Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for my Father

#16

There’s a certain meditation that’s supposed to teach you compassion. I believe it comes from the Buddhists, though I am not enough of an expert to say. You take four people — yourself; someone you love; someone you don’t know; someone you dislike — and you make the same four wishes for them all, over and over. Happiness, safety, health, peace. The way I say it is: 

[PERSON] deserves to be safe. 

[PERSON] deserves good mental health. 

[PERSON] deserves good physical health. 

[PERSON] deserves to accept themselves as they are. 

I don’t say “happy,” because no-one is happy all the time, and I don’t say “peace,” because more than once I have heard people wishing for someone to “be at peace” as a passive-aggressive way of hoping they’ll go away or die. I say “deserves,” because it foregrounds justice. Even if I hate you, I can admit that you don’t deserve cancer, you don’t deserve to be hate-crimed, you don’t deserve dysphoria or depression or self-loathing. You deserve to be a basically healthy and well-adjusted person, and hey, if you were, you probably wouldn’t be a jerk. 

This practice doesn’t force you to like people. It equalizes them. It helps you to see that the person you love and the person you hate and the stranger are all just people, same as you are, and that all people deserve sympathy, because life is hard. 

Well: I do this a lot, every day if I’m having a problem with somebody, but in all the years I’ve been doing it, I never tried including my father. I couldn’t hold us both on the same plane — if I loved him, I would have to hate myself, and vice versa. I would have to decide if my father was someone I loved or someone I hated or a stranger, when really, he was all three. 

I did do it for him eventually. But we’ll get there. We have time. 

#15

My father died in a hotel room, having been evicted from every apartment he ever had, and  fired from every job he ever had, and having alienated every single person he might stay with. It took the management a while to realize that he wasn’t coming out of his room, and it took a while for the police to locate anyone who knew him. 

He was one of eight children, and those children are close to each other — his mother, who he told me was either dead or permanently institutionalized, in fact lived to age 95 and went to live with his sister when she couldn’t work — but he cut them all off. He had two children; I stopped seeing him when I was sixteen, after a failed intervention. My brother held on longer, but he got to a point where he needed a full team of therapists to keep him together, and each and every one of those therapists told my mother that there was no chance of my brother being remotely mentally healthy as long as he was still in contact with Dad. 

My mother was the last person to speak to him, because he actually never stopped calling her up to scream at her. Every time he hit a rough patch, he would wheel around and try to make himself feel better by beating up on Mom, and she could have blocked his number, but she didn’t, and I don’t know why. She tells me that in their last conversation, he told her that everything was her fault — that he had gotten fired again, that his kids wouldn’t talk to him, that he had ended up this way, alone, with nothing. 

I said, ‘we haven’t been married for thirty-five years,’ my mother told me, ‘there’s no way any of this could be my fault.’ And he said, ‘oh, yes it is,’ and he called me a bunch of names and hung up. 

One of the problems he had, in the last years, was white matter disease, which can lead to vascular dementia. It had a relatively early onset, probably because of the drugs. Most of his health problems were because of drugs. When I was eleven he had a “nosebleed” that put him in the hospital for weeks, and he nearly died, and he told us all a story about how as a young lad he had a misadventure and fell face-first into a pit, but the pit was metaphorical, as it turns out, because what the nurse told my mother was that he did so much coke that his nose caved in. 

So it was hard to tell how bad the dementia was, because of the drugs, because he was incoherent most of the time so how would a degenerative brain disease even register, but when she told him the divorce was thirty-five years ago, it might have come as a surprise. Maybe he thought that he still knew us, that he still had a chance with us. Maybe that’s why he called. 

#14

In the days after I found out, I would do something ordinary — cook a meal, or work out, or kiss my husband — and I would think this is the first meal I’ve eaten since my Dad died. It was a sad, eerie sort of feeling. So then I’d try to cheer myself up: You don’t know for sure that it’s the first time! I would tell myself. It might have taken weeks to find him! 

Well. That didn’t really work. The day I got the call, I had been writing about Valerie Solanas — about second-wave feminists, really, and how so many of them came to bad ends. Shulamith Firestone starved to death in her own kitchen. Andrea Dworkin had a phobia of unconsciousness and died in her sleep. 

