I remember when it started. My father had been experiencing terrible back pains, complaining of them every day, clutching his back, and often limping around the house. Despite his condition, we’d taken a vacation to the woods, stayed in a house in a forest, in Georgia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Driving up there, we stopped at a restaurant to eat lunch. It was a very waspy place. Sort of like a country club. Everyone there was White, blond, blue eyes.
We were the only Jews.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent And I think the waiter knew this. I remember him, a chubby, red haired man, with a Southern drawl, and he dutifully attended to all the other customers, sweet as sugar to them, but he totally ignored us, didn’t take our order.
Finally, my father complained to management, and I don’t remember if we were served by another waiter or if we left.
Perhaps this was my introduction to antisemitism.
While staying at the vacation house, I watched “The Terminator” on Betamax tape, and after finishing the movie, I went to ask my parents if cyborgs were real and if they might kill us one day. The cyborgs didn’t scare me as much as the zombies, but still, there were a formidable, credible threat, to my young mind, and perhaps with AI evolving, they’re a realer threat than zombies… Which most of us are these days, on our phones, but I, again, digress…
Worried about cyborgs, I walked down the hallway to my parents’ room. When I approached the threshold of my parent’s doorway, I caught my parents fooling around in bed, which was the first time I’d seen a grown woman naked.
I stared for a few seconds and ran away, ran for dear life, as if my feet were on fire. I was absolutely horrified by the moans my mother was making. It was far worse than the cyborgs!
I was also terrified that my mother’s pussy was hairy, and it struck me how different it looked than Michelle’s, Alice’s, and the several girls with which I’d played “I’ll show you mine...” To this day, I believe that seeing my mother’s hairy pussy, hearing her moans traumatized me and caused me to prefer a shaved or neatly trimmed vagina…
My father, while at the vacation house, began experiencing even worse back pains, like nothing he’d had prior.
When we got back home, he scheduled a checkup, and, after a couple further exams, the doctors found a cancerous growth, and that he had pancreatic cancer.
I still remember before the diagnosis, driving to the hospital, learning the words
“benign” and “malignant” and him having a procedure to see which type it was.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Afterwards, he told me that there was a 50% chance he’d live and 50% chance he’d die. I’d discovered later that he’d told me this because he couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth. The cancer was terminal, and he was given about a year to live.
In the months that followed, his health deteriorated.
He lost weight, became skeletal. His skin became jaundiced. His cheeks were sunken. His once thick wavy black hair wilted like a dead plant and fell out. He’d pass malodorous gas. He’d vomit. I remember us keeping buckets around the house for him to vomit in.
He and my mother would fight, screaming at each other, over what, I didn’t know then, but I’d found later that it was her trying to convince him to accept the reality of his situation and that it was impossible for him to come to terms with, like he thought it wasn’t really happening. He’d been convinced a quack doctor in New York, who was performing a “radical” cancer treatment, involving injecting alcohol into tumors, that that could cure him.
I remember asking him if he died could he please try to talk to me from Heaven.
He didn’t really respond to that.
He wasn’t religious, and, a scientist, he was an atheist, so I’m sure that on some level, he must have known the gravity of his situation. And as opposed to a religious person, who might find comfort in thinking there’d be a Heaven he’d see, my father didn’t have anything to look forward to. For atheists, death really is death.
Even though he was an atheist, maybe because his father had escaped the USSR, arriving to America by boat at age 13, and his father had been an atheist and done nothing Jewish whatsoever, not even celebrating holidays, my father wanted different for me. He wanted me to have the “Jewish” experience and had sent me to synagogue; we’d go every Saturday.
(Thinking back on it, he’d probably wanted the Jewish experience for himself too, was living it vicariously through me.)
Our rabbi was quite helpful during my father’s illness. He spent time with my father, as my father’s health worsened. They had long talks about life, science,
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent the Torah. Despite my father’s lack of spirituality, he and the rabbi bonded immensely.
(Strangely enough, the rabbi was a Red Sox fan and my father a Yankees fan.
Perhaps death is the only thing powerful enough to unite those factions…) I don’t remember the rabbi speaking with me or my mother, however. I don’t even recall what he looked like.
I do remember a couple people from my father’s family coming over. One was my aunt, an apple-faced frumpy woman who wore heaps of garish makeup and musky perfumes and had come from England. As well as an uncle, a shaggy-faced hippy coming from California. I remember them staying with my mom, dad, and me at the house, during the ordeal.
My father’s family were in dismay, and like him, they couldn’t accept what was happening. They were who’d suggested my father to see the quack doctor in NYC
who claimed he could cure cancer by injecting alcohol into the tumors.
They, my father’s family, and my mother fought a lot, much of it due to them expecting my mother to handle all the housework, cleaning, cooking, while she also worked and was attempting to raise and care for me as well as her dying husband.
The family, particularly my aunt, paid little attention to me or my mother, perhaps due to my mother never ingratiating herself to them, my aunt being very possessive of my father, too, and never bonding with, or even making much of an attempt to get to know my mother.
