The Man With The Golden Arm

The Saturday before my Dad died……..

I got up at the butt-crack of dawn and drove through a rare, blinding snowstorm from Chicago to Carbondale, Illinois. “Just like Dad to make things difficult,” I grumbled as I crawled along highway 57 at 15 miles an hour. When I called my sister Toni to ask if there was anything I could bring to the hospital, I heard my father’s voice in the background saying that he wanted donuts and a six-pack of Leinenkugel’s. The same thing he asked for every single time I came to visit.

Dad was only 22 when I was born and frequently behaved more like an exuberant and volatile big brother than a father. We loved when he would play the ukulele and sing “Ragtime Cowboy Joe”; he’d tell us bedtime stories about Albert Schweitzer in the jungle, stories he would end with a blood curdling scream that would elicit shrieks and giggles from us kids and stern “Willard John Genz’s” from my mother. During those early years, he earned a pharmacy degree while working at a local drugstore. He had begun pitching softball in the Navy Leagues and had been known to clock in at 99 miles an hour, underhand pitch. He continued to play amateur softball throughout my childhood, culminating in a state championship and MVP trophy.

I remember Dad’s tenderness when I would stand on his feet to dance but I also remember at age five receiving the full force of his strong pitcher’s hand on my bare backside for waking him up from a nap. Dad’s moods controlled the household. He was funny and charismatic around others who never got to know him intimately, but his wife and kids saw the monster under the bed. When the mood was bad, it was a raging hurricane and when it was good it was bright sunshine.

I was 14 when I found out the cause of the crazy-ass weather that was my Dad.

Mom sat me down at the kitchen table and told me he hadn’t had a heart attack as we had been told when he’d collapsed the day before; he had OD’d on an injectable drug called Demerol. He was not in the hospital in town, he was in a drug rehab center in Minnesota called Hazelden. I was not to tell anyone, especially my younger siblings. We were what is called in my profession a “looking-good family,” meaning our outward appearance and status seemed healthy and normal. No one knew the dark secrets that were sheltered under our roof and Mom wanted to make sure it stayed that way.

The afternoon before my Dad died……..

the family gathered around him in his hospital bed. We turned his beloved football on the television and ordered a pizza. He was on a morphine pump but no life support. The DNR order was in place. His kidneys were shutting down and toxins were filling him, creating torpor and confusion. He ate no more than one bite of pizza, putting it down and saying, “I don’t feel so good.” My heart squeezed.

About three years before this, I stopped talking to my father because he completely ignored the fact I was re-marrying. There’s always a last straw, and it’s often the silliest straw, but in truth I’d had my lifetime fill of begging for his love and attention. There were years my birthday was forgotten, important events unattended and unacknowledged, communication a one-way street, carefully chosen gifts tossed aside in disgust, pleas for empathy and comfort met with contempt. There were lies and manipulations that led me into a lion’s den of conflict with family members. There was physical, emotional and verbal abuse. There were decades of mindfuckery, at which he was a world champion.

My marriage didn’t last as long as my estrangement from my father. One day, a month after what would have been my second wedding anniversary, a tectonic plate inside my heart shifted and I picked up the phone and called my Dad to wish him a happy 85th birthday.

“Hey, Dad,” I said, “Happy birthday.”

“Why thank you, hunner. How’s my Chicago broad?”

There was no talk of the past three years’ silence and he even said he was very sorry to hear of my divorce earlier that year. He made a funny/insulting quip about Nancy Pelosi just for old time’s sake and was pleased when I took the bait. He didn’t hang up abruptly like he usually would and he told me he loved me. He had never been able to pull off being a great father for more than five minutes at a time, but it was always just enough to reel me right back in.

I had been told he’d complained about my not calling and said I didn’t care about him, but he also never picked up the phone to call me and see what was wrong. I tried to kill the hope he would become the Dad I wanted or needed, because most of me knew he was incapable, but like a hungry baby bird, I continued to take the stray worms he happened to toss my way.

The truth was I cared a lot. I cared more than I should have cared, cared more than he gave me cause to care, cared more than was good for me. I cared more than I wanted to care, because my heart and mind held the memories of not only how he mistreated me but how he mistreated others I loved.

But I also wondered if, deep down inside him, he felt unworthy of our love and that’s why he couldn’t bring himself to reach out.

As the toxins in his brain ripped through his rock-solid defense mechanisms, he looked at me, Jennie and Toni and said he knew he’d done some bad things. He then said we should “all get along and hold hands, forever and ever, amen.” As though wanting to secure a promise that we would still love him and each other, despite all the damage that had been done. It felt to me like a muddle-headed deathbed apology. Before the football game was over and he lapsed into a deep sleep, in a single moment of perfect clarity, he said he just hoped that the Rams would lose.

The night before he died……..

I dozed in the big chair by his bed. I had never forgiven myself for not being with my mom the night she died so I wasn’t going anywhere. During the wee hours, Dad woke up and, wide-eyed, spoke over my shoulder to someone he saw standing there. “Will she be all right?” he asked, and then he nodded as if someone had spoken back to him. “She’ll be all right.” I will never know, although I wanted to believe, that he was talking about me. That he was worried I would not be all right after he died. That I wasn’t inconsequential to him after all. I got up and sat by his side on the bed, covered his hand with mine, and told him that we would all be all right. That it was okay for him to go to Mom. He then closed his eyes for what would be the final time and drifted back to sleep.