I thought Valerie’s was the worst, because Valerie’s life was the hardest. She had periods of lucidity and charm before she shot Warhol, but imprisonment and a long stay in the famously abusive Matteawan mental hospital ended that. She became convinced that the government was tracking her through a chip implanted in her uterus. (Matteawan was known for performing involuntary sterilizations on patients, so she may have been reacting to a real surgery.) She alienated all the feminists who tried to take her side, spitting on them and screaming at them and, at one point, threatening to shoot a woman who wouldn’t let her stay rent-free in her house. 

Valerie wound up in a run-down hotel, patronized mostly by drug addicts; it was a step up from living on the street, which she also did for much of her life, but it wasn’t good. She went into her room and did not come out, and eventually, management realized her bills hadn’t been paid, and went looking for her. She was kneeling by the side of her bed, where she had fallen, the lower half of her body eaten by maggots. 

So I thought that was probably the worst way for anyone to die — alone, broken, in some hotel, decaying silently because no-one cares enough to find you until they need money — and then I found out about my father. The most committed misogynist I ever knew, and he died just like Valerie Solanas. Imagine that. 

He also lived just like Valerie Solanas, though, so it’s not surprising. Really, the only difference is that she was a better shot. 

#13

What can I tell you? I lost track of the number of times he threatened to kill me. He did it every time he felt an argument slipping away from him: I have a gun upstairs in my closet. I can go get it. That’s OK, Dad, I don’t care what we watch. One night, a few months after I stopped speaking to him, my mother told me that she had to go on a business trip, and that I needed to stay with a friend whose address Dad wouldn’t know. He’s got this plan that he’s going to come over with a gun and shoot you, then shoot himself, my mother told me. 

I clung on to that memory for so long as proof that it really happened — something out of the ordinary was going on, someone else saw it, I really was Being Abused — but my mother doesn’t even remember it. When I asked her how she could forget, she said, because he threatened to do that every weekend, honey. That was just the only weekend I was out of town.

#12

Two down, one to go, is what my aunt said. To explain this, I have to tell you something, which is that my father is actually not the worst man on the list of this family’s terrible men. My mother is the oldest of three sisters, and like a fairy tale, each sister had a terrible first husband, each man terrible in his own way. 

The middle sister married a man who vanished. They had just divorced, and their four children were split between houses — the two teenage girls with my aunt, and the two elementary-school-age sons with my uncle, so that they didn’t have to change schools. Anyway, my uncle got sick of it, having a family, and one day, the two boys came home from school to find the house empty. No  furniture, no food, no clothes, no note, no forwarding address. They survived because they found a neighbor — they lived out in the middle of the country, and had to walk a while — and the neighbor found their mother.

That uncle died of brain cancer a few years ago. His daughters arranged a funeral. His sons refused to pay. 

The youngest sister married the worst man of all, Uncle Rick. He gave her a black eye the night before her wedding. My grandmother asked if he had done it, and my aunt said, no, Mom, I fell. Uncle Rick got used to getting away with things, is my point here, and over time, he got a more and more inflated idea of what he could get away with, and that is how my family got its claim to fame: Uncle Rick is the reason all the police stations in Ohio had to be re-designed, because one day, Uncle Rick was arguing with his girlfriend — not my aunt, but the woman he dated after her — and  she ran into a police station for help, at which point he followed her into the lobby, pulled a gun out, and shot her in the head. 

Rick is the one who is still alive. He’s in prison. It turns out that when you shoot someone in front of several dozen police officers, it’s not hard for them to crack the case. His girlfriend is alive, too. She’s paraplegic. She attends every parole hearing and says the same thing: As long as I’m still in this chair, he should be in that prison. 

The year this happened, my third-grade classroom did Current Events every week. We were each supposed to bring in a story from the paper and discuss it. So we went around the room, and kids said things like there was a parade, or the war is still going on, and when they got to me, I sat up straight and said, brightly, my uncle shot his girlfriend in the head! 

My mom got a call after that one. I got a talk, about how I was never supposed to tell anyone these stories, or the other stories like them. People will think we’re the kind of family where these things happen, my mother said. But that’s the thing: We were. 

#11

You are my reason for breathing, he told me. You are the point of me. You are the reason that I’m alive. 

