I know you
said you wanted to hear positive stories, but this is the only one I've
got. You get the story you get. I can say that in the end, it is
positive...hopefully it's worth it. I
don't want to depress you more, but I think there is redemption and comfort
embedded in all stories.
An hour
after we were told my Father would die, my stepmonster was screaming at me by
his deathbed. For the entire week, as we
took turns holding vigil even through a blizzard, I was just smoldering with
rage and trying my best to push it aside and stay in the present instead of
sifting through every hurt, every disappointment, every lie I'd been told, all
of it. I wracked my brain for just one
happy memory and came up blank every time.
When he died, I refused to join the family and go to see the body, despite my brothers' urging (of
course, it WAS my birthday, which didn't help), because though I felt I should,
I didn't want to be near my stepmonster.
Instead, I went to my studio to seek solace…only to find my studio-mate
with a broom, sweeping water towards the garage door. The ceiling had collapsed and flooded the
place, destroying all my works in progress in the process. It was not a good day.
We muddled
through the week of making plans, and she pretended she was letting us make
choices even though we were only there to keep her company while she decided on
appropriate flowers and song choices. I
was put in charge of the program and was told I’d be reimbursed for the
expensive color printing, but of course that never happened. We weren’t even put in the obituary (to “save
money”, we were told). She refused to
speak to us at the funeral, and was enraged by my Mother’s presence. Some of my father’s works were on display (he
was a woodworker and made beautiful, hand carved replica guns); I tried to get
myself to take a picture of them but I couldn’t muster the energy. I didn’t know I wouldn’t see them again.
Later, we
found that she had changed his will; around the time he was diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s. (Most likely before? Hence all
the secrecy surrounding his noticeable decline?) It was now a “Living Trust”, the terms of
which we were not allowed to see. She
took everything. My brother and I
crafted a letter explaining what we wanted – the gold watch passed down through
6 generations, the family Bible, my childhood spurs. He had promised me his tools; she had begun
to sell them the minute he was out of the house and in the home where he died,
miserably unhappy. The letter went
unanswered. She knew we had no money for a lawyer.
While we
planned for the funeral, I learned new things about my Father, as always
happens. I learned that he had claimed
to have earned a college degree; my Mother, who was there at the time, knew
that hadn’t even started to happen. (My
hard-won claim of being the first one in the family to get a college degree – a
true story, and one not without it’s own pain – was suddenly erased.) I also learned that my father, who had hunted
for our food and made succulent elk stroganoff from his own kill and surprised
us with fluffy, bubble-filled beer pancakes on Sunday mornings, had never
cooked again in his new life, for twenty-four years. As my
brother and I related memories of my father’s talents – salty summer sausage
hung in the garage rafters to cure, rich beef burgundy over buttered noodles –
my stepsister stared at us astonished.
“He never cooked! He could
cook?” My stepmonster looked at her
hands, and I recalled all the times I had been chased from her kitchen when
trying to help…thought of the rigidity with which she viewed gender roles…and I
began to understand something new that turned my view of him on end.
I had always
been upset with my father for never spending time with me, never coming to my
events, never seeming interested in my life.
(Amongst other things…there was a fair amount of physical violence in my
relationship with him as a child, and his distant teasing was a stand-in for
the affection my Mother assured me he felt on the inside.) But now I recalled a tic in so many of our
phone conversations, wherein I would ask him if we could go to lunch, ask him
for help with a project, invite him to something I was doing…the answer was
always, “well, I’ll have to ask Carol”.
Which at the time, I saw as being considerate…but was that all it was? If my Father didn’t feel the freedom to
pursue one of his passions, cooking, then did he feel freedom to carry on a
relationship of his own with his offspring?
(Or was it that he only cooked because my Mother hated doing it so much
that everything came out of a can or the freezer?) Aside from dragging him into therapy to
listen to him lie in front of my psychiatrist, I almost NEVER saw my father
alone, and the times I did were the times I cherished, when we actually talked
and communicated fluidly, rather than in the stilted formality that his wife’s
presence seemed to inspire. But was my
father…afraid of his wife? Was he
deferring to her wishes or cowering?
