« Letting Go of My Dad »
“Hours could seem like days.”
— Spock, The Wrath of Khan (1982)
“So can minutes.”
— The Voice in My Head, During Dad’s Lectures (1962-)
Along with my dad, about a month has passed (as I start to write this). A liminal state still envelopes the family, and I am feeling ambivalent about tenses (especially those around being):
I need to internalize my understanding that he is dead, but I’m not there yet. I should be there… or at least be substantially closer to there than I am. But I am not.
Writing this chapter will help me to figure out why... which might (in turn) help me to make some progress towards an equivalent of closure (which seems like it should be important).
There are some suspects that I can rule out right away; for example, I know that simplistic denial does not account for the delay. I have felt some grief, occasional sadness, and sporadic moments of, “Oh yeah… Dad is dead” (accompanied by various sensory images from his last days). His ashes are just a couple of feet away in a bio urn (which will end up nurturing a maple tree in New England so that he can display fall colors and secrete sweet sap). These are not abstractions; they represent concrete aspects of my life that cannot effectively be denied.
And yet that real-life experience has not been enough to make the facts feel fully real inside.
Nor can I blame the lack of closure on any remoteness from the events as they occurred; on the contrary, I was closely present as the events unfolded over the years, and the reality of the situation was impressed upon me as he was dying, including the intense exposure to the extended post mortem aftermath. For example:
Precursor Events: A handful of years ago (or so), my dad could no longer escape a conversation by getting out of his recliner; as a result, whenever he wanted to maintain unilateral control of a lecture, he would play possum. If someone took exception to his declarations, or tried gently to persuade him out of a snit, he would suddenly cover his ears (first stage), or dramatically plummet into a pretend state of deep sleep (second stage). The impact of this method relied on looking dead to the world.
Event A: I watched as the paramedics wheeled my dad out of our home backwards in a transport chair while he pretended to be unconscious, looking rather dead.
Event B: Just four nights later, on the advice of the final hospice nurse, I did not look while the mortuary attendants transferred my dad’s body from the bed onto their stretcher; however, I did watch them as they solemnly wheeled that stretcher out of our home, his body draped in a US flag.
While those were two different cases of “being wheeled out of the house while appearing not to be alive,” only one such instance really meant, “Dad is dead.” The other case felt more like there was a cadaverous hand lurking beneath moistly wormy graveyard soil, tensely waiting to spring forth and grab my ankle; that is to say, my dad was only playing dead (yet again).
Therefore, when the hospice nurse was listening for the lack of a heartbeat, I more than half expected my dad to fling open his eyes and gasp awake… precisely because that sort of thing used to happen during one of his sulks, especially if…
the rest of the conversants disregarded his fake sleep by continuing to talk among themselves, only to have...
someone express an opinion about which he simply couldn’t resist “coming back to life” to resume his lecture.
This time, though, when the nurse was confirming the lack of any pulse, that didn’t happen. He stayed dead.
And he kept staying dead when I tried to close his mouth by lifting his chin. I was trying to help him rest peacefully, or something. Even though I have never closed a dead person’s eyes, I am literately familiar with the tradition. I thought that’s what it would be like.
But nope. Wouldn’t budge.
He was dead.
He is dead.
And I know that.
So why isn’t the internalization of his death more reliable?
Why don’t I feel worse?
Why is he still… here?
…?
• • •
All in all, I suspect that I am experiencing a reluctance to let go and feel safe. I am afraid to let my guard down because my dread is entrenched, as if I might be dragged back into yet another hours-long attempt to overwhelm me with a seemingly endless barrage of, “Words, words, words” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1603).
I don’t want this to keep bothering me for the rest of my life. I feel fresh, resentful frustration boil up when I remember him talking for many dozens of looong minutes at a time, only deigning to pause so that I could fawn (in essence). I was even allowed to elaborate on occasion, just so long as I continued to comply with his theories; however, if I disagreed, then I would get out maybe one or two sentences before being interrupted by his regal gesture, the one where he would raise his eyebrows as he levitated his right hand a few inches up off of the armrest of his recliner, all while taking an indrawn breath. That was his signal for me to shut up (again) so that his cherished, beneficent wisdom could continue to flow over us from on high.
