Working to Rest

The house we live in is a cold place. It numbs our fingers and makes us shiver.

The upstairs, where we sleep, is colder than the downstairs, where our waking hours are spent. This rule has one exception. The thirteen-year-old daughter spends her nights downstairs with her younger sister, the feeble black lab whom she has known her entire life and who now needs her company, or anyone’s company, at night.

We can only afford to heat the house to where we can tolerate the cold without catching cold. This is the affording that we hadn’t known before we became a family. Then, at the brink of summer, there were fewer mouths to feed and a different season ahead of us. Now, in the icy air, we have trouble huddling up as a family, to keep warm or keep friendly.

The trouble lies as much in our busy-ness as it sits in our temperaments. We are busy with, and we struggle through, so much—the children’s schoolwork, meal preparation, church attendance, the general upkeep of the house—while we also struggle to keep our own hearts and minds.

We each keep our minds filled with the contents of our own worlds, and for a variety of reasons. The kids are in school and the parents are not at work, as it would be with most parents we know. One parent is on disability, after being bed-ridden for more than a year and recovering for about fourteen more, when her spine was injured beyond repair.

The other parent is seeking the same sort of income. For this other, panic attacks have littered his past; he presently faces deficits in memory, focus, and coherency, and the lethargy that brings on a sort of vertigo. These have been major stumbling blocks, of late.

For him, it feels as though the only coherent thoughts that come from him are those that he enters into a Word document, as he writes something to be read by others. There, he can collect his thoughts at his leisure, without the pressure of direct conversation, and then address those prepared thoughts to the reader. Extemporaneous speech is, for him, a dicey exercise fraught with land mines and quicksand.

These are the worlds of the parents. The kids have their own, as well.

Because there is no television in the house, the children focus on books and internet interactions. As they do that, the parents focus on the kids’ school work and the various lessons of life, while somehow pushing through their respective disabilities, to varying degrees of success. The children have one agenda; the parents have another.

With each of us in separate worlds, worlds collide when the sequestered ones mingle about in the house. This is most often seen in the partaking of meals, which aren’t shared together, anyway; they’re only served that way.

One teenager won’t eat downstairs, at the kitchen table, even when special occasions arise and special meals are prepared. As far as the other teen goes, the parents, out of an urge for self-preservation, have partitioned themselves from her, as she swings from pole to pole so quickly that they experience emotional whiplash, disturbing their desire to eat with her, or even at all.

When it comes to the parents, one of them is on a strict diet of watching the other eat, making the other self-conscious while he eats.

This is our current routine. It is the closest we have come to sharing meals together.

We are all so apart, it’s a wonder we’re ever together at all. When we find that we must get together, like to discuss a degree of respect for each others’ things or feelings, the temperature in the room rises quickly and the atmosphere can be likened to a police bust, or a domestic call that’s not easily diffused. The feeling of togetherness that we experience is only one of proximate geography, rather than hearts or minds that might think as one.

But we are raising teenagers, we keep telling ourselves, and the parents are also husband and wife, we tell ourselves, so perhaps things aren’t really as bad as it seems. The children will outgrow their teenage predilections, and may not be so obnoxious one day. The husband and wife, each struggling with their latent psychologies, will look beyond their individual struggles and come together in a place of understanding. This is what we hope for, as each day’s challenges are brought to bed, when all else is said and done.

We’ve got to learn patience, in this cold house without the same luxuries that most of America enjoys. We’ve got to be patient with each other—they with us, us with them, us with each other—lest the house would no longer be a tie that binds, but a snare that entraps.

Here is what we’re told, this time of year: “Chains shall he break / For the slave is our brother / And in his name all oppression shall cease.” We have faith in the chain-breaker; yet, I think we’re not clear on who we have enslaved, nor are we clear on who may have enslaved us. We need some soul-searching, to probe the depths of this question, lest the chains around us and others remain, decomposing at a slower rate than the atrophy in our bones and muscles—the parts of us once used to heal and comfort others.

Perhaps this isn’t exactly what we each had anticipated, when we first got together. Then, we believed that the needs within us couldn’t be met by another until we met each other. Nonetheless, we believe in commitment and are committed to seeing this through, until the end of ourselves, because that is the kind of cloth out of which we’ve been cut.

