Three Months

 Well Dad,

It's been exactly three months since your extremely sudden passing. You warned us in no uncertain terms it was soon to come, but you'd been warning us for forty years, how were we to know when the 'boy who cried death' told the truth? We might have known if we read the facts properly: so many of your bodyparts were going wonky; your brain made you list to the side, your heart made you take incessant naps, your memory of iron began to slip, you fell once a month and if you didn't actively fall you at least fainted. And still we didn't believe it because every reliable doctor in Baltimore worked on you. Even with all that, we were not prepared for death. I prepared myself for an agonizing 10 year decline, and I think Mom secretly steeled herself too. Even in a compromised state, I would have rather you stuck around so I could prove my penance by taking care of you as you took care of me, but knowing you, I'm sure you'd tell us that you'd rather have died J... T..... than risk living as whatever might come. 

I don't know whether that's a mature point of view or an immature one, but truth be told, you were a boy in some ways right to the end. The public wit and the businessman of vast shrewdness concealed a man whom it barely took anything to set off into nauseous worry, worry you'd take out on us all every hour of every day for decades. It wouldn't be fair to blame you for the hole in my brain growing to the size of an exploding atom bomb for thirty-five years, but this is, finally, my space that you can't dominate, so at least here I get to say: you didn't help. 

What you took to be my 'hostility' was always based on one basic fact: that for decades you clearly thought I was faking everything--the disorganization, the panic, the procrastination, the delusion. You might have believed I was suffering, but to you, it was always a failure of character, not neurology; just a spoiled kid throwing a tantrum, a manipulative son playing the victim, and I never stopped suspecting that on those rare moments it got through to you that the suffering I experienced was very real, you secretly believed it just. In your generation, people like me either ended up on welfare or in mental institutions. You devoted much of your life to serving just such people, but it embarrassed you to deal with a person like that in your daily life, and talked many times of jealousy for parents of my peers who had children they could be proud of. You did your duty toward me thousands of times over, and you certainly loved me, but from my childhood onward, you willingly told me you were ashamed of me.

If ever there's proof a narcissist can be an exemplary human, it was you. Hundreds of people thought they knew you, but I won't sugarcoat you in death; when it came to the words you used, you were a schmuck. I'd list quotes but there are so many that I have no idea which to choose. For the vast majority of my life, praise from you was as likely as rain from Death Valley. You were not abusive, but you were a petty tyrant. Life with you was a never ending list of mistakes we made, and you freely admitted that if we did something right, you thought it proper to move onto the next thing we could do better because there is always room for improvement. You did not hit your children often, but you were quick to yell and manhandle us in ways that you meant to be quite painful. You spent the second half of your life telling your family all the things we did wrong, and then were mystified and hurt when we didn't immediately affirm that you were a magnificent father and husband. And would that were the extent of your self-importance. One friend of yours came up to me at the funeral and talked about how you were hysterical company, but what made you a gem was that your jokes were never mean and always at your own expense. My jaw went to the floor. If he knew only but one of the cheap shots you'd take at in private at the expense of friends, family, colleagues, your own children and wife. Anywhere you sensed a weak opening, you poured acid on it gleefully. I often wondered if anything gave you more pleasure than reducing other people's dignity to the size of a mouse. 

Now, let's be pellucidly clear. However bad you were in my adolescence, I was worse, worse in ways for which I will never permit forgiveness. Whether due to justified grievance or entitlement, I was a monster: rageful, full of threats, sometimes violent, issuing awful provocations at prime volume, a domestic terror suffering from lacerating mental illness, lashing out like an uncaged animal against a world that seemed to torture me like one. In my mind, I simply thought I was fighting back against a world of fathers, teachers, so-called friends and family who made life hell for me at every turn, but much of that hell may have been in my mind, not theirs, and I caused far more grievance than I ever redressed. Nevertheless, I was the son, not the father, trapped in a situation I knew even then would bound me forever to a gordian knot of emotional paralysis. You were my father, and offered barely any solution but attempts at harsh discipline and vitriolic resentment. I was not nor am not lazy nor a leach nor a bum nor a deadbeat nor worthless nor no good nor bound by excuses and cruches nor undeserving of a middle class life nor the worst traits of our family incarnated into one son, \many of these insults and many more were said in the good moments, not the fights. But I can't imagine what it must have been to deal with me thirty years ago; and every day of my life, I worry that if I truly venture into the world the way other people do, that monster will return. For more than thirty years, I am nailed to a bed of suffering without limit or end, and all I ever wanted to do is get up from it. Your solution was walk around with the nails still in, and occasionally hammered in more just in case I could ever walk free of the bed. 