My aunt, my father’s sister, had had her own heartbreak, losing their mother to breast cancer fifteen years prior. My grandmother’s death also a slow, brutally painful one, her catatonic on pain pills, withering and waiting for death on their couch, in front of the TV, before finally passing away in a hospice.
Then my aunt’s father, my grandfather, died in a car accident, five years afterwards. My grandfather and his new wife, plus two other relatives of mine, driving on a bridge in rural New York state, the driver being my step-grandmother, the lady a very short, very elderly woman, who was barely able to
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent see over the steering wheel, and the four, in the car, driving off a bridge, the gray Buick plunging into a river.
I don’t know if they died on impact. I hope for their sake they went quickly and painlessly. Drowning to me has always been one of the worst ways a person could die. Something about not being able to breathe, the pain, the horror, lungs filling with water. I really do hope that didn’t befall them.
(I never met either of those grandparents. Both died before I was born. I’d heard that my grandmother was a lovely, kind and caring woman. Before she went to a party in the Bronx, where she’d meet my grandfather, she kept saying to her sister, “I just hope they like me!” And fortunately, they did like her, as did everyone who knew her...)
((My grandfather wasn’t as well-liked. He was a quiet, sullen man, hardened by his upbringing, coming to America, from the USSR, on a boat when he was 13, with only $15 in his pocket. He didn’t speak English. He knew very few people.
He’d had it tough, worked in factories, most of his adult life he’d worked in a factory that produced war planes and was, however, delighted that his planes could bomb the Germans and Japanese in World War 2.)) (((My grandfather and father had a strained relationship. My grandfather had come to America with Horatio Alger dreams of finding the roads paved with gold.
But, in reality, he found himself slaving away in factories, living in a series of tiny apartments in the Bronx… My grandfather practiced the old, cold Eastern European tough love, never praising my father to his face, but whenever my father wasn’t around, my grandfather was bragging to everyone about his boy.
Sadly, my father never heard this, and he wanted to; he wanted just once for his father to praise him, show his approval, be kind and loving. After my father left for college, they rarely spoke, and were just beginning to reconcile at the time of my grandfather’s tragic and sudden death.))) Back to my aunt, before my father’s illness, she’d lost her pregnancy to miscarriage, and her husband divorced her, leaving her mostly because he wanted kids.
Having just experienced miscarriage and divorce, it was incredibly difficult for my aunt to lose my father, one of her few last remaining close family members.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent They’d grown up together in a shoebox apartment in the South Bronx, back when it was a Jewish, Italian, and Irish neighborhood, and she and my father had remained close throughout their winding paths in life.
She’d left America for a job in England many moons ago and stayed there after marrying a local man, adopting a British accent after only a couple months and adapting quickly to the British lifestyle.
(Having later lived abroad, traveled in the UK, I can say from firsthand experience it does become tiring having people mention your accent, daily, asking you where you’re from, and you having to tell your emigration story repeatedly. So I believe she may have taken up the accent to blend in, avoid sticking out. Or it might be a subconscious thing… Any “Yank” living in the UK will surely pick up on the British English and slang, the British slang being the world’s best, in my opinion, but she’s the only American, aside from Madonna, I’d seen take up the British accent, full on, and I’ve never once seen a Brit in America take up the American accent… I mean, seriously, who would want to give up that slang!) My aunt would still visit America once a year or my father would travel to England, Europe to see her. Despite their distance in geography, they remained closely emotionally connected.
As I previously stated, my aunt never connected with my mother. And nerves were frayed, with my father dying and the grief to all that that brought. After a heated argument with my mother, my aunt and uncle left our house shortly before my father took a turn for the worse and went into a coma.
Before he went into the coma, my father had come back from the hospital to see me.
He told me we had one day together and asked what I wanted to do.
I didn’t know what to do or say. All I knew was that there was this toy I saw my classmates playing with at school and that I wanted it and so we drove around, checked a couple stores, but didn’t find it.
Of course, as a grown man, I’d have asked him to sit down, eat and drink with me, tell me as many of his stories and dreams and important lessons as he could. But, sadly, as eight-year-olds, we don’t have such foresight.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The day my father died, I was playing kickball with my classmates when my mother arrived to pick me up from school. When I saw her approaching the playground, it was like she was the Grim Reaper; I knew why she was there. Her face looked carved out of stone. I think her emotional reservoir had been drained.
We then drove to the hospital, in silence, and the hospital staff allowed us to see his dead body.
They let me be alone for a time, with him.
I examined his dead body. He lay in a baby blue hospital gown and looked, with his eyes pressed shut, almost like he was sleeping, but it was somehow different.
Standing alongside his deathbed, I pulled up the white sheet, peered under it, and saw his catheter.
I let the sheet fall back in place. Then I touched his face, held his jaw, and spoke for him, forced him to tell me he was sorry for dying and that he’d be back later.
