Dad feels

I spend a lot of time working and not very much time at a desktop computer anymore, which means I write in the notes app on my phone. So this feels like texting more than writing, although even typing feels like instant messaging more than writing. It is what it is.

Four days ago my father shot himself. It has been interesting to observe myself, to see me absolutely unable to make my voice sound cheerful on the phone or on the dispatch radio, to lack the capacity to animate my face or even manage eye contact when I’m around others. I feel myself being sieved out in pieces depending on who I’m talking to. I can’t get everything out all at once, not with anyone. 

I feel like a tourist penny put through a souvenir machine, rolled flat and stamped. I think about other things momentarily and then my mind turns back to the same long embossed thought of what his last moments must have been like. I am perversely grateful that he was successful, both because I don’t have to deal with him as his health fails in old age and also because this way I don’t have to deal with whatever he would be like after a traumatic brain injury.

We hadn’t talked in over five years, and I had no real plans to ever resume contact. It has been a difficult lesson for me to learn, that sometimes people lie both to you and to themselves when they tell you they love you. Based on behavior, my father didn’t love me, and a lot of the pain comes from the fact that he thought he did. He used me, horribly, the way he used anyone who stuck around him. The tragedy is that to him, that really was his version of loving behavior. Using me to satisfy whatever need he had in the moment was the best he had to offer as a father.

There won’t be a funeral because nobody wants one. I think about living my whole life, dying, and nobody who knew me wanting to celebrate with each other the fact that I was alive, and I get sad in a way that I don’t know the word for. It’s like schadenfreude without any delight; someone getting exactly what they deserve, and yet.

Then again, I’m not sure what I would even do at a funeral. What eulogy is there to say? Two failed marriages, a failed business, a child who won’t talk to him; this is my father’s legacy. He was breathtakingly racist, telling me he thought Black people are “just wired different” and gleefully calling Brazil nuts “n*gger toes” whenever he found one in a nut mix. Don’t worry, he was also extremely homophobic; I asked him when I was about eight what the difference was between homosexual and bisexual and he said, “homosexuals can’t help themselves but bisexuals are perverts who would fuck a hole in the ground.” It is what it is.

I’ve managed to not want anything *from* my dad for a long time, but I still wanted a lot *for* him. I wanted him to know what it’s like to be satisfied with one’s life on any given day. I wanted him to know how good it feels to help another person in a meaningful way. I wanted him to do the Vonnegut thing of being able to stop and look around and think, “if this ain’t nice, I don’t know what is” every once in a while. 

I know what it feels like to be so miserable you want to die and motivated enough to do something about it. I attempted suicide almost 19 years ago (after a week trapped with my dad on one of the road trips he liked to drag me on, and immediately after a conversation where I tried to suggest he wasn’t a very good father and the first words he responded with were, “I never laid a hand on you! I never touched you!” over and over at maximum volume). I know how much work it takes to drag yourself from the beginning of a day to the end of it at times. So it’s not even like I’m all that angry at him (although this is the most classic Dad way to leave the world — creating a large mess that everyone else has to clean up), nor am I particularly mad or guilty with myself. I’ve gotten decent at knowing what I can and can’t take on emotionally, and my father was, if nothing else, a building perpetually on fire. 

After the last time he visited me (highlights included “accidentally” showing me porn on his phone while trying to show me cat pictures and later asking me to give him a pedicure, classic boundary-testing moves he was fond of) I was venting to my sponsor at the time, and when I’d run out of words for the moment, she said, “you know sometimes the most we can know about a person or situation is ‘that’s fucked up’ and then keep away from them.” 

Even as I started to put together a lot more answers for why my dad did the things he did, knowing that I might never understand *and I didn’t have to* was a real gift. And so even if I never fully know or understand why he did what he did on the last day of his life, that’ll be okay. I barely understood him in some ways when he was alive, after all. The things I’m grieving are in many ways things that never happened, because now they never will. I’ll never get to see him really happy. I’ll never spend time with him without being tense or afraid. I’ll never feel safe around him. There’s never going to be a day when I figure out why a person needs a father, or what fathers are supposed to do. Or at least, I won’t learn that from him.

