So Your Dead Dad Walks Into The Room

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.

Parents, Forgiveness, and Acceptance

Parents, we’re stuck with them, we’re born to them.  They have dominion over us throughout childhood, which seems to last, if I recall, almost forever.  Some are a mixed blessing; some better; some worse.  It all falls into something like a bell curve, like most things.  Thin at the leading edge, the saints; thin at the trailing edge, the real devils; and very broad in the middle ground, the more or less okay.  They are our parents, and we are expected to love them, we are encouraged to love them.  It can be easy, or hard, according to the evidence, and according to our temperaments.

Of my own parents, I can say that one was an active torment to me and the other was an absent disappointment.  I had friends that did better, and friends that did worse, much worse in some cases.  It’s hard to view these things objectively, since they are by nature extremely subjective.  At some point we must make a choice, an adult choice, as to whether we will bear a grudge forever, or if we would prefer to be magnanimous, look at the big picture, and chose to forgive them their peccadillos and accept them for what they are: human beings with human foibles who probably did their best to discharge their responsibilities as our parents.

I’ve known parenting from both sides now, and I have observed a lot of parents and children on both sides of it, too.  One thing is for certain: there are few, if any, perfect parents.  Mistakes are inevitable, because we’re talking about human beings here.  Real people.  Nobody bats a thousand in the game of life.

Of my American friends, there were those who soldiered through the experience of having really awful parents, maybe only one, maybe both.  Most of them have tried heroically to swallow their bitterness and keep it together, for the sake of family or for the sake of their own sanity. 

Of my Thai friends, there are a couple of young people whose experience of childhood and parenting left them with such a comprehensive bitterness that they have taken the extreme step of changing their names and now live with the firm intention of never talking to those people again, or even thinking about them.  I’ve heard the stories, and I understand their pain.  Whatever it takes, brothers and sisters.  It’s up to you.

There are those among my American friends who now speak glowingly on social media about parents that I remember as being less than stellar.  Their love for their parents is very touching.  It occurs to me that they have discovered the obvious truth at the center of the parenting phenomenon:  one’s parents are a fact, a fact that nothing can change.  That woman is your mother; that man is your father.  Even death cannot change that. Their duty was to do the best that they could, and maybe it was, even if it that “best” was borderline criminal. Maybe our duty as their children is to forgive them their imperfections, and to accept them as the imperfect people that they are, that we all are. 

I’ve felt for a long time that our duty was to our own children as well as to our parents.  If we had difficult times with our own parents, the least that we could do was try to model some good behavior for our children and forgive our parents, and love them, and be good to them.  In the hopes, you know, that our children will, in turn, forgive us and be good to us.  That’s the dream.

I think that I have done okay in this effort, my conscience is clean. As an adult, and a parent myself, I did my best to bury the past and put a good face on it all.  We visited with my parents frequently, and I called them often.  I avoided all recriminations and tried to be unrelentingly upbeat.  Frankly, I’d sometimes get off the phone with my mother and say to my wife, “when I die, I’m going straight to heaven, because I was nice to grandma.”  It wasn’t always easy.

My sincerest wish is that someday my own children will find it in their hearts to afford me the same consideration.  When they’re ready.  We can all dream, can’t we?