I Was Mad at My Dead Dad

 

My pops has been dead for almost two years now. I was angry at him for those two years too. Not because he died. He held no sway over death. No one does. I was angry at my dad because he didn’t live. Or at least he didn’t live my definition of the term. It was a dark emotion to carry around, particularly given how raw his passing still was. It isn’t proper to feel anger at someone who has recently passed. Sympathy and sadness are the only officially-approved emotions. As a child in particular, you don’t have the right to be mad at a dead parent. Regardless of age. The culturally-engrained and reinforced parent-child hierarchy forbids that kind of rebellion. So I knew my feelings were both impolite and inappropriate. But I just couldn’t help myself. My disobedient spirit wouldn’t allow me to simply let my dad lie.   

Before dad died, I knew that day was on the near horizon. Dad had been diagnosed with inoperable and incurable cancer and had quickly been placed on hospice care. The cancer had metastasized in his bones and the doctors knew that they powerless to prevent the inevitable. It would all be over soon. I’m pretty certain dad understood that too. He never actually acknowledged that to me. With us, his masculine pride wouldn’t allow it. Or maybe as the family patriarch, he felt he had to convey an abiding strength regardless of circumstances. But I saw emails he had written to others. He could tell those outside our inner circle things he would never say to us. And he was telling these folks that he wasn’t’ well. That things weren’t right. So when death finally crept in and stole dad while he slept, it really wasn’t a surprise. It was a relief. A wrenching and painful relief, but relief nonetheless. The waiting and the wondering and the agonizing was done. We were unburdened from that yoke of uncertainty.

I got to see my dad before he passed. At the time, he was sleeping around 20 hours a day. He couldn’t move about without assistance from my mom and his walker. He was wearing absorbent adult diapers. He was short of breath and could barely keep his head up and his eyes open. He was on the brink. But sitting in his Depends undergarments on the edge of his bed, he wanted to tell me about the things that excited his imagination. Things he never learned in high school because he never went to high school. We talked about the Peloponnesian War, the philosophy of Rene Descarte, the writings of John Milton, Herman Melville, Alexander Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Miguel de Cervantes, Samuel Clemens, and John Steinbeck. Dad was what we call “learned.” He was possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge that made playing Trivial Pursuit with him a futile and aggravating experience. The only way you could gain the upper hand on him was with the Entertainment category. That was dad’s one weak spot, his Achilles heel of knowledge. Yet, sitting there half clothed on his bed, he told me how very little he knew. Like Descarte, he said that he felt like a farce and a fraud because he actually knew nothing. One of that last things I recall him saying to me was “did you know that a sparrow hops along the ground very differently than a robin?” My pops may have been a lot of things, but an intellectual fraud he was not. 

We buried dad in the Santa Clara cemetery on a clear and blustery day in January. The pandemic was still raging so we had no funeral. Just a sparsely-attended graveside service with family and a smattering of close friends. Because dad served his country in the Pacific theater during World War II, the military supplied an American flag to present to mom. The local Poetry Society was there to pay respects too. Someone said a prayer, we read some of dad’s poems, then there was more praying. That was it. Ninety-two years distilled down to 20 minutes. We left before they lowered dad into the ground. 

We also buried my dog Shadow that day. When I was younger and still living with my parents, I brought home a Springer Spaniel puppy from the pound one day. I knew what the answer would have been if I had asked first, so I didn’t. I figured it was easier to seek forgiveness than get permission, so I made the unilateral decision to get a dog without consulting my parents first. They of course were furious, but over time my dog became their dog. When I left home, the dog remained with them. Years later, old and feeble, Shadow passed on. My father was a stoic man who wasn’t prone to tears. He didn’t cry when his mother died. He didn’t cry when his siblings died. He didn’t cry at any of the major life events of his children. I only heard him cry one time in his life. That was when Shadow died. Then, he didn’t just cry. He sobbed and wailed uncontrollably as if a lifetime of hurt had accumulated within him. Shadow’s death, the dog that dad neither asked for nor wanted, wounded his soul like nothing else had before. My parents had Shadow cremated and then kept his ashes in an urn in their bedroom for over 25 years. When we put my pops in the ground, we placed the urn in the casket with him so that Shadow could spend eternity at his feet.

My dad was a writer and a dreamer. Not by trade. He was a lawyer. He practiced and excelled at that profession for 40 years. His office was in downtown Salt Lake City and the shortest and most direct route from our house to his firm was the freeway. Late in his career, however, he began taking the most circuitous routes imaginable to the office. Instead of the simply jumping on the interstate, dad would go up Kentucky Avenue, across Peach Street, down 4510 S., east on 2700 E., west on 2760 S., underneath the freeway and across 1700 E., down 2100 S., east on 1300 E., and then west on 500 S. into the heart of downtown. A drive that should have taken him about 25 minutes would end up taking him closer to an hour.

