Talking about Father, 2

Responding to my mail, Brother said:

 

To clarify, the confusion thing is not really like Alzheimer's-type confusion per se, just that there are some conflicting things and it seems hard for him to find the balance. It's not like he doesn't remember what pills he's already taken or what his name is.

 

As I understand it, the In-Law thing was quite specific. They arrived one day for some family event, and Dad hugged Cousin 2 in the wrong way (he's always especially liked her), and she felt uncomfortable about it and told her parents. When they talked to him, he resented their suggestions. "We can be very understanding, you know...", when he didn't think there was anything wrong in the first place, felt very patronizing to him. So he realized he'd had enough of them, having rarely gotten along with them for the previous 40 years anyway. Funny that they said they didn't know what it was about.

 

I think I have heard of them meeting up a few times in recent years, when they were passing through town, so maybe it's changed and no longer the full freeze-out.

 

Ultimately, I agree we have to be responsible for our own outlooks in life, but one's family is a special case. I don't think Dad looks back fondly on a life well-lived, because, well, he has so many regrets. It's just how he is, and I know he replays conversations in his mind. The big ones are probably career-based: He should have been a better businessman. He should have followed the acting thing and not have tried playing businessman at all. He should have been able to make a million doing home loans in his later years, because we all know how easy it is ... if you'll just follow these 10 easy steps. (I really hate what the get-rich-quick brigade has done to him, to say nothing of Fox News.) He didn't really need to work after selling the business, but to some extent he was just coasting on the business his parents built, so it may not feel like he made a killing in the [family] business. And he wasn't able to make anything happen after that because he was always looking for an easy way.

 

I think his family—us and your kids—are the one thing he can really feel proud of and good about. So, even though I don't have a lot to say to him sometimes, I try to hang in and listen to his stories, and something will come up. Even if you don't have anything to say to the old man, avoiding him in the hallway will have the effect of him thinking he's losing his son now, which has got to be one of the worst feelings, I imagine.

 

Yes, he's needy and insecure sometimes. Some of my growing up has certainly involved learning to be a parent to him. But he has been through a lot in life, as I suppose anyone that age has, and I wonder what he has to teach me still. For you, "making peace" might mean giving him a break and listening to his stories a few more times, making his life as nice as it can be, and trying to understand whatever you can of him—at the very least, not let him die wondering if is elder son hates him. I mean, nobody really has a lot to say to their dad, but you end up talking to him anyway. I think a good political argument would brighten his spirits. And he certainly has some notions that deserve a good take-down!

 

And my next installment ran:

 

I had to smile when you closed by saying Father has some notions that deserve a good take-down, but that particular job is one I no longer feel up for because he doesn’t listen. He’s appreciative of a part well-played, but sometimes it feels to me as if it would be all the same whether I engage him in an earnest political wrangle or recite the soliloquy from “Hamlet”. Either way it’s performance art, but he’s not going to reflect on what he’s heard. Or maybe he does for you – I can only speak from my own experience. But that experience is that he usually thinks I have said something different from what I really did say, and the next time we meet he has forgotten all about it. Not very rewarding on my side.

 

By comparison, it’s really easy to listen to his stories. If he would spend more time performing his own stories and less time asking me to be on stage presenting something of my own, it would be a lot easier for me.

 

Of course you are right that he doesn’t look back with contentment on a life well-lived, but I think he wouldn’t have anyway regardless what he had achieved in life. He is always second-guessing his past actions and berating himself over them. And I have to wonder, … how is it possible that he never, in all those years, realized the futility and pointlessness of brooding over the past? Worse – given that he’s never realized that – how much can any of us really do for him? Show up and listen to a story? That’s a quick fix, sure, but so is whiskey. So is television. What’s more, the whiskey and the television don’t have to go home at night because they don’t have to go to work in the morning, so as quick fixes go they are more reliable than we are. But I despair of being able to do more for him than that. He’s got to do it for himself, or it just won’t get done. And if the best I can offer him is the same quick fix he can get from whiskey and television, … well, it’s hard to feel excited about that.

