The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

“Pluck out these damn hairs in my ears. They’re driving me nuts they’re so itchy.”

  |||||||||||

  My father’s health was fragile, though stable—or so we all thought— when a mental-health journal agreed to publish another essay I’d written about the therapy and my lawsuit in June 2014. The special issue, the editor had clarified, would be devoted to “psychiatric medication.”

  In late August, on the eve of the publication, the journal’s editor contacted me to say that some members of the journal’s governing board had objected to my essay on the grounds that they’d found my story to be “in bad taste,” generally “offensive to psychiatry.” They didn’t want to publish my essay, but agreed to hear any rationale I might be able to provide as to why it should be included in their magazine.

  My editor was outraged, and said as much to the board, and to me. Considering the journal had been created specifically “by” and “for” survivors of mental health to provide a venue in which they could voice personal experiences about a system that sometimes ended up harming the very people it was meant to help, she found the board’s hesitation reprehensible, bordering on censorship, as well as undermining her own role as the sole acquisitions editor.

  Still, she asked me to comment.

  I reiterated to the board that I thought it important, in this “supposed politically advanced day and age,” to read true-life stories about psychiatry’s treatment of homosexuality. My lawsuit had settled out of court only in the not-too-distant past. Political and personal change had, of course, occurred since the days of my treatment. “Conversion therapies” were now almost universally denounced by all official mental-health organizations, including the World Health Organization. In 2013, California had become the first state and jurisdiction anywhere in the world to pass legislation banning conversion therapy for minors. Other states had since passed, or were about to introduce, similar legislation—events that would have been unheard of during my own therapy.

  I was convinced, however, that any official change about the so-called diagnosis and treatment of homosexuality from within the boundaries of psychiatry would not necessarily change what was still in the hearts of some, though not all, of its practitioners, as well as any number of other mental-health providers. Changing laws was not the same as changing hearts. When all was said and done, some members of my own family still could not look me in the eyes and talk about the fact that I was “a homosexual,” occasionally even lapsing into debates in front of me about how “certain interest groups want special rights” and are “wholly responsible for the fall of Western values.”

  To assuage any of the board members’ fears about a potential libel suit, I explained that all names in my essay had, of course, been changed. Only my own name was “real.”

  After days of back and forth, the board concluded that there was an “ethical responsibility to honor the testimony of peers,” particularly those concerned with experiences of abuse—abuse made possible in the first place by ignoring or silencing the voices of victims. They acknowledged the courage it took to break out of any abusive relationship: Speaking, writing, and testifying in court all required enormous bravery and had the potential to affect, and improve, the lives of countless others in the future. Testimony in whatever form might reach out, directly or indirectly, to men and women trapped within abusive relationships with professionals who seemed to be under the mistaken impression that the Hippocratic Oath was first do harm. One member of the board said she felt “ashamed” that the organization had even stumbled over the issues raised by my story.

  The essay appeared in the journal as originally planned; the board’s chairperson, who wrote a lead-in essay for each issue, however, withdrew his ordinary introduction because he did not want to be “too closely associated” with it. And though it had been initially planned as the main article, my essay ended up being buried, mid-issue.

  In any event, no sooner had the essay appeared in print than my father’s health, far from stable, declined.

  30

  THE FIRST TIME WE watched him hobble across the living-room floor with his walking stick, or even when he complained about razor-sharp pains cascading down both legs, no one, not my mother nor any of her children, connected my father’s inability to stand upright and walk with the cancer. Or if we did, no one said it aloud.

  “I can’t walk,” he told us, barely seven months after the initial diagnoses of lung cancer. We all encouraged him to walk even more.

  “You need to keep up your strength,” we said.

  In the early hours one autumn morning, my mother rose from bed to use the bathroom, tripped and tumbled to her side, the kind of fall that might have almost gone unnoticed by any healthy person. But at eighty-nine years old, she didn’t have the strength to raise herself back up. My father, staring, horrified and helpless, at his wife now clutching the handle of her bedroom dresser, found he could neither stand nor walk to her aid from the bed, just four feet away.

  “Call Pisti,” my mother told him.

  Somehow—no one knew how—he made it to a phone, called my brother, who flew out of bed and drove the two miles from his house to their home. An ambulance arrived minutes later and then my mother, with my father staring on, grief-stricken, was taken by stretcher to the hospital.

  The next day my brother Frank drove my father to the hospital for his first scheduled radiation treatment, then home later that day. He went straight to bed. The next morning, moaning and incoherent, he could not rise from bed.

  “Oh my darling,” he kept repeating from bed, wavering in and out of tears, “I could not help my darling…”

  Frank called oncology, who said my brother should bring our father to the palliative unit as soon as possible.

  For the next three weeks I, along with my four siblings, visited both parents every night in the same hospital—my father on the eleventh floor in palliative care, my mother in the hip-replacement unit directly five floors below him; they shared almost exactly the same view of Vancouver’s downtown skyline. My father’s cancer had metastasized to his bones, doctors advised, hence the pain in his legs. Radiation would continue, at least twice more, but he would never return home. If he survived at all, which they said was unlikely, he’d be moved to hospice.