Multiple people have told me to try and focus on “the good memories”, and it’s true that I had some generally positive experiences with my dad. We went to the movies together a lot. He taught me more than I ever would have chosen to know about combustion engines, but some of it was cool. When I was very little, he would play Lite Brite and Barbies with me. One upside of him having extremely poor boundaries or understanding of the difference between children and adults is that I was allowed to make messes of my toys that my mother would *never* have allowed. (And shout out to that He Man slime mountain thing from the 80s, that shit was awesome and also completely destroyed multiple action figures). We used to play games of Monopoly that lasted for months and he would just leave the game in its state of play out in the dining room table in between visits, which felt extremely transgressive to me as a kid who normally had to put everything away the moment I was done with it. 

I remember being young enough and half in love with him enough that I thought all his stories were wonderful and I thought he would always be the most interesting person in the world to me.

The trouble is, the edges of all these memories are sewn together with many other, stranger experiences. Crawling into the far reaches of the living room and hall closets and trying to breathe as slowly and quietly as possible so my dad wouldn’t find me. Pretending there were cameras hidden throughout the house behind all the mirrors and I was being watched at all times (and if I behaved well enough, someone would take me away). The two recurring night terrors of my entire childhood and adolescence: the first, that there was a man in my bedroom and if I moved or made any noise, he would kill me and my mother. The second, that my dad had kidnapped me and taken me to a new town where nobody knew we were related. The fact that I can’t remember anything about the bedroom I slept in from ages 11-14, even though I remember the layout of the rest of the house. 

I used to wonder about this stuff more. Why did I do those things? Why did those nightmares paralyze me? And the one I still can’t answer fully, and probably never will: what happened to me in that house?

I suspect one of the tougher things for people with more traditional childhoods to understand is that incest isn’t unremittingly awful so much as it’s profoundly confusing. The times my dad tried to act like a normal father (aka when he was dating someone) were baffling to me. The rest of the time, he was the worst boyfriend I’ve ever had, forcing me to like all his hobbies, to operate entirely on his schedule, to eat and drink whatever he wanted me to when he wanted me to...and nobody would let me just break up with him and move on. I asked my mom once if she remembered when I stopped wanting to visit my father. She thought about it and said, “you know, I don’t think you *ever* wanted to be around him.” That’s how I remember it, too.

Despite that, I loved my dad very much, and I spent the first three decades of my life in the cycle of trying to meet his demands of me and then pushing him away when it got to the point where doing that depleted any energy I had for my own survival. I stopped talking to him and maintained my distance out of love, for him and for myself. I didn’t want to behave unkindly toward someone I was angry with, and I didn’t want anyone to treat my dad the way I would end up treating him when we were in contact. I knew I couldn’t take care of him, and absent that role, I wasn’t sure I liked him enough to do the work of building and maintaining some kind of relationship. 

I decided fairly quickly after cutting off contact that I wasn’t going to tell the rest of his family about the sexual (and emotional and physical) abuse while my father was still alive. He didn’t seem to have the opportunity to groom any of the next generation of kids the way he did me, and I figured people deserved to have their own relationships with him without having to reckon with his parenting. It’s strange trying to sort out how to talk about him now; I don’t want to dwell on only my negative experiences with him, but it’s impossible to pretend I have any memories untainted by his behavior and the choices he made. I’ve wondered for a long time how he managed to live with himself, and maybe the answer is that in the long run he couldn’t.

I am a pretty spiritual person, in my way, which is to say in a very self-centered way that is mostly evidence based. I know I woke up one day and was able to realize I’m an alcoholic, despite many many years of waking up in even worse conditions and stubbornly refusing to admit it. I don’t know what changed, and so I call that change God. I’d decided a long time ago that it was up to God if and when my dad ever got better, in part as a way to finally let go of feeling responsible for his wellbeing. I told someone this the other day and they said, “well maybe this *was* God working on him. Couldn’t do anything for him down here so he brought him up there.” I don’t generally believe in heaven, but I like the idea enough to accept it for now. For all that so many possibilities are now lost, the certainty of my dad’s suffering is also over, and I’m grateful for that.