And yet he had no clear understanding of how pontifical his delivery was. (The vast majority of Popes would have blessed him with a standing ovation.) In his later years, he would come to refer to this compulsive output as his “blather”... multiple times a day. So he knew that we complained about his lecturing us, but his unwavering response over the decades was only to wallow (at similar length) in a self-deprecating drama detailing his theory around why he could do absolutely nothing to help it. He would sulk for hours in a pout to end all pouts... only to pout again.
He had not just been an only child, but spoiled as the first male in his generation, or so he and his cousins tell me... although he also said that went sour when he was in middle school.
The man could talk forever, and if you wrestled a couple of words edgewise (channeling an oiled Turk), he would still archly interrupt with the deadpan (or maybe bedpan) expression, “If I could have a turn?” Like he hadn’t already commandeered all of the turns up to that point.
In sum: aaaaarrrgh...
“Well then why didn’t you just walk out, or tell him to stop?”
Because.
Because his retaliation for any perceived slight was always catastrophic, such as being declared to not be his son.
Because we could only come to an agreement (necessary for important matters) if I paid this toll.
Because I understood that this was part of his disability.
Because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
Because that would change nothing.
Because I empathized with him.
Because my dad loved me.
Because he was dying.
Because... because....
Heartwashing.
That’s why.
• • •
Look, the point is not for me to vent. (Not here, anyway.) My dad is dead, and it seems like it would be better – more loving – to let some things fade away. So please understand that this next passage is not bile. It’s context crucial to an accurate understanding of the dynamic, however unflattering that recounting can become.
So, having set that stage, allow me to say that...
My dad had always lectured his family without any apparent awareness of just how long he had been rambling, with zero tolerance for insertion, much less outright interruption.
Sometimes he would return from work, get me and my brother out of our beds, and then have us stand there in our (respective) underwear for hour after hour as he preached. “You have to be responsible for the consequences of your actions,” he would earnestly repeat, as pretty much every day our actions had spawned semi-grave consequences for which we were responsible (of which I have written elsewhere in some depth).
Eventually, we would be swaying in place, struggling to keep our eyes open, while occasionally chanting the approved chorus of “Yes Dad” whenever it seemed like he had left us that specific opening. When we had finally been hypnotized beyond the reach of our auditory comprehension, he would wrap things up by admonishing, “Don’t laugh... Don’t laugh...”, then dismiss us to stagger laughing off to bed.
We still laugh when we’re in trouble.
And we still hate being lectured.
On many a payday Friday, my dad would come home late, and drunk. (Some periods this was more the regular pattern, but in others we would go to the grocery store instead and get a certain set of treats: roasted sunflower seeds, Fritos, sharp cheddar cheese, and light beer.) His rhetoric would be more intense, and what he said could be painful. It’s nearly 50 years ago now, and I still hear his tag lines. “Are you any good?” he would ask. To this day, I am nauseated by the muddled odors of stale cigarettes and beer, reminded that I am not any good.
Jeff’s bedroom was closer to the front door than mine, so my dad would go there first, and I would try to draw his attention by calling out to him. I don’t know why my mom didn’t try to draw him away from me or Jeff. My kindest explanation is “learned helplessness.”
Car rides could be torture. In my early teens, I (once) started to throw myself out of the moving vehicle because my dad wasn’t respecting my begging him to stop, and I couldn’t take even one more minute of his holding me hostage.
I still try to avoid having serious conversations in the car because I don’t want anyone to feel trapped.
The thing is, he didn’t really want a response. It truly didn’t matter who was there. He was therapizing himself by heaping his personal demons onto whomever his audience happened to be, where his family members were just built-in captives.
None of which did I understand as a child; instead, I just grew up wondering what the hell I was any good for, and assumed that I wasn’t unless I could prove otherwise. Which of course I couldn’t.
