She experiences sudden upheaval—afresh.
Late January of 2004, we arrived home past midnight from a fundraising event for Tim’s theatre company to find that my mother had called multiple times. I listened to the first voicemail and decided to wait until morning to deal with the rest. I turned the ringer off, and we went to bed. In the morning, I listened to message after message of her frustrated sighs and snide tone in Italian: “Why aren’t you home? Where the hell are you at this time of night? Do you hear me? Are you not answering because it’s me?” Finally, on the last she said, “Call home, Papa go hospital.”
My heart did a frenzied dance while I waited for someone to pick up. No one answered.
I phoned Aunt Angelina—another no answer.
Finally, I reached my Aunt Sofia. My father was in emergency at Trillium Hospital.
Dad had called her, distressed, his voice strained: he couldn’t take the burden, couldn’t carry his cross to bear any longer. He’d made too many mistakes. He had taken all his sleeping pills and called 911 but was drowsy and losing focus. Alarmed, seventy-year-old Sofia bolted out of her home wearing a cardigan and her slippers. The sidewalks were salted and uneven. She navigated the patches of ice as quickly as she could, arriving at her brother’s home as the paramedics were leaving: the house appeared empty. My mother had locked and bolted the door—refusing to respond. In Sofia’s best English, she pleaded with the young men to break down the door. Her brother was inside, dying. The medics knocked louder. The lock rattled. Mom answered, annoyed at the disturbance. She held crochet hooks and a doily project.
The paramedics found my father slumped between the wall and his bed. They checked his vitals, administered first aid and carried him out on a stretcher for transport to the nearest hospital.
I sat on the floor, half-collapsing, cross-legged, and sobbed. My legs shook. I wheezed like I’d run up a flight of stairs. “What? N’age capite. Can you repeat—I don’t understand.”
“Is bad. How he can think to do this? Last night. His voice. I knew something was wrong. He didn’t sound right. I say to him phone ambulance.”
My mind raced faster than my heartbeat, all manner of jumbled clichéd thoughts passed through: this was the price of freedom. Everything came at a cost, the pound of flesh closest to your heart. I bent over and keened. Not this again. Not this purgatory. Fourteen years after my father’s first all-consuming battle with psychosis, I felt the same grief-steeped guilt.
I interrupted my aunt: “This is my fault.”
“No say that.” My aunt gave me the hospital’s number, waiting while I crawled to my desk, found a pen and returned to the phone.
We said goodbye, and I paced the living room, back and forth. Like my father. He never sat still for long. Life with my mother made him a moving target, always on his feet, on the go, heading out the door. Now his life, the tapestry woven through the time of our shared history, the thread that was him, was in danger of being cut.
I contained an equal measure of rage and grief. I felt my heart could go supernova like a sun in a secluded galaxy and shroud my world in darkness.
When I called the hospital and reached patient inquiry, I told them my father’s name.
“Michelantonio Fantetti. Michael Anthony Fantetti, but it’s a complete name in Italian. He goes by Mike but some people call him Tony.”
The nurse couldn’t locate him.
“Is this Trillium? In Mississauga?” I wanted to tell her he answers to the name Papa. I wanted to ask if she could put me on the speaker system. He’d answer if he heard my voice.
“What’s he here for?”
“Attempted suicide.”
With no change in her professional tone, she said, “One moment please.” Sixty long seconds later, she came on the line again. He was still in emerge. “They’re getting him a bed. You’ll have to call back later.”
A mantra of indignation repeated itself.
How could he do this?
Why would he do this?
How could he do this to me?
I searched for someone other than myself to blame. His doctor. My mother. Himself. His cultural background. His faith that the hand of God would intervene. The Catholic Church.
I finally got through to my dad that afternoon. My aunt said his voice had been flat, monotonous for a month. I could hear nothing but terror when he spoke.
“Be careful. Everywhere you go, watch out. Mamma—”
The narrative I had repressed except as a punch line cascaded out in his frenetic speech: my mother was possessed. She was evil incarnate. She’d been sent by the devil to destroy us. Thank God I lived so far away. The distance made it harder for her to do her demonic handiwork. From the hospital phone at the nurse’s station, he whispered the story to me as quietly as possible, so that my mother wouldn’t hear him with what he imagined to be her bionic Beelzebub ability. He said she’d been paying sorcerers skilled in nefarious arts to murder him.
For years my mother wandered through the house, bitter and laying siege, shouting, “I’ll be widowed before I ever divorce this piece of garbage.” I thought my father’s ears were plugged with cotton. I couldn’t fathom how he withstood the menace. He hadn’t. This was him, cracking under the burden of her wicked temper.
The past echoed into the present. Once again, he begged me to come home and be with him. Once again, I failed the hero test.
All my life I felt as though my father had been waiting for me to fix the unsolvable mess that was this gnarled, acrimonious union. Behind his repeated statements that “Everything would be taken care of” and that he had “everything under control,” existed a complicated formula with a complex solution to the twisted situation that I alone was meant to discover, and implement. The simplest equation—the one I grew up with, two against one—was likely the resolution he hoped for.
He waited for my answer.
I said no. I couldn’t.
An old sermon resurfaced. The one about me being selfish and spoiled. How he’d done nothing but support me. He added new lines to the soliloquy: I’d been nothing but a drain on him, a parasite, like everyone else.
“If I’m not alive tomorrow, your mother finished me off. And you didn’t come to say goodbye. That’s on you for the rest of your life.” He hung up.