The last morning of his life……..

I had a sudden urge to find a poem Dad used to read to us: Edgar Guest’s “Little Master Mischievous” and read it back to him, despite his comatose state.

“Little Master Mischievous, that’s the name for you;

There’s no better title that describes the things you do:

Prying into corners, peering into nooks,

Tugging table covers, tearing costly books.”

As I read the last lines of the last stanza, long ago forgotten, my voice caught as a sob clogged up my throat. I was struck by the irony. The poem could have been my Dad’s theme song.

“Little Master Mischievous, have your roguish way;

Time, I know, will stop you, soon enough some day.”

He’d cut a path of devastation through the center of his family’s life and now, in death, he would finally be stopped. We would be free.

The afternoon he died……..

he began to snore a loud, raggedy, open-mouthed snore. A terrible sound commonly referred to as the death rattle. We knew it was now a matter of hours. My sister Cam, who couldn’t make it because Minnesota was shut down due to the blizzard, ordered us dinner, but the restaurant wouldn’t deliver, so I went to pick it up. As I walked back into the hospital lobby I saw my uncle sitting there. His phone rang and he answered, listened, nodded, and hung up. “He’s gone,” he said, “Just now.”

Shit.

As it turns out, my sister Toni, who had cared for him since my mother’s death 18 years before, had been in the bathroom when he breathed his last, so I didn’t feel quite as bad. If anything, we joked that he timed it on purpose. We wouldn’t have put it past him. Little Master Mischievous.

After his death……..

we discovered he’d never stopped using. He’d lost his pharmacist’s license back in 1974 so we naively assumed he’d also lost his access to drugs. We should have known Dad was way more resourceful than that. Looking back, it explained so much of his insane and maddening behavior, like faking a series of illnesses. Dad’s addiction first came to light years before it was fashionable to show up on the cover of People magazine for a confessional. It was in the years when such things had to be denied and disappeared. His supreme pride and arrogance, held firmly in place by an undertow of shame, stopped him from admitting a problem or accepting help. Despite several stints in rehab, bankruptcy, an arrest, getting kicked out of the house for a couple of years, losing his professional credentials and alienating family members, he was never either able or willing to stop.

Several years after Dad had come home from Hazelden, I found him lying on the couch, passed out, with a needle still stuck in his arm. I pulled it out, wrapped it in a tissue, and disposed of it. The next morning I told my mom he was using again. She said, “You always think the worst of your father.” That stung, even though, looking back, I know she was demolished by the news. I also know that she protected Dad fiercely, always.

If anything, I became a wizard at wrestling my cognitive dissonance to the ground when it came to my Dad. If I hadn’t, I could not have continued to visit, to give cards and gifts, to tolerate the insults and the slights and the moods and the gaslighting. I couldn’t have known about how he treated others and still talked to him. I hung on to the teasing, the political banter, the pet names, and the rare “I love you’s.” I hung on to the glory days when I could feel pride in his softball prowess and bask in the glow of his spotlight.

Because before everything went to hell, there were also barbecues and waterfalls and rock slides and swimming pools and popcorn and movies and piggyback rides and singing along with Mitch Miller. There was the time he made me a scavenger hunt for my birthday and the time he ran to the car with me cradled in his arms when I jumped out of a tree onto a board and impaled my instep on a rusty nail. There was the pride of seeing him pitch a perfect no-hitter. He kept a roof over our heads and food on our plates. There were moments where I thought I had the best Dad in the world and in those moments, I did.

Love is unconditional. We love even when we find we can’t tolerate. The pain of losing a parent is no less if we’ve had a terrible parent than if we’ve had a wonderful parent. It’s just a different kind of pain. The most real I ever saw my Dad was in the days before he died. He appeared vulnerable, without guile, confused and frightened. I grieved for the waste of a life that had held such promise~despite the fact he took the rest of us down with him. In that moment, I loved him like a child again. And I saw a man who was terrified of not being loved but had no idea what it meant to be loved or how to love others well.

Father’s Day is a day when I teeter on the fence between forgiveness and un-forgiveness. I know I’m supposed to forgive, but there are things that can’t be forgiven. I see the wreckage and it is considerable. I settle for moments when the pain and anger lifts. I settle for pity. I settle for compassion. I have blinders that I take off when I can stand to see the reality and that I put back on when I can’t. I focus on rising above. I settle for being frequently unsettled. I have made a decent life for myself and I hold on to that. I thank my Dad for whatever he did to contribute to who I am today.

And it’s okay to feel whatever I feel towards a father who was severely psychologically damaged. It’s okay to love, to hate, to pity, to be sad or confused. It’s okay not to care. It’s okay to forgive and it’s okay not to forgive. He may have done the best he could, but it wasn’t anywhere near good enough for his family and it’s okay to say that. It’s okay to ignore the holiday or it’s okay to throw myself a big old fancy pity party. I refuse to pretend anymore.

Or, three years since his death……..

perhaps it’s okay for me to put on my reality blinders, get myself a six pack of Leinenkugel’s and a dozen donuts, turn on a baseball game and, just for five sweet minutes in time, allow myself to feel that Father’s Day belongs to me too.