Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for my Father

Ballad of big nothing. Honestly, this is the nicest he's ever been. #16There’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. #15My 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. #14In 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. #13What 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.#12Two 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. #11You 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.