You’re rolling your eyes now, because this is yet another essay about hating my father. How many times can he go back to that well? Hasn’t it run dry? But that’s the problem: I did not hate my Dad. I adored him; I worshiped him. When I was a child, I loved him more than anyone on the planet. He loved me that way, too, and he told me so, many times. 

You are my reason, the best thing I ever did. You are all the good in me. They took all the good out of me and made it into you. 

He could weave these spells, sometimes. The language would just flow through him: Mad incantatory poetry, enraged soliloquies, stand-up routines. My brother remembers it too: Once, his girlfriend introduced him to someone by saying “you’ll like him, he’s really funny.” No-one can remember exactly what he said next, only that he spoke, uninterrupted, for the next forty-five minutes, about how he wasn’t funny. By the time he was done, everyone in the room was crying and choking with laughter. 

My father was alive with language. You couldn’t call it writing, but you can’t call what a bird does composing; the song exists regardless. So he’d hold me, and he’d say: If every grain of sand on every beach in the world had the word “love” carved on it, that wouldn’t be even a fraction of how much I love you. If the light coming from every star in every galaxy was made of love, all that light that would be a tiny little candle, compared with how much I love you. Every time my heart beats, it’s saying your name; listen, listen. 

He would hold my hands and look into my eyes and say these things, over and over, because I was his favorite. I know that, too, because he said all of this in front of my brother, who was also in the room. 

My brother did not get speeches about stars and sand and heartbeats. My brother got called fat and a faggot, and sometimes he got furniture thrown at him, for emphasis, because boys have to grow up tough. That was my Dad. He couldn’t even love somebody without using it to hurt somebody else. 

My brother hasn’t talked about him since it happened. He wrote a eulogy, and it was good. It was respectful. He talked about how mom raised us in the Catholic church and Dad played us “Sympathy for the Devil,” about rock and roll and the Cleveland Browns and how Dad always said the Browns were “just good enough to break your heart.” 

How are you, really, I said, when I was alone with him in his car. 

I’m all right, he said. I mean, I don’t think they’re ever going to catch me for killing Dad.

Then he went back to not talking. 

#10

What does it mean, to die with nothing? You hear it all the time, you know people do it. But then it happens to your father, and you can’t make sense of the phrase. 

He had a stereo system. He had crates upon crates upon crates of records; I remember rifling through them while he was passed out, fascinated by the sexy tomatoes on the Little Feat albums, the airy pastel top of the cake on Let it Bleed. He had few books, but the books were good — Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut. He had a poster for Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and though he said he just liked the title, he and Norman had enough in common that I think he probably liked the rest. He had a wide-screen TV, and then a bigger wide-screen TV, and then an even bigger, even wider-screen TV; over the years, the apartments stayed small, but the TVs just kept expanding. He had a convertible, when he got older, and it was red, because of course it was; years after I stopped talking to him, a friend was dropping me off at my parents’ house, and I saw long white hair in a red car in the driveway. I said, just keep driving. 

He had leather jackets and he had jean jackets and he had beat-up white sneakers, he had a pack of Kool cigarettes always on him and heavy glass ashtrays. He had a glass coffee table with edges so sharp you could cut yourself and a king-sized waterbed and a couch with bottle-green cushions and bruising, angular, wooden arms; furniture for a bachelor pad, furniture never meant to be touched by children. He had an old recliner that was his and his alone. He had bottles of maple syrup from fishing trips up in Canada, and he had a wide-mouth bass that he caught in Lake Erie, mounted and lacquered, hanging above every gigantic TV in every tiny apartment, so he could look at it for the rest of his life. 

He had so many things, and all of them are gone, because he never had the money to pay for them. He mowed lawns at golf courses, until he got fired. He was a printer at a printing press, until he got fired. He was a cabbie, until he “got robbed,” meaning that he put the till up his nose, at which point they fired him. He hit us up for money; my brother lives on disability, and Dad was siphoning the disability checks, calling him up late at night to scream at him for not handing the whole thing over. He didn’t work, while he was married to my mother — he said he’d only married me because he thought I would make a lot of money one day, my mom told me — and after the divorce, she settled for less than the minimum child support payment, something like twenty-five dollars a month, which he didn’t pay. 