Yet when it came to deeds, you were an absolute mensch. Mensch doesn't even cover it: you were a saint. Whatever contempt you secretly felt for so many people in your life, there was nothing you would not do for them: time, money, encouragement; keeping company to the lonely, visiting the sick, giving the bags and bags of money to charity that you'd resent if any of us spent a little on ourselves, tutoring the learning disabled for hours and hours--both the sons of your workers and particularly your own son: every trip to the airport you had to be the driver, every home repair in someone else's house, it had to be your wrench, taking your kids' friends to literally anything and everything for twenty years. Thirty years after you sold your nursing homes, you had a whole payroll of ex-workers you'd help out with money and jobs whenever they needed it. In spite of 40 years acrimony, when my health went kaput you re-opened your doors to me as a full member of the household with no questions asked. You insisted on cooking me meals, figuring out my finances, keeping track of my car, and a thousand other things. I obviously didn't want you to be the one to do all that, but as usual, you insisted, probably because you never thought it would get done if left to myself, and it's true, to this day, such things give me vastly inordinate stress so I thank you for it now a hundred times over as I've thanked you five hundred times then. You had your perspective just as I had mine, and you've earned the right for yours to be heard a thousand times over. 

You were on a lifelong mission to prove you would do everything better than everyone else, and one of the worst interactions in daily life is when a narcissist is proven right, and a vast majority of the time, you were right about that. You were impressed with yourself to a point that in anyone else would have been delusional, but quantitatively, your perception was correct: you really were as brilliant and altruistic as you seemed in your own head, and you did everything you could to live up to your grandiose self-image. You were mean precisely because the sense of responsibility you felt to the people in your life was implacable, and you snarled with resentment at what you took to be obligations which nobody else you knew took upon themselves. You are the only Baby Boomer who lived his whole life for duty and service. Your dreams meant nothing to you, and even if it was the only thing about you that was quiet, you quietly made whole communities flourish. 

Life philosophies like yours are what keep communities afloat: communities, institutions, families, whole cities and societies and countries. You were born in January 1946, but you were one of the last members of the Greatest Generation whose belief in self-sacrifice gave the world generations of prosperity. But just like Boomers felt with the Greatest Generation, you leave the next generation with an impossible standard of self-sacrifice in a situation too easy compared to yours to understand why we need to make it. What did you work that hard for? Was it so your family could live in peace? Or was it so another generation of us could go to war with life again? 

Now that you're gone, I feel as though I've truly gone out 'into the wild' of social interaction for the first time in my life. Just in the weeks before your passing I threw caution to the wind and tried to embrace lifestyles that I never thought would appeal to me like polyamory with an eye to trying kink. It was not a perfect fit, but I was so lucky to be in a relationship just as you passed, and in periods of reflection feel terrible guilt that the happiest period of my life was just around the time you left us, but that happiness is over now. This new world is no different than the old, full of the same arrogance, hubris, compulsive exploitation and self-delusion as yours: in both cases, just a sanction for the powerful to exploit those with less. I'm now at the beginning of a period of miserable alienation from two completely different worlds where they don't even allow me the dignity of quarter-membership. 

All I've got for sure is the writing, the music, the reading, the inanimate objects and air that give my life meaning and acceptance no human ever did. Lonely people take to the internet because real life is tough, but part of why I post on the internet is because it's the one space I have where I know you couldn't dominate it. 

