There Was A Shock

I received quite a shock recently. My father died at the age of ninety-five. No, that wasn’t the shock. It can’t be a shock when a ninety-five-year-old man dies. He was a very fortunate man in general, and so it was at the end. Although he had had a lifelong, painful arthritic condition, he had never gotten sick at all, and his heart was fine. He simply dropped stone dead of a stroke one day, about a month ago.

The shock came with the reading of the will. I went to Arizona to be with my sister, and after a few days she broke out the will and we took a look. I was mentioned, as is proper in wills. “I have one daughter, (name), and one son, Frederick Ceely.” It went on to say, “I also have one daughter-in-law, (name).” That was my ex-wife. The bequest was, in equal parts, to “my daughter, (name), and my daughter-in-law, (name).” I was left out.

What’s the difference between unreal and surreal? I should look it up. My feeling at the time was one of those. I’m feeling that way yet.

The will was a new one, drawn up in December, 2013. I had filed for divorce in November, 2013. So you’d have to think that those were related events. Excluded from a will on account of getting divorced, you say? Surely there was more to it than that! Well yes, there probably was.

Let me say clearly at this point that it was his money, and that he could do anything that he wanted to do with it. I have always maintained that anyone who counts on money from the dead is a fool. Strange things happen. At least he didn’t leave it to a church. On the level of WHAT he did, I am at peace. All of my inner turmoil comes from wondering about the WHY.

It was not a total shock, actually. I had been expecting some shenanigans. Something like generation skipping, some kind of hair-splitting, maybe the employment of trusts. But the will was as simple as can be. Some introductions; a bequest to two people equally; a no contest clause (aimed at me); signatures, the end.

I’m afraid that my exclusion stemmed from the fact that my father had never really approved of me. The divorce was only the last straw. He had always thought that I was flighty and irresponsible; that I had generally bad judgment and bad habits; that I was lazy; and that on top of it all, I was probably a bit stupid. He had probably formed this opinion of me when I was in high school, the stupid part anyway. It was a fair assumption based upon my high school grades. I hated high school and was being generally uncooperative. Very late one evening I listened in on a conversation about me between my parents. “What’s wrong with him?”  my mother said. “Maybe he’s just not that smart,” replied my father.

My father and I were of very different temperaments, which I will sum up by pointing out that he had only one job that lasted for his entire adult life, and he had been very successful at it, while I have had over fifty jobs in my life, largely without success. (That’s “50” plus jobs; it wasn’t a typo.) Also because of his temperament, once he had formed an opinion, nothing could shake him from his belief in his own judgment. He was supremely confident in all such matters.  

He liked to let you know what he thought, too. He always got his little digs in. When I was in my fifties, I got him a subscription to the New York Review of Books one year for Christmas. I told him that I had had a subscription for years and that I enjoyed it very much. On a subsequent visit to my parents, he gave me a bundle of them. I had already read my own copies, of course. “You might want to try reading these,” he said. “It’s hard reading, but you might like some of it.”

Saying things like that hurt me as much as the will did, and there were many instances over the decades. How would you have felt if your father had told you when you were seventeen, “not everyone is cut out for college . . . maybe you should take the test for the Sanitation Department.”

I’m no Donald Trump character, always explaining how smart I am, so I will not make any such claims here. There’ll be no lists of my accomplishments. Let’s just say that the record shows that although I may not be a genius, I am also not exactly stupid.

He was also of the opinion that I was reckless with money, probably based on the feeling that I had neither made enough money, nor saved enough money in my life. None of that had been reckless, though. While it was true that I’d probably spent too much money over time on magazines, records and the like, it was also true that my habits included a jealous husbanding of “bulk money,” or “bank money.” I was always aware of which money was set aside for bills, and what money could be fooled around with. I was also more careful with credit cards than most people, including my ex-wife.

Well, based upon some or all of the above, my father zeroed me out at will time. Was he just trying to be practical? Was he trying to give the benefit to my children in some left-handed way? (Like before I could squander it.) Did he just love and trust my ex-wife more than me? Or was it, as I fear and suspect, a final act of disapproval and rejection? I should never know for sure, absent the discovery of new evidence. It would have been a great relief to have the extra financial cushion, but I’ll probably be okay without it. Baring, that is, some extravagant medical catastrophe.

