* * *
—
To be grateful for that.
* * *
—
Sometimes I wonder if he is asking, in his sidelong way, for permission. That if I were to give some sign of being ready to let him go he’d feel released from the bonds (of fatherhood, of family) that I am sure are the last things keeping him clinging to his wreck of a body, of a life. I imagine myself noble and bold, humane enough to grant this to him. Would he take it? I think maybe yes. And if this is so, then perhaps it is no less than I owe him: this final mercy. A son’s understanding. Forgiveness and release. If I have what he needs and am capable of giving it, why shouldn’t I?
* * *
—
Because it is terrible and wrong, if this is what he is asking. No father should ever ask such a thing of his child. If he wants to die, let him, and let me live with the already considerable trauma of having survived this ordeal. To dare to add to that burden the guilt of permission, of complicity…Fuck him for putting me in a place where such a thought is even thinkable. A thousand times fuck him.
* * *
—
How do you save a drowning man who doesn’t want a life preserver? Who only seems to want company, a witness, while he sinks as slowly as he can?
* * *
—
But to ask this is to misrepresent his mindset, his intention. If my father could understand that he has become the central trauma of his children’s lives he would suffer a heartbreak even deeper than those he’s known already. (Milton: And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide…) Countless times I have tried and failed to convince him of the impact that his behavior, his being, has on other people—that we are happy when he is happy, sad when he is sad, et cetera. He understands that his happiness is connected to ours, his children’s, but the reciprocal property of the axiom cannot be comprehended. I believe this is because, at a fundamental level, he does not believe he matters to anyone, is incapable of receiving love and so cannot credit the notion that he suffers any way but alone.
* * *
—
“There is no me,” he says.
* * *
—
I have heard him say this so many times. It is the howl of the beast that lives at the bottomless bottom of his misery, his sickness, the abomination that feeds on everything that falls down the black well of his suffering. He forces the words out between choking sobs, crying the way a child cries, achieving emptiness. All of this thin and crackling in my earbuds as I pace the apartment (whichever apartment, the years go by) with my phone in my jeans pocket, hot against my thigh.
What should a son say back to that? What would a wife have said? What can anyone say? The statement beggars every possible refutation. The only thing you can do with a ravenous beast that you can’t kill and can’t catch is try to starve it. So I don’t say anything. I take deep breaths and let him hear me breathing, pacing my calm breaths to his ragged ones, until he calms down enough to match me. Until he comes back to himself enough to ask me to change the subject. “What’s new with your writing?” he asks, his voice steadying. “What’s new at school?”
* * *
—
My aunt Francine once told me that when they were all kids they’d sometimes find him sitting on the stairs looking shell-shocked, crying, saying things like “Nobody loves me” to himself over and over. His siblings didn’t know what to make of it, and his parents either did not notice or did not care.
Another way to understand my father, then, is as someone who has lived his whole life as an undiagnosed manic-depressive. At various times various people have suggested that he seek treatment, at least “talk to someone,” but he always refused all attempts at intervention and mitigation. I imagine he was scared of what he might learn about himself, and of whether, assuming it worked, he would recognize the version of himself that emerged on the other side. How many of us, after all, can imagine ourselves as wholly separable from our core traumas, our constitutive lacks and faults?
Maybe he never believed that he needed the help.
I doubt that. He was—is—preternaturally intelligent. The most common thing people say about him is that he’s one of the smartest people they’ve ever met. The second most common thing people say about him is that he is intimidating, and can be a real asshole. Even I have to admit that I think of his best and worst qualities as fully interwoven, so that separating them risks eradicating something essential and animating, the thing that makes him him.
I think he always did know what he carried within him, and so it must have been a conscious choice, stubbornness plus fear plus the self-preserving whisper of the sickness, that made him decide to go it alone.
To live his whole life at war with himself.
* * *
—
Why am I writing this?
My motives are largely selfish. The confession and the narrativization are both deeply relieving, even pleasurable. That much must be obvious. It feels good to revel in hot, raw hurt. But there is little that I’ve said about my father that I don’t see some version of in myself. What starts out causal—a new city, a search for work—degrades into causelessness. Suddenly everything is a problem, and it’s hard to so much as wash a dish after lunch without cursing the sandwich that got it dirty, the money that the ingredients cost, the dwindling bank account out of which that cost was paid. At a certain point it starts to seem reasonable to leave the dish in the sink, even though that’s going to mean an argument later about why you didn’t clean up after yourself when you made lunch. And because it will be impossible to explain that the alternative to leaving the dish in the sink was not cleaning the dish, but rather flinging it across the room, you won’t give any answer to the question, which will then become a problem in itself.