You viewed us all as entitled, me particularly of course, and never let us forget it. Perhaps you're right, about me at least, but just because you were able to do relatively extraordinary things does not mean your children should, and even if we are capable of repeating your miracles, why would we want to do what you wanted from us? We saw what a psychic toll it took. You were outwardly joyous, but inwardly a man of very real turmoil. The scars of parents who survived the Holocaust were everywhere on you: their losses, their neglect, their rage. Your view of family being an extension of your arms was precisely what you learned from your own father. He too was a great and good man, but like you he was colossally temperamental, provocative, arrogant, and traumatized, like you and like me. 

The nadir of your fathership was at my Bar Mitzvah. I had my own nadirs, worse than yours that I'm not ready to write about, but you were the example to set, not that which to follow. You had me work for it like a dog. Conservative and reform synagogues do the torah portions abridged, and usually the bar mitzvah portion is shared by two kids. I did an entire parsha of orthodox synagogue proportion, along with reading from two extra torahs and the second longest haftorah of the year.  It was the great triumph of an adolescence that had very few. And then you grabbed the microphone at the party for 40 minutes to complain about the cost and make fun of every single guest in the room, complete with a slideshow that showed my then overweight mother in a bikini, leering at your best friend's wife, commenting on the disappointment of another friends' 'wedding night,' commenting on how your 'attention problems' have been 'passed down,' regaling to the guests in great detail the history of your own life. It should have been the great triumph of my childhood years, when I got to show the world that a supposedly disabled kid could do greater things than all the normal ones. You made me do the whole thing, and then you made it all about you. 

I was my own worst enemy, not you, but if there were any hope to set me on a redeemable path from my early years, that night made it much more difficult. This was just one instance of when I finally got a chance for the spotlight and you either ripped it from my hands or undermined me in private just before I went onstage or right after I came off. You always claimed at raised volume you were my biggest fan and best friend, but friends don't do this, and great fathers certainly don't. Whenever I brought it up later, you always told me that I used it in fights as an excuse for the latest thing you resented about me. If I were really interested in fighting, I could have brought up dozens of others. 

But it only occurred to me, thirty years later, that your Bar Mitzvah was the source of a trauma that was if anything far worse. Your father was determined to make your Bar Mitzvah the event that showed how he made it in America: Mo.... Tu..., formerly Me.... Ti......, had triumphed in a world that wanted him dead. When you freaked out from the stress and cut the back of your hair yourself, Zaydie beat you so hard that your younger brother had to separate the two of you, shouting 'You're gonna kill him!' 

I fear that I've inherited a bit of your narcissism, more than a bit, but neither your competence nor your altruism. At 43, staring down my life at what you never let me forget is a vast wreckage of irresponsibility, I still dream away of the day I finally produce the great art that my own delusional self-image whispers is somewhere within me, and so absorbed for half a year have I been with my love life that I've barely begun to mourn you in earnest. 

When I do think about it, it's not sadness or loss, it's terror and shame. I have been so caught up in overwhelming guilt about that fight the day before which I worry agitated you to death, that I have not yet been able to mourn you in any other way. Until perhaps this weekend, my memories have only been of the final day when I saw you get into a fight with your grandson, not quite five, in which you partook of tug of war over a permanent marker while screaming at him. When I told you not to do this you started with a familiar opening gambit with 'of course you disapprove of what I do', meaning that I always take everybody's side against you in the legionary number of disagreements you always raised with your family members, and when I said something along the lines of 'he's just four', you snarled at me as though you wanted to take a swing, and started a raised voice lecture about how you have responsibilities to keep things in order, and even if I don't think your responsibilities are truly responsibilities, you know they are.

What got me was not the lecture, it was the snarl, and it was that you did it in front of E__, from whom every adult but you agreed we would shield our disagreements. When you left the room, I was trembling with frenzy. I very nearly followed you into the next room and said that if you ever got into a physical altercation with E__ again I would pull you out of the room by the hair. I managed to calm myself down sufficiently to not say it. My next idea was to take the magic marker and scrawl all over the kitchen wall in exactly the manner you dreaded E__ would do. Finally I took what I took to be the sensible option: went into the next room and told you that if you ever got into a physical altercation again with E__, I'd tell his parents to not bring him over. You started again, the exact same snarl, then denying it was a physical altercation, I say 'physical altercation has no meaning if it was not that', and then you start with the exact same lecture about responsibilities. And in a masterly coup de grace, I tell you to 'Go to hell' before I leave the room. 

