Alf holds a special place in my heart for bringing me joy during childhood. But he also brought me pain and heartache upon the death of my father.
Life

How Alf Ruined My Life: A Tale of Love and Loss

Alf holds a special place in my heart for bringing me joy during childhood. But he also brought me pain and heartache upon the death of my father.
Photo Credit: davitydave on flickr

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While ALF only hung around for four short seasons, he was a staple in my childhood. With his fake fur coat, long, leathery brown snout — think Gonzo, coated in chocolate and melting in the midday sun — and unapologetic love for belches and burping, he hooked me right away. (Which wasn’t hard. Flatulence always made me giggle, and I was that girl, i.e. the girl whose father taught her to burp the alphabet before first-grade.)

I had an ALF puppet, an ALF t-shirt, and various ALF “action figures.” He sat alongside my Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids at our afternoon tea parties, and once I got a battery-operated boom box, he and Elton John attended all of my curbside dance parties. I watched the television series when it aired in the late ‘80s and again in syndication in the ‘90s. There was something special about that alien from Melmac, something I couldn’t place — though it is presumably the same thing I saw in Mork from the planet Ork.

Never in my life had I imagined ALF would betray me. Never in my life did I think the only thing I would remember about that fuzzy brown bastard was how he told me my father was going to die.

I should clarify: ALF didn’t start speaking to me. I wasn’t hearing voices in my head, and I didn’t have a legitimate conversation with him and the whole Tanner family. But he was there on the most defining day of my life, on November 13, 1996. He was there, laughing and trying to eat Lucky, while my mother was there crying.

Some details of that day are sketchy; others are obscenely clear. While I do not know what transpired between the time I got home from school and found an oxygen mask and used chest paddles — covered in my father’s thick, black hair — strewn across our kitchen floor and when we arrived at the hospital, I do know what was on the TV when we got there: ALF.

My ten-year-old brother and I (just two years his senior) sat in the waiting room of the cardiac intensive care unit alone, waiting for my mother and watching that little fur ball I loved so much. As family mingled just outside the room, speaking in hushed voices and making calls to others across the country, ALF spoke to me as he always did: rudely, cynically, yet in the most loveable way possible. It was just after he delivered one of his trademark lines, like “I’m the King of France” or something — anything — about cooking the cat, when my mother walked in.

She propped me on one of her bony knees and placed my brother on the other. I looked at him and her and back to ALF. I couldn’t keep their gaze — both their eyes welled with tears, tears that were magnified thanks to their high-prescription lenses — and I couldn’t look around the room. All eyes were pressed on us; I could feel it, and I couldn’t stand it. I knew I couldn’t stand whatever she was about to say because, thanks to a few sloppy paramedics, I already knew my father’s heart had stopped.

I already knew there was bad news to follow.

So instead I kept staring at the TV. I kept staring at ALF and the Tanner family and their living room, which grew more distant each and every second.

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“Your father passed out today.”

“His heart stopped,” I interjected. “There were chest paddles, with his hair. He didn’t pass out. His heart stopped.”

To say I was angry would be an understatement, but to say I was afraid would be the truth.  I was tired of the lies. When my grandparents came to get us from the house, when they came to bring us to the hospital, they told us he had “lost consciousness” and was just being evaluated, but I didn’t believe it. I knew better than to believe it. I wanted desperately to believe it, but I also wanted to know what happened — I needed to know what happened. And so, too afraid to speak normally and too afraid to ask questions, I demanded answers.

“What happened? Why does everyone keep telling us he passed out? They don’t put you in cardiac intensive care if you just pass out.”

My mother paused. She inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. Her breath was a mix of Basic Menthol Light 100s and Doublemint gum. After shifting her eyes from my brother’s to mine, she spoke. “His heart did stop, but they restarted it. He’s stable, but he’s not awake. After hours of testing they found he has a brain aneurysm, and it ruptured.”

“So he’s going to die?”

I didn’t ask. Not really. Maybe the average 12-year-old would have, but the average 12-year-old probably would have also asked what an aneurysm was. I didn’t have to. I watched my Aunt undergo surgery for six (six!) just a few years before. I listened as she and my father spoke about how lucky she was, about how she would have died if they had burst.

She was lucky. My father wasn’t. My father was going to die.

My mother explained they were working to drain the blood from his brain. She explained they were working to do everything they could, but there were no guarantees.

And just like that, my world disappeared. Just like Melmac (ALF’s home planet), my world exploded and my life — as I knew it — was nothing more than a distant memory.

Maybe it’s unfair to blame ALF for ruining my life. Maybe it’s unfair to put my guilt on him. But maybe, just maybe, I was doing the best I could to survive in a strange new world. And while I didn’t try to eat cats when my father died seven days later or barter lint for bottles of soda, I did what any survivor does: I found something to explain the unexplainable and moved on.

So I’m sorry, ALF: you were the unexpected casualty of my personal tragedy. But know you still hold a special place in my memory and in my heart.

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