I stared at the phone. The dial tone buzzed.
Five minutes later, Rocco called.
I answered, high-pitched and hysterical and incomprehensible.
“Listen to me, you can’t fix this situation. You understand me? This is not your mess.”
Rocco stayed on the phone with me while I wailed. When I calmed down, he told me to drink water and go for a walk.
“Are you kidding? I don’t want to go outside.”
“What you want to do? Stay inside and cry? That’s not going to help.”
“It can’t hurt.”
After a few days, my father camouflaged his distress. The hospital gave him a weekend pass. He would leave and finish what he started. He calmly said goodbye, and told me he was sorry to learn of my true nature: ingrate.
I called back to speak to the nurse but bungled my words, bawling and begging her to cancel the pass.
Tim rushed into the room and grabbed the phone. “Listen, my wife is understandably upset right now so you can talk to me. You need to understand. You can’t let him out. My father-in-law is still threatening to kill himself. That’s what he’s saying to his daughter.”
The nurse expressed surprise: My father was projecting a serene façade to the staff because he wanted out. They cancelled his pass.
I finally connected with the hospital’s social worker the next day. She recommended shock treatment. “He’s not getting better on the meds, and we all feel it’s unfair to let him suffer like this.”
She asked if I had power of attorney, if I could make decisions on my father’s behalf.
“No. I don’t.” I let her know that fourteen years prior, during his first and only psychotic break before this one, his medications were tweaked enough to save his life. I never prepared for another crisis. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Meds stopped working sometimes, she said. She would try to convince him to undergo the treatment. “Forget what you’ve heard about this from Hollywood or bad movies. The results have been life-altering for patients.”
The next time I called and spoke with him, he asked me what I thought about “electricity shock.” Full of fear and doubt, he said, “Something has to be done, I no can go on like this.”
My heart broke so many times that winter, I lost count. I thought nothing could ever make me smile or laugh again. I curled up in bed and got through the months of February and March by sleeping and going to work. I barely noticed Tim’s upcoming theatre project. His decision to mount the play came after my father was committed to the psych ward and kept him away until late at night—he usually returned after I’d fallen fit-fully asleep. Some nights he found me in bed staring at the ceiling. He talked about rehearsals, production notes, anything to distract me, but my mind acted like a sieve. I retained nothing, incapable of following or maintaining a conversation.
The hospital recommended up to ten to twelve electroshock treatments for my father.
“You think is safety?”
“I think it will help, Papa. I heard it helps a lot of people with severe depression.”
He wasn’t convinced, but he went through with the treatment. Humbled, I saw that I had confused his indecision and deep kindness for fear. I understood nothing. He provided an example of indestructible courage and bottomless compassion. I had been resentful for too long that he hadn’t saved me from my mother’s deranged assaults. One man against the weight of tradition and expectation fending off a woman with a treatment-resistant strain of schizophrenia—no wonder his health buckled. After his sixth treatment, I reached him on the hospital line.
When I heard the elation in his voice at hearing from me, I realised how seldom I’d heard him joyful. “I feel better. Thank you for calling me. Chickpea. You’re the one good thing I did with my life.”
Hearing my childhood nickname made my voice catch. I blinked back tears. “That’s not true. You’re the good thing you’ve done with your life.”
“I was lose my way, but everything going to be better now. Don’t you worry.”
I almost cracked a joke: Who, me? Why would I worry? I slumped, leaning back on the couch. Took a breath and relaxed my shoulders on a slow exhale.
“Ti voglio bene, Papa. Tante, tu ne sai quande.” He couldn’t know how much I loved him. Because I kept my distance, this time and last, every time he needed me, each time he clung to life by a fist. I thought of Nonno Gennaro’s vices and his inability to appreciate this decent, hard-working son. I considered Grandfather Baron’s soulless suggestion to have his daughter put down like a lame beast of burden. The poverty and harsh conditions that created them also produced my dad.
“I know I’m lucky to have you as my father.”
“Okay,” he said. I could hear the smile in his upbeat tone. “Let’s we say I was good for you and you was good for me. Okay?”
“Okay.” I hung up the phone and bawled.
Two weeks after the conversation with my father on the mend, I hit a point of impenetrable frustration in the cycle of mounting unpaid bills with Tim.
Linda, my therapist, said, “You don’t have to pay people to love you.”
I sat back in the chair with the weight of her words pressing my chest, squeezing my heart. I put my hand on my collarbone and rubbed the area below it. I massaged the space above my chest, the place yoga practitioners say houses the heart chakra: it felt sore and painful. I might have had reflux. I bent over and put my head between my knees, trying to slow my breath.
“Will you be all right?”
I gave a muffled affirmative reply as I tried to quell the rising nausea.
“You don’t have to buy anyone’s loyalty. You’re worthy.”
“Uh huh.” I held my head in my hands.
I made plans to move out. I asked Tim to manage his own expenses for six months. I wanted a break from paying for groceries, rent, hydro, and phone plus internet while he extended his maxed-out credit cards, digging trenches of enormous debt to produce another Jacobean tragedy for the discerning theatregoer.
“You walk out that door, our marriage is over.”
“Then I guess we never really had one.” After all the hyped-up festivities had ended—the party, the gown, the wedding guests—we had a feast-or-famine relationship: I footed the bill and still felt starved for affection. A husband who spouted Shakespeare now repeated vapid movie-of-the-week script lines?
My parents’ marriage was finally over, and four months later—during the Transit of Venus when the planet of love passed in front of the summer sun—so was mine.