In 2016, I saw a therapist for the first time. After a few sessions she told me that there was nothing wrong with me, that I was responding appropriately to the objective stress factors in my life: dislocation, unemployment, a sick father, months of rain. I did not need meds, she said, as there was no diagnosis. No cure for the Portland winter or for being part of a family. I wasn’t sure she was right, but I wanted to believe her, and so I laughed and she laughed with me. “It’s good you don’t need medication,” she said. “That’s a good thing. But without a diagnosis your insurance won’t keep covering these visits.” Which was too bad because I had found talking about Dad to be extremely cathartic, and pragmatically useful. It forced me to take what I was experiencing and form it into a story that, however halting or inchoate it may have been, at least it had a recognizable shape and features (characters, motives, a plot) as opposed to the amorphous unhappiness that was fucking up my life.
Therapy also kept me from pouring every last drop of my anxiety about Dad onto my wife, in effect reproducing in her the demoralization and exhaustion that talking to him produced in me. The therapist, understanding this, offered to fish a little longer to try to find a diagnosis so that I could keep scheduling sessions, but I told her not to bother. Even with the insurance I was still on the hook for the co-pay, and limited to one visit per month.
* * *
—
My father’s whole life may have been ruined by his inability to understand himself as being loved by others. It is likely that this was genetic, hardwired, or, if you prefer the language of spirit (which he wouldn’t, but I often do), it is a small black spot on his soul. His parents, through what they did or didn’t do, allowed it to spread. Dad has spent the last ten years fighting the decay of his body, but he has been fighting the decay of his soul for far longer; for his whole life. If I believe that, and if I believe that my own soul bears the same black mark, I also believe that it has stayed just that size—a mark, a scar, a tiny blemish—because of what he and my mother did right, the ways they
succeeded.
But that it exists at all is a reminder that there is no choice you can make, no parenting strategy you can implement, to fully supersede a genetic predisposition to depression, or the fact that sadness is a part of being human, or that anyone is capable of digging himself into a hole from which he cannot escape without aid.
When my wife texts and says she is missing me while I’m away for so long in Indiana, that she cried yesterday in savasana at the end of her yoga class, it is the small stunted dead black part of me that is confused by her words, though I myself felt and feel all those same things. I cried yesterday too. And yet while it makes immediate and complete sense to me that I should love and need and miss her, it is somewhat less self-evident, less reflexively understood, that she should or would feel the same about me. That’s the dead spot. But its voice is small and easily silenced. I know it is a liar.
But what if I didn’t know that? What if one day I forget?
* * *
—
My father traces his decline to the one-two punch of his marriage collapsing and his illness taking hold. In the version of the story he tells himself, the collapse causes the illness, so that all the trauma has its origin in the divorce—an “event” itself years in the making, comprised of countless subsidiary episodes. The marriage was on its last legs before the move to Tennessee, in 2004. The move—which he almost didn’t make—was the Hail Mary, the hard reboot, that failed. It’s almost as if, having made the move, he thought his work was finished, rather than just beginning. It is possible he believed he had done my mother a great mercy rather than that one had been done by her for him. He wallowed in self-pity, lashed out at the new city, refused to make friends. He made their lives more miserable than I would have thought possible. I wonder now—as I wondered then—what he thought was happening during this period, why it did not occur to him that all these actions would have repercussions, in his marriage or his children’s lives or his own life.
Could he really just not see that? Or did he see but not believe?
In 2007 I asked these questions as a son trying to comprehend the behavior of his father. In 2017 I ask them as one married man trying to comprehend another man’s marriage. Why it lasted as long as it did and why it failed.
After the divorce was finalized, after he sold the house because he couldn’t afford to keep it, after he moved into a hotel because he couldn’t bear to leave town, he still wrote his ex-wife letters. Endless emails (I have seen a few), some of which were hateful and recriminatory and implicitly threatening while others were weepy and sentimental and hopeful—even then—of reconciliation.
