Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(27)

“Okay, they just took him in.”

“Took him in where?”

“To the OR.”

“You’re kidding me. How did you get him to do it?”

“I threatened him, mostly,” I said, like a businesswoman. “He’ll be in the OR for four to six hours. I need you to bring me some shoes—preferably my own.” I looked down at my footwear. “Or some breath mints for Dad’s Uggs. They smell like hard-boiled eggs.”

I had become a fixer. A true number eight. I didn’t think about how scared my father must have felt, or try to understand where he was coming from. I just needed to fix the situation for the family, and for myself. I thought about the choice between life and death, and there wasn’t a chance that was going to happen to us again. Not on my watch.

    I can’t believe I convinced him to go through with a quintuple bypass just so he could go on to sexually harass the entire African American and Cuban communities of the tristate area. My brothers and sisters were kind enough to remind me of this every time he had another “incident.”



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? ? ?

My relationship with my father had always been about my version of things; I never contemplated what might have happened in his life to make him act the way he did. I never considered his story. I was a child, yes, but then I was an adult. It’s hard for me to have sympathy for my father because a lot of his behavior I find inexcusable, but it’s important for me to look at his story as independent from my own, and try to have a little empathy. I had never thought about being his child. I thought about him being my father, but never the other way around. Empathy. We both had none.

I didn’t know he lost his gas station after working six nights a week, that he was held up at gunpoint, that he came home early every Wednesday night, with corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, because he wanted time with his family—that he worked fourteen-hour days. This was all before I was born. It was all before Chet died.

When Chet died, he was torn apart with grief, but he never gave up, never threw in the towel. He could have gone off and left us, or he could have just killed himself. He didn’t do either of those things. I don’t know if it was the best he could do, but I also don’t know that it wasn’t.

    No person is just one thing. People can be filled with light and affection and also be tortured and conniving and dishonest. Happiness can coincide with great pain. One can lead while also following, the same way one can follow while also leading.

Dan asked me how all of this made me feel.

I told him that I now understood my father’s limitations along with my own. I thought our relationship was about me showing him how great I was, when truly he was most likely trying to prove to me how great he was. He was wondrously obsessed with himself, as I was with his affection for me. Today I’m able to say with confidence that I do love my father. I don’t know how much I like his behavior, but in the end, isn’t love more valuable than like?



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? ? ?

I had a boyfriend when I was eighteen years old. He was twenty-eight. He had a house in Belmar, New Jersey, and we would go there every weekend with my fake ID. He thought I was twenty because that’s what I told him. Every Sunday, when we would drive home from the shore back to our respective suburban dwellings, I knew I wouldn’t see him for a few days because we both lived with our parents, and sleepovers were a no-no—for his parents. I doubt mine would have noticed.

Every car ride, I fell silent, refusing to speak to him the whole way home because I hated that we would be separating. He would ask me every weekend what was wrong, but I didn’t have the tools to express to him that I hated having to separate. That would have made me vulnerable, and vulnerability wasn’t allowed. Eventually, he broke up with me because it was too hard for a twenty-eight-year-old to date a nine-year-old.

    “I’ve been nine for a really long time,” I finally said to Dan.

“Probably only with men.”

“This is why I test them. If things are going well for a couple of weeks, I raise the stakes and force the person I’m dating to prove to me he loves me and that he is willing to do anything to demonstrate that. I create drama so that he can mollify the situation in the name of protecting me. I just really want someone to ask me where I’ve been all day.”

“Of course you do. That’s called a relationship.”

Now that I had a better understanding of why I was so pissed off, I could finally do something about it. Not knowing where your anger is coming from is basically the same as walking through life with a broken leg. “It’s fine,” you tell people who are constantly looking at you with concern. “Nothing to see here.”



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? ? ?

It wasn’t until I met Dan that I realized Chet was my very first breakup. That my nine-year-old brain had no ability to distinguish between death and rejection. That my nine-year-old brain didn’t understand that my brother didn’t choose to die. That Chet didn’t find another family with a little sister he liked more. That was simply the way my nine-year-old brain had digested it. I was reacting to the death of my brother like a spurned lover.

Subconsciously I was waiting for my brother to come home because that’s what he said he was going to do, and I waited every single day for that to happen, even when I had ostensibly accepted his death. To my nine-year-old brain, it was rejection.