I’m continuing my writing journey and just completed a 8-week workshop course on writing memoirs and personal essays with Lighthouse Writers Workshop here in Denver. This is all so new to me; I feel very much out of my comfort zone and quickly found that painting with words is hard. But, I’m learning a lot about telling and writing stories.
For now, I’m compelled to write about my life mainly to just get these stories out of my head and onto paper. This urge that drives me is quite similar to my abstract painting process… I often show up at my painting table in my studio just to get paintings out of my head and onto paper.
So, I’m going with my flow – here is a longer essay (draft) that I’m finally getting onto paper.
The End of the End by David Castle
I had finished my announcement of just two words and it was my mother who was suddenly at my side, tightly gripping my hand with both of hers with tears already streaming down her face. She was on her knees next to me as I sat at our family dining table, in the chair I grew up in, in the log home that I had helped build, in an empty North Idaho meadow. My stoic father sat in his paternal chair at the other end of the table. I noticed that he’d already begun to disappear as this moment coalesced.
Time would tick normally for the next sixty seconds or so on the nearby grandfather clock — the one left to me by my mother’s mother when she had died. I didn’t know yet that it would someday be denied to me, just because I was me. And in those first few seconds I knew that each of us at that table — me, my father and my mother — would never tick normally again. I brought the three of us together for this moment and it would now stretch and warp as the many paths of my young life converged like so many trains jamming from sidings onto the main trunk line.
It had been quite a journey for all of us to meet at this table in this moment. My solo trip from my home in Denver to visit them wasn’t that unusual, but I knew some of the travel logistics had appeared a bit mysterious, especially the rental car I had driven myself in from the Spokane airport, rather than the usual pickup by my father. I had called a family meeting at the table where we had done so many times before. No one except my father called family meetings at this table.
I thought about all of the places we had each experienced along our paths; they connected like dots on a map. These “elsewheres” ticked through my head, flip photo album style: the big city and our grand escape to the forgotten farm deep in the Ozarks followed by a different escape to North Idaho for more forced labor, this time to build the family log home. Finally it was my turn and I made my own escape to college in Arizona, then back to my native Colorado, then four years in Europe before returning to Colorado. A grand total of 17 houses in 4 states and 3 countries for my young life.
Sitting at that table, a bizarre thought zipped through my head, “Am I a nomad?”
Nomad or not, my paths surely took me to more elsewheres than many and I knew this had been important as I discovered my own life along the way.
“Eyes on the crisis,” I thought, “I’m here for my big reveal.”
A few more seconds ticked as my mother kept talking. Or gushing. Or begging. I wasn’t sure which and I felt a brief moment of overwhelm from her tears, her grip and her words. I squirmed as I smeared away a few of my own very different tears with my free hand. I knew what my tears meant: an unfathomable relief that bloomed right in my core. And freedom — total and absolute. I didn’t know what her tears meant; I still couldn’t understand her words. Instead, I focused on that relief that grew from my core and expanded, like my vital organs were filling with helium, punctuated by that satisfying sound you hear at Party City when they rapidly inflate balloons from that huge tank. But I didn’t float away; my mother’s hands anchored me in my chair. And now I had to resist a familiar urge to recoil from this grip.
“I don’t know this person and she doesn’t know me,” I thought.
I squirmed some more as I tolerated the touch of this stranger; I couldn’t yet extricate my hand without creating more of a scene. This moment was yet another stop along my path and I had known for awhile that, at some point, I would sit in this log house with these strangers and say: “I’m gay.”
Now I braced as a stunning journey began, all within the remaining sixty seconds that continued to tick. All as her grip on my hand persisted and her grip on my life ended. The man at the other end of the table faded even more; the log house around me disappeared. Closing my eyes, I pictured myself in one of my favorite, safe places — a comfortable railcar. I had been here many times before to contemplate and cope, watching selected scenes from my life roll by out the picture windows. I had always loved trains, especially this one introduced to me in a poem by Robert J. Hastings. He envisioned a life focused on the journey, rather than some destination or station. I let the scene out that window run with a view of the many divergent paths my young life had already traveled — many alone, without my parents by my side.
“All that you’ve known and nurtured is false,” I thought.