Later on, in the following weeks, I’d cry all night, yell and scream for him to come back, to talk to me, but he wouldn’t. He was silent. My mother would rush into the room, comfort me, sometimes give me a pill or shot of whisky to put me to sleep.
I also stopped going to synagogue because I was angry at God for letting my father die.
I remember at the funeral, it rained, and I told my mother it was God crying for what he did to my dad.
Many people turned up for his funeral, and I was asked by the rabbi to give a eulogy. I don’t remember much of what I said, other than “He was the best dad I ever had.”
(I do recall, though, as I was giving the eulogy, seeing what looked like my father’s ghost, standing in the back of the synagogue, with a forlorn look on his face, and him turning around, slowly, and walking out the door, perhaps on his way to Heaven, or whatever afterlife exists. Was this his communication with me from beyond the grave? Or PTSD? CTE? I’d like to think it was his spirit, and I hope he heard my eulogy…)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The rabbi must have had quite a bizarre day, with his son being born on the same day, in the same hospital as my father died in… The rabbi and most all of my father’s friends, family, who were there at that funeral, at the wake, at our house, following the final services, though, they basically disappeared after his death.
It was like cancer was contagious, and they didn’t want to catch it. Many also had young children. I guess they didn’t want a similar fate to befall them or their kids.
Many years later a friend of my mother’s would tell me, after she’d survived brain cancer, about her friends leaving her, even telling her things about how her cancer battle made them feel, as if a person battling brain cancer should give a damn about how it affected her friends’ moods.
The abandonment I felt still burns me to this day.
All those people, that room packed at the funeral, those family members who never visited; the family friends, like Bryce, a Vietnam vet, who walked with a limp from being shot in the leg in the Battle of Hue, who was plagued by night terrors from his time in the war, and who smoked weed with my dad, and would come by the house all the time. He stopped coming by after my dad died. I never saw him after that.
All those people from the funeral, who disappeared from my life, left not only a hole in my development, but left me having a more difficult time bonding with others, afraid on some level, they’d abandon me the way those people did, because of my father’s cancer.
It’s also made me not want children of my own. Because I don’t want to risk dying on them, leaving them.
I’ve had many people tell me many things about it. One callous psychiatrist insisting “I get over it.” Kids at my school, eight-year-olds, who knew about it, taunting me, saying “I’m glad your dad is dead!” to me, and a camp counselor, about twenty-years-old, when I was twelve, also taunting me about it, challenging me to a fistfight.
Situations like my father’s certainly do bring out the best and worst in people. The whole spectrum of humanity.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent His death left a hole inside me that will never be filled. But it also taught me a valuable lesson about how cold the world can be. And it taught me self-reliance.
As well as the value of time, how ephemeral everything is…
In the end, though, with all the deadbeat dads, child molesters, and far more grisly fates that could have befallen me or him, I think I’m fortunate to have had a loving, caring father, who, despite his temper, was a beautiful person and was highly devoted to me.
I’d rather have had a father like that for eight years than none at all. I feel forever blessed by the time I had with him…
It’s still a sore subject for me, still a downer, a bummer. Occasionally people will ask about my family, parents, and the story will come up, and I’ll have to relive it, talk about it, or sometimes, growing up, I’d compulsively lie, make up stories about my father, where he was, who he was, so I didn’t have to tell the truth…
It’s been decades since I visited his grave. I wonder how long it will be there, his grave.
(I even vaguely recall riding in the car with him and my mother, to the graveyard, to pick out the burial plot. I didn’t understand quite why we were there, since I’d been told he wasn’t dying, for sure. His impending death was still a semaphore.
But, in recollection, I admire his bravery in venturing there, to that graveyard, to look at where he’d be buried. I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been for him. The thoughts that must have gone through his head, peering down at that patch of grass…)
What a strange thing to do, have a grave. Why is it that we Occidentals do that?
Why do we have tombstones? Why do we talk to tombstones? Why do we feel so entitled, as if we deserve more of the Earth than we’ve already cut? Why do we feel we should own this chunk of dirt for eternity?
Think of all the graves, burial places that’ve been built over, washed away.
Someday there could be a shopping center or robot supply store there. Perhaps that graveyard replaced another graveyard. Perhaps a robot graveyard will replace it. A graveyard for cyborgs...
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Or it could be washed away by rising seas, like what happened in Hurricane Katrina, to many graveyards. I can’t ever forget the images I saw on TV during Hurricane Katrina, those graveyards flooding, coffins sailing down the flooded streets like small wooden boats. Flushed out of the ground.
This is part of why I wish to be cremated.
After my father’s death, my mother met another man, maybe a year later. He, like my mother, a psychiatrist.
He was divorced, with two kids, a boy and girl, older than me.
They never formally married, just were with each other, my mother and me visiting his house over the weekends, in another suburb of Miami.
Then, shortly after, they bought a house and moved in together, which was tough for me, leaving the school I liked, leaving my neighborhood, childhood friends, everyone, everything I knew. It was a whole new loss, leaving there.