Death of a Marine

This post is about a friend of mine who died last month.  It's part obituary, part backstory, part requiem, part soliloquy -- all rolled into one.  The obituary I read was nothing more than a brief snippet, altogether worthless of the life she led and the impact she had on others, myself included.

Photo courtesy Melissa M. Shafford

She was Melissa Mary Shafford, raised as a Navy brat from coast to coast until she and her family ended up in a "spit of a town" called Taft, Florida, and later to Sanford in Central Florida.  Back then, their home sat across the street from a lot where a traveling carnival parked its shit and took a long rest between tours.  She said her dad moved them all out of there after a major accident happened on that site and it became important to him that the entire family got the hell away.  Some of her treasured memories included getting dressed up as Batman and assorted superheroes along with her cousins in the back yard; her less favorable ones were generally while growing up in a household where any expression of emotion was seen as a sign of weakness.  She and her siblings weren't even allowed to cry during sad movies because the threat came from her father: "I'll give you something to cry about."  She told me once that what they grew up considering to be harsh treatment is viewed in modern parlance as a physically abusive environment.

Her relationship with her father seemed to be the most difficult experience for her; he belittled her constantly and made her feel like nothing she did was right.  It seemed to only motivate her to achieve the best grades in school, but she stopped considering her home a sanctuary.  Her formative years into adulthood didn't offer a better path necessarily, not at first.  While serving in the Marines, she was raped by another Marine who was drunk and got her pinned down on a bed.  She was too embarrassed to report the rape, but it took its toll on her mental well-being and she ended up with an early medical discharge a little over a year later.  Psychologists could possibly call it the defining moment of her life at that stage; I certainly would have.  She was subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from that nightmare, but she chose to never confront her attacker.  When I asked her why she wouldn't, she said it had been so long ago, her memory was hazy on his identity, and she didn't want to spend time reliving the horror of something she had already worked hard to put behind her.  I knew better than to try to go near that land mine and try to disarm it all on my own.

By the time I met her, though, she had become a different person altogether: tough, articulate, and thoroughly incisive in her professional observations, such that I never would have guessed as to the trials of her early upbringing until she had confided them to me much later on.  She had no patience for bullshit or bullshitters and made it known early on.  It also made enemies for her, which she knew, accepted and embraced.  She knew when people were being genuine with her and she knew when it was mere sycophancy rearing its head, and she smacked down the latter with a crisply executed chop.  That's the kind of hard bitch she could be.

Which isn't to say she lacked empathy.  She was also one of the kindest people I knew, and it shone through in unexpected moments that you could only spot from an oblique angle.  Some of the people whose lives she touched sought her counsel and ended up in tears from the sudden, cathartic release of talking to her about their problems and listening to her advice.  She brought a clarity to the way she looked at the world and the people who lived in it with all their associated dysfunctions, manias and misguided motivations.  She was direct, and she was blunt.  One day we were speaking about a co-worker named Ron, and she said to me, "I'll tell you how I feel about Ron -- if he's laid up comatose in a hospital bed, I'll clean the shit out of his bedpan.  That's how I feel about Ron."

In terms of human companionship, love, romance, all that sappy shit, she never really had time for it.  She learned to put up walls at a very young age and not let anyone in, and her life didn't revolve around a man anymore, not when I knew her or since.  She suffered through a first marriage to an abusive husband and through a second failed marriage to the extent that her emotions consisted of only two expressions: happiness and anger.  If she had a love of her life, it possibly existed at one point for her Marine recruiter, who was married with kids and was not in a situation where he would leave his wife. "I know how to pick 'em," she would say about that.  She would also say that if he had ever shown up at her door, she would have left whoever she was with to be with him.  Knowing how sparingly she made such declarations, I know what she felt must have been true.

Photo courtesy Melissa M. Shafford

She was on her way to a top spot in our little corporation when her mother's diagnosis of cancer derailed everything for her.  The casualty of that horrifying knowledge also culminated with a series of professional attacks and check-mates that effectively guaranteed a hard fall down the career ladder she had worked hard to ascend, mile by bloody mile.  But the sad truth is that she left a place where the shit was hip-deep to a place where the shit was neck-deep.  She knew that would happen, too.  She fought it as best she could, with no help from anyone.  She soldiered on, in the end spending thousands in legal bills to a law firm that sucked her finances dry.  She did win her case against the government for failing to protect her from an environment of pervasive harassment, but she never lived to see any money actually awarded to her.  The illnesses and PTSD symptoms kicked in hard again, and there is only so much that a person can take when the human body and the human psyche gang up on you.

She was wired to handle the shit at work and the health issues, but Melissa never really recovered from the death of her mother in November 2011.  By then, she had moved across the country, taken a position of lesser responsibility and much lesser pay, endured the ostracism from her new co-workers and bosses, and even sacrificed her lunch hour to leave the workplace every day and care for her mother, with meals, with bath times, with everything that a human being who is preparing to exit this plane of existence ought to receive when diagnosed as terminal.  And when her mother passed on, there was a hissing void of empty space that her care and nurturing had once filled.  I think, looking back, that maybe, absent a significant presence in her life, she needed to be able to care about someone at least, someone she loved deeply and with all her heart, someone who protected her as best as possible and never wished her an ill thought.  When that is taken away, who knows what happens to an uprooted soul?

The last time I spoke to Melissa in person, she still had that hard edge about her, that clarity of considerable perspective, but I could also see cracks in the foundation where doubts and misery were creeping in.  Her family's issues had come full circle such that her father was busy re-imagining the life with her deceased mom as a June-and-Ward-Cleaver love story; her brother was fighting with a nightmarish ex-wife over child custody matters; and her sister was, disgracefully, reveling in Melissa's barely controlled descent after envying a meteoric rise.  Melissa was still the glue keeping that living dysfunction from slipping into more severe dysfunction.  Although I wouldn't have called it a downward spiral, since reality was not gut-punching her to the point that she was on her knees, the ground was still coming up fast for her.

I don't want to romanticize this part of it.  Even in the times when everything looked bleak for her, she found the time to reach out to me and pull me out of my own darkness, to pull me through tunnels and over rocky paths that eventually led to a place where I could catch my breath, look around, and feel the sun's rays sink into my skin again.  Of my own doing, I ran into a perfect storm of bullshit at that point in my life, and she kept me relatively sane, and my soul owed so much to her that I never came back to repay.  She was a far better friend to me than I ever was to her, but she never rebuked me for that; again, that's who she was.  A constant giver to those who she felt needed her more than she needed to help herself.

She lived alone and didn't venture out into public places anymore.  Her closest companions were the ones she loved dearly and stayed by her side through the worst of the storm: her dogs, Jack and Apache.

I don't know how she died.  I hear rumors and ignore them; they don't represent the person I knew, and I choose to remember her for the inspiration and friendship she gave to me and so many others.  I've met many people in life, and some of them, this world could do without.  Not Melissa.  The world is a lesser place without her.

Watch your six, Melissa.  Rest in peace, and semper fi.