But he had a red convertible. He had cocaine, which is a rich man’s habit. He had money, at different points in his life — but not enough money, not steady money, and he spent it whenever he got it, and now it’s gone. 

There is a black trash bag in a Motel 6 near the Columbus airport, and it contains everything my father owned on the day he died. Maybe there is a letter in there, or a notebook, something that tells me what he was thinking. Maybe there are old polo shirts that smell like Kool cigarettes and Rolling Rock and Brut. Maybe there is something I would remember, something I could hold on to. I don’t know. It took over a week for me to get the police report with his location and time of death on it, and when I called the Motel 6, they directed me to the manager. 

We didn’t know he had any family, the manager said. Nobody came to see him. 

Yes, I said. He had some problems. 

I mean, you never came to see him. 

Yes, I said. But we’re here now. 

Well, you see, said the manager of the Motel 6, he left me quite a nice little bill. 

#9

I tried to tell this story once, in a college writing class — about Dad, and my disappearing uncle, and bad old murdering Uncle Rick. I thought I was cooking with gas, delivering real trauma, the kind you’re supposed to have in a memoir. The professor squinted at me, and he said, why do you think this happened so often? Is it something about your family? He said, are you farmers? 

That’s what you think, right? When you hear a story like this? You think white trash. You think why are you taking a college course. Why aren’t you on a farm. That’s what my mother was trying to protect me from, when she told me never to tell these stories — the way people would try to take the blame off the men, and put it on the bloodline, or the income bracket, or just the women and children who survived it. People cannot stand to see a man put to shame, so they smear it around, turn his shame into hers and ours and mine. 

Well: Some of us really were farmers, so I didn’t say anything. I went back to pretending I was normal. I went back to pretending that I’m from the sort of family a writer is supposed to come from, somewhere like Connecticut, maybe, where the houses are all clean and the addicts get put into rehab somewhere out of sight. Nobody ever says ain’t or drops consonants, and abuse just never happens. That’s who you need to be, if you want to write, and explain the world to the world. You need to be someone who has never lived there. 

I was so embarrassed, when I learned how my Dad died. I looked down at my body, my bones, my skin, and they’re all made out of some drug addict whose rotted-out body got found in a Motel 6. Can anything made out of garbage not be garbage? It all came back, the shame of it, sitting in that classroom: Is something wrong with your family? People ask that, because if they didn’t, they’d have to ask is something wrong with the world? 

#8

I love you. You are my purpose, my heart, my reason for breathing, and then came the inevitable follow-up, which was: If you ever leave me, I’m going to die. 

I was not allowed to date, or he would shoot the person I dated. I was not allowed to date anybody who wasn’t white, or he would shoot us both. I was not allowed to be gay, or he would shoot me — the other person got a pass there, strangely — and I was not allowed to move to a different city, like New York: I’ll hunt you down. I’ll drag you back here by your hair. You don’t leave, ever. If we were in a park, I was not allowed to leave his side — someone will rape you, there’s perverts everywhere — and if we were in his apartment, I was not allowed to be in a different room. 

I had to be there, right there, by his side, constantly. I had to drop what I was doing and console him every time he hit a speed bump; I had to keep a constant eye on him, make sure my brother was safe from his temper, keep him happy so he didn’t blow up. I was not allowed to want an adult life, or plan for one. I was not allowed to love other people — even loving Mom was a betrayal, because it meant I had chosen her side, when he needed me so much more. I was not allowed to build my life around anyone but him, and I was not allowed to have a goal other than taking care of him, because I was the only one who could save him — and if he wasn’t saved, if he died, it would be my fault. 

No-one else in the world is ever going to love you this much. Nobody in your life will ever love you more than me. There’s no-one else who can give you all this love. Only me. It’s just me and you.

There are terms for this kind of thing — enmeshment, parentification. One book uses the yikesy term emotional incest, which I object to, if only because I don’t think you can show up to the incest survivors’ meeting and say, yes, but I was emotionally incested. I think that has to be a hands-on experience, so to speak.

“Parents who are emotionally immature may turn to their child for emotional support… instead of realizing that it’s supposed to be the other way around,”says one of the many thinly sourced and unhelpful articles you can find by Googling. “Instead of the parent meeting the needs of the child, the child is meeting the needs of the parent,” says another. Maybe we don’t need a catchy, molestation-adjacent name for that. Maybe we can just call that what it is.

