It's
been about three years now since my father died. I devoted a lot of
blog time early on to complaining about the son-of-a-bitch. Sure, I
was angry, but not without reason. There was very little to recommend
him as a father. He had become disinterested in family life early on,
and after that we hardly saw him and he never spoke with us, his
children. (If cornered, he would speak at us, in long monologues, but
never any real conversations.) I overheard him several times in
conversation with my mother, but I wish that I hadn't been listening.
Those were unremittingly negative affairs, and his references to me
were degrading and disheartening.
Those
years of the blog are full of awful recriminations, based on the fact
that he obviously bore some huge grudge against me, as though I, and
my mother for sure, and who knows, maybe my little sister too, had
personally ruined his life. He always saw himself as being perfect,
and he rarely found anyone who could live up to his standards for a
reasonable human being. My mother failed miserably in his eyes, not
an altogether unreasonable conclusion, and my sister and I went down
the drain with the dirty bathwater. It was a real shit-show. In a
final act of contempt, he left me completely out of his will without
so much as a fair-thee-well.
Why
bring this up now? Why today of all days? Simply, I saw him in a
dream the other night. It was one of those mostly unremembered dreams
that went on and on, including chapters where I revisited old jobs,
scenes where I was again undergoing military training as a recruit,
nothing remotely realistic, old bosses being surprised to see me,
fellow boots being surprised to find a seventy-year-old in their
number. Dad did a walk through, I forget the details. It all made me
wonder, though, what would I really do if dad walked through that
door right now?
Setting
aside, for the moment, that I do not believe that the dead have any
future at all, no future of any kind, only the dreamless sleep of
eternity, identical in its specifics to the future of a dead dog, a
dead tree, a dead worm, a sunken ship, or a dead mushroom. There is
no afterlife, and there are no ghosts. Okay, back to our story.
What
would I say? After so much bitterness and disapproval? I knew
immediately what the answer was. I would greet him cheerfully, give
him a hug and tell him that I loved him and that we had all missed
him. I would ask him what his requirements these days were for the
perfect chair. (He had terrible arthritis in his back, and he was
never really comfortable.) I would apologize for the absence of
bourbon in the house and offer him a short vodka, which he would
accept. Would that be hypocritical of me? Well, no, not really.
Even
assuming that the dead would be privy to all that I had said and
written in the meantime, that is the greeting that he would prefer
and expect. He was always one to create his own world, where he was
king. Besides, we had had a wonderful relationship, to all
appearances, for the last thirty-five years of his life. I hated and
avoided my parents as a teenager and through much of my twenties, but
after that I decided to take the high road. They were my parents,
after all, and just as I had when I was a very young boy, I loved
them. I was them! I was a product of whatever had masqueraded as love
in their relationship. Acceptance and cheerfulness are required of
us. We are expected to be grateful for the gift of life, however
little we make of it or care for it. If our parents were not perfect,
well then, who is? Not me, I can tell you. Who am I to judge? (There
is a terrific argument to be made that I am in a perfect position to
judge, having witnessed the entire conspiracy with all of its acts in
furtherance, and all of its crimes. Let's save that discussion for
another time.)
My
father, hopefully with his hearing restored, would give me a rousing
lecture about something, perhaps a full book report on Tristram
Shandy, death having finally allowed him the time and inclination to
finish it. I would smile, and eventually the conversation would turn
to certain great meals that he has missed, and other drawbacks of
being dead. I would occasionally try to get a word in edgewise, but
he would, as usual, begin to gaze out the window until it was his
turn again. I would smile at that and encourage him towards a subject
that I knew he liked. Like boxers from the 1940s and '50s, the
strange fish-based soups available in Spanish restaurants, or
newspaper humorists from the 1920s and '30s. And I would listen,
happy for the attention.
And
that, my darlings, is why I am such an approval whore to this very
day. Let his words and his tone be insincere or even malicious. Let
them only mimic approval and I will be well satisfied.
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