I opened my eyes and watched my mother’s face for a few seconds. I felt an almost audible snap in my head, like a rubber band, as these paths came together. It resulted in a jarring clarity.
“This isn’t the beginning of the end,” I thought clearly, “this is actually the end of the end.”
I sat frozen in my chair. I hadn’t said anything more as that clocked ticked, and I noticed how those deep, throaty ticks were separated by a pause that stretches impossibly until the full pendulum arc snaps and the next tick arrives. It was a curious sound that only grandfather clocks seem to make.
I thought about the beginning of this particular journey in discovering myself. It was a beginning without an exact date and time, but I knew there was a moment when I had realized something was different. It was sometime in the 5th grade — I was perhaps 12 or 13. It was a fragile and innocent beginning as I simply, desperately wanted to be best friends with certain classmates. But then it grew from pursuing best friendships to a different feeling, one that was somehow not the same as the awakening in everyone around me. What exactly was different I didn’t know, but it was bad. What, exactly was bad, I also didn’t know. Maybe the instincts I had developed over years of traveling this world and everything it and my parents had instilled in me kicked in. Instincts that had crept in, seeping deep over so many years, molding my values, my sense of self, my very identity. It informed my knowledge of right and wrong. It warned of the eternal consequences of disobedience to my parents and God.
This would culminate the next year in a sharp sting — the truth of what, exactly, was going on and who I was. I was gay. As comprehension dawned I knew with certainty that whatever was wrong with me was something I had to hide at all costs. This moment was actually the beginning of the end.
There were no defining characters around when I realized all of this — no role models anywhere to be found in Ozark County, Missouri. Still watching from my safe railcar, I saw now that there were glimmers of hope in that time though, out in the greater world. Spotty flickers of growing tolerance.
“Fuck tolerance,” I nearly said out loud to my parents, still at the table.
In this moment the choice for them was simple: acceptance, but with celebratory cake and balloons. Or — nothing at all. I knew I had already done the hard work by then, just me and God. I had sunk to the depths of self loathing and turned to the heavens to pray it away. I had survived constant fears of being discovered and ideations of suicide by autobahn. And I had done all of that while crafting and perfecting my golden-boy facade, developed especially for my mother. It was my only key to this family and for so long it had consumed nearly everything I had to give.
That’s what the beginning of the end was like. And now, sitting at the family dining table in the log home I helped my parents build, this moment was so very clearly not the beginning of anything. So here we were at the end of the end. It could end right now in this moment with my mother still on her knees next to me. Or, it could drag out for years as we battled for the favor of God, Nurture and Nature. I again studied her face, but she was still crying and I still did not know any of her words. They could be “get out”, but I finally understood them to be something like “we will get through this with you.”
I thought about all of the paths that came together in this moment as my mother held my hand. Most of them I had walked alone — well, just me and God. It was Him who I first begged for forgiveness for being the human He had made me to be. I begged Him to change me at my fundamental core — to take this away so I could fit into my family and this earth. I would wrestle and contort myself but ultimately, He denied those requests; He had already made me perfect.
The scene from my railcar resumed and now I saw the low mountains of southern Germany rolling by and knew the next stop was the town of Triberg, one of my favorite spots nestled next to Germany’s highest waterfall. I had lived in Düsseldorf for a few years, on the banks of the Rhine, and it was in those years that the spiraling with myself and God peaked. I often escaped the stress of my technology work and our very German clients, racing south through the countryside to the heart of the Black Forest. At some point on these drives, an uninvited passenger joined me: the key components of a more earthly escape from all of this. A final, simple solution that I could control. My project-manager brain sorted out those components — When, Where and How — as I sped at German speeds on those autobahns. I really don’t know how I processed who I was and how I didn’t fit as I sped, but I easily catalogued the possible Wheres along the way: concrete overpasses marked by accompanying ausfarhts that alerted me as I approached these easy targets. I became quite familiar with these Wheres as I traveled my favorite route. Each autobahn drive I took was my next available When. And the How? A simple jerk of the wheel that would end it all in a crash at over 100 mph. It could be so simple, but I once again chose the difficult path, defying so many, but now no longer defying God.
