Tuesday was a “national” day of celebration, but not everyone was in a celebratory mood. While our nation and others were partying and gorging themselves on corned beef, potatoes, cabbage, and an overabundance of beer, one person was grieving and sinking into a rabbit hole of sadness over the death of a parent.
The grief on this day was not because it was the anniversary of the parent’s death on that date, but because the parent’s birthday fell on that date when he was living. That deep sadness and mourning were the descriptors for the day; there was no silver lining or anything to be enjoyed. It came and built into a massive downward spiral of grieving and guilt, as it does every holiday that does not include him. It has been two years, and it doesn’t seem to be improving or getting easier.
You might be thinking I had a bad day on the anniversary of my dad’s birthday, when he was alive, but it wasn’t me. I don’t hold onto things like that. My sentimentality is for the living. My dad is gone, and celebrating every ‘when he was here’ or ‘today is so many years since’ is not something I do. I don’t tend to keep things and let them ruin something for the living. So, for me, it was just another day.
I don’t drink, so alcohol wasn’t a cause of depressive thoughts. I did make the corned beef and cabbage meal because I love it, but I made it yesterday. I forgot to take out the brisket for the actual corned beef holiday. Cows’ cries were heard around the globe that day, by the way. That didn’t ruin my day either. I often forget or miss “special” days. Days are all like any other.
I, quite frankly, don’t get why we have to have a holiday for every stinking thing, a month for anything, and a constant reminder of one day in history over another. The history is enough.
True story. My husband and I forget our anniversary just about every year since we have been married. Why? Because it’s just a date. We do something special when we remember it. Sometimes.
In reality, we just don’t think there is one unique day to do something special to commemorate anything.
If you live contentedly and with the understanding that life is short, you appreciate everything and make each day count. It doesn’t mean we don’t have normal, dull days when we just bum around or that we sometimes take things for granted. We absolutely do. It just means we don’t feel pressured to make a big deal of these things. For me, my dad’s birthday was just a day. Not so for my sister.
She grieved and mourned and made herself miserable all day. She called me later that day and asked why I hadn’t called her, but I knew the depths of the pit she was putting herself through were not going to be improved by my call. I was not about to give her a reason to sit there and feel worse, and I was not about to go down the hole with her, even if she thought I should have.
She thinks I should be in perpetual lament, especially on key dates. I can’t go there. It is not me, for more reasons than one, including that I dislike being down or in heartache for any reason. I have had enough of that my entire life, and I won’t live the rest of it dragging that weight with me. That makes my sister angry. She calls me cold. So be it. I can’t change her perception, and she won’t hear why I don’t over-feel as she does.
My dad. I don’t grieve for him. My mom either. Both are gone.
My mom, who was neither my biological nor my legal mom, was not a warm person. Not to me, anyway. She was warmer with my sister, but even that had limits. She gave love in the form of financial transactions. She loved you ‘as long as you asked for nothing’. She loved you only ‘when you didn’t need or want anything more than a conversation’. Her love and attention were always conditional, framed in ‘as long as’ or ‘if’ terms. At least that was my experience. Even in death, she showed me she was not ‘mother’ and did not consider us on the same level as her two biological children. I was not a consideration.
I can’t grieve for my dad; I’ll explain why.
When my father was dying, I flew out to see him as he approached his departure. I thought it was going to be a miserable, gut-wrenching visit. What actually happened was different from what I expected.
I saw him, weak and barely tethered to the here and now, and I felt sorrow for him. It was so sad, no doubt about that. I helped as much as I could. I spent time with him, got him all his favorite foods, even though he was no longer eating much at all, and I gave him my forgiveness so he could go in peace, with respect for me. I didn’t want him to go on to the next life thinking I did not forgive him. I did forgive him, a long time before his decline in health.
What surprised me was that I did not feel like I was going to fall apart. That was not what surprised me most. I was calm and I was fine. What surprised me was that the reminiscing, as one does at the end of life, your own or someone else’s, left me empty. I felt void, confused that I could not come up with one good memory of my dad or of life with him. I had so many bad ones, and even today I only have very brief, limited remembrance of any good times with him.
