Dad?
Gnosis interrupts its irregularly scheduled program of Essays After Montaigne for this:
My therapist suggested that I write you a letter on the seventh anniversary of your leaving to fill you in on what's happened since you've been gone. She suggested this because I've found myself depressed all of a sudden and without apparent cause, and she thinks you might have something to do with it. There's the damned anniversary (linked as always with Father's Day). I just read On The Road. And summer, with all of its light and heat (well, sort of), is here again. But I'm jumping to the end of the story. Let me go back to where you left us.
Actually, it's kind of hard to locate the moment at which you left us, or at least it is for me--I was so confused. When Cindy called, she said it was "real bad," and I probably knew what that meant, but I wasn't about to admit it to myself. She didn't say you were gone, so I clung hopefully to that. We even stopped on our ride from the Fairfield train station to Hartford Hospital at the Burger King in Cromwell. When we got to the hospital, Admissions directed us to Intensive Care, so I figured you hadn't gone yet.
But when we got up there, Cindy's mother met us at the elevator and said, "I'm sorry, he's gone. He dropped dead in the backyard," like she was ripping a Band-Aid off. It wasn't that simple, though. They had you on life support, and they were asking me questions: Could I reach Tim? Should they stop the life support? And later, I've been told, what should be done with your body? I couldn't reach Tim, and I couldn't even figure out what I would want to know to answer the other questions. I kept asking whether or not you were dead, and no one seemed prepared to address that question in straightforward terms. The lovely and deeply sympathetic nurse said something about you being part way to heaven, and that we should let you go the rest of the way. I guess what she meant was that you were dead and it was time to turn off the life support. Maybe someone else needed the table. I just wanted everyone to do whatever they were supposed to and not ask me.
At some point, I asked someone to wipe away the blood that was trickling down your chin from the tube in your mouth. I bent down and kissed your forehead, and asked you to send word from wherever you went. I told you I really, really needed to know what happened next. Obviously I haven't heard from you, but I don't know if that request was fair. Of all the people who've lost someone and wanted to know where they went, why should I be the one to find out? Then I think they turned off the life support, but they never actually announced when or if they did. We all sort of stood around and mumbled. We went out into the hallway, and there were two weird people with a Bible and their backs to the wall, crossing themselves and praying in Latin or Spanish. Perhaps they meant well, but it struck me as predatory. I wanted them to go away, but I didn't have the energy to do anything. Then there was some alarm that went off for a while before someone turned it off. But just as there was no announcement that the life support had been turned off, no one told us when you died or pulled a sheet over your head. So I don't know quite when you left or how much, if any, of this you experienced.
That's what happened, but let me tell you what I felt. After Cindy's call that morning, I collapsed on the bed crying. It was reflexive and overwhelming, probably because I already felt what I wouldn't admit to myself. This was worlds away from my largely emotionless reaction when Cindy called about your first heart attack four years earlier. I was on the verge of tears on the train up to Fairfield, though my sadness wasn't really conscious (I wasn't thinking of you and getting sad--it was coming from somewhere primal and inarticulate), but I was conscious of really wanting to reach Tim and being frustrated that I couldn't. In the ICU, when Cindy's mother gave me her blunt version of what had happened, I was overwhelmed by that reflexive sadness again. I fell crying into Mom's arms. (Her being there was as welcome as it was unexpected.) When I saw you, my sadness became milder and more focused. You were lying there unshaven, without a shower after the morning jog that killed you, a tube jammed in your mouth, and your head pushed down so that you had a double chin. You had had the angioplasty, took the cholesterol medication, ate well, exercised vigorously, and had just passed a stress test with flying colors. Yet there you were--fifty-two years old and in better shape than me at twenty-eight--dying and looking awful. It was a sad sight.
But as I thought through the facts surrounding your demise, all of the sadness, regret, and concern faded into my rapidly swelling fear. The only emotion that I could fully feel, of which I was fully aware, was the emotion that I felt for myself. And that wasn't the grief of losing a beloved parent. Our relationship wasn't explicitly emotional, so the end of that relationship wasn't an emotional loss, though there were other, less tangible losses and implications. I realized that what I saw was what awaited me--perhaps not as prematurely as it came to you--but someday, and what I felt in the face of that was abject terror. I didn't whisper in your ear that I wished you well, that I would miss you, that I loved you, or anything else for your benefit. I wanted you to make this better for me. I had to be more grown than I was ready to be yet again, and one more of the forebears standing between me and my mortality was gone. As far as I was concerned, this sucked for me.
