Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(62)

Effusive, smiling bright. He even dressed well before I was born. He was so handsome on the beach with two kids, then three, then four, then five, then six. Then five again. There were pictures of him long after Chet died where he was smiling again. He had aged significantly, he’d let himself go, but there were pictures of us holding hands, hugging, and laughing—I had forgotten about that.



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    “I think my dad was an eight,” I told Dan, the Monday morning after the funeral.

“Yeah, maybe he was.” Dan smiled. “We can try to figure it out, if you want.”

I didn’t. Dan and I hadn’t talked about the Enneagram in a while, and at that point it felt like the Enneagram—or Dan’s interpretation of it—was just the framework I needed in order to address my issues head-on.

“Guess who else is an eight?” I asked Dan.

“Who?”

“Donald Trump.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard that.” He gave a small laugh.

“That would have been nice to open with, Dan,” I told him, sternly. “My father, Donald Trump, and I are all number eights. What…a thruple.”

“What’s a thruple?” Dan asked.

“Oh, and also…” I remembered. “A lot of eights are sociopaths. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Dan.”

“You are not a sociopath,” Dan said, very slowly. A little too slowly, if you ask me.

Dan explained there are self-actualized eights, who are able to identify their weaknesses and growth edges and are very different from unactualized eights.

“You are becoming self-actualized. Now maybe you can have a little more empathy for your father, knowing he was also in a lot of pain. And that, if he was an eight, maybe he too lacked empathy.” That made sense. My father lacked empathy, for sure.

I liked the idea of blaming my eightness on my father, but I had come too far with Dan for that to be my mental footprint. Instead, I remembered all the pictures of my father as a young boy, growing up in Newark, New Jersey. Running on the beach with my three brothers, with a football in hand. With his huge smile, and these great big lips—he looked like a hurricane of life. I was going to remember my dad the way he would have wanted to be remembered—at his peaks.

    “People have been dropping like flies,” I said to Dan. “Every time I look up, there’s a missed call. Tammy, Chunk, my cousin, my father. It’s all so strange. This year feels like a dream. The first time I start really dealing with my grief about Chet, it feels like death is knocking on my door. I keep losing things that I love, and I now know what people mean when they say they’ve had a rough year.”

“Do you feel like you are grieving?”

I didn’t, and needed to explain to Dan what years of walking around with psychological cement felt like.

“I have a very out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude when it comes to people. It seems harsh, but I really just stop thinking about people once a relationship has been severed.”

“Well, that’s the way you say goodbye to people. It has to be black or white. That’s the only way you know.”

“I don’t miss people. Ever. I don’t think I’ll miss my dad.”

“You’ve been preventing yourself from missing people because missing someone means that you are vulnerable, and you are only just learning how to be vulnerable. You can’t expect these things to shift overnight. You are trying very hard.”

“Yeah,” I said, sighing. “You keep saying that.”

“Are you angry?” Dan asked me.

“No. Nothing even close to angry.”

    “Are you sad?”

“Um, I want to say yes, but I feel like that would be a lie. I guess, based on my reaction to his death, my father wasn’t one of my self-defining relationships.”

“Maybe he wasn’t,” Dan agreed.

“That’s sad,” I told him, with the tears finally welling up in my eyes.

I felt sad, but not necessarily about my father. What I was mourning wasn’t just my brother, or my father, or my cousin, or Chunk, or Tammy. I was mourning the childhood that had lasted years into my adulthood—because I got stuck. I was reconciling myself to the loss of my youth as a self-actualized adult, now that I had the tools to face it all—and now that I was officially an orphan, and had no choice but to grow up.

“I totally get me now,” I told Dan. “I can work with this.”



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I’ve learned that many people are just bridges to someone else. Some people become bridges that you take back and forth to get back to yourself. That’s how I interpret self-defining relationships. The people who bring you back to you. The ones who say, “You are always welcome here. You are family. I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so get used to it.” My father’s funeral was a reminder of how important family is, and how important tradition is. That showing up for a funeral is tradition, and that tradition is not a trope and that there’s nothing stale about it. Every person that came to my father’s funeral had given me information I hadn’t had before—information I was now willing to receive. My dad would have loved that.