Which totally undermined the caring way in which he otherwise expressed his support. I also have stories about his fearlessly taking on any aggressors who threatened his family.
The point is that I’ve been living with all of this in my house again for the last several years, and it has been affecting my health and my behavior.
• • •
Here’s a terribly hard truth, requiring its own chapter: my home won’t be any safer while my mother is still alive.
• • •
When I was growing up (i.e., while I still lived at home), my conversation rules were inadequately functional in the wider world. While some of that was the result of dealing with my dad in specific, some of it came from having a group of friends (my main communication partners) who were largely high-functioning spectroids (just like my family).
As I moved beyond high school, my social circle necessarily changed. I spent almost zero time per year around my folks (phew), or with my high school friends (sadly). I lived in the dorms. As I started to date more broadly (and more often), my social circle expanded to include a number of young women who were more neurotypical (usually). I wanted them to know that I was paying attention, and that I cared about their thoughts and feelings. According to their rules, that almost always meant my obedient silent-sitting while they talked at me.
Unfortunately, my communication patterns tended to overwhelm them (when it was my turn), leading many of those women to feel that I didn’t value what they were saying; on the semi-contrary, I highly valued all of that in spirit, but my genuine interest was totally obscured by my oblivious behavior. Not surprisingly, my sophisto D&D skills from high school weren’t Baggins the babes. (Little FRP humor there.) I had industriously honed the wrong kinds of tools.
So, yeah... damn.
Naturally, I have changed my approach over time, but I am still afflicted with residual dysfunctional reflexes under stress.
At base, when people ask me to share my feelings (and so on), they have no sufficient idea what they’re risking. My thoughts and feelings and beliefs tend to be involved, even convoluted. You’ve just been reading pages’ worth of material that to me is just one cohesive idea. Yes, I have learned (pretty much) to empty my monologues onto paper rather than spewing them all over people as I refine them; for example, I haven’t talked with anyone in any detail about my dad’s death, not even with my wife. I will write this all out first. I even avoid inflicting such pondering on a counselor because I don’t want to torment the poor bastard (of whichever identity).
So I do listen. I always am listening. I always have been. But now I try to make that much more obvious by matching other people’s rules... such as when I avoid talking while I am listening.
A problem crops up when other people still want to lecture me, especially when I should be able to trust that person not to hurt me. Sometimes it matters to them that it’s me that they’re talking at, but not always.
I still make the mistake of thinking that I have been invited to participate in a discussion, when in fact someone actually wants me to just shut up and sit there while they talk. As a variation on that theme, sometimes they want me to just sit there and shut up while they talk.
Either way, having my paw caught in that bear trap is painful, and I can’t take much lecture at all before I escalate traumatically and start gnawing at my leg (as my brother describes it). This can lead to my peculiar brand of an autistic meltdown.
All that said, my tolerance had been steadily improving, until my dad and I shared a house again.
• • •
I have spent the last several years here at my home office desk (off and on, of course), worrying about my dad brewing storm clouds in his recliner just one room over. He would nap fitfully during the day, then lie awake at night and obsessively ruminate over past indignities and worst-case scenarios. I couldn’t help but wonder what he was waiting to lecture me about next, and then my mom would come in and announce (ruefully... wearily) that my presence had been requested in the audience chamber, “when I had a minute”… which threatened hours.
I would find time to listen to him escalate because I knew that he would experience at least some relief from his personal demons if I stood there while he talked. I would deliberately stick my paw in that bear trap because I didn’t want him to be in constant pain. Sometimes, sometimes, he would offer me an opportunity to respond. Most of those times, however, it was only because my uttering a few words would give him a seed from which to grow yet another chapter. But there were also times when I was able to talk him down out of his own variety of autistic meltdown.
I was there because he couldn’t help the bad parts. Deep inside, he was fundamentally a good boy. Loving. Generous. (Betrayed. Damaged.) I wanted the end of my dad’s life to be better than the bad parts had been… and that end turned out to last years and years.
• • •
On top of all that, I had always admired the way that his own father had loved me without condition (albeit he died when I was still a kid). I wanted to be that kind of man.