Second impressions, as we’ve seen, can be vastly different than the first, but where the desire to experience a third or fourth impression may be lacking, we are pulled along no longer by that, but by choice and promise, vows made before witnesses on a glorious spring day, when we were dressed to the nines, where the lake on one side of the bridge drained to the creek on the other.

The cold house will soon no longer be occupied by us four. Soon it will be occupied no more, once the bank contacts the sheriff to remove us, since ours is a home under foreclosure.

This situation is due to circumstances beyond our control, those set in place before we became a household: payments not made by a prior wife in a prior family arrangement, or payments that could not be made, when the house was a rental, for a time. What or who is to blame now matters not.

These things have worked against us staying in this neighborhood where the children feel safer than they once had, when they lived next to the inner-city, with the city’s lawlessness bleeding through. We’ll each be asked to leave in the coming year, making stability for these young ones an impossible dream, but one that they long for, nonetheless. Every kid does, do they not?

We are in poverty, but not like that experienced in third world countries. Ours only feels like it when we compare ourselves to those with substantial income, credit cards, cable bills, cells phones, houses in the mountains and down the shore, houses with multiple pianos, the latest cars and SUVs, vacations and excursions—i.e., our relatives.

What we are in, if it is poverty, is not something we’re desperate to be out of; desperation is no frame of mind to be in. Yet, if the heavens were to open up and provide for us, we’d be happy to receive the blessing and even bless others in turn.

We do this sort of dreaming but it is not with exorbitance in mind. We just wish to build a place for ourselves in the woods, near where we were married—where we had visited, from time to time, before we made our vows. There, we think we can be free of so much of the tension that we absorb from the environment around us—from the state highway to one side, and the county highway to the other, possibly even from each other.

But freedom, as so many have found, is elusive. We may be dreaming, or we may be deluding ourselves. Sometimes, there is very little difference.

We’ve been married for less than a year and have yet to settle down. We’re still handling the remains of the house we had lived in after the wedding and before the move to New Jersey’s east coast. We’re still in that insecure place, but we are comforted knowing it is a temporary place for us, as we search for a dwelling to call our own. All this is unsettling.

What we have now isn’t a settling down. It can’t be; the dust is still flying and we’ve yet to cull the premises of the remains of so many yesterdays with so many connections that we’ve lost count.

We’re connected to the furniture, pictures, books, shelves, clothes, and so many other things that comprise our lives. They are so much a part of us that we hesitate to downsize too quickly. We hope that we may, after all, when the time comes, have room for what we’ve lived with these many decades—more than a century, between the two of us.

These are the things on our minds. Something else is on our hearts.

Day after day, we exercise our faith, believing that tomorrow will be better. One of us was a successful business developer, the other an effective security specialist. Even though we know we can’t be those things again, we believe that what was lost will return, though in another form—because we now find ourselves in another form, and we’re learning the meaning of these new forms.

We know that faith is the evidence of things not seen, and we try to keep the faith. We push through the darkness knowing there is light—either around the corner or down the road. Without us knowing that kind of faith, we can’t comprehend how, or if, we will see tomorrow.

We are in a time of transition, but like the children, we also long for the stability of a place to call our own, without fear of eviction. We long for the income to provide better for the children, in a world that places greater financial demands on parents than when we were growing up. We look for a place that, for all we know, may not even exist.

The stress of all of this makes the soul weary, the mind faulty, and the body weak, yet we know that this is what is called Fighting the good fight. We do not give up, because we have hope in a greater Hope than ourselves. In this, we are content to know that all of our needs will be met, and those that aren’t met may not be needs, after all, but just wants that ought to be pruned from the trees of our lives.

We know our weaknesses. In this, the advice we give ourselves may seem like a paradox, but it is yet effective.

We seek to not fight the weakness, for we know we have not the strength to fight it. Rather, we relax into it, knowing that from that place we can find another launching pad from which we can become stronger, perhaps in a way that we have never known before—in a place that we’ve never seen, until we have reached this very particular, special place in our lives.

We work very hard at not working. Instead, we only seek to settle into a frame of mind that permits us to see all things working together for our good. This is our only striving. In this is the peace that our souls long for.

White Like Me: Grief & Remembrance

I miss my friend Michael. He met my parents and I at this time of year, on December 18th, one of the few dates in my life marked by life-changing events.

I remember the date because it was the day that I left for an eighteen-month Air Force deployment to southern Italy, with an electronic security group, there. We met in a Philadelphia Airport terminal, before getting on a DC-8 bound for Naples.