  I had to explain the word “hospice” to Pisti. I remembered the word from my days as a home-care worker, from courses I’d taken in palliative care and books I’d read, notably Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. But we didn’t discuss the possibility of our father’s death each night we met for dinner at a burger joint and then drove to the hospital. We talked about our favorite albums from the 1970s: Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Queen’s A Night at the Opera… We talked about people who lived with cancer for years, about how after four months our father could be transferred to a long-term facility, where we would visit him daily.

  During one dinner, the conversation turned to our father’s book, all the years he’d spent in his office writing.

  “He tried to talk to me once about his writing,” Pisti said, “you know, about his childhood. We were in his office. He started to tell me a story about his life as an orphan, and his mother. I guess it’s one of the stories in his book. The more he talked, the more uncomfortable I felt. He never talked about his life, and now he was opening up about such personal, emotional subjects. I didn’t know how to listen to him. I interrupted…I asked him some political question about Hungary, totally off point. He got mad. He told me to forget the whole thing, and he stormed out of the room. I’ll always regret that. He was trying to open up with me after years of silence, and I shut him down. I know Dad was brutal with us when we were kids, but…you know, I don’t think he was a bad man.”

  “Good people sometimes do bad things,” I said. “Especially when they’re in a lot of pain.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Read about all his heartache. I couldn’t do it. It
makes me too sad.”

  “I’ve lived in that world for a long time. Nothing about what he writes is all that foreign to me. What do you think I was doing in that therapy for all those years?”

  “I don’t ask you about that because I know it’s private.”

  “Or maybe because it makes you uncomfortable.”

  “Well, I just want to thank you. For the record.”

  “For what?”

  “Helping Dad the way you have. All the work you put into his book. No one else in this family could have done what you did. If you hadn’t gone to Europe and found his relatives, our relatives, well…I don’t think he would have even written that book.”

  |||||||||||

  After three weeks, our mother was discharged from the hospital and returned home. Her hip had been dislocated and bruised though not broken as first thought, and snapped firmly back into place.

  “I thought this would all last,” she told me as we sat again in her living room, now without my father.

  “What would?” I said, from my father’s chair, across from hers.

  “The good times; our lives together. We always knew, of course, it wouldn’t. All those wonderful Sunday dinners with you. Do you know how much joy you’ve given us?”

  I glanced down at my father’s slippers, still lying next to his chair, a sign that he might yet return home.

  Within days of my mother’s discharge, my father was transferred to a hospice facility, which looked like a private bungalow, across the street from a botanical garden with cascading waterfalls, at the end of a cul-de-sac. Inside his room—one of only fourteen— plush curtains draped over shuttered windows and big, comfy pillows were spread across a luxurious gray sofa “with a pullout bed,” the hospice staff explained, “in case any one of you wants to spend the night.”

  An ivory crucifix hung on the opposite forest-green wall from where Dad lay in his motorized bed, and below it, a flat-screen TV. He had his own wheelchair-accessible bathroom; and we could visit the kitchen—around the corner and down the hall from the 24-hour nurses’ station—for snacks, juice, and coffee whenever we wanted. Even his pain medication, morphine, was regulated by injection, once every four hours, with regular “top-ups” every two hours. The province’s government-funded health provider would cover $5,000 of the total $7,000 amount owed each month. When I heard the cost, I asked one of the nurses, outside his room, how long patients typically stayed at hospice.

  “Some remain here weeks, maybe a month.”

  Of the three CDs lying next to the portable CD machine by his bed, Dad chose “Pachelbel’s Canon in D by Seascape,” which we played on repeat, day and night.

  He slipped in and out of consciousness, was delirious one day, ordered us to “sell the damn house,” lucid the next day, asked how “this will all work when I go home.” No one, not even my mother, had the heart to tell him that he would never go home again.

  For the first time in his adult life, he asked for milk. “A big glass of cold milk would be so nice,” he said one night.

  With a propensity for kidney stones, he had never been able to drink milk as an adult, but I remembered from his book that his favorite drink, as a child, had been ice-cold milk.

  During one visit, while Pisti was getting his milk in the kitchen, I held his hands and told him, yet again, that I would finish his book and make sure each of his children received a copy. His fingers were thick and strong, the hands of a man who had worked with machinery—full of life—not the hands of a person who could one day not live.

  “Dad…? Are you in pain?”

  His eyes remained closed. “My pain is not physical,” he said, weakly.

  I wondered if he kept his eyes closed to avoid seeing me looking at him dying.

  “Are you afraid of death?” I asked.

  Pisti had told me not to ask the question, but I’d said our father might have needed to be asked the question, “by someone.”

  “I am not afraid of death…I am only afraid of leaving your mother alone.”

  Late one Saturday, three weeks after being taken to hospice, his face was pallid, ghostlike, his pupils smoky, as if behind them he’d already begun to leave his body. Death happens slowly, I remembered thinking later, like leaving a room gradually.

  He had also stopped speaking English.