It has been said that “no man is an island.” I think they mean that no man can exist all on his own, with no support system. If any man ever were an island, though, that would have been my father. He had the strong suspicion that everybody but himself was crazy, stupid, or both. He trusted only his own counsel, and he lived by his own rules. But he’s gone now, so it’s all water under the bridge. As usual, the living are left to wonder, and suffer. 

The Curse Of The Eights

I was born in 1948, and it seems like all of the years ending in eight that followed were just terrible. Call it the Curse of the Eights.

1958 was a bad one. I did an accelerated year in school that left me almost two years younger than the other children in my class. That was a curse at least until the end of high school. My parents bought a house. It was in the same town, same neighborhood, really, but even slight geographic shifts affect children that age. New social patterns, new friends added to the old ones. My parents, speaking of whom, had a big difference of opinion in 1958 that ruined their relationship irrevocably. My mother, who had always been unpredictable, kicked it up a notch and became "mercurial." My father, for his part, stopped coming home from work. He moved into a sales position at his engineering company, and he was on the road almost all the time. We saw him maybe once a week after that. Altogether, it was way too much for me to properly integrate. I don’t think that I’ve ever gotten over it.

1968 was a terrible year for the entire world. I won’t run down all of the horrors that were in the news, we all remember them. Personally, in February I was given an early “Honorable” discharge by the Navy. Not a big deal, I just wasn’t the military type and they gently asked me to leave. I spent many months on unemployment, being generally depressed and depressed in particular by current events. My relationships suffered. It was horrible.

1978? The real crisis had taken place two years earlier, in 1976. But in 1976 I turned twenty-eight-years-old, so that’s an eight, isn’t it? 1n 1976 I had had some kind of massive identity crisis. I had been fired from most of the jobs that I’d had up until that point. I had not made any success of schooling since 1957. My wife was pressuring me to have another child, and I was resisting. I was under-educated and under-employed. I wanted to start making a better living, but I didn’t know how. I knew that things needed to change, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to go about it. By 1978 I was just formulating a new perspective, I was learning to be more positive. I was still in a fog, though. It was another few years before I really came out of it.

1988? In 1987 I almost died from a burst appendix. That drove home the fact that I still hadn’t figured out how to make a living. I had finished university in the meantime, and I had turned myself into a very good student, finally.  But I still had done nothing to build on that success. Somehow I decided to go to law school, and I started that enterprise in 1988. Law school was a good experience for me, I kind of enjoyed it and I did fine. Passed the California bar exam on the first try, too. The law was like a Venus Fly Trap for me. It was very pleasant at first, but it becomes fatal when the bug reaches a certain point. Sowing the seeds of future unhappiness does not make for a good year. So I’m going with terrible, based on the tensions that were inevitably created.

1998 was the worst. The law was not a good fit for me. I found it all so stressful that I could hardly stand doing the things that needed to be done every day. I had been drinking too much for a few years, and in 1998 I scaled that back dramatically. Without self-medicating, the stress seemed even worse. Without putting too fine a point on it, I was becoming a danger to myself. I survived the year, but only barely. It was horrible.

2008 was the year that my wife informed me that she couldn’t live with me anymore. So there’s that. It was bad news to me. I spent the rest of the year nervously waiting for her to change her mind. I had been asked to leave the home the previous year, “temporarily.”  I was living in Bangkok by then, in a cheap, small rented condo that was essentially a ruin. I didn't know anyone in Bangkok, so I was alone all the time. I had only a lap-top for company, without wi-fi. My kitchen consisted of a folding table with two plastic chairs (ever the optimist!) and an ice chest (milk for the Corn Flakes). It was terrible.

So now I’m kind of dreading 2018, only two years away. I’m post-divorce by now, settled into a new life in Thailand. My situation is generally good. My health is good. Patterns can be broken.  I’m optimistic.