Michael was an interesting guy and full of life. He was a runner and a weight lifter, as was I, though I focused more on the weights than on the road-running.

Michael was a unique Christian. Once in a while, if he had gotten to the chow hall before me and was eating by himself, he would set a place for Jesus, on the other side of the table. He also enjoyed making fun of the devil, by giving him names; Old Turkey-lips was his favorite.

I knew Michael some thirty years ago and regret losing touch with him. I don’t mean to eulogize him; I just don’t know if, since the time I knew him in Italy, he had passed away.

I’ve looked for him a number of times, on the internet, but have had no success. I wonder why I miss him so much. I’m thinking that it may be because he was kind of a fascinating guy, or it may be because he was my first black friend.

As long as I’ve been an adult, I’ve only had a few such friends as Michael. A man and two women immediately come to mind.

Marvin was a co-worker I had, when I lived in Maryland and worked at a federal agency there. I worked with him and a few others on a government project that was as much of a learning experience as it was fun.

Marvin and the rest of us learned how to program a network and we learned about each other. Some of us had nicknames; Marvin’s was Marvinus, which was later shortened to Venus. He kind of was a Venus because, in the course of the project, we learned that he had a part-time modeling career.

I miss Marvin, too. But, since I had seen him last, I’ve been wondering if I had said the wrong thing or shouldn’t have said what I said.

A couple of years after the network project was over, and my ex-wife and I had moved to New Jersey, we went back to Maryland to visit. The trip included seeing Marvin, since we knew that his wife had delivered their first child about a year earlier.

We told Marvin about the town that we had moved to. He asked how we liked it there. I said that we do, but we haven’t been able to find any black people there, let alone make friends. What I said was that it was “Too Lily White for me.” Marvin gave no answer and just stared back at me.

As a result, I have felt guilty ever since making that remark. I have felt guilty for even thinking about it. I wondered why I would consider a distinction like race, let alone voice it.

I tend to heap guilt on myself. In this case, I was heaping white guilt upon myself and have been wondering, since losing touch with Marvin, if I should be slapping myself on the head for letting that thought arise and then letting it out. This is, for me, one of life’s unanswerable questions.

And then there is Landoria, and Louvenia. They’re known as Lani and Beanie. These ladies were other co-workers I had in Maryland.

They each initially appeared to not know what to make of me; though, once I became friends with them and understood their intense sense of humor, we connected. I still remember chatting with each of them in an alleyway—where the smokers had been banished to, while on their breaks—and how Lani would always share her Lorna Doones with me.

I felt, and still feel, honored to know Lani and Beanie. Unlike Michael and Marvin, these two and I are still connected, though only through social media. Still, I miss the face-to-face contact that I once had with them.

I also miss my classmate Barbara. I learned, years ago, that she had passed away, but didn’t know how it had happened. I learned at last year’s reunion that it had something to do with her family being at a South Carolina beach and with her trying to swim out beyond the breakers to possibly rescue her daughter and that, in the process, her daughter survived but she had not.

When I heard this, I felt awful for her and her family. A reunion with her won’t be happening, this side of heaven.

In our high school yearbook, Barbara said that she didn’t like being referred to as You people. I think that this is more than an expression of a pet peeve, but her desire to be seen as an individual and not simply as a demographic. From what I remember of her, she extended that same courtesy to everyone.

Beyond the few mentioned above, I have had a few other black connections. Sadly, they’ve each been short-lived.

One of these was the result of a chance meeting. When I was on a business trip to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I found a bible lying in the parking lot, outside of my room. A name was on it, and I inquired at the front desk in which room the owner might be staying. I went there, and the owner—staying in the hotel, after his house had burned down—was glad to see his bible once again.

His name was Mr. Brown. He invited me to church. I went, and had a great time (a better time than at the mostly white church I went to, the first of the three weeks I was there); he then invited me to dinner at someone’s house. I had never been so well fed or so welcomed into a group of strangers than I was on that day.

Then there was David Anderson, my pastor for a time, when I lived in Maryland. He was a tall man with a radio-personality voice, and he did have a radio show.

He wrote a book entitled Gracism, which he described as "The art of inclusion," saying that regardless of our race, we can extend grace to one another by understanding and appreciating each other—not just for who we are as individuals but also for how our respective cultures have shaped us.