Everyone around me looked out for me and tried to take care of me. They all said it must be awful for me, and didn't expect anything of me but that it be awful for me. And it was, but not in the way that they meant. Still, I received a great deal of good will and became more emotionally open than I remember ever having been. Though Donna and I were to be married in two months, it was during that time that our marriage was emotionally consummated. I grew emotionally connected to her in a way that I have never been connected to anyone else. But I wouldn't realize that or what it meant for years after that. In that week after your death, there was a single occasion on which the deeper, more complex, and more profound emotions made themselves known. Sitting home by myself, not quite sure what I should be doing, I opened a card from my friend Mark. He mentioned a visit he made to Connecticut where he had seen you and me speak simply, as friends. I burst into tears. His misconception of our relationship (he seemed to see our lack of affect as informal comfort) was touching, and what he described was a paternal relationship that I wanted (and that I had seen between Donna and her father). But I hadn't had that, and now I never would.
Your death accelerated an emotional awakening in me that continues still. By proposing to Donna, I had made a commitment to a certain level of emotional connection, but your death brought forth such a wave of emotion that my connection to her became much deeper and stronger than it might have otherwise. And the thought has crossed my mind more than once that your death may have been caused by a similar emotional awakening in you. The morning after my bachelor party, Father's Day morning, that is, you sounded different--more available and more engaged. You told me that you were definitely going to read Infinite Jest. I know that you got through the first section or two (if your bookmark is to be believed) in the week before you died. I wonder if you got far enough to see the themes (Hamlet, athletics, addiction, failure of communication, etc.) and how they might apply to our lives. I wonder if reading that in the midst of the preparations for my wedding proved too much for you--if your attempt to feel without enough preliminary stretching to warm up for the emotional strain burst your heart. That would be poetically tidy, but I don't know (I won't ever know) if it's true. I am learning first-hand the power of emotions and their danger in untrained hands.
I spent the months after your death trying to find out why it happened. This may have been motivated in part by a sense of regret about what might have been done differently, a sense that was heightened by Cindy's subsequent revelation that you had been suffering through a depressive episode when you died. If someone had looked after you or you had known how to look after yourself, would you have survived? That question, which I asked in light of years of Mom's saying that Tim and I should establish a greater emotional connection with you, made me feel guilty. That, in turn, made me angry--at Mom for making me feel guilty and at you for putting me in the position where I might be seen as failing to prevent your demise. And I was angry at Cindy for having known that you were depressed without doing anything about it. Yet more than regret, fear drove my wish to understand the causes of your death. I wanted to know what happened so I could avoid that fate. If I could figure out what might have been done to save you, I could figure what might still be done to save me.
I started by having my heart looked at from every conceivable angle, which culminated in my wearing an automated blood pressure cuff for a twenty-four hour period. But my family history aside, no one could find any real reason to be concerned about my cardiovascular health. That brought little comfort, since they couldn't find anything wrong with you just three months before you died. I might have been happier if they had found something specific wrong that could then be fixed. But it seems that the problem lay elsewhere.
Just after the fourth anniversary of your death, I went (without Donna) on a two-week bike trip through Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, and Denmark. From the moment I started down the stairs in our building to get a cab until a few days after I returned home, I was miserable. I spent nights in charming European towns trying not to obsess over the fact that one day, Donna and I would be separated by death. If that awaited us anyway, why was I separating us to ride a bike in the rain for two weeks? A few days into the trip, I kind of came apart in a shower in Arlon, Belgium. It occurred to me that this probably wasn't appropriate vacation behavior. About a month after I got back, I started with Donna's therapist. I knew I needed to do something, but I wasn't quite sure where to start with her. I told her that I was sometimes suffered a disruptive fear of death, but I didn't know how to present it as a problem since my fear seemed entirely rational to me.