That struck us as hilarious and we used to laugh a lot about the absurdity of it. We’d even devise the most indirect and time-consuming routes imaginable and then giggle just thinking about my dad driving those routes to the office. As a young man, I couldn’t see what was happening. I didn’t grasp why my father insisted on following the most irrational route to his place of employment. Through the lens of time and experience, however, I came to understand that my dad was done with law and he was done with work. His route selection was simply an avoidance technique to delay his arrival at the office. Every minute dad was in the car traveling was a minute that he wasn’t at his desk. He continued to lean on that tactic until one day he came home and without any prior notice, warning, or consultation, told my mom that he was finished. Just like that his career was over. He no longer had need for all those laughably creative routes to downtown he had conceived.

With dad retired and the kids matriculated from the house, there was nothing holding my parents in Salt Lake City any longer other than inertia. So they relocated south to a more hospitable clime. In choosing the place where they planned to spend the remainder of their days, my parents only had one real box to check: the absence of snow. Santa Clara, Utah satisfied that criterion, so after surveying the area, they declared “this is the Place.” In their new and adopted home, my parents no longer had need for snow shovels or parkas or mittens or galoshes. Dad even stopped wearing shoes most of time. But Dante’s inferno was the price they paid to be away from snow. Living in an oven was the quid pro quo for the bargain they made. 

In the searing heat of the redrock desert, some unseen barrier inside my father burst and the words came gushing forth as if an ancient aquifer had been tapped. Thoughts that must have been bottled up in him for decades suddenly spilled across reams of paper. It was mostly poetry, but he also penned several family biographies. I asked him once where it all came from. He didn’t know. I suspect it was always in him. That his true calling in life was as a writer and poet, but he chose law out of practical necessity. It made me wonder how much more he had in him that we never saw because the hour glass ran out of sand. I’ll never know that now of course. All I know is that when dad’s time here was finally done, he left us with volumes of work from his beautiful mind.

This was dad’s writing phase. He always had phases it seems. He would get interested in something and then tenaciously immerse himself in it to the exclusion of almost everything else in his life. When I was a child it was the guitar. Every day he would come home from work, change his clothes, and then rush right downstairs to sit on the edge of my bed and play. He’d be down there hours much to the consternation of my mother who contemplated installing an intercom system so she could call him for dinner. He grew his nails and played so often that his fingertips became hard and calloused. Dad wore that alligator skin like a musical badge of honor. 

Then running caught his fancy and dad put down the guitar never to pick it up again. I remember the first time dad went out for “a jog.” He was probably in his late 40s or early 50s. He didn’t have any running gear so he went out in street clothes. He ran from the top of Kentucky Avenue where we lived to the stop sign at the intersection of Peach Street and Apple Blossom Lane. As kids, we rode our bikes back and forth over this same stretch of road a million times. It was one-tenth of a mile exactly. That was dad’s limit. He was completely gassed. Relenting wasn’t in an option once dad became fixated on something, however. So he kept running like he played the guitar. In the summer, he’d come home, lace up his running shoes, and go out until well after the sun set. In the winter, he’d leave the house before dawn to run in the frozen darkness. Eventually he was running marathons and he and my mom would travel so that dad could satisfy his new running addiction in some distant locale. 

I don’t now recall why dad stopped running, but he did. Maybe it was gradual but the stop seamed abrupt to me. Perhaps age had something to do with it. All that pounding on an aging body. Or maybe that is when writing lifted her skirt and showed Dad some leg to curry his favor. Whatever the reason, his running shoes were banished to the dust bin of his personal history never to see asphalt again.

Dad told me once that when he was young, he was never inside. He would wander the southern Alberta countryside from dark to dark exploring and getting into mischief. In the wintertime, he’d arrive at the frozen pond to play hockey with his pals and have to lace up his skates in the pitch black of the pre-dawn. He wouldn’t remove them again until the blackness of night settled on the land. In between, he’d skate non-stop in the frigid Canadian air without stopping to eat. But as an adult, and other than his running phase, dad wasn’t really much for the outdoors. We didn’t hike, camp, fish, hunt, or boat when I was growing up. That wasn’t part of my dad’s repertoire. I had to learn those things through scouting. Or the same way I learned about sex: from my friends and through trial and error. Dad did teach me to ski although his days on the slopes were brief. Once I became more proficient than he, dad stopped accompanying me up the canyons. That suited me just fine at the time as I was in my own embarrassing phase where hanging out with your parents was considered embarrassing. 