And yes, some people do claim that there is no such thing as unconditional love, but that’s just (im)pure sophistry. It’s true that love is sometimes so conditional as to be fragile, and in such cases maybe it is not worthy of being referred to as love (unmodified). But at other times love does deserve to be honored as wholly unconditional; that is to say, it is only susceptible to breaking under circumstances that you would hope would be utterly bizarre.
To broadly misquote Dave from The Full Monty (1997), “Unconditional love there may be, but unconditional like there is not”; in other words, there are times when you can love someone just fine, but not like them very much (at the time).
Like my grampa did, I love(d) my dad without condition.
And frankly, given that I put up with this sort of chronic abuse from my dad (there, I said it, okay... abuse abuse abuse), then what won’t I weather with the people whom I hold even closer in my heart?
Now there’s a question that I wasn’t anticipating when I started writing.
I can answer this far right now...
I love my wife and children without condition.
I have always liked my children (and continue to like them unabated).
[redacted]
I have experienced a number of long-term but ultimately failed relationships where the love-deadening circumstances – the ones that I had blithely assumed would be utterly bizarre – turned out instead to be disappointingly commonplace.
Back then, I was much harder to like enough to love, made all the worse by how little I knew about choosing partners discriminately. I felt so very not good for anything that I would glom onto anyone who showed me the slightest bit of interest, not realizing how imbalanced that dynamic was.
When my first marriage failed, it had taken me 19 years to learn that I was able to give up. [redacted]
While my mom has that ability to give up (or at least threatened my dad with it, once upon a time), he did not have it, other than to make punitive declarations of persona non grata. Note well: he never non-grataed my mom’s persona, knowing that she’d just shrug, walk away, and never look back. They were married for well over 60 years... until his death did them part.
And that concludes the contextual elaboration within which sits the following description of my dad’s death, about which I have been so slow to come to terms; therefore, it is apparent that a significant factor in that lack of progress has been the sheer amount of information that has been processing.
So let’s see if I can(’t) bear down and finally get this finished.
• • •
When it comes to people about whom I care, I find myself virtually unable to withhold second, third, and subsequent chances (and hope that they will extend me a similar grace). I cannot remain closed, so there are some people who injure me again and again and again. For this reason, I spent the vast majority of my adult life not pursuing contact with my parents: it wasn’t safe.
But then about eight years ago (or so), my nuclear family home expanded generationally. We all moved into the same house. The benefits for my family have been significant, so I have overlooked the erratic treatment by my parents. Yes, it can hurt, but I’m used to it, and I understand it. I don’t take it personally. If an abused animal bites, it’s the fault of their abusers… who likely had been abused in their time. I recognize what happened to my parents, and how they came to be this way, and how trapped they are.
No: how trapped he was.
So, that is another part of the puzzle, namely that I have become used to my parents being around all of the time; in fact, my dad became increasingly housebound, finally coming to the point where he would spend virtually all of his time in the bedroom in a powered recliner, reading the paper, watching TV, and ruminating over past wrongs. He used to get up to put bird seed in the feeder, or to watch the waterfall in the backyard. The near-final stage of those years lasted several months. He was always present… a fixture.
Then he had a couple of short hospital stays, the first of which led to the use of a Foley catheter. That event was important for two reasons. First, it meant that when my dad was not a presence in the bedroom, it was because he was just in the hospital for a little bit and would be right back. Second, he could no longer make it to the bathroom and back safely, or at all comfortably, so he was just that much more anchored to the chair… just that much more permanent and unmoving an entity.
That’s also when various caregivers entered our lives. People were trying to help us figure out how best to support my father, and how to be optimally planful about the future.
At first, the notion was that he might be able to get rid of the catheter in a couple of weeks, and maybe even recover some of his mobility, so he was on home health rather than palliative care; that is to say, the goal of home health is to help people to recuperate. There was talk about clients who had been on and off of home health for spans of many months or even years. The PT came by to promote at least enough exercise to help my dad safely use the walker; however, my dad’s personal priority at that point was to remain in individual control of his healthcare decisions, and not to let the PT (or anyone else) “boss him around.”