When I think on all this now, I am seized by a cold horror. In the moment, I had no idea that it was inappropriate for a grown man to tell a six-year-old child that they were his replacement for family and wife and God and self-control, or to burden that child with his salvation. It scared me, but I pushed the fear aside, because I thought it was weak and ungrateful. What I thought, at the time, was: I must be really special for him to choose me. What I thought, at the time, was: No-one loves me as much as Dad. 

#7

Every time he tried to quit smoking, he did it on my birthday. It was his idea: Ask me to do it for your birthday present. If I’m doing it for you then I’ll have to quit. His true and pure love for me would conquer the demons of addiction. I would save him from himself, and give him the strength to carry on. On and on, same old song as ever. 

But I really did believe it, back then, so I’d ask: Please quit smoking, Dad. I would suggest things I’d seen on TV, like nicotine patches. Sometimes he tried them. I really did want him to quit. He smoked constantly, a cigarette in his hand every waking moment, and I was terrified that he would die of lung cancer, or just set himself on fire, like Keith Richards with worse insurance. So every time, I would ask him, and I would mean it: Please, Dad, please quit smoking for my birthday. Every time, he’d quit for two weeks, tops.

He’d spend the two weeks twitchy and dangerous. He’d start turning the TV off or switching the channel when they played a commercial for nicotine gum — it don’t work!! — and then, somewhere in the space between one visit and the next, the glass ashtrays would reappear, and then he’d be smoking.

But you said it was for me. For my birthday, I said once. 

You didn’t get enough for your birthday? He said. You think you can tell me what to do now? I go to work, I make money, I cook dinner. I feed you. I don’t have to feed you, if I don’t want. Try saying “thank you, Dad.” 

It went around and around: Save me, save me, you are the only one who can save me, I will die unless you save me, and then, the second he was tired of being helped, it was, who do you think you are? I’ll do whatever the fuck I want. I have a gun upstairs in my closet, I can go get it. No, it’s OK, Dad, you can smoke. So then he’d go do whatever the fuck he wanted, and it would make him sick, or make him sad, or hurt him, and then it was save me, save me, you are the only one who can save me, as if the rest of it had never happened. 

He was just a teenager his whole life, honey, my Mom said. All he wanted was to get high and listen to rock music. That was true. I was older than him by the time I was in first grade. He was a rebellious fifteen-year-old boy entrusted with children, and I have been forty years old my entire life. Nothing was ever his fault, my Mom said. It was never his responsibility, why he wound up the way he did. He always had to find somebody else to blame. That was true, too, but nothing eases the sting of it: He made me responsible for his salvation. He did that knowing he would refuse to be saved.

#6

I will probably never know everything that he did to me. These things slip under the surface, get repressed, even though some part of you always remembers. It sounds like bullshit, the repressed-memory thing, until you actually see it: Once, in a piece of fiction, I included a detail about someone threatening to drive his car into a wall while someone else was sitting in the passenger seat. I didn’t know why, only that it seemed like a realistically terrible thing for someone to do. Talking to my mother, after the funeral, she said: He’d started threatening to drive into a wall again. That was one of his preferred ways of threatening suicide. I must have seen it. Based on what I wrote, I might have been in the car. 

What did my Dad do? What was so terrible, that it justified abandoning him? I can’t really tell you. It’s stored in me at a cellular level: It’s the furious contempt I feel when anyone, particularly any man, says it’s not my fault or makes up an excuse or puts on an exaggerated display of weakness to avoid being held responsible. It’s the way my breath catches, the half-second of panic, when my daughter grabs at my arm to prevent me from leaving the room. I can’t actually remember what prompted the intervention. I can’t tell you the moment that I decided to leave. 

I have theories. I know that he had broken up with a girlfriend — Andrea, the second of two long-term girlfriends I know him to have had — and that things had gotten very dark in her wake. He wasn’t leaving his house. He didn’t come to see us on visitation days. I remember walking into his apartment, after a couple of months of not seeing him, and the room was dark, and the air was still and cold. It was Christmas. It felt like walking into a tomb. That was the first time I really looked at him and thought: If this keeps going, I’m going to watch him die.