In retirement, dad became even more indoorsy. And sedentary. If he wasn’t sitting at the computer composing, he was sitting at the kitchen table working a crossword puzzle, a single pane of glass separating him from the world just beyond. Or he was parked on the sofa watching old black and white reruns of the Andy Griffith Show with the volume turned up so high that it was impossible to have a conversation in the same room. In earlier times, Dad would have scoffed at such drivel. In his old age, he found that nostalgic and sentimental drivel enjoyable.

My parents’ Santa Clara home is the one they always wanted but never had. It has a wide-open floor plan, vaulted ceilings, a large master bedroom with walk-in closets, extra bedrooms and a living area upstairs for visitors, an office for my dad, a spacious, modern kitchen with a double-oven for my mom, and a big landscaped backyard with a covered patio. When we would visit at Thanksgiving or Christmas, I’d always try to coax dad outside and into his magnificent backyard. Summers in the Land of Zion are miserable, but the winter months are something special. Bright warm days, clear blue skies, crisp cold nights, and no snow. I wanted dad to experience that. On occasion, he might come to the back door, squint like a vampire at the daylight beyond, and then recede back into the hermetic confines of the kitchen. Most of the time he’d just decline the invitation outright. Not matter what you did or said, you couldn’t coax him out of the house.

When we would leave, my parents would always walk us out to the car and then stand forlornly at the edge of the driveway waving as we drove away. I think that’s universal behavior. The sadness that accompanies children leaving, no matter the age, is one of those parental shared experiences. Over time, however, only my mom would walk us to the car when we left. Dad would stay seated at the kitchen table and say his goodbyes there. Due to his inactivity, his physical condition had declined to the point that he no longer could make the short walk from the kitchen to the garage without considerable difficulty. His weight had ballooned. His feet were so swollen that he could no longer slip on a pair of shoes. Moving from one place to another, even within the limited confines of the house, was a challenge. So he moved very little. Ultimately we would get him a walker. He despised it just like his eyeglasses and would avoid using it whenever possible. It was a visible emblem of his blossoming frailty, a blatant reminder that time had taken his body’s best days.

Perhaps I don’t understand the aging process. I definitely don’t know what happens to a person when they retire. With any luck, I’ll find that out one day. Maybe too I was expecting more from my dad then he was physically capable of giving. Perhaps his physical decline was the cause of his sedentary lifestyle and not the effect. Either way, what I do know is that both age and retirement changed my father in ways I never expected. While they were the catalyst for his sublime and transformative writing, they simultaneously murdered his desire to live any sort of life outside the box that was his home. 

That was why I was mad at my dad. I was angry at his stubborn refusal to set foot outside. I was angry at his sedate mode of living. I was angry at the destructive impact his interior lifestyle had on his physical condition. And I was angry at what it all meant for my aged mother even though she didn’t seem to mind. I couldn’t understand how a person could be satisfied living the life my dad lived in his so-called Golden Years. It was completely at odds with my romanticized idea that “old age should burn and rave at close of day.” In sum, I was angry at my dad because his chosen lifestyle failed to live up to my expectations. 

I’ve thought about that a lot recently. I’ve wondered what unseen force suddenly appeared on the scene to hold my dad inside and insulated from life. Was it fear? Uncertainty? Discomfort? Boredom? Had he reached the point where he was just waiting for death’s knock? I just don’t know the answer to those questions. But what I have come to realize is that my anger about it says more about me and my own imperfections than it does my dad. It was the product of arrogance born of a rigid mind. It was me imposing my world view, my wants and desires, my expectations on my dad and then demanding that he conform. It was role-reversal where I became the over-bearing parent and my father the disobedient child who needed correcting. 

For almost two years, I didn’t feel badly about that. In fact, on some level I think I enjoyed being in the finger-wagging role for once. If I was tempted to re-evaluate how I felt, I pushed those thoughts to the side because I was confident that my path was straight and my ways righteous. Then one day very recently something occurred to me that hadn’t before. Maybe my dad wasn’t unhappy with his cloistered lifestyle. Maybe dad believed as his hero Descarte did that “to live well you must live unseen.” And just maybe I was the only one who was displeased with the whole situation.

It was a startling moment of clarity. When the revelation struck, I was like the Grinch on Mt. Crumpit when he heard the Whos singing down in Whoville. My heart grew three sizes that day because I finally understood. And with that understanding came liberation. Liberation from the guilt I had been lugging around for almost two years.  

I still can’t fathom how my father got enjoyment and meaning out of his late-life routine. I still wish that he had taken better care of himself physically. He had a lot of living left in him that I fear he may have squandered. I’m disappointed too that he didn’t rage more at the dying of the light. But who am I to call any of that into question? Dad lived the life he chose to live. Presumably he was satisfied with it. He certainly never gave hint otherwise. At the end of the day, I suppose that is really all that can be asked of someone. That they live an authentic life. I now believe that my pops did just that. As a result, I am relieved to say that I’m no longer mad at my dead dad.