 

In many ways the situation he’s in is a very sad one. I believe he has spent his whole life being afraid of other people and therefore holding them at arm’s length by trying to entertain them non-stop: because as long as the bullies are laughing, they aren’t beating you up. But he never lets up, and he’s never slowed down enough to reflect on what he’s doing or to understand it consciously. He doesn’t listen to the silence any better than he listens to other people. And so he has been running away his whole life.

 

To mix metaphors, he has painted himself into a corner. It’s really sad that he’s stuck in the corner, truly it is. But what are we to do when he has been the one clinging to the paintbrush for dear life all these years?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

 

The In-Law thing is a special topic, so let me address it separately.

 

The version of the In-Law story that you told is the same one I’ve heard from him, but I suspect he misunderstood what happened. I wasn’t there, so everything I say is reconstruction. But he did make sideways remarks to the effect that Aunt C was there too – so that it included at any rate all the In-Law women (except possibly Cousin 1 who might have been out of the country) – and that everybody chimed in. Wait – they were all there? But they live in different places. That must have required some planning and organization. And I know that they have talked for years about wanting to do something, because they have all felt consistently uncomfortable around him … dating back to when he first married Mother and Aunt C was still a teenager and he would make remarks about her – in her hearing -- even then. My calling it an “intervention” (in the sense used here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intervention_(counseling)) is admittedly an interpolation on my part. But when Father first told me the story, the very first thought that sprang to mind was, “Gosh, so they finally did it.”

 

Anyway, I assume that no reasonable person could have made as big a deal as he describes out of as innocent a hug as he describes; and in my experience the In-Laws are reasonable people. For them to have gone on at such length, they have to have been talking about more than one hug – probably about the last fifty years, or some appreciable fraction of them. And I think Father just never understood that part because – as noted – he doesn’t listen. He reacts emotionally to a felt sense about whether the person talking to him is For Him or Agin’ Him, and he tunes out all the subtle details. But the subtle details matter: they make all the difference between “I hate you because I am a malicious asshole and your enemy” and “I love you but hate what you just did so please don’t do that thing again.” As near as I can tell, anybody who tells Father the latter runs a strong risk of being misunderstood as having said the former, even though the two sentiments are worlds apart.

 

Also, … did you hear the story from Christmas 1995 about Father groping one of Cousin 2’s breasts when he was drunk and he thought nobody else was watching? I heard it from Wife when we drove home from that very party – i.e., back in 1995. Admittedly some of Wife’s stories are pure fabrication. But she would have had nothing to gain by making this one up, and I saw with my own eyes that Father was more or less consistently drunk all his waking hours during at least the three days we were there. Aunt J says he kept it up after we left. Booze makes people bolder anyway, so I’ve always assumed that the story is likely true. And it would be far more believable to me that Cousin 2 could have brought that up as one in a series of examples designed to show a pattern, than that she would object to being hugged Hello. Again, when Father first told me the story about this bad meeting with the In-Laws, I assumed immediately that that must have been what they were talking about, but that he didn’t hear all the critical details like the words “back in 1995”.

 

I wasn’t there so I can only guess. But it’s a hypothesis that accounts for the data, and it pains me to say that it does not strain my credulity.

 

Time to get to work. Ciao ….

 

After that I decided to e-mail Aunt J, just to check whether my hypothetical reconstruction was correct. It wasn’t, and so a couple days later I sent Brother a correction:

 

Turns out I was wrong in my hypothesis about what happened with the In-Laws. I e-mailed Aunt J to check, and there was never any single big “intervention” … just an ongoing series of incidents followed by people talking to Father asking him not to do X or Y in the future, followed by him getting offended at being asked. She identified at least a couple of different times that the communication dropped off for more than a year over such events. The “don’t know” remark came from Uncle when I asked him last year, “What is all this about?” He shook his head and smiled sheepishly and said something like “Sheesh, I don’t really know myself.” (That’s not a direct quote.) Aunt J wasn’t there at that particular moment.

 

Sorry for assuming something more dramatic than really happened. I should have checked before: there is no substitute for getting your facts straight.