Well, OK, here I go, before I lose my nerve.
As regular readers and friends know, my dad passed away a few months ago. It was a bittersweet milestone, really. I envy the people who can genuinely grieve for a parent, and who can truly celebrate a long life well-lived.
In my case, my dad was a lifelong mystery. On the surface, he was handsome, sweet, smiling, WASPY, with a uniform of button-down shirts, rep ties, and (depending on the situation), grey flannel trousers or tan chinos. But the core reality that I experienced from childhood was his alcoholism. From the moment he got home from work at 5 pm, he poured himself a new cocktail every twenty to thirty minutes until, somewhere around 8 pm, he would "fall asleep in front of television." So many nights, I would try to wake Daddy up, shaking his shoulders, but he remained entirely unresponsive and slack-faced in his easy chair. It felt, to me, like he died every night. I knew that he didn't from the evidence of my eyes (there he was, leaving for work the next morning) but it was a daily heartbreak that I was not allowed to acknowledge or understand.
During my 20s and 30s, I explored this situation (and subsequent family perplexities) in therapy and 12-step programs, and yet I never felt that I had gotten to its core. No one else in the family wished to join me in solving the mystery, and so for a good decade or more I just tried to forget about it all and get along with everyone.
Somewhere around 2000, an old friend of the family expressed dismay that I had changed my life entirely in order to help take care of my mom while she was dying. This woman said, "Your father is an incubus. He's just using you." I was so clueless, I had to ask her what an incubus was. Vampire. Bloodsucker. I said, "Oh no, you're wrong."
Fast forward to 2014. Two years earlier, I had moved to his town out west, both because the choir at St. John the Divine had been disbanded and I wasn't sure what to do next, and because I thought once again that I could be in relationship with family by "helping." (Dad was due to make a major move into a different housing situation, something that never actually happened.) It had been a wrenchingly difficult few years, but I had survived. One night, I ate dinner with dad at his swank retirement community's dining room, and he said to me, "Liz, come back to my apartment for a minute before leaving. I have a present for you." Silly me. Dad had almost never spontaneously offered me anything and my heart almost burst with anticipation as we walked down the hall.
He handed me a 99-cent plastic bag of discount candy, you know, those sugar-coated fruit slice-shaped soft gum drops. Before I even registered the shock and disappointment of receiving something so totally worthless after such fanfare, I sensed that there was something even more amiss. The bag felt oddly heavy. I pinched one of the candies between the plastic and my fingers and it was as hard as a rock. I peered at the expiration date (I am the Queen of expiration dates). Lo and behold, that date was a good seven or eight years earlier.
"Dad, this candy is extremely stale." Silence.
I plucked up all my courage, and with as much control as I could muster, I said, "What on earth would possess you to give your beloved only daughter a stale bag of candy years past its expiration date?" He looked at me with this utterly blank look that often came over his eyes, but he regrouped and said, "I thought that you could share them with your friends at the Y." (The fact that he was living in luxury and I was living at the YWCA was another one of those clues that was finally adding up, although all of a sudden I was proud to be there.) I said, "Dad, what kind of person would I be to do such a thing? Most of these women are living in abject poverty, missing many of their teeth, and breaking a tooth would lead to dental work they cannot afford." He stared back at me, and then walked away. I dropped the bag into his wastebasket, and walked out the door. This was a watershed moment. This wasn't about his age, or dementia (which he did not have) or alcohol. This wasn't just "a man of his generation." This wasn't some unique situation, the result of a bad day. This was the latest in a string of inexplicably subtle but cruel interactions that I had never understood, and it had to signal something far worse.
The next morning, I went to the public library, and wandered around the psychology section hoping that some insight would leap out at me. And of course, information that might be applicable was easy, but horrifying, to find. Dad would never in a million years have consulted with any mental health professionals, so an accurate diagnosis may never be possible. And I'll never know whether his condition, whatever it was, was genetic, or the result of his experiences in World War II. I'm just going to be conservative and refer to it as extreme narcissism. But surrounded by stacks of books and the light slanting in from high library windows, I finally came to understand my experience of my father.
Other than the New York Giants, the New York Yankees, and alcohol, I never experienced my dad taking a loving interest in me or any other person, activity, or situation. He never really had a career, hobby or creative pursuit.
I never experienced my dad apologizing or expressing regret for anything, even though there were many events and situations where that might have been appropriate.
I never experienced my dad expressing genuine appreciation for anyone or anything, unless it reflected on him. (On Easter, he would tell me and my mom, "My ladies look nice today," kind of thing.) He did stand up and say some nice words about me at my 50th birthday, words he had never said directly to me; there were some of his old friends there, and I'll never know who he was really speaking to.
I never experienced my dad helping people or offering to help. He never said, "Here, let me do that for you" or "I'm going down the street to help Joe paint his shed." He didn't belong to civic, church, or volunteer groups. Most of my interactions involved my feeling that I had to help him. However, late in life he led the residents' group at his retirement community, which I never really saw firsthand. Perhaps a new side of him came out at that time.
In my experience, my dad was highly manipulative about money. That is all I will say for now on that subject.
Fortunately, my dad had no global ambitions, and his energy vis a vis the world was quite passive. The people most affected by his emptiness were family. I think the fact that I was female and utterly his opposite meant that I was exiled, at birth, to a point off his radar screen, except for some key occasions when he could use my free help. The candy incident gave me an intellectual context for finally solving the family mystery, but the waves of emotion didn't start to hit me until last year. I apologize to readers for taking so long to more fully explain some of my metaphors, but I literally didn't dare speak until well after he was gone.
I left Montana soon after I learned the lesson in the bag of candy, but I did go back one more time two years ago, when he almost died. We had what we both knew to be our last encounter. I thanked him quite genuinely and in a heartfelt way for the emphasis he had placed on getting a good education, for his and mom's choice of churches (where I was introduced to the English church music tradition), and for our summers on Lake Champlain. I told him how these three things had enriched my life. And then there was silence. This was when another father might have jumped in to say, "I love you so much, honey. I am proud of you. I hope you will have a wonderful, happy future." Instead, a long, dead, silence. I finally blurted out, "Dad, do you even love me?" He said, "Of course." "What is it that you love? I mean, I am not sure I even know." He looked at me blankly, clearly not having a clue what love is, who I am, or how a quote-unquote "normal" father would feel on parting for the last time from his daughter. Finally, after a few more empty moments, I stood up, went over and kissed him on the top of his head, said, "Good-bye, Dad," and walked out.
There are a million more stories to tell, but that's all I can bear for today. I guess you can see why, when I say I'm just now learning about love from scratch, I am not joking. I think I have always known how to love, but not how to believe that love, respect, or caring will ever be returned in my direction.
