It is now 4 days and 7 hours since my father passed away. As is always the case, more of reality has emerged and more facts revealed than anyone could have guessed, perhaps except for me, because I finally understood my father years ago. It’s that understanding that drove me away from him, and it’s that understanding that, I hear, now illuminates for others why I walked away.
So what’s come out? Let’s begin with the Will. What did my father leave for his children? Nothing. Not the house that some of them spent their last years growing up in, nor so much as a book of photographs. No letters of love or affection, no indication that in his final years his own children so much as crossed his mind. Instead he left the entirety of his possession (which, fairly, amounted to little more than the bedraggled leavings of a rat’s nest, the sort of destroyed domicile you’d expect from a drug addict) to his new and vastly not improved wife, a skanky drug addicted creature the very observance of whom is enough to send the penises of most men into hiding. He was married to her for roughly 2 years, and therein lay the answer to the question of how much he valued his family: not at all.
My father was a coward. He lived in fear, which induced an epic anger, and he died in the most perversely frightened way possible. His disease, Hepatitis-C, ravaged him in the last few years, yet he refused to follow the recommendations of doctors on treatments, dietary needs or getting off the drugs that had ruined so many years of his life before then, and more than that he lied to his parents and children about it. He trembled in the face of threats from a drug addicted creature who only loosely fits the term “female” that she would leave him if he didn’t leave her everything and betray his very own children. What is revealing is not that someone should make such demands but the way in which he accepted them: complete capitulation.
One can observe in my father a figure so ruled by fear of everything, including loneliness, that he accepted the demand that he walk away from the few people who actually did love him. What this final act tells you about my father is a volume about the quality of his character. In short, his character was of the lowest quality one can imagine, and exactly the kind of father every man among us should dread to be remembered as.
What must a man have received from such a creature as she, to forsake his own children, you ask? The list will startle you. For his trouble he received, as his brain began to fail, food deposited into his mouth while this skank and her children laughed as the dog ate from his slackened jaw while he was powerless to do anything about it. For his trouble he received a woman who, in the days after his death has bragged endlessly (and erroneously, as she will soon find out) about how all the bills will be paid off and she’ll be left with a house free and clear (the truth is that my father had no such insurance, his illness prevented him from acquiring it). He was left with a woman who, in the wake of his death, told jokes to my father’s mother, about the choking, gurgling way in which he died, unable to speak and with little to no command over his own faculties. As if the poor woman hadn’t suffered enough to live long enough to see the day her first born child died, to see his empty corpse in the mortuary, she must now also carry the memory of jokes about her son’s dying moments for the rest of her days.Jokes. The only humor to be found in this situation is that this “woman” will soon be out on the street in the financial ruin that my father left in his wake.
It’s a miserable feeling to make such admissions about one’s father. A son always wishes to believe that his dad is the good man to whom he can look up, the hero after whom he should model his own life. I find myself in the curious position of being happy that whatever else is true about me, I am not like my father. He was not a good man, had not a good heart or character or soul. He was an empty and spineless shell masquerading as a man, and it’s mind boggling to consider that he was able to hew his way through life as long as he did. Greater men have lived shorter lives and died under less Just circumstances.
I wrote before that I forgive my father for his innumerable flaws, and that I wish him to find whatever peace may be out there to be had beyond this life, if any exists at all. I hold to that wish and feeling, but at the same time reiterate that he does not deserve forgiveness, and this fact was never more evident than it is now in his death. I stand in these final words on the subject in a curious place, a place that I suspect no one would ever want to stand: Mourning not the death of his father, but the life of him. My dad, who was a smart man who could have done great things, utterly wasted his existence.
Goodbye, Dad. At least wherever you are now, you won’t hurt anyone else.