I have often wondered whether he understood that the sentimental letters were being read by the same person who’d had to read all of the hateful ones. But then, given that the same person wrote both of them, it stands to reason that he was not able to see the disjunction, the nauseating rhetorical swerve from one to the next. The cognitive dissonance he produced was in exact proportion to that which he suffered, and in the end Mom did the only thing she could do: She stopped reading.
* * *
—
My father wanted to design the financial plan for the divorce himself. He didn’t trust my mother—by this point the family’s sole breadwinner for at least a decade—to manage money. Amazingly, she let him. “He wanted to keep the house,” she said, “so he gave me the cash amount he felt was fair. I trusted him completely on this. He wouldn’t have lied or cheated—that just wasn’t him. The trouble was he wouldn’t sell the house, he just sat on it and watched the market decline.” This would have been 2008, 2009. Eventually he did sell, at the bottom of the market, and what money he made from the sale was, to put it plainly, pissed away. I don’t even know how many thousands of dollars he handed over to the International Hotels Group, getting slowly sicker all the while, until he found himself homeless and suicidal. Now he lives on the charity of his nephew and his ex-wife, on the phone with me and crying himself to the edge of hyperventilation as he tries to explain—again—that he is sorry there’s no trust fund, that I have student loan debt, that I have to be absent from my own new marriage for these stints to go where the work is, that after two years in Portland we still can’t find a house we can afford. He’s sorry that he doesn’t have the family house, the one in Florida or the one in Nashville, so that there would be somewhere for everyone to gather. He’s sorry that things aren’t different. Life wasn’t supposed to happen like this. And yet somehow it has.
* * *
—
Fall 2015: The Stuff was still languishing in the storage unit my mother had been paying for. Nobody knew exactly what was in there. Much of it, we suspected, was effectively garbage, not worth what it would cost to ship to Florida, to be crammed into his already cramped apartment. He kept saying he wished there was some way for him to get back to Nashville, to take care of it himself, as he should have done before leaving, would have done before leaving, if only we hadn’t rushed and railroaded him. (Would—we all knew it—never have done if he’d been left to his own devices.) But he was no longer well enough to make that drive, much less do the loading and unloading. He had all but stopped eating, was living on a couple bucks’ worth of food a day, cereal and juice mostly: a child’s diet. His neurologist had told him years ago to eat more red meat, that he needed the B12 for dopamine production, but he read somewhere online that protein can interfere with his Levodopa (the anti-shaking medication) and those couple of hours a day when the medicine is working are all he lives for. They’re all he talks about. This was one choice he did not hesitate to make.
Mom offered to move everything to the basement of the home she was by this point sharing with her boyfriend. This incensed my father, drove him to resurrect the most horrible things he ever said about her back during their breakup, as well as to recite all the worst things he says she said during that time: that she’d never been happy with him, that she never loved him. That she didn’t give a shit about the family photo albums and would just as soon throw them out as keep them.
Did she really say these things? Did she really mean them, and if so, was her earnestness categorical or conditional—that is, tied to the ferocity of the moment?
I have never asked her these questions. Why would I want to know?
And yet here was Dad telling me all these things that I didn’t want to know, and didn’t know whether to believe. I wasn’t sure whether they were more horrendous if they were true or if they were his fantasies—spewing bile for half an hour only to wrap up by reminding me that it is important that I not let this ruin my relationship with my mother, that I must still love her, as indeed he himself still does, and that—again—he is sorry to have told me any of this, only he doesn’t have anyone else to talk to so sometimes it all just comes pouring out when he doesn’t mean for it to, he’s sorry, so, so sorry.
Not sorry enough to not do it, of course, but sorry enough to be sorry that he did.
It occurs to me now that this sounds like gaslighting behavior, predatory and manipulative. I suppose it is, in its way, but it’s mostly himself he’s playing head games with. I’m just the guy on the other end of the phone call, the witness, the bitter obliging son. His point about the family photo albums, at any rate, was that Mom couldn’t be trusted with them. Neither with the childhood keepsakes, boxes of my and my sister’s old shit, most of which we’d tried to throw away ourselves many times before but which he kept because he thought we might change our minds one day, and that he would be held to account by us for what was gone.
Riding with the Ghost Page 6