I know that things between my father and I had gotten uncomfortable when I hit puberty. I was starting to realize that I was probably some kind of gay, and my father was watching news reports on Ellen DeGeneres and muttering that she should be shot. God made us different for a reason! I tried saying, yeah, Dad, he did, God made Ellen gay and you not gay. You can imagine how that went. I tried saying, Melissa Etheridge is gay, because he loved Melissa Etheridge, but all that did was make him throw out her records. It was a real blow to Dad, realizing that he didn’t have a shot with Melissa. That veil was torn from his eyes, and the daylight stung. 

Puberty was uncomfortable for other reasons, too, which I won’t belabor — that my father was hyper-attuned to the ways my body might be perceived as sexual; that he was always accusing me of being a slut or a whore or trying too hard to get male attention, when what most people saw, looking at me, was a bony, androgynous thirteen-year-old in an XXL t-shirt and cargo pants. He hated women, and I was starting to look like one. He thought I might want a significant relationship with someone other than him, and that was threatening. Was that abuse? Was it just patriarchy? Have we ever really established that they’re different things? 

There was the day I let my friends meet him. I had never tried taking anyone over to his apartment. I knew that he couldn’t handle being exposed to daylight. But when I was fifteen, I had a group of really close friends, which was rare for me. I tried bringing them over, and he was actually pretty good about it, letting us talk in my basement bedroom instead of insisting we all hang out. It didn’t change the outcome. What happened was what I knew would happen: On Monday, when I saw my friends at school, one of them said, I don’t think you should go over there any more. I think it makes you really sad. 

So I chose a day — one of his visitation days — and when it arrived, I hid behind a wall, in a locked bedroom, because I knew that I couldn’t do it if I had to look him in the face. He stood in the stairwell, behind me, and I said, I think you need to stop drinking. I’m not coming over again until you stop. What happened next took a long time. I know the word “bitch” was used, because for years afterward, any time I heard a man use the word “bitch” about a woman, the back of my eyes would flash red and I’d want to kill him. 

I don’t remember the last thing he said to me. My mother does. After his funeral, when I wouldn’t stop asking about it, she finally told me. 

He said, ‘if I can accept you being a crazy bitch, you can accept me being a drunk.’  

See? This is what I’m talking about, with the repressed-memory thing. How could I have forgotten — how agonized, how devastated, how red-eyed scary mad I get when anyone calls me crazy? 

#5

Victim is a long term resident at the Motel Six in room 211. Witness states that he had not gotten his mail in the last 5 days. Witnes stays [sic] she went to check on him since he has some medical issues. Witness states she found him on the bed and called police. CFD Engine 26 responded and pronounced at 11:11 pm. The Franklin County Coroner’s Office was called and responded to scene. Victim was transported to the Coroner’s Office by [NAME REDACTED.] 

Five days. Five days spent lost in the Underworld, from July 3^rd, the last time anyone saw him, to July 9^th, when his body was found. Natural causes, the police told us — but what did nature cause? How did it happen? Did he go quickly in his sleep? Did he linger for days, paralyzed? Did he know he was dying? Did he suffer? Was he frightened, was he in pain, did he understand what was happening, or was it just a light switch being flicked, was he there and then gone? 

Eventually, I got my hands on the autopsy. Hypertensive coronary disease, it says, and chronic ethanolism with liver disease under “contributing factors.” Translation: He drank until his heart stopped working. That’s not news. That happened long before I was born. The autopsy also told me what a body looks like when it’s spent five days in the open air, summing it up with crisp, technical language like marbling and skin slippage. It notes that he was dressed for sleep, in a t-shirt and underwear, but he was wearing his glasses. He can’t have been in bed long. He may have been awake. It tells me that he had grown a beard, since the last time I saw him, and that his fingernails were clean.

How does a human being die this way? How does a human being die, completely alone, with nothing? It’s an argument here, a thrown chair there; it was the first beer he ever drank, it was the first time he hit my mother; it’s a homophobic slur, it’s a missed visitation day, it’s a shitty remark at an intervention — it’s all just a series of mistakes, large ones and small ones, but mistakes, and then one day he passed the point of no return, he made one mistake too many, and he was doomed to be a corpse that rotted alone until the rent came due. 

