Death of a Salesman

My father died at about 8 a.m. on May 29th, and I was camping in a fairly remote area of the Gunnison National Forest that morning, off the grid. I got my brother's text the following day when I came down off the mountain. 

My first emotions were a feeling of relief on his behalf, since I had just seen firsthand the incredible constraints within which he lived, physically and emotionally. Also, knowing he had had a stroke a few days before, and was now not only physically imprisoned in his body but also mentally impaired, the idea of life lingering on for him in a bedridden and incapacitated condition just seemed hellish. So I was relieved. 

Of course, I'm also saddened. My father and I had reconciled, in large measure, over the past decade or so, after years of estrangement. He and I were on friendly terms when he died, for which I am grateful. He began to learn how to be supportive, kind, respectful and admiring of his children in his advanced old age, and I was able to let him know that, whatever he had been able to do for me, I was grateful for it. 

There are a great many other complex emotions. My father was a judgmental, controlling, emotionally undeveloped, toxic, bullying, abusive man for much of his life, and, in a direct sense, he did very little actual fathering. Well, honestly, he taught me almost everything I know about self-hatred, hypercritical self-awareness, hypervigilant anxiety, and shame. He also taught me, by negative example, how to be a better man. How to listen to other people, how to value my own experience, how to trust my instincts and pursue my own happiness. 

I would have gotten a lot out of a direct, frank, honest conversation with him, but he was never interested in such an exchange. Talking about experiences and emotions was simply beyond his ability. He had been severely abused by a raging alcoholic in his own childhood, and he carried with him most of the earmarks of the "adult child of an alcoholic" for his whole life. By comparison with his own father, my father was a veritable saint. Not having the opportunity to heal or recover from his own hellish childhood, my father did his level best to "do better" than his father had done. My father's way of attempting this was to be sure we were materially provided for. That was about it. 

The problem with my father's style was that it was rooted in martyrdom. His provision of a reliable material and financial context for his family came at a tremendous cost for him. He hated his job. I believe he never really wanted to do about 90% of everything he did in his whole life. 

He was performing the entire time. Not having access to authenticity and recovery from his own trauma, the best he could do was look good, keep up the look good, and look good at all costs. Imagine how bewildering and horrifying it must have been to try to do this throughout the 1970's and 1980's, as his children were (for example) 15, 17, 19, and 21 years old (in 1976), and the world was collapsing. A staunch defender of the Vietnam War, of Richard Nixon, of "law and order," watching his children be wildly progressive, etc. There was a ton of drama. The themes of chaos and collapse then coincided with the total train wreck of the American steel industry (in which my father was a white collar executive), and a great many other indignities, not the least of which was his being forced into "early retirement" at age 54, after 32 years of "service" to the steel industry. 

Everything betrayed him, because he had put all of his stock into a variety of completely unreliable and dishonest propositions. He believed the lies of the American Dream, and he wanted his children to be impressive, and America was indifferent to his loyalty, and his children did whatever the fuck they wanted. It was only in the past ten years or so that my father learned to accept me (well, about 60% of me) for who I actually am, and I feel like he reached at least some kind of marginal peace with reality before he died. 

The real arc for me was that I saw him as a hero, and then a terror, and then a profoundly pathetic figure. There's a lot of drama in there. The little boy in me, so to speak, always profoundly loved him and wanted his approval. The adolescent in me was contemptuous and resentful of him, bitterly hated and feared him. Now, I grieve the life he had more than I grieve his death. I grieved not having the father I wanted years ago, when I worked through a lot of family system recovery. I did a few thorough inventories of my own role in our conflicted relationship as part of my sobriety work. By the time he physically died, I had reached clarity and peace with the entire story, and it was as if he was already gone, 100 times over. 

His obituary, written by my brother, reads as a set of very fine lies, and I think there's nothing more honest than that, in the final analysis. I still find it shocking that I come from a family of liars and expert denialists. I find the tendencies in myself of course to be the most pernicious. 

One of the phrases in the obituary is "He was happiest surrounded by his kids, grandkids and granddogs with many happy memories of holiday gatherings at home and weeks "down the shore"." This is not how I remember him. I think obituaries should tell the truth, or at least honor a person enough not to tell lies. Our family never used the Jersey phrase "down the shore," for example. We went to the beach. These things matter to me. I guess this is why no one asked me to help write the obituary. haha. 

The idea that we honor the dead best by lying about them seems absurd to me. 

Martin Prechtel, in his somewhat annoying but useful book about grief, The Smell of Rain on Dust, makes the essential connection between grief and praise. We grieve to the extent that we are willing to praise the dead. I praise my father for finding one way out of a hellishly abusive, grindingly poor, dark and sad childhood. I praise him for his sense of humor, his basic decency as a provider, his astonishing capacity for suffering in silence, and his gradual mellowing and increased spaciousness as he headed through his late 70's into his 80's. I praise him for everything I learned from him, negative example or not.