Back in this moment with my mother still crying on her knees, I no longer wished to kill myself. But I pressed my eyes closed thinking, “I suspect that there will be more than a few moments in the coming years that I’ll wish I could die though.”
I next marveled at the total collapse of my grand, golden-boy facade… I had nearly forgotten about that. I pictured it as a grotesque, thick armor lacking any human features but with all sorts of tangled sharp and pointy things sticking out of an otherwise dull surface. It slid off and all we heard was that clock ticking. I wondered at the time and energy I had dedicated to this facade and how much of my soul had it consumed. I marveled at how I had, apparently, pulled off this fake role for so long with the very people who thought they knew me best.
My face grew hot with embarrassment knowing that my mother still gripped the hand of a stranger, knowing that she gripped the hand of a child she didn’t know and who had never even existed. Finally, mercifully, the sixty seconds ticked out and I untangled myself from her grip, from my seat at that table, and from everything. I glanced down at my faded father as I stood and made my second poetic announcement. A final soliloquy:
“This is who I am.
This is my authentic self
given to me by God
discovered and nurtured
by myself.
You don’t know me
but I came here to give you that chance.
And that choice.”
No one spoke further and my relief quickly carried me out of that house and away to sit beneath the “big pine” – my favorite thinking spot.
For another, single day I allowed this scene — the end of the end — to continue. There wasn’t an agenda or schedule and we all vaguely milled about that log house. There were “public” moments of my mother crying on the living room couch. I heard other “private” moments of her crying alone in her bedroom. These weren’t big, dramatic sob sessions, but it seemed clear that a lot was coming together for her. My father hovered around not saying much. Perhaps he was already brainstorming silently to himself about future plans for my conversion and salvation. Of plans to take me straight to that mothership in Colorado Springs where they have a whole team of family experts just waiting to focus on fixing me. His silence endured through the discussions I had mostly with my mother. We talked about my real life and my real self just a bit, but only in snippets we all could handle.
We didn’t talk about the past at first — those years of the beginning of the end. Instead, I mentioned my hopes of a future life with my own family. The specter of two men raising a family was too much; more crying and anguish. I mentioned being “safe” in the era of AIDS; more crying and anguish. And then we did turn to the past — and those snippets got bizarre. As my mother searched for reason and fault, there was an angry discussion about my father choosing to never have the “sex talk” with us boys (my sister was filled in on all the details at some point by my mother). The bitter look she gave my father made it clear whose mistake that had been (maybe she thought this omission in my education had made me this way).
In the middle of this single day I noticed the things we didn’t talk about — most glaring was the absence of any explanation or justification for my parent’s reaction. I knew they thought it was guided by God, but they failed to present any bible verses to support their fear and lack of acceptance. No one explained the disconnect between their professed unconditional love and the foundation of rejection they had already built.
Towards the end of that day, most startling was my mother’s description of the moment she first panicked at the thought that I might be gay; I was still in her womb at the time. She described her severe depression upon my birth and her decision to dry up her mother’s milk rather than subject herself to nursing a homosexual. She described that it was the only time in her life she sought the help of a psychologist.
She wouldn’t explain further how she (and my father?) got through that period and I’ll never know more about my welcome into the world. Yet still, I tried to picture a new-born David exiting Lutheran Hospital in the autumn of 1967.
“How does a mother know her fetus is gay?” I wondered.
Now I saw how, in the subsequent years of my life, she made many pointed (and sometimes cruel) efforts to instill in me those things that would perhaps discourage gayness: a relentless, non-negotiable masculinity, admonishments to not “be a sissy”, forced hunting trips with real guns and forced team sports like the football my older brother played. He had always been a model of manliness and I guess my efforts to drown surplus kittens or slice the heads off chickens or castrate calves didn’t prove much…
In later years, it was my manly brother who would declare that sexuality was a choice, for once without any biblical reference. He next proclaimed he chose to be straight. Bravo! Really, quite a marvelous choice… cake and balloons for you, too.
I was closest to my sister growing up and she initially choose a sort of vague neutrality. That quickly proved to be an unsuccessful path for her as she succumbed to the godly influences of my parents.
