"Deathbed Promise" by Linda Vigen Phillips
– No family is left to fact-check the story.
Her husband promised to tell me what she never could.
Linda Vigen Phillips’ poems, essays, and flash fiction have appeared in such places as The Texas Review, The California Quarterly, NC Poetry Society Award-Winning Poems, Wellspring, Windhover, The Friends Journal, Moonshine Review and more. She has two published YA novels in verse, Crazy and Behind These Hands. She recently studied with poets Dannye Romine Powell and Jessica Jacobs to complete her first chapbook, For Survivors to Consider. She lives in Charlotte, NC where she is a member of Charlotte Lit and Charlotte Writers Club.
Author Talk
Linda Vigen Phillips
When my debut book, Crazy, came out in 2014, it was important to me to take it on a tour of my home turf, Oregon, where the story originated. The semi-autobiographical YA novel centers on a fifteen-year-old girl trying to navigate the world of mental illness in her family during the dark-ages of the sixties. While the rest of the world reveled in canned laughter over the wholesome antics of Beaver Cleaver and his idyllic family, I struggled silently and alone to understand why my not-June Cleaver mom was falling apart. I lived in constant fear that whatever caused her psychotic episodes had me in its crosshairs. The better part of my energy was aimed at keeping the lid on the details of her bazaar behavior, shock treatments, and hospitalizations that interrupted my home life. Not even my best friends knew what was really going on in my family, and no one inside the family seemed to know either. Ironically, more than one person from my graduating class told me “I stole their story.”
I poured out my heart to my journal, and I believe to this day that the solace I found in writing was a major reason why I stayed intact. The other reason was my father. I was his only child and he spoiled me like one even within our meager means. He did the best he could to provide for my needs when my mother couldn't, and he stood by her through all the years of illness. At least that's how I saw it.
Until recently, when I learned the rest of the story, the part that was never discussed. My father—the person I admired most, the one who nurtured me through dark and difficult circumstances, the one to whom I credit some of my best inner strengths—was a flawed man. He violated my half-sister which likely catapulted my mother into one of her worst psychotic breaks.
After the shock of this belated news wore off and I worked through the stages of grief every bit as much as if someone had died, I returned to the salve that has always healed my wounds: writing. And now, more than ever, I hope that sharing my story, both part 1 and part 2, will speak to the heart of someone suffering silently and alone.—Linda Vigen Phillips
