Most of the people who know me have no idea that my father died last November. The reason they don’t know is because I don’t mention it, and the reason I don’t mention it is that I expect my reaction will disappoint them. The strongest emotion I felt in the days following his death was relief. No remorse. No sadness. No joy - just this gently dawning sense of peace within myself. As I told Dan, I was just so glad to know that I really didn’t have to see him again.
As I have mentioned before, my father was a mean, paranoid, misogynistic, drunk gambler. He was cruel and at times violent toward his children. I know this description fits a lot of dads – I’m not trying to say that mine was the worst. I’m just saying that he was a dick of a person. Especially as he aged and allowed his body to be eaten up by various addictions, poor diet, lethargy and depression, he really had no charms, other than an impressively acidic sarcasm that I seem to have inherited to some degree. That quality on its own isn’t too endearing. And, seeing as he had never shown me any tenderness or affection or concern for my well-being, I eventually decided that I didn’t owe him any daughterly loyalty.
Several years ago, I secretly encouraged my mother to leave my father and the last time I saw him was the day I helped her move out of the house where I was raised. He and I didn’t speak much that day. He made a few attempts to contact me over the next two years, including once when he showed up at my workplace unannounced (thankfully, I wasn’t there). These half-hearted attempts to reconcile an empty relationship really pissed me off. I was also pissed at the rest of my family for pretending to see some secret, redeeming greatness in him, just like the proverbial emperor’s new clothes. So, I stopped talking to the lot of them for a while.
After the surprise visit at my job, I didn’t hear anything from or about my father for well over a year. Then, about three years ago, a flurry of in-family group emails informed me that he had disappeared from his apartment in Nevada. He was missing for several days before my mother tracked him down in a Vegas hospital. He had suffered brain damage when he drunkenly fell and hit his head at a casino. After a couple of decades of steadily deteriorating health, including a stroke, two heart attacks, and quadruple bypass surgery, he had finally drunk himself into a nursing home.
That time he went missing was a turning point for me. I happened to be really unhappy then and had been drinking a ton all summer. Hearing about my father’s disappearance made me slow down and sober up. His reappearance as a vegetable was an even bigger eye-opener. But the unexpected happy part was that I also had the relief of knowing he was physically incapable of popping up in my world. And that was about the time I stopped hating my father so much.
A lot of people don’t understand that’s the best part of estranging yourself from someone you despise – you don’t have to hate them anymore. I don’t enjoy hating anyone, walking around with that shit in my soul. I’d rather let it go. Turns out, letting go is a lot easier when your foe is gone.
When my father’s life ended, he left behind a pretty meager version of himself. Even I can admit that he once cast a much brighter light – never from his heart, but definitely from his brain. I can’t see that his death was so bad for anyone, even himself. Given that, and my void of love for the man, I find myself occasionally referring to his death quite nonchalantly. And you know what? People can’t handle that shit. I have had the following interaction twice this summer: someone asks me, “Hey Tara, where does your father live?” and I casually respond, “He’s dead”. Then that person says, “What? Huh?” so I repeat, a bit louder, “He’s dead”. But then, that person continues to pretend they can’t hear me until I say, in a soft tone, “He passed away” and they say, “Oh, I’m so sorry!” and I say, “Thank you” or “It’s okay” or some other thing that will make them feel more comfortable about my bad dad’s death. I guess that, because I’m generally a pretty nice person, they don’t want to think of me as being so callous. What they don’t know is that the day I decided I wanted my father out of my life was the day I started to really live.
1 comment:
Very well-written. :)
Post a Comment