My parents,
for my sake, had hoped to stay friends.
They got divorced when I was thirteen, and though I cried, the true
emotion filling my awkwardly growing body was relief. Our house was a pit of tension; my parents
barely spoke to one another and even had resorted, a couple of times, to the
cliché of having me “tell your mother…” After my father moved out, I would go
on Wednesday evenings to his extremely tidy apartment nearby, and he would make
me gigantic salads filled with everything I loved – chickpeas, hard-boiled eggs,
strawberries, olives -- that we would eat on tv trays in front of the Rockford Files. I don’t know if my Dad ever knew I cherished
these nights. I had no way to tell him,
no words to help me draw the shape of our new relationship.
Within a
year, my Dad remarried. The wait was
only for respectability’s sake, as my new stepsister and I discovered in our Gunne
Sax calico dresses at their modest wedding.
Comparing dates revealed a long affair, one of which I was sure my
Mother was unaware. My Father had
already been in my new stepsister's life for some time, a person I didn’t even know
existed. In an age of secrets, this was
one more to harbor.
Through
high school, family Christmases became a bizarre bundle of tension and regret
as we tried to include everyone in a merged ball of awkwardness. My Dad and my Mom were still friends – as
high school sweethearts together 25 years, how could they not retain some
friendship? But Carol was prickly and
jealous, and not good at hiding it.
After we ended this charade with no amount of relief on my part, it
became clear that my Father was not “allowed” to call my Mother unless it was
an emergency. This hurt me, as I knew they
still loved each other, even though it had changed long ago from a romantic
love to simply a deep friendship.
So, this
was why I was being berated at my Father’s deathbed while his raspy breaths
filled the room. (Could he hear us? Was he still in there, saddened by this
conflict?) I had, apparently, unknowingly
committed a cardinal sin by bringing my Mother to see him, one last time, while
he battled his considerable demons in an Alzheimer’s fog. It was the only time I saw him smile in that
place, the only time his face lit up since his brain began to turn to Swiss
cheese. Thirty years fell away like broken
shingles as he beamed when he saw her and their granddaughter, standing with
his more regular visitors in front of the door disguised as a bookcase to
confuse potential escapees like himself.
My Mom smiled too, though I think she was shocked to see his face
beardless, which it hadn’t been since the country’s bicentennial when he grew a
beard on a bet. He spoke with a quiet,
wispy voice – he called it the “Hubble voice” after his Mother’s side of the
family, claiming “all the Hubble’s spoke like this”. It was a short visit, but the best one.
And, as the
stepmonster pointed out harshly – I hadn’t visited enough! And it was true, I hadn’t. Of course, in a lifetime of being held at
arm’s length, seeing my Father monthly was an accumulation of visits that would
have spanned years in our previous lives.
And of late, it had been even worse – long bouts with sicknesses had
kept me away, as germs were verboten in the elder-hive. But what’s worse, I knew in my heart I had stayed
away deliberately – her accusations were true – because each visit I saw him
angry, agitated, unspeaking…plotting escapes and awaiting trolleys that weren’t
there to take him away. I asked several
times if I could take him on outings and was denied, the stepmonster’s iron
fist didn’t even allow his children to be consulted for medical decisions, much
less trips outside the walls. So I would
try to talk to him, he would look past me…I would walk him around the grounds,
and he would mention his idea to throw chairs through the windows to
escape. I’ll admit: I am weak. I would leave each time and sob alone in my
car in the parking lot, across the street from the old Ft. Logan Mental Health
Hospital. How many tears were shed on
those acres? Mine were
insignificant.
Guilty,
guilty as charged. And yet…had the
tables been reversed, would my father have been visiting me more? No…this was not about him, or I, or either of
our wishes, but yet again about her.
