I checked in with my mother once a week and spoke to my brother two or three times, but I always felt worse afterward. I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling. None of us had ever had the language to talk about our family’s dysfunction—we’d never wanted to talk about it; it was too scary. Neither of them could help me, although they made it clear that they were suffering, too.
I believed my brother, but I couldn’t understand what my mother was going through. She and my father had been divorced for eleven years and apart for almost fourteen. After they split up, almost every interaction she had with my father ended with her railing against him—how incompetent he was, how irresponsible, what a terrible father; how much she hated him.
Right after she told me he was dead, she added that she really had loved him once. I couldn’t process this totally incongruous information, and it left me feeling bereft.
After every conversation I had with them, a darkness lurked; it grew, and it began to take over. A feeling of guilt began to creep up on me. When I told Fritz about it, he said, “You should feel guilty,” but he didn’t explain why, and I just had to take his word for it.
I didn’t speak to him again until we were both home for Thanksgiving. I was angry, because I knew he was right. My father was dead and I didn’t even miss him. Most of the time, I doubted if I’d loved him. Without question, I hadn’t loved him enough.
In the three days I’d been home for the wake and funeral, each one of my aunts and uncles had approached me with terse versions of a man I didn’t recognize, as if awkwardly bestowing a gift: “Like wealthy men who care not how they give.”
The words Donald and my grandfather had always used to describe my father—kind, generous, sensitive, trusting—were meant to be insults, euphemisms for “weak.” “Such a great guy. So handsome,” Donald said now, because he didn’t have anything else to say. And then he winked.
“What a guy, honeybunch,” Robert offered. “What a sweet, funny guy.”
Elizabeth didn’t say anything at all.
Maryanne came over to me, but she didn’t hug me or even shake my hand. It seemed to cost her, but she finally said, “Your dad was the best of us.”
But how, when they made it impossible for him to be any of those things? Why couldn’t he be any of those things for me?
None of them called me after I got back to school, so I had no frame of reference within which to understand this new information. To me, it was revisionist history. I only knew the man they humiliated and ridiculed until he could no longer fight back. They took my father away from me before I was even born. By the time I was old enough to be aware, he was so steeped in self-loathing, so ravaged by drinking and chain-smoking, he bore absolutely no resemblance to the portrait they sketched. I didn’t have the first idea how to grapple with any of it.
It would’ve been terrible if I’d loved my father as deeply as I should have, if he and I had had a great relationship, but it was so much worse because my grandfather created the conditions that made those things impossible. By the time Fred decided he no longer wanted to bear the burden of being constantly reminded of his greatest failure—he had given this weak, unmanly creature his name, after all—he’d already conditioned the rest of us not to care.
When my father became ill enough to be confined to his bed, my grandfather took the opportunity to deprive him of alcohol, without regard for the consequence. In addition to being sick, then, Freddy suffered from severe alcohol withdrawal, which would’ve stressed his heart and made him that much sicker, that much easier to ignore.
When it was over, Fred was finally able to proceed as if his oldest son, and, by extension, Freddy’s children, had never existed. Fritz and I were still required to meet certain obligations, but without our knowing it, our grandfather had already erased us on paper, even though a couple of decades would pass before we found that out.
My father’s tragedy was that ultimately, he believed every lie his father told about him. My tragedy was that I did, too.