That’s how he perceived things. He was afraid.
He even referred to the “PT Nazis” when the PT was only trying to support my dad’s expressed goals (like being able to get to the bathroom and the waterfall). But when asked about such goals, he would also talk at length about peripheral topics around his control of his life, and how he was well cared for by his family, and my mom being his revered therapeutic gardener, and so on. Every new caregiver was subjected to this speech.
Many, many people were being patient with his need to ramble on. It’s true that giving him room to express his concerns was important, but nothing was allowed to change for the better. He’d agree to engage in PT, and occasionally allow someone to help him walk a circuit of the lower floor of the house, but more often than not he would start to escalate about the evil PT and change his mind at the last minute.
Emotionally, he was having a very rough time of it. His lifelong defenses included avoidant traits that reflected his strong apprehension about any change… because for him, every change risked pain. That’s not unusual at all for autistic people. So he kept digging himself in more deeply.
Our family focus was on supporting his hygiene and comfort, given that we were in no physical shape (individually or collectively) to safely transport him around the house. I had to lift him a couple of times (through sheer lack of viable alternatives), and that took out my back (as predicted). My son had to help him after a backwards collapse onto the floor (that took out a bookshelf and left my dad bleeding). My mom proposed that she could act as his stabilizing balancer, which would have resulted in them both falling.
In the face of this hullabaloo, the OT made a referral that brought about a hospice evaluation, but since there was no terminal diagnosis of less than six months, my dad’s consequent identification as a candidate for hospice care was not approved.
After a week or so, he was shifted to palliative care, which is what happens when recuperation is no longer in the picture (such as the PT being refused), and the decline into death might still be more than six months. Similarly, we were told that some people repeatedly go on and off of palliative care as they experience cycles of recovery and relapse.
So this was still looking like a long haul.
But then the second hospitalization occurred. He collapsed (down and back into my supporting hold) as we were trying to help him to the bathroom. That is a long story in itself, and portrays my dad in an unsympathetic light, entirely at the (lack of) mercy of his challenges, so I’m not going to get into the details. Suffice to say that the paramedics arrived and transported him to the hospital (as mentioned earlier, wheeled backwards out of the house).
When he got back home a couple of days later, he had the terminal six month diagnosis that hospice required: sepsis, unspecified organism (associated with aspiration pneumonia, a UTI, and stage III chronic kidney disease… among other things).
He did not want medical intervention to prolong his life. Not even antibiotics.
The nurses removed most of his remaining medications, then added optional pain killers. At this point, he told them that his family provided him excellent care at home, but that he was feeling ready to move to the facility down the street, saying, “Let it be known that I made the first move.” We were told that finding him a bed could take another couple of weeks or so, and that he might be there for months. So I was still planning for months’ worth of time.
But then things went steeply downhill.
He lost interest in eating and drinking.
He started in on the pain medications.
The notion of “months” vanished.
Within a couple of days, he was dead.
(Dad is dead.)
• • •
I keep going over those last days, trying to understand how it caught me so off guard. That feels like an important factor in the lingering suspicion about my dad still being around.
When he started taking the morphine, I was blithely thinking that it was just to make him more comfortable, and that he’d have plenty of lucid periods over the coming weeks. I really wasn’t expecting what happened.
He needed the medicine for pain every two hours, and I was not the one who kept getting up that night to dose him. I did it once, but we had decided that I would be the one to stay alert during the next day. [redacted[
When the hospice nurse stopped by the next morning, someone described how my dad would occasionally make a moaning sound that seemed to indicate pain. The nurse upped his dosage, saying that the point was to make him as comfortable as we could, and that there was no reason for him to be feeling any pain at this point. The higher dosage would allow us to rest for longer spans in between (and then be able to take care of him better while we were awake).
Later that evening, my dad got his dose. Not terribly long after that, as I was stepping out of the bedroom just to wander about and see how things were going, I was told that he was dead.