Always about her. As she berated
me I finally snapped, “was I ever even part of this family anyway?” And making a shocked face, her sticky mascara
lashes widening, she claimed, “we were going to try to have you live with
us! We wanted to take you out of that
situation with…your mother!”
This was
ugly, horrifying news. My mother and I
have always been extremely close, but those bonds forged by the early, messy
days of the divorce, with strange men coming around and hysterical crying jags
for days, were deep and strong. And to
think that they had wanted me to live in that beige coldness and Southwestern-flavored
sterility that they called a home, constantly annoyed by my stepsisters who
were favored and coddled, not even having my own room…THIS was somehow proof
that she cared? What HAD those whispered
conversations, truncated by my sudden presence, been about?
So who was
my Father? I am still puzzling through
the handful of facts and misremembered anecdotes to construct a portrait of
him. Four years after his death, even
the truck that he had babied, that my stepmonster sold me for more than the
blue book value, has died. The things I
have of his are precious and few: a green army blanket that was ever-present in
every vehicle he ever owned, a carved gun stock on a meticulously crafted stand
that was a sample for clients to see his workmanship, the scroll-bedecked easel
he made for me when I was a young artist, with his fine craftsmanship showing
in the hinge he built and the care shown by plugging each screw hole with
walnut. The one thing that the
stepmonster left, in a box of odds and ends she didn’t want that she left on
her porch for my brother to pick up; (no further contact, no further response
to our request for his heirlooms, and demands that his handcrafted guns be
given to a museum) she couldn’t have known I would cherish. My father’s briefcase filled with his
drafting tools…plastic arcs and circle guides that I played with as a child,
the same pens he taught me calligraphy with, a few scraps of paper with his
ordered draftsmanship. This plastic
shell, monogrammed in fake gold stickers with his initials, held more memories than a
million heirlooms, though just trash to her.
I still want my childhood spurs, last seen hanging on his workshop wall.
I fed my
father his last bite of food. He had
fallen, alone, outside, and hit his head.
Unbeknownst to us, as we rushed to the hospital as fast as we could late
at night, the stepmonster had signed a DNR, without consulting us, as usual. We were never included in decisions, at any
point in his life, even when we were convinced he was on the wrong drugs, no
one would listen. I wouldn’t have
disagreed with the DNR – my father was clearly unhappy, caged in his confusion
and hallucinations. But to be consulted
would have been to be treated like a person of some sort of consequence, at
least. As we drove down Broadway that late night, I told
my husband, “I think my Father is going to die”. He reassured me, said it was fine, said all
the things one says, both kindly and dutifully.
At the hospital, my Dad’s neck had been encased in a giant foam collar
meant to immobilize his head, and every few minutes he would notice it was
there and begin attempting to pull it over his head, like an itchy
turtleneck. He would struggle, we would
calm and sooth him…eventually he exhausted himself.
The next day, back at the home, he sat propped in a common room in front of an endless television, lying in a recliner dwarfed by pillows. I fed him pudding and used the spoon to scrape the excess from his thin lips, as he once had done for me I’m sure. I could see gratefulness in his eyes, and humility, for just a brief moment. He couldn’t speak. But as his watery eyes locked with my red-rimmed ones, there was a short connection, that somewhere, as the subdural hematoma slowly leaked into his brain tissue, there was enough of him left to see me, to know who I was, in his last hours of consciousness. The next time I saw him, he was asleep in his room, his breaths growing harsher and more uncertain, his newly bald chin slack, almost collapsing into his neck, as if his body was sinking deeper and deeper into itself. The only change throughout that long week was in the timbre and length of his breaths, the effort his ribcage rose and fell with becoming more choppy and labored. The last time I saw him, I sat by his side, alone, and said, “it’s ok Daddy…you can go. I love you. You can just relax and sleep.” Did I imagine a change in his face, a slip of a muscle, a wrinkle twitching? I’m sure I did. We see what we want to see, always.