A few minutes later, you, so full of bluster, start talking to my Mom in the next room over about what I said. I immediately recognize the tone, it's your loud 'whisper of complaint' that you always meant for me to hear. 'His usual smack talk' I thought to myself and I raise my voice to be heard in the next room "And I meant every word." You answered, strangely cooly, "I don't doubt it." At that moment, I see, this does not look like a typical reaction. You looked genuinely disturbed to me. You were never good with little kids, unable to let go of the irony that defined every interaction you ever had, but your grandkids were the joy of your dotage, the people you'd been working for your entire life, and I'd threatened to try to take them away. You knew that my brother and sister-in-law mean business when it comes to how the family acts in front of E__, and if I say something, they might listen to me. 

Usually, by 12 hours after a spat, we apologized, and life went on. Growing up, a sincere apology from you was as rare as sunlight in an Arctic winter, especially as you made a practice of not accepting apologies from me. 'Sorry means you'll never do it again!' you'd often yell at me when I was a kid. One time I threw that line back at you when Mom made you apologize for something, so you said, 'Well, I'm not too sorry.' But as you aged, it dawned on you that apologies may be important, and I'd long since realized that as a crazy person, 'I'm sorry' is the phrase I need tattoo'd on my hand. But this was a sufficiently bad fight that there was no apology in twelve hours. I'd already had a miserable week, and was clearly more sensitive than usual. I would need another twelve hours at least before an apology was ready. 

But for an hour or more, you and I sat next to each other in the den on our computers. Not a word passed between us. When you were done, you simply pushed in your desk chair, and went to the house's back. I stayed up late as I usually do, and would hear you as always making your many nightly trips to the bathroom. The next morning I hear you stirring in the kitchen as I always do, but I sleep late, partly out of fatigue, partly out of depression. Suddenly I heard my mother saying something I can't quite make out, but in the middle of a distinct sob, all I heard was 'he's probably gone!' After I ran downstairs in my boxers, it took me about twenty seconds to put the thought together: 'I killed him.' As I sat in the house after my mother and brother drove to the hospital, that was my primary thought. At 11:21, I felt a shudder go through my body that was almost mystical, a few seconds later I remember to look at my phone and I see a missed call from Mom, and I knew. 

'I killed him' was my primary thought on the drive to the hospital. It was my primary thought next to your body. It was my primary thought on the day of your funeral. It was my primary thought at shiva, at shloshim. The next thought usually came to reassure me, 'how had our relationship not killed him already?' 

Just as I'm my father's son, perhaps you're your son's father. If I live every day of my life with terrible obsessive thoughts, so might have you. You would hardly be the first septuagenarian to die of severe mental agitation. We will never know what happened in your final eighteen hours, but the thought that you died alone, miserable, as horrified of your thoughts as your son was every day for years, has haunted me every day for three months. I don't wish those thoughts on my worst enemy, and I certainly don't wish them on my father. 

There's an empty bedroom in my parents house right next to mine where I've slept for the last three years, and in the bedroom is a pair of baby shoes. I brought them downstairs, thinking they might be J___'s, or at least an old pair. But what I didn't notice was the moniker on the shoe's outside: 'Baby Jack.'

I couldn't believe it. My grandparents who'd barely spoken English got customized baby shoes for a baby that had now died a not quite old man. Every time I pass that room, if the door is open, those shoes break my heart. You too were once an innocent little baby, full of unlimited potential, a story yet to be written in an era when so many stories were prematurely erased. 

I stare at those shoes, and thus far it is the only thing that's provoked me to fight back tears. 

I will mourn you yet Dad. I love you, and I will forever be honored to be your son. 

Evan