I was caught off guard. I had failed to distinguish between two different types of possibility:
For several years, there had been an unsubstantiated possibility that he could die at any moment.
More recently, however, there had been a substantiated possibility that he would die within the next few months.
The fuzziness of the former had affected my understanding of the latter. While I knew that the morphine would have him drifty, I thought that his actual death would still be a matter of days or weeks and so forth. I wasn’t expecting that once he took that first dose, he’d effectively be out of contact, and then be dead.
In short, his dying wasn’t a surprise, but I wasn’t expecting the speed with which he ultimately died.
Nor was I expecting that I wouldn’t have a chance to talk with him again. Not that there was anything that needed saying. We had gone over everything that was important to him, and I felt no need to say any of the stuff that you’ve been reading here.
But it would’ve been nice to give him a hug and say, “Thanks for being my dad.”
“You did well.”
• • •
I keep asking myself, “How did I miss it?” And I keep coming back to this: I thought that I was paying close attention to what was going on.
Someone had let me know that my dad felt reluctant about taking the medicine.
That was not unusual. He was funny about all medications. First, he wouldn’t want to take whatever it was, but then after he finally started, he wouldn’t want to change it. Unless of course he was doctoring himself based upon his concocted medical theories, then he would just change it up... and then he would want to talk with the doctor on the phone to discuss starting them up again (or whatever). The saga of the tamsulocin alone is epic. The doctors were notably patient with him, and clearly remembered him from call to call.
For years, he wouldn’t change his warfarin dose when advised (every couple of weeks or so), but instead would influence his INR levels by adjusting the amount of alcohol or leafy greens that he would eat with his personally formulated, special dinner salad (that my mom had to make for him virtually every day). He would talk about the doctor advising changes to the dose, and say, “I’m not about to play that game.”
What? What game? I... I just... arrrgh.
When a doctor changed the dosage of his medicines as a result of his first hospital stay, he didn’t want to make that adjustment for a few days after coming home because he wanted to first finish taking the set of pills that he had already arranged in his pill holder (during his weekly ritual).
Why? Because they were already there. They were already set. We couldn’t just go in there and change the pills in the holders. That would be utter madness. He wasn’t about to play that game either.
So he was already feeling waaay out of control because most of his medicines had been stopped altogether, including the coumadin, and the notion of starting to take the pain killers was not an easy change for him.
Plus he was used to just trying to brave out the pain... that was just his approach. Who knows where that came from... but probably from his drive to avoid change.
Have I mentioned that my dad was some variation on high functioning? I have? Well, good. Cuz he wuz.
Which all added up to mean that he was not feeling like he could give himself permission to use pain killers.
I was the one who told him that he didn’t need to be brave about the pain, and that it was okay to take the medicine. He listened to me, and after a few moments he nodded his head, and made a summoning hand gesture to mean, “OK, bring it on.”
Given how fast he died after that, it feels like I talked him into ending things. I only meant for him not to be in pain in the time that he had left.
I keep finding myself coming back around to that thought.
Jeff had arranged for a wheel of dry Monterey jack cheese to be shipped to our house. I was going to make an Italian cheese-and-rice frittata that was one of my dad’s very most favorite things to eat. We call it “rice cake.” I told him that the wheel was on the way, and he gleefully exclaimed, “Yay, cheese!” He was still cognitively with it at that time. But his health declined so suddenly that it never happened. It is early October now, and I will make rice cake as I usually do, to honor his birthday right near Thanksgiving.
I was even thinking that he’d get to read over and approve his obituary. I wrote it up with Jeff’s contributions over a day or two, but by that time Dad was only present enough to wake up just a bit as we shifted his position. He was with it just enough to swallow the morphine (and get some water off of a toothette, plus some lip balm). The obituary is kind of clunky because of the rush, but I think that he would have liked it very much.
As we approached the end, before the morphine, he was resting assured that we had everything taken care of, and that my mom’s continued well being was guaranteed. He was at peace. And after the morphine, the end was swift and painless.
So I need to resign myself to the fact that I never got to round things out with my dad.