My father was not a nice man. I never said those words out loud in my entire life. It took me many years to stop protecting his honor and to come to terms with what I had in my father. I can’t miss him. I don’t.
When he was alive, he made life miserable. He was abusive, physically (not sexually), emotionally, and mentally, to the extreme. He invoked fear, not love. As a child, I always said I loved him and defended him against anyone who said a bad word about him, but I haven’t in years. I don’t speak of this with family, other than my husband and son, because no one understands it. I definitely don’t talk about it with my sister because she somehow shut out all the bad and holds on to her guilt by remembering life with dad as a fantasy story, where there were no monsters, just beauty and wonder.
There were monsters. There was little beauty. Life was a constant fear of what lay around the corner. My dad was the dragon in my story.
He breathed fire and burned everything in his path that didn’t please him. I don’t remember anything nice. I remember awful.
I know there were nice and happy moments, I do. The thing is, the bad outweighed the good for me by a landslide.
I was the eldest, and I paid for it, though I had no horse in the race that awarded me that prize. When my biological mother abandoned us, I was two, and I was instantly made an adult in terms of chores and taking care of my sister and the home. I cooked, cleaned, watched out for, all of it. I did that while also getting good grades in school. That was not so bad. I mean, not having a childhood was miserable, yes, but it was having to deal with adult, serious things as a child, that I should not have had to even think about until I was on my own, that ruined my childhood first.
Any good memories are clouded by bad ones. He took us to Disney, and that should be a great memory, but I only remember his introduction to his girlfriend and her tagging along. The issue wasn’t that, really. It was that my sister and I had been gone for over six months. We hadn’t seen our only parent that long. He had shipped us to New York to meet our bio mom, after saying we would never meet her until we were of age to make that choice. He sent us there with a one-way ticket, which I didn’t recognize as a sign that he didn’t intend to bring us back too quickly, if at all. He had apparently had time to meet and begin seriously dating when he said he was doing everything he could to bring us home. Meeting the stranger and having to act like I felt like her child didn’t work. We were begging to come home. He put us off for six months, and we were forced to stay with our grandparents in a one-bedroom hoarder’s paradise apartment. I fault him for that memory.
I have brief recollections of having fun by the lake where we lived, visiting elder neighbors who were so sweet and gave us milk and cookies, but all of these memories are overshadowed by the beatings I’d get because I didn’t hear his whistling for us to come home, or because I went too far from the house, or because I spilled polish on a bed sheet. Even the adult memories are marred with misery.
Dad couldn’t take the dog leash or belt to me by then, but that didn’t stop him. He was verbally abusive. I can hear him calling us whores and bitches for god knows what. I don’t know what the yelling was about anymore, but I recall every name he called me.
If he wasn’t making me miserable and keeping me down, he made sure to ruin the day somehow. By the time I was married and making a home for my own family, far away from him, he knew he could not physically hurt me. He still invoked extreme fear. I was always afraid to answer the phone. I knew he would pick a fight. It was his hobby. He would then launch into verbal tirades and put-downs. And still I thought I loved him.
I made sure he was flown out for the birth of my only son. I flew him out each time, and I flew his sister from Spain for a visit. I knew he could not afford it, and that he loved her and had not seen her in over thirty years, so I did it.
When we first found her, I flew him to Spain for a month to be with her. A week into the visit, he wanted to return stateside. Apparently, he was losing control of his live-in girlfriend and had to attend to that. Fine. It was arranged.
On both occasions when he came for a visit with me and his sister, his trip was cut short because he would pick such ugly fights with one of us. His degradation was not just directed at me but at her as well. She would be on vacation in my home, and he would bring her to tears.
The last time he came to my home, I had flown him in again to see my aunt while she stayed here for a month. He started early that morning. He got mad that I asked him to stop smoking in the guest room and to smoke outside.
My aunt, also a smoker, managed to comply with my wish the entire time and never once lit up inside my home. When she agreed that, if that was my request, he should honor it, he went insane with anger. He didn’t direct it at me, but at his sister. She had taken sides with me against him. He insulted her, called her names I will not speak. He went on and on for what seemed like hours. She was crying the whole time. She is a gentile woman and had never been talked to like that, and here was the man who should love her, berating her and stomping on her spirit.