Where was the moment? What did it look like? If I know how it happened to him, I can make sure it doesn’t happen to me. If I can put the whole story back together, trace the chain of cause and effect, then maybe I will find some evidence that says I didn’t kill him. Maybe I can prove this was not my fault. 

It wasn’t just me who abandoned him: My brother left. My mother left. His girlfriends left. Every single one of his dozens of brothers and sisters and cousins and nephews and nieces left. Not a single person who knew him could stand to be around him, in the end, so if I want to prove to you that he was a jerk or a bad parent or a bad person, well, there’s not much more vindicated I could get. If I want to punish him, get revenge, reclaim my power, there is nothing in this world more powerless than an old drug addict slowly choking his last breath out on a motel bedspread. The very worst fate you could wish on your very worst enemy — that’s how my father ended. I can’t kill a dead man. I can’t hurt him any worse than he hurt himself. 

This is victory. This is annihilation. This is me, standing in the rubble, having finally survived my father. So why do I feel so sorry for him? I never could have saved him. He never would have let me. Why do I think I failed? 

#4

You’ve come with me this far, so I might as well take you to the really abject, pitiful part. I tell people I abandoned my father, because it creates an image of me as strong and wronged and righteous, holding my head up and walking away clean. It didn’t happen. When I was twenty years old, I decided to reconcile with my Dad. 

I was home for Christmas, and I was with my boyfriend, and we got to talking about why Christmas was sad for me. I didn’t tell him the entire story, but I gave him a rough outline, and my boyfriend said it sounds like you miss him. I did. So I sat down, and I wrote my Dad this long letter, about how I didn’t want to spend my whole life without a father. He got the letter and asked my Mom if it would be all right for him to swing by and take me to dinner. I said yes. 

It was a few days after the New Year. I remember that. All of the holidays were over, but the world hadn’t really started up again, and it was cold, and rainy, and I sat in my mother’s kitchen, nervous, looking out at the gray world through the window. I sat there for hours. 

Eventually, my mother walked into the kitchen and said your Dad says he’s feeling under the weather. What does that mean? It means what it always means, honey. He had gotten excited about our big reconciliation, so he went out drinking, and once he started drinking, he couldn’t stop drinking, and when he woke up, he was hung over, so he canceled. He didn’t show up. 

That was the last time I ever tried to forgive my father. He called; he sent gifts; I never touched them, I blocked his number. He threatened suicide; he faked several terminal illnesses; I said to call me when there was a body. I thought I had been so strong, drawing my lines in the sand and forbidding him to cross them, but you can’t play a player: He made sure I got the guilt for leaving. He made sure he was the one who left. 

#3

Come back here, old man. I’m not through with you. Come back here so I can show you what you’ve done. I’m going to Field of Dreams you, you white-trash dogfucker. I’m going to make a baseball diamond in a cornfield so you can be alive again and I can punch you in the face. I’m going to bury you in the Pet Sematary and have you come back evil, because you were already so fucking evil that whatever they did would be an improvement.

I’m going to replace your entire carefully curated funeral playlist with “Femininomenon.” I’m going to put your fucking skeleton on trial for war crimes. I’m going to skin you and turn you into an animatronic display that tells stories about my childhood, so that kids with terminal illnesses can go visit you, at which point they’ll realize that, hey, there are worse things than leukemia. Sure, they’re dying, but at least you weren’t their Dad. 

And I don’t drive, so I don’t want your car — even though I’m sure it’s a fucking Lamborghini; even though I’m sure you won the lottery and spent a million dollars on a car and that’s why you died homeless — but I’m going to make Motel 6 give me your car so I can beat on it with a tire iron and scream “DID. YOU. EVER. LOVE. ME. YOU. DUMB. PIECE. OF. SHIT” until the cops come or your ghost materializes to answer me. I will do all this until I am satisfied, and I will never be satisfied, so you had better speak up.

Come back here. Come back here and clean up your own mess, for once, so I don’t have to do it. I want an apology. I want an explanation. I want you to have never been alive in the first place. I want, I want, I want you to stop being dead.