I know that’s entirely common. I know that’s something that vast numbers of people experience. But right now, it’s still another factor that’s holding me back.
I just wasn’t expecting to be one of the many people who “never expected things to end like this.”
I thought that we had time for rice cake together.
I thought that I had time to say thanks.
Dammit.
• • •
Taken all together, this story illuminates the reason that I still don’t feel safe.
I have been living in the same house as someone who – although they were good to me – was pretty bad to me. I didn’t have sufficient time as an adult to escape from it and heal. So it is entirely reasonable to expect that my reflexes won’t change any time soon, or (at this point) maybe any time ever.
But writing helps to expose the stigmata to the light, and fade.
The more that I turn that image over in my mind and heart, namely the sense of risk around letting go of the fear, the more that the truth of it seems to be a real part of who I am.
It’s not the whole puzzle, but it does comprise the corners and the edges.
I know that my dad was proud of me, and that he loved me. He was a very generous person. His sense of compassion was intense, leaving him so very vulnerable to being hurt (repeatedly) that he built massively spiky defenses. The sad part is that he came to be compelled by those defensive constructs, chronically obsessing over a life filled with hurts (both real and imagined).
My dad could be very supportive, and was often a delight to be around; unfortunately, it was his challenges that ultimately controlled his interactions with people. That was true even with those whom he loved, because some of those people were not very careful with his feelings; in fact, some of those people were deliberately hurtful. That sort of betrayal is traumatic for a child, and continues to be painful for an adult.
I know.
I really, really know that.
Maybe you do, too.
Epilogue
As I have been writing this, I have erased some of the sections as I have gone along.
They are events about which I still feel wounded. While writing things down helps me to let them go, I don’t want to associate a bunch of bad stories about my dad with the end of his life.
I am told that one of my cousins sat at her mother’s hospital bedside as she lay dying, taking the opportunity to work out all of the wrongs done to her. That struck me as an awful thing to do (whether or not it happened).
I don’t want to do that kind of thing.
I didn’t do it when my dad was alive.
I didn’t do it while he was aging, for reasons explained above (in addition to any other reasons of which I am still unaware).
I won’t do it now that he is dead.
(Dad is dead.)
I had my gripes, but I was determined never to run him through the mill.
Truly, what would be the point of doing so?
Sure, I know that some people find that sort of thing to be cathartic... hashing it out with whomever.
But there is value in not taking someone to task when they will only be hurt.
Confronting my dad would only have hurt him, not helped him, and I don’t need to feel better at someone else’s expense. I felt no need to make my dad aware, to raise his consciousness, to bring him to repent, or any of that stuff.
At base: forgiving and forgetting is kind. It’s nice. It’s loving.
Plus, I can feel better just through my writing. Having written this chapter, I understand much better what has been going on with me, and what I can do to keep making progress.
What I’m really wondering now is whether I need anybody else to read this (in my lifetime, or ever).
If you are reading this story, well, then it is safe to presume that I decided ‘yes’ (one way or another).
Maybe it will help you. Maybe it will help me.
So... thank you.
Epier-logue
I saw my dad yesterday (on Holy Saturday), alive and (relatively) well, just a little bit more than seven months after his death.
No dream. No hallucination. No illusion.
At the grocery store. A real person.
From top to bottom, seen from the side as he passed across my field of vision from right to left:
Same dark-grey wool driver’s cap.
Same haircut and beard.
Same tinted glasses.
Same skin tone.
Same Land’s End green jacket.
Same loose khaki pants.
Same black leather sneakers.
Same shuffling walk.
Same mannerisms of the hands.
I don’t know who this man was. I saw him a little later with his wife (presumably), wandering around the store.
I felt trapped... like I was back in the space of not knowing how long the lecture was going to be. And of course that inability to escape triggered the precursor sensations that I associate with an impending meltdown.
So I startled in that moment and found myself buying a lot of Girl Scout cookies.
The upshot is this:
writing this all out has helped me enough for day-to-day living.
But that is not enough to actually defuse the trauma buried inside.
Not sure what I’m gonna do about that.