I told him to stop right then, but he kept going. He had his fuel for rage and liked it. It was power to him. But he didn’t count on one thing.
At some point, my husband asked him to stop and settle down. That is when my dad went off on him and threw my son into the mix. The same tactics he used on me and my aunt were now directed at my husband and son.
I have never seen my husband angry. Ever. That day, when my husband said in a loud voice, “enough,” I felt it in my bones. For him to reach that point was serious. But he was right. This was it. No more. He had been here for three days, the usual timeframe for him to find a reason to fight.
Anyway, when I saw, heard, and felt my husband’s voice reverberate in my blood, I told my dad to pack his bags. He was leaving. I called the airline, paid the fee to change an unchangeable ticket, and called him an Uber. I didn’t want to be in his presence for one moment longer. I did not want my aunt, my guest, in my house, spoken to like I had allowed him to speak to me my entire life. I was not about to allow him to speak to my husband or child like that either. He poked a bear. And he got what he never expected.
I said that day that he would never be permitted to come here again, and he never did.
There were times when my sister asked why I couldn’t fly him out or invite him out, and I would have to remind her that I had made a decision and would not go back on it.
I think that was the day my heart’s connection to my father was severed completely. It had been held together by a thread for many, many years, but that tether had been stretched and worn to the breaking point. My love for my dad died that day.
I realized that loving him was not possible. I realized that I had not loved him for years, but that I was fulfilling a child’s responsibility to love their parent. This thing with my dad was not love. He did not know what love is.
It’s a man allowing her to bring her dad over and over into his home, knowing how it always ended, and never saying a word. It’s that man using his hard-earned money to have her buy the airline tickets, knowing what happened every time he did. It’s a young child, my son, appeasing me by calling his grandfather every week so I wouldn’t have to get a lecture. It’s him putting up with his grandfather’s crassness, even though he had met him only twice in his life.
My dad did not love. He controlled, manipulated, twisted the truth, and outright lied. He forgot any kindness shown to him the second after it was given and cashed in.
I left my dad that week, after seeing him, confused about why I didn’t feel sick or experience deep sadness. I didn’t cry for his eventual passing. I didn’t cry when he passed. I cried. Plenty. But my crying was for the pain I saw my sister going through. I was profoundly sad for her suffering and guilt.
She had the same experience with dad that I did, but her mind shifts into guilt each time. She feels guilty for every bad interaction with anyone. She will suffer over and over again so she doesn’t disappoint, make someone else unhappy, or make an enemy. I am just too cut from that cloth. She doesn’t understand or approve of my reactions or feelings about much.
I can’t feel anything for my dad anymore. I loved him, and I never got that back. I felt hated and manipulated. I don’t love that. How could I? I regret that whatever caused him to become what he was changed him from what might have been a wonderful man.
I don’t know how long it’s been since I stopped loving my dad, but I do know it’s been a very long time. Maybe I never did. Maybe I said or felt I had to, out of fear or expectations. It doesn’t matter anymore, really.
I made peace with all of it many years ago and forgave him. I found my own peace in that. I gave him absolution from any guilt or worry he might have had in his last days. He might have felt remorse. He often looked out into space as if he were rethinking every year of his life. Maybe he was angry, maybe regretful. I will never know.
For two years now, I’ve been waiting for the call I know I’ll get from my sister on every ‘special’ day. The one where she expects her grief to be mine as well. I don’t seek her out. I just can’t put myself through what I don’t feel. I won’t fight with her about how or why I don’t feel as she does. I love her too much to make her any sadder or to keep her in her misery and mourning. I won’t add to that.
She asks me why I don’t show any emotion for dad, why I don’t feel as she does. I say nothing more than that I process differently than she does. I can’t go through what she puts herself through. I can’t grieve, mourn, or guilt myself over dad or even mom. Do I have to?
Maybe I am wrong about my approach. I don’t think I am. I am at peace and content. I hold no grudge and have let go.
#life #relationships #grief #writing
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