#2

Maybe every failed relationship has its perfect moment — that one day you can look back on, and say, that’s what it would have been like, if it was good. For me and my Dad, it was my twelfth birthday. I had gotten a CD player, so my Dad took me to the mall and let me buy CDs. I got every Sonic Youth album, even the ones that were early and obscure and that no-one else had. He said he was really proud of me, for being into that kind of music — it was proof of what Neil Young had said, that rock would never die. Sonic Youth had opened for Neil Young, so he had seen them. It was so cool, it was so unfair: My Dad, not me, got to see Sonic Youth in the ‘90s. I never got to see them before they broke up. 

Before he took me back to my Mom’s, we stopped at his apartment. He sat me down, in the stairwell, and looked me in the eyes, and said: You’re growing up now, and there’s one thing I want you to promise me. Never, ever, ever do drugs. 

He said, it’s the greatest lie in the world. I remember that. He said, it will take everything away from you. Your home, your family. It’ll turn you into somebody you don’t want to be. It’ll make you hate yourself. One day, you will look around, and everyone will be gone. 

He really did say it, and he looked into my eyes, as he said it, and I saw someone good looking back at me. He didn’t take responsibility, exactly — he wasn’t capable of that; it was “drugs” that had done everything, not his violence, and not him — but for that one moment, he looked me in the eye and told me that what he’d done was wrong. 

That person was in there. I kept digging in the dirt, trying to find him, trying to get my real father out from under the wreck he’d made of himself, and I never did. He was a broken slot machine, a rigged carnival game, he was Russian roulette with all six chambers loaded; he was the Cleveland Browns, just good enough to break your heart, every single time. Still: There was a part of my father that understood everything he had done to us. So I know why he died the way he did, why he refused every attempt to save him: This death was what he thought he deserved. 

#1

The night before we left to see my mother in Virginia, my daughter woke up at two in the morning. She might hate me for telling you this later — I try to remember that she will have the right to tell the world about me, when she’s older, and that if I deserve a bad report, I will get one — but she had an accident. She was scared to go down to the bathroom in the dark, and she didn’t make it in time. 

I heard voices coming from her room, and I woke up. My husband is a reliable, kind father, but he doesn’t do well with mess, and he had to get up at dawn to make a ten-hour drive. I could hear his voice getting higher and tighter with stress, and I could hear my daughter crying, because what kid wants to upset her Dad? So I went into my daughter’s room and sat next to her bed and rubbed her back while my husband cleaned up. Eventually, she told me what she was afraid of — that we would cancel our vacation, or just go by ourselves and leave her at home; kids are so powerless before the whims of adults, we must be terrifying — and I told her that would never happen. I said that kids make mistakes, because they’re still learning, and we would never leave her or punish her for being a kid. 

She started nodding back toward sleep, as I slumped on the ground with my head on her mattress, and I thought of my father. I thought about how hard it is to be a parent, in ways I never knew before I became one, and how easily kids can frustrate or overwhelm you even on your best days. I thought about how much effort I put into staying calm for my daughter. If I hadn’t had my father’s example to look back on, who knows how I would be handling it? If he hadn’t been so terrible, if I hadn’t left him, would I work this hard to make sure I didn’t lose my kid? 

Then it happened. The whole thing fell open, like a lock when you find the combination, and I was saying it: 

Berney Doyle deserves to be safe.

Berney Doyle deserves good mental health.

Berney Doyle deserves good physical health. 

Berney Doyle deserves to accept himself as he is. 

Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints, all the old sympathy for the Devil came back to me. It never really left. I wondered if I would call him; I wondered if we would reconcile. I knew it wasn’t a good idea — not with me being out of the closet, not with me married to the person I’m married to, not with a small child in the picture — and I understood that forgiving him didn’t make it safe to be around him. But I could know that he was dangerous and still love him; I was done being angry with him, and I was done hating him, and I knew that more might be possible, if I gave it time. 

That was June 29th. In the morning, we left for Virginia. Mail began to pile up at the front desk of a Motel Six near the Columbus airport. Two weeks later, the phone rang, and someone told me: While I was forgiving my father, he had died. 

At my other job: I wrote about Imane Khelif's lawsuit against J.K. Rowling, which got Rowling to log off for a few blessed days, but which is unlikely to put a stop to the Rowling juggernaut for good.

I know, I know, this is long. I cut as much as I could. It's the size it needs to be. If it's truly unreadable, though, tell me, and I might try to put up a version with some pagination.