A Sad and Personal Note

I think it's time for me to write about my father, who is dying.

The medical reason he is dying is that his heart is in the process of failing; a faltering machine only a tiny shadow of what it once was. The real reason he is dying is that for reasons I — and maybe anyone who looks out the window and sees a new spring born again — can never understand is that he no longer wants to live. Somewhere in the last few years he reached an internal tipping point, where the joys of his new family and his children no longer outweighted the demons from his past.

And those demons are truly creatures of nightmare, fierce Oni hunting for souls to carry to a hell I don't believe in. My father believes in it, though, and the dark shapes in the darkness may change shapes, but they are always coming for him. Always.

He killed men once on some Pacific island; came home and played some football; married the cheerleader queen; had three children and bought a VA house in the suburbs. And it should have been happily ever after, or at least mostly happy, but somewhere that train jumped the tracks and careened into uncharted dark territory.

The middle son, the brilliant talented brother I adored, died hard and slow, and the cheerleader queen young Mom spiraled out of control, taking the remnants of the family with her. Mental illness is catching, you know, an influenza of the soul. It passes from you to the ones you love the most, as you draw them deeper into your own death spiral. Until there's nothing left but a reverse image world, with a sun that no longer shines. If you are near that dark sun, you are left with a single option — escape.

And I did. It was neither easy nor pleasant. My younger sister also escaped, although in a different direction. We don't speak, unless someone dies. Then we speak in platitudes, which is of course another way of not speaking.

I thought I could save my parents and tried numerous times. I was wrong. The nature of "being saved" involves wanting to be saved. Their world was self-contained and provided everything they needed; they put on a good front for the rest of the world and continued spiralling down through the levels of hell.

And then my mother died. Suddenly, like I would wish to go, your proverbial bolt from the blue. She and I talked on the phone one Sunday morning, as was our tradition. My mother was excited. We think we finally have our lives under control, your father and I, she said. She was tired, she added, and thought she'd go lay down for a nap. I told her I loved her; two minutes later the phone rang with my father in hysterics. She just...died...he said. Died, just like that.

My sister and I began making plans for institutionalizing my father, because it was clear that he couldn't help himself. And then the strangest thing in the world happened — within inches of the ground, he pulled himself out of the nosedive. Quit the drugs and the self-medication; shook off 20 years of stupor and reintroduced himself to the world outside his and my mother's filthy living room.

He came to visit and spent time with me — in all the years I'd been gone, neither of my parents had ever set foot in any place I'd lived. Something I understood, since I was the bad seed, not the one who was supposed live.

So I actually met the father I never really had, and I liked him. A lot. He was smart and funny and humble; he remarried, to the nicest woman in the world with a huge extended Southern family — something else I could never give him — and even adopted a little boy. When he told me about the adoption, I took him aside. This time, I said to my father, you've got to stand up. Or don't do this thing. On my word, he said.

The train seemed back on track, but demons never sleep, do they? A couple of years later he had some health problems; went to the hospital, where the kindly doctors hooked him up to a morphine drip. Drip, drip, drip. They might as well have put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. By the time I got to Tennessee, he was a crazy man, my crazy old man back again — cursing his stunned new family in terms that were appalling even to me; on the phone to his old druggie contacts; ranting that he was in pain and needed the medicine. I reasoned with him that time, harshly, with the only line of reasoning that I knew would work...you don't want to risk losing your new family, because you don't want to end up in my hands. I am the fate worse than death. Great.

I could take you through the years, the relapses, the recriminations, the fights, the reconciliations, but does it really matter? I understand the terrible hunger, the need. Maybe more than I would care to understand it, because some portion of each of us is the sum of our genes.

And I understand that it is ending. Ironically, the doctors tell me that they're making him comfortable, so in the end, he gets the morphine drip after all. If that is the only comfort left to him, so be it.

Through our ignorance, say Buddhist thinkers, through our lack of knowledge of who we are, we create so many prisons. I have nothing that profound to say. I am a writer; that's what I do, and telling stories is how I relate to the world. So this is my father's story, or at least a small part of it. His doctors tell me that he will never get out of the bed he's in, and I suspect they're right. So it's time for me to go sit by his bed. The Prophet said, "People sleep, and when they die they wake." Inshallah.

"Oh how many travelers get weary
Bearing both their burdens and their scars
Don't you think they'd love to stop complaining
And fly like eagles out among the stars"

— Merle Haggard
Out Among the Stars