My dad has always been a musician. He wrote and recorded an album, played in a few bands, and when I was young would often sit at the piano and play and sing. There were lullaby’s at bedtime, silly songs in the car. It’s possible I so strongly associate him with music because he is the obvious source of my own talent; my favorite thing about me.
One of my favorite things he would play was what I would call the “glass of beer” song. When I would ask him to play it, he would almost always oblige. It was so beautiful and sad and powerful. I loved it.
It wasn’t until I was somewhere in my 30’s, listening to the Elton John album Tumbleweed Connection, that I realized he hadn’t written it. I laughed about that one for a long time. He never claimed he had, he just never said he hadn’t and for most of my childhood, if he sang something I didn’t recognize, I assumed he made it up.
He and I have a complicated relationship. In a different way than my mother and I did. In his case, I know he loves me – to the best of his ability. But, much like my mother, he seems incapable of seeing past his own wants and needs to express care or concern for others.
When he and my mother split up, it was quite amicable. They still spent time together socially and shared a group of friends. Even when my mother got involved with my step-father, things were friendly; this largely owing to the fact my stepfather was my father’s 2nd cousin. Convenient, right?
As time went on, and the relationship between my mother and stepfather became more serious, things began to change. Andrew had a terrible violent temper. He would punish us for the most minor transgressions, usually with physical abuse. In retrospect, it was almost inevitable it would unfold that way. He was only 16 when my mother, then 23 took up with him. He was living in our basement to escape the violent abuse he had suffered at the hands of his own father. He didn’t work, so my mother left him in charge of her 2.5 and 5 year old children. Children who had – up to that point – been rather overindulged and subject to almost no discipline.
He had no other tools in his arsenal than screaming and hitting. My mother seemed to think this was just how things were done and never objected or intervened on our behalf. We would go to school with bruises we were supposed to hide. My grandmother and his both knew what was happening. There was a lot of tut-tutting, but no one acted to prevent this abuse. Not even my father.
He still can’t articulate why he didn’t get involved. I’ve asked him any number of times. For my part, I am sure it is because having 2 small children around interfered with his social life to an unacceptable extent.
One Sunday, he was bringing my sister and I back from his every-other-weekend visit. We got back to our house, and no one was at home. He was instantly furious. Like his cousin, he didn’t have a short fuse, he had NO fuse.
He knew my mother and Andrew socialized with some of the neighbors up the road. He marched us next door and asked if he was there. We were let inside and an argument immediately commenced. Dad was angry no one had been home to take us off his hands. He could also tell Andrew was high and that set him off as well. Rich, coming from the person that gave him weed in the first place, but I digress.
As the shouting intensified my sister and I stood there watching them getting more and more aggressive. Finally, my dad reached out and slapped Andrew across the face. I have no idea what possessed him to do that. He wasn’t ordinarily a physically violent person. Whatever his thinking was, it unleashed a fury in Andrew like I had never seen. He turned on his heel, ran into the kitchen, and came back brandishing a huge butcher knife, screaming he was going to kill him.
At this point my dad grabs my hand and my sister’s shoulder and we run outside. We pile back into his car and go back to his house. Later, when my mom was finally home from work, she came and picked us up and took us home.
I was about 5 at the time, but even then I remember thinking, why is he sending us back to someone who threatened to kill him right in front of us?
There was never a satisfying answer for this. Indeed, I didn’t hear from him at all for over six months. Andrew held a grudge like no other and said if he ever saw my dad again he would kill him. My father’s response? To stop coming to pick us up at all.
Time went by. I turned six. I went to the phone booth and looked him up in the book and called him. I told him he couldn’t just stop being my dad because of what happened. He was chastened, and started making arrangements to meet my mom in a parking lot to pick us up so he didn’t have to come to the house.
The rest of my relationship with my dad is filled with examples of this dynamic. Me, asking why he abdicated his responsibility to keep me safe, and him having no good answer.
I learned early I would need to protect myself. One way I did this was to close my heart to him. After so many disappointments and acts of active harm, I no longer trusted him. Somehow, his treatment of me felt like more of a betrayal than my mother’s indifference. I had once felt tremendous love from and for him. To lose it was much worse than never having it.
For many years, only music acted as a tether between us. He arranged for me to have studio time to record my album. He gave me his piano. He tried, in the only way he knew, to keep some connection between us alive.
Over the last decade or so, his health has declined precipitously. He is now at a point where the repeating cycle of medical emergency > surgical intervention > return to original health-damaging behavior > medical emergency, etc has escalated to a point of no return. His surgeon advised us that to treat his current condition would require multiple additional surgeries with diminishing hope of meaningful recovery. He urged us to consider palliative care as an alternative, and after significant discussion, that is the option he chose.
We spoke at length about his fears and regrets. He begged me, in tears, to forgive him. I told him I had done so long since, and that any forgiveness he felt was withheld was for him to grant himself.
And in the dawning realization that he is already in the process of dying, my heart is softening. I know there are a number of reasons why this feels possible now, when it hasn’t before. Not least because having lost my mother without warning just nine months ago, I know how much I don’t want that to happen with him.
It is painful to re-engage with these feelings, but I am grateful to have them. I would rather be present with the true core of my love for him than deny myself – and him – the opportunity to experience it. Now at this time where I finally feel safe from any chance of him hurting me, I can once again be vulnerable enough to access the parts of my heart where my connection to him has been hidden for so long.
It’s hard to articulate all of the feelings this process is bringing up. Gratitude, sorrow, frustration and ambivalence are all taking their part. I have never been involved in end of life care for anyone before. The only way I feel sure I can connect to him, and help him feel the depth of my wish that his pain be eased, is to be present.
We talked once about how certain songs always made us cry. For me, it’s America by Simon and Garfunkel. For him, it was The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics. As much as it is FIRMLY on the nose, it feels like the right offering to bring to the moment. Remembering all the times he sang the song I loved for me, I will sing the things I cannot say, and hope it speaks to his heart.
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