Bjarni Sr. Passes

A bike-trip with mom was planned for this glorious-weather morning, but when I called mom up to see if she was still up for it, she informed me that Bjarni Sr., my stepdad, had died this morning from complications of a long term illness.  This wasn’t entirely shocking, since he’d been sick for a long long time, and he had exhausted his nine lives eons ago.  Neither was it heartbreaking, since we hadn’t been close for an even longer time.  But it was still very very sad.

Bjarni Sr. had the misfortune to be alcoholic from a very young age, and I suspect that during his crazy life he probably tried every single chemical there exists to avoid having to endure this boring old ‘reality’.  After all that his body was simply ruined.  He was 58 years old.

All of us (my mom, brothers, their spouses and kids) went to the hospital this morning to say goodbye.  As it happened, we arrived during morning mass, so a deacon joined us at some point and we spent a good while talking about the life that was.

It’s a little tricky talking about Bjarni Sr. because the memories attached to him tend to live on the extremes.  There was good stuff and there was bad stuff, a lot of wacky stuff, but somehow not a lot in the middle.  Maybe memory just wipes those parts out?

I think mom and Bjarni Sr. hooked up when I was 4 or 5 years old.  They co-habited on-and-off until I was around twenty years old, or for some 15-20-ish years.  They always stayed in contact, they last spoke a couple of days ago.  They were soul-mates with utterly incompatible life-styles.

Bjarni Sr. functioned as two different people, Sober and Not-Sober.  As Sober he played guitar and sang, went on car-rides, fun-wrestled and paid for the food at my wedding.  As Not-Sober he cheated, lied, and harmed hairs on other people’s bodies, which I’m not entirely sure I’ll ever really forgive him for.  Even if I’m ‘supposed’ to.  Thankfully he never did a thing to harm a hair on my body, and I never feared for my own safety around him – although he fist-banged a dent into our fridge door at some point when a 9-ish old me had heckled him non-stop about not following a waffle-recipe To The Letter and he was already trending towards a ‘fall’.  Mentally he was tough to live with.

Speaking today about the life that was, we kept coming back to the fact that mom never allowed any drink or drugs in the home, and how this probably saved us kids from following in his footsteps.  He got unceremoniously kicked out every time he went down that path, and then once he had finished his ‘tour of the underworld’, he’d return (often some months later) for a semblance of sober normality which lasted for some weeks to months before it all went south again.  Life lesson: if an addict goes out to ‘buy bread’, expect him/her to return months or even years later (Thailand)!  It can certainly be said that life inside the circle of influence of Bjarni Sr. was never boring.  I think mom liked that.

From life with Bjarni Sr. I learnt to shrug and go on when things didn’t go as planned or something unexpected happened.  Long term planning seemed futile.  I learnt not to expect things.    Sure, I held a slight grudge when a horse he promised me and Helga (my stepsister) never materialized when we were young,  but overall we deeply internalized the Icelandic National Motto of “it’ll all turn out all right somehow”.  Also, to this day I get quite anxious if the car gas-light comes on, because of how many times Bjarni Sr. ran out of gas.  And I still miss the only car we had that had electronic windows.  Yes, Bjarni Sr. changed cars like other people change socks.

I don’t think I minded Bjarni Sr. all that much when I was younger, but once I hit my teenage years (also known as ‘Hrefna-becomes-insufferable’) this whole merry-go-round-life started to grate on me.  I was annoyed at everything Bjarni Sr. did, that every promise was broken, and how he endlessly contradicted himself, so I stuck my nose sky-high and moved to my grandparents’ when he was ‘in’ and back home with mom when he was ‘out’ to help out with my very young brothers.  I did not sympathize at all with my mother who was effectively a single parent with three toddler boys and a surly teen.  The fact that everybody made it out of those years alive surprises me to this day.

Somewhere inside Bjarni Sr. there was a good, charming, and talented man.  On top were crappy genes (his father was alcoholic too), a terrible upbringing, and addiction.  The addiction just won.

I hope you rest in peace Bjarni.  You’ve suffered enough.