The year of my wedding--which also included a move, having our apartment burglarized, your death, your mother's death, Donna's father's death, and other assorted traumas--had left me emotionally disoriented and vulnerable. My monumental reticence was crumbling. I felt more and expressed more. The bike trip found and exploited that vulnerability and opened it further. Therapy crawled right up into the opening, rooted around a little, and everything came pouring out. First came the anxiety (the energy that held everything else back), and then came the depression, anger, and nausea that it had been holding back. But unlike you, I had rich emotional connections, medication, and therapy to prop me up through this process, and I wasn't as committed to emotional stupor as you had become. When you were my age, it seems that you could (for the sake of your wife and children) have made the same choice I've made. But I can only guess that it appeared too daunting or that you simply weren't aware that you had the choice. Whatever the reason, you seem to have spent decades compressing your emotions until they became too dense for your heart. I'm getting poetic again, but that's hard to avoid in this case. It's over-determined.
I made a different choice, and now my emotions are spilling out all over the place (or so it must seem to you). I've even taken to publishing them, which must horrify you. And I'm not going to claim that, having made this choice, I've never looked back. As I said, emotions in untrained hands can be really dangerous, which didn't come as a complete surprise. But I've been astonishingly well cared for. That's the one thing I've learned that I would never have suspected and couldn't have learned any other way. If you just say you need help, no one's going to run away. People will come out of the woodwork to help you. I wish you'd known that, or took the chances necessary to find it out. So though I can't claim to be happier in any simple sense, I'm much more alive. And I'm willing to bet that, whatever else may happen, I won't die of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two.
You may hear a note of anger in this, and that's no accident. If you had screwed up only your own life, that would be regrettable, but you caused so much pain and suffering for so many. Such an accusation may not seem fair. After all, you don't seem to have been emotionally equipped for life. In fact, I'll bet that you could write a letter much like this one to your father, just as he probably could to his. One of the corollaries of viewing familial dysfunction as an illness is a chain of causation that defers responsibility deep into genealogical history, but I don't know that I buy that. You may not be able to control what others do to you or even how it affects you, but you must take full responsibility for what you do to others. What made me so angry about Sal and Dean in On The Road was that in seeking to shed the burden of attachment, they never stopped to consider the burden that placed on others--their lovers, their wives, their children. Given my experience as your son, the Beat pursuit of freedom strikes me as a reckless pursuit of cheap thrills; Dean Moriarty strikes me as a manic, narcissistic putz with A.D.D. and delusions of grandeur (like your friends Walter and Saunders) and Sal as a toadying fanboy. I might feel differently if Dean and Sal had found some deeper truth in their addled wanderings or if you had found happiness in your retreat from the bonds of family, but I've seen no evidence of either. Because you chose to have me (for the self-serving purpose of avoiding the draft, no less) you were responsible for me, just as, having chosen to adopt Tim, you were responsible for him. You fulfilled that responsibility in many ways, but you failed us emotionally. You didn't give us the hope of which every child is supposed to be an expression.
So here I am, at the beginning of another dreaded summer (the one thing that always made perfect sense to me about your death is that it was on the first day of summer--if you're going to leave, best to do it before it gets miserably hot), and I'm angry, sad, and scared. It didn't have to be this way. The night before last, as I was trying to fall to sleep, I felt myself being overcome by my old fear of the infinite again. I was trying to picture how the universe could be contained, and felt that old familiar panic in the pit of my stomach. Eventually my mind wandered off to other matters and I slept, but I wasn't at all happy about the return of that old familiar feeling. Yesterday morning, we went to a friend's Bat Mitzvah, where there was much discussion of God and infinity. During a moment of silent prayer, I asked to be freed of the burden of infinity. I spent much of the service reflecting on how religion handles this question. During another moment of silent prayer, I considered the question from a Buddhist perspective, which prompted the question: What did I want that was causing me to be so unhappy? Asking that question was like pulling the keystone out of the arch of my anxiety. It just collapsed with the realization that I was making myself unhappy by trying to understand something that was simply beyond my ability to comprehend. If I had grown up without the sense that I had to understand everything, that I was responsible for everything that happened to me, if I could have believed that there were parents and a God that would look after that which I couldn't, I would have been a much happier child. I don't know what good telling you all of this will do, but maybe now I don't have to carry it all.
11:23:31 AM 
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