Through all of this, my choice remained: accept God’s gift, one that did not allow me to choose who I loved.
Just over thirty years have now past since those sixty seconds ticked by at that table. In this time, the end of the end did finally end. I had become fully me and took control of my path and the only destination it could lead to: forgiveness. That was all that remained for me — all I had left to give. In the time since the end, my mother’s unconditional love had morphed into hate. She had demonstrated it often in her last years in cruel ways, no longer hiding it from me or God. And then one July day she was gone. Her death from ALS was belatedly reported to me via text from my estranged brother’s daughter who braved to defy my mother’s dying wish that I not be notified of her departure until after she was in the ground.
A few years after her death, as we emerged from the pandemic, I travelled to that log house in North Idaho. It still sat among my favorite tamaracks; my hands no longer remembered any part of its construction. I called the trip my Forgiveness Tour, and it was an opportunity to say those words in person.
I visited my mother’s grave. Her site was still unmarked as my siblings feuded over those most important of Christian priorities — money and stuff. I navigated to an area about 14 feet northwest of a giant evergreen, while getting real-time navigation instructions from my sister. I felt like a sort of grave-comber as I swept my cellphone back and forth attempting to find the slight depression in the ground, just hoping that it was the right spot. I had brought a single yellow rose — her favorite — from the Safeway in town and placed it there. Then, on a whim, I sprinkled rainbow Skittles over her, too. It made me smile as I sat in an old camping chair taking in the scene and popping the remaining candies in my mouth. I worried that she wasn’t with God in her final destination.
“I forgive you, Mom,” I said out loud to the ground and sky.
It felt like the many other times when I had silently sent out my forgiveness, not sure if it ever reached her. This one was carried away, up through the pines on the late summer breeze. Nothing happened as I sat. There were no witnesses and no tears. No one gripped my hand, no one mourned and no specter of hate rose from that place. It was just a moment at another elsewhere along my path.
As for my father, he still lived in that log house and he was still disappearing as the substitute reality of dementia took him. I sat with him for a bit in silence while we both watched the tamaracks that had witnessed the past 40 years. My familiar, simple sadness sat with us. The logs pressed in around us seeming to have soaked up more hate over the years than love. Once again that clock — my clock — stood sentinel. But now it was silent; its pendulum hung still. I marveled at knowing that my mother had actually directed from her grave that I was never to receive my clock after all, and I wondered about its uncertain future.
“I forgive you, Dad,” I finally told him.
“For what?” was his immediate response, rare and coherent.
So I explained the rejection, and the oppression, and the hate, and the crusade for a cure: a summary of my life, from the beginning and now almost to the end. I described for him the years he focused on actively seeking a godly cleanse for me and his refusal to consider any support for himself — from God or from man — to understand, or cope, or support, or accept. All of this didn’t take long and I next handed him a small abstract I had painted just for him. I held my breath and watched as he mouthed the word “Castle” where I had written my name on the back just above the title “Forgiveness“. He puzzled over it carefully for several more minutes in silence, while I took a bitter moment to reflect on his zero acknowledgment of my 20-year career as an artist. He looked over at me, still gripping “Forgiveness”, and shared his random thoughts about the inequality of play time he had experienced as a youth with black players like me on the basketball court. And then, like an errant sunbeam piercing the scene, he apologized for “stepping on my toes.” I wish I could have pocketed that sunbeam as I left him in the stillness of that log house, knowing I most likely wouldn’t see him again.
The end of the end had reached its end a long time ago. I don’t dwell on it much anymore, having accepted the choices we each made. But I’m still sad sometimes whenever I watch from my railcar the many scenes they missed along the way: joys and sorrows, failures and triumphs, my travels and all of the elsewheres. And my loves, especially a husband of over 20 years, my forever person found out of billions.
I’m not a parent but I will never comprehend the unconditional love – with conditions – that my mother and father professed, all governed by the same God.
For me, I persevere, no longer mired. I’m lifted up by the forgiveness that remains in me. I often greet each new day with just that.
David Castle Art 
David your sad and courageous story was crafted with a beautiful economy. No melodrama just the unthinkable act of parents abandoning their child. I’m sorry this is what happened.