A Very Short Repine Regarding Me and My Father

For days my father howled in pain from his hospital bed, which was startling as he’d become such a quiet guy, not silent, just reserved. He withheld, didn’t complain much since he and my mother divorced, least not that I could recall, though our contact, admittedly, had been limited. He didn’t stand out or have strong opinions, or maybe just didn’t care to share what he was thinking. The cancer rotting his innards must have been hell to have him yelling like that. He wasn’t shy to accept the morphine, probably saw it as means to make less nuisance of himself. But the pain burst right through, ruptured all his restraint. 

It did nothing for me to see him and his wife so rattled. I expected to take pleasure in their indignity. My father’s wife was a cruel, miserable person who strategically ostracized every member of my father’s family. Some insecurity on her part? Maybe, probably. She destroyed my father’s relations with his younger brother, with his older sister, with both his children, the two of us—me and my sister. Of course my father’s wife wasn’t a hundred percent to blame, a man should be accountable for consanguinity, or lack thereof, with his children, but she got a mighty assist. Before my wedding I brought my wife-to-be to my father’s house for dinner. They picked up a pizza—she wasn’t going to cook for us. In a bit of silence as second slices were being served, my father’s wife shoved her paper plate aside, glared at my soon-to-be wife and lashed out: How dare you come into my house and look at me like that! I don’t know what you think you know, but you don’t judge me! I curse you! 

We left fast, obviously, my wife-to-be shaken at the assault—it was an assault, came out of nowhere. She couldn’t restrain her tears and swore she would never go back. How could I ask her to? What was the use of saying: Yup, that’s what my father’s wife does.

I despised the resolve, the diminishment of my own distemper toward my father. It’s not that I’d forgiven his ineptitude, his cowardice, that he never spoke up, apologized, explained, or sought reconciliation with any of his relations. His daughter, my sister, wasn’t at his deathbed. She’d learned to live with his absence. And I hadn’t forgiven, just that my father’s pain and approaching death, they’d made my charges insufficient, even if I believe a parent should be punished for the inherited failures their children carry. All I wanted was to tell my father that nothing was forgiven. I wanted to howl it like an animal, lean over his cowering face that looked far too much like my own and scream it into his every scream—and he did scream, it was truly horrifying. But I never got to. I walk about all day with the wail I failed to deliver to his deathbed. I have no opportunity now, hold a job, have another wife, I don’t know how, I’m not giving. I’ve been carrying this scream all my life. I am less than everything I should be.

I could have not gone, it might have conveyed the insult, refusing his deathbed, would have demonstrated my contempt. But I wanted to see my father dying. I’d seen every other stage, even if only once every six or seven years for the last thirty. I’ve been an irregular witness, but a witness all the same, to his aging. As a child I was terrified of him. Married to my mother, his misery made a madman of him. It was his next wife who drained all that rage dry.

I didn’t think witnessing his death—flying across states, standing for days while he cried out and his wife shrank into her cornered hospital chair—would have a positive impact, that it would balance the negative impact his persisting presence has generally had upon my life, even if it hasn’t been a terribly negative impact, more of a non-impact, a subtle abscess with a slowly souring stench. It really is crap how relentless the presence a parent lodges in our consciousness, especially—is that right, especially? Yes: especially—if that presence is an absence. My father was missing from my life. I wanted to fill the vacancy with the sight of him dying. It was a hard death, it went on for days, my father howled and his wife countered every cry with prayers cast from her chair jammed into the corner of that hospital room. It kicked the hell out of him. He was shrinking, visibly, it was almost miraculous to witness, the decimation of the full-figure of a man, all that screaming until the final breath none of us caught left a puny corpse I looked down at no less disappointed.