the first time spoke with him about our painful shared past. I tried my best to forgive him. At the time, the lack of specificity in our talks seemed merciful. I had no desire to emotionally beat up my elderly father for acts he’d committed as a young man, nor did I think it necessary. I assumed we both knew what we were talking about. Indeed, he acknowledged the nexus between my concussions and my vertigo-driven fate. He felt guilty for front-loading my concussion count. His demeanor and my anger both had calmed as together we aged, enabling us to start rebuilding our relationship.
My mother couldn’t speak openly about emotionally challenging topics. She was defensive and contentious by nature. So we danced around our past, and I gained no resolution from our discussions. She was already showing symptoms of dementia, so I accepted that whatever relationship I might build with her would be basic.
My wife, kids, and I started vacationing every spring school break with my parents in Corolla, North Carolina. This tradition lasted a decade or so until my mother’s dementia worsened. Soon afterward in April 2013, Dad asked me to save him and my mother from their advancing cognitive and physical descent. So we took them into our home, cared for them, and managed their daily lives until Dad died in October 2015 and Mom died in May 2018.
Those five years were the hardest of my life. My daily commitment to my parents took away time for my own family’s needs. I joined the “sandwich generation,” and met many fellow members who also were struggling to give their spouses and kids the time and attention they deserved, while fulfilling the very demanding duties owed their downward-spiraling parents.
But I also learned things about my parents while caring for them that brought me understanding. These revelations about issues in their own childhoods helped me understand them and contemplate forgiveness. But forgiveness isn’t linear. It seems to spiral, like the counterclockwise rotating bands of a low-pressure weather system, often threatening to escalate into an angry storm.
I regret that my father and I didn’t talk in detail about our ugliest moments. That was a mistake. I wish we had talked about everything. It’s now clear to me that to gain full understanding, every question must be asked and answered.
Dad died peacefully, something for which I am thankful and credit my wife and children. Every day and night, he needed reassurance, and we gave that to him through rituals we constructed for his benefit: moments, meals, and quiet conversations. Sharing our daily lives enriched his. We took him to Mass twice a week every week over his last 2-1/2 years. We sat in the front handicapped pew. The last thing he said was “Thank you, God.” My daughter, into whose ear he whispered those final words, is certain that Dad was speaking to God directly, and that Dad believed he was in God’s presence at the time.
Mom lived five years in my care. Most of that time she was so deep into dementia she referred to me as “the nice man” and not her son. Beneath her hard, enigmatic shell, I found a sweet but frightened person. I also learned that she created that shell to protect herself from pain that resulted from her illegitimate birth and abandonment. This helped me understand her detachment.
THE DRESSER
The morning of what would be the night she died, Mom had a rare lucid moment. I was startled because it had been a long time since she’d recognized me as her son. Hoping to take full advantage of that moment, I sat with Mom on her bed and used my cellphone to share with her dozens of photos of family members. She beamed, pointed, and said their names for the first time in more than a year. At some point, she told me that she felt cold, so I found a cardigan sweater in her dresser and helped her put it on. When I sat back down next to her, Mom pointed to the dresser and said, “When you were a bad baby, I put you in there to punish you.”
A tsunami of emotion threatened to swamp me, but I recognized that I needed to be her loving son, not her inquisitor. So I didn’t respond to her comment; yet her admission instantly made sense of things that I’d never understood before. I closed my eyes and conjured up scenes from my nightmare. Understanding its origin suddenly made it less threatening. Still, contradictory feelings played off each other inside me: confusion and understanding, happiness and sadness, love and hate, anger and forgiveness. By the time I sifted my emotions and considered again whether to ask her about what she had revealed, several minutes had elapsed and she was adrift again in the fog of her dementia.
Twelve hours later, I held Mom in my arms and whispered all the right things into her ear as she died.
THE STORYTELLER
When my now-grown children were little kids, we would visit my parents once each summer and swim at their neighborhood pool. After dinner, we would drive home to Fredericksburg by way of the George Washington Parkway and pass Mount Vernon. One of the first times we did, it kindled memories of the Mount Vernon Monster.
I often told the kids stories back then as we drove home from various places, when sleep was closing in on them and would probably capture them somewhere along the drive home. So I told them an edited version of the Mount Vernon Monster story, one that included the reports of animal screams in the night air and the police investigation of them. I also included some elements of my scary run along the trail in the dark. The result was a slightly scary story with a happy ending, and they loved it. Every time after that, when we drove home from my parents’ house, the kids always begged me to retell that story, and I always did.
Unless they read what I’ve written here, they won’t know that the story meant one thing to them and something different to me. I hope they’ll understand the complicated connection to my parents and, like me, try to forgive them.
EPILOG
Two years after the nosebleed triggered the flashback in my tent in the San Juan Mountains, I have a clearer understanding of what happened but no real resolution. On the plus side, my nightmare hasn’t visited me, and my claustrophobia is improving.
I began hiking in nature’s cathedral in search of peace of mind after my parents died. Trekking hundreds of miles in beautiful and remote places like the Colorado Trail, the western Ireland peninsulas, the highlands of Iceland, and the West Highland Way in Scotland have inspired good things in me and helped me to believe in all the things I wish to be true. Yet, I am certain that peace of mind, if it exists for me, must be found within the confines of my daily life.
And that remains a work in progress.
I don’t have a feel-good ending for this essay, although I am resolved to forgive what I’m able. I also am resolved that some things might be unforgivable and that some wounds may never completely heal.
I will always remember everything disclosed in this essay and more, and that is a burden and a gift. I will always shade toward walking alone through life because my profound hearing loss and my neurological issues will always affect my existing relationships and impede the possibility of new ones. And I will always struggle with the gap between what might have been and what is—because that gap is measurable, tangible, and real to me.
Despite all that, I know I will get up every morning and hook my dogs to their leashes and happily greet each day with them as we walk and sing our way through the cathedral of nature at the battlefield park near our house.
Maybe we’ll run into Pete, the best retired Marine you could ever hope to meet, with his black Lab, Jackson. Pete and I will chat about anything, everything, and nothing while the three dogs have fun chasing each other off-leash.
And maybe we’ll come across Marie-Anne, our almost-80-year-old French-accented retired teacher friend, so that we can remind each other, lest we forget, that the lessons of the past should give us cause for optimism.
While my pups will not live forever—Jake is 6 and Lucy is 5—we’ve got a lot of good miles ahead of us, and I trust that my memories of our times together will last for the rest of my forever. And that realization crystalizes for me my own best path going forward.
I am only a victim of my past if I allow it to impair the good days and miles ahead. I think I’ve done a pretty good job so far. I have enjoyed my life, and it’s been interesting. I also trust that by practicing unconditional love, I’ll live on in the hearts of my kids and grandkids, and who can ask for more than that?
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Michael Brian O’Keefe lives in the Fredericksburg area with his wife and two dogs. He is an endurance optimist and spends most mornings walking and biking, and most vacations hiking in the cathedral of nature. He has been very happily married for 38 years and has three grown children and three growing-like-sunflowers grandchildren, who collectively are his sun, moon, stars, and nightlight.
Little Molas Lake, on the Colorado Trail/Photo by Michael O’Keefe