  “Istenem…Istenem…Istenem…”

  I knew this Hungarian term: “My God.”

  “Istenem…Istenem…Istenem…”

  His dinner lay uneaten by the side of the bed: roast beef with a scoop of mashed potatoes, baby carrots, and twigs of asparagus. Pisti crushed one of the few medications he took orally into his dessert, an individual chocolate soufflé, and fed it to his mouth. Still delirious, eyes glassy, his lips parted and the soufflé slid in and down, spoon after spoon.

  The next morning, Sunday, I awoke early, and as I did I noticed that Pisti had called my cell at six o’clock. In the back of my mind I knew, I must have known, something had happened. I went about dressing, washed my face, made my coffee, toast, and eggs, all the while never not thinking that as long as I didn’t return my brother’s call, my father was alive.

  Finally, I called. Pisti said that, at midnight the previous evening, after returning to his own apartment, he had felt compelled to return to our father’s bedside, where he found him fighting for breath.

  “He won’t live through the night,” the night nurse had said before administering a dose of medication to help clear his lungs, help his breathing, stop the pain. All night Pisti sat by my father’s bedside, holding his hand, keeping watch for imminent death. Early that morning, Pisti started his round of phone calls.

  I jumped in a cab and arrived at the hospice within the hour. My sisters couldn’t be reached, but my two brothers and my mother and I stood by the bed.

  Unconscious, his breathing was shallow, gurgled. Then it slowed to a murmur. Slowed until the spaces between each breath were longer than the breaths.

  A priest arrived to deliver Last Rites.

  “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…”

  A friend of my parents, a nurse from church, arrived seconds or maybe an hour after that. She felt his pulse. “It won’t be long now,” she said.

  We stepped closer. My brothers said something, I’m not sure what.

  “I love you, Dad,” I said, words I’d said before but now they would be final. “Thank you for the life you gave me, for your love…for my love of Hungary, your homeland…I’ll always think of you when I go to Budapest. I love you, Dad…”

  My mother, crying, took his hands. “I love you, dearest,” she said, leaning over his body, kissing his forehead, stroking his cheek, gently. “I love you…”

  Seconds later, as if in response to my mother’s expression of love, a pronounced intake of air, deep and prolonged, swept through his body, and his face twisted, almost unrecognizably, from side to side, and then everything stopped: his breathing, but also all of us as we watched, unmoving, unthinking, our own breaths hanging on his last exhale.

  A minute later he surfaced again, for one final gasp. Then he was gone.

  |||||||||||

  Three days later, my mother asked me to write and deliver his eulogy at the funeral. We were in her living room at the time.

  “Me? But…I’m the youngest. Don’t you think that would off end Frank? Or even Pisti?”

  “You’re the writer. Dad would want it to be you. It meant a great deal to him that you helped him with his book. He was very proud of you.”

  In the eulogy, which I delivered after the funeral before a crowd of roughly 200 parishioners, including my mother, sitting ten feet before me, I described my father’s childhood as an orphan in war-torn Budapest, without a mother to hug him or a father to hold his hand. Because he had no “Earthly Mother,” early in his young life he had adopted his “Heavenly Mother” as his own on Earth. No matter what his hardship—nights alone, crying; mornings in tears, praying; various
foster families; the Russians’ invasion into Hungary, Soviet rifles pointed at his head—he knew that “She” would forevermore walk beside him, holding his hand. Through rising tears, I described events from my father’s life that even my siblings did not know and that I knew only as a result of working on his book—because of the trust my father had placed in me.

  “My father was not an easy man,” I said, near-breaking but steady, mid-eulogy. “War brings trauma and leaves scars, some of which the children of the survivors end up needing to heal in themselves.”

  It was the one part of the eulogy I had worried my mother, to whom I’d given a copy beforehand for her blessing, might have vetoed.

  She did not.

  I went on to say what I believed. “The mark of any man, however, is the love he brings to the world in spite of his pain. The mark of any person is the love that lives on in the hearts of those who knew him. Love does heal wounds, and there is no doubt to anyone who ever knew my father that he loved deeply; that my father was a deeply sensitive, caring soul. He named the squirrels that visited his backyard and the black crows that drank in the birdbath on his and my mother’s porch. He loved his garden; he loved cooking jam with my mother. He loved his birth country, Hungary. Anyone who ever knew or met my parents, at church on Sundays, at the symphony or the grocery store, knew how much they loved each other. He was completely devoted to my mother, and after fifty-eight years of marriage, my father still loved her as much, or more, than on the day they married. That kind of love never dies.

  “The philosopher Emmanuel Kant once said, ‘Those who live in the memory of the ones who loved them are not dead, only far away. Dead are those who are forgotten.’ Though his body may leave us, my father’s love will never die, because it will live on in the hearts of his entire family, forever. I love him very much.”

  |||||||||||

  At the internment, hours after the funeral, as the priest said a final prayer, each member of my family sprinkled a handful of the soil I’d brought back from my grandmother’s grave in Vecsés onto my father’s lowered casket. Another wish fulfilled.