I still appreciate this man. He extended grace to my ex-wife and I for helping us to handle the bullying that my son faced, at the hands of some black boys who wanted him to know that Cracker was a term he needed to get used to hearing. Pastor David recognized that bullying and racism are just that, regardless of the direction they faced.

But I’m speaking about more than a few lost connections. I’m also thinking of my wife. She has had to endure two lost connections of this nature.

These were severe losses, more intense than mine. They caused her to question God about why he would allow such a thing to occur in her life, something she would never have thought of doing before that day.

My wife had foster-parent custody of two beautiful twin boys. During the course of a year, as she lovingly provided for their needs, she sought to adopt them. After the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) had placed Jacob and Jack with her, and after DYFS had awarded her Foster Parent of the Year, they gave her a call.

“Hello, Miss ———?”

“Yes, this is she.”

“I’m Sheila ———. From DYFS. I’m calling about your request for adoption, for the boys that you’ve been foster parenting: Jacob and Jack. Your request has been denied.”

“What? Why?”

 “You’re white.”

“Yes. I know I am.”

“Well, DYFS believes that it would be in the children’s best interest if you were black.”

This was the call in which my wife was denied the adoption and also denied a chance to foster parent these boys any longer.

I’m not a mother, but I know what it’s like to be an adoptive parent. And I know what it’s like to lose a child that you are adopting. Such a thing happened to me.

Fifteen years ago, my ex-wife and I were in the process of adopting a boy whom we had named and had brought home from the hospital. Within a week, the birth parents demanded Nathaniel back from us. The state backed them up, because these parents hadn’t yet relinquished their rights as parents.

This was a crushing blow. Yet, I’m sure that it wasn’t as difficult a time as it was for she who had been raising two boys for over a year and then was told by the state that they were no longer hers—though she had been doing a very good job of it and though the boys were also loved by her depression-era parents, who held and accepted them, regardless of racial attitudes in place when they were brought up.

My wife went to court, to retain the twins. She lost. The judge later apologized to her, but that was little consolation. Since then, the law, on who can adopt whom, has changed. Also little consolation.

She lost the boys and the connections, though not entirely. They were placed in another foster home, nearby, but didn’t much like it there. When they were a little older, they would run away from that foster home and to my wife’s home. But, because she lost in court, she relinquished them all over again.

I had thought that time would have healed my wife’s wound—that is, until very recently, when we were getting ready to leave our neighborhood Walmart. 

This is where we noticed a young, Caucasian woman taking out her own, African-American, twin, toddler boys. They were about the same age as my wife’s twins were, when she lost them. We didn’t say anything to the woman; instead, we admired her handsome boys.

I didn’t ask my wife about whether she had cried, upon seeing that woman’s twin boys, but I believe she had wiped a tear from her face. I regret not being more in touch with how this reminder had affected her.

We might have misread that woman’s situation. To us, it appeared that hers was close enough to my wife’s to be felt in the depths of my wife's soul.

I ache for my wife. She is doing much better than she was, years ago, but the damage has been done, and her heart is still healing.

For the both of us, it seems as though too many connections have been lost, due to neglect, simple and unavoidable circumstances, avoidable remarks, death, and state intervention. These are the connections that we’d like to have back.

We miss those who are lost to us because we loved them then, and we still love them. They are our friends, family, and co-workers. They look a little different than us, but we have great admiration and affection for them. We may even appreciate them more, because they are culturally different from us, and for how their culture enhances our lives.

These connections are different than the many mundane connections we may otherwise have, in our monochrome world. They allow us to connect to a unique people, with a certain style and excitement about life that the rest of us can only begin to appreciate.

These connections, as short-lived as they may have been, have enriched our lives. And while we mourn their loss, we try not to create others like these on our own. Instead, we wait for the magic moment when God will bless us with new ones.

Heart of the Pinelands

The New Jersey Pinelands skirt and go in and out of the fifty-something municipalities in which it resides, including the one in which I reside. The Pinelands National Reserve, as it is properly called, is a corrupted place. While it is a reserve, so much of it is not preserved in the state in which it is found by those who visit its wooded lands and the ghosts of smelting, forging, and logging villages that are now all but a memory or the set-aside corner of a state park.

So much of the Pinelands’ pine, oak, and cedar forests are no longer pristine. They instead have become what I call Suburban Woods, where the unnatural decay of suburban life conflicts with the natural decay and regeneration found in the woods that are asking to be left alone, if you don’t mind.

These woods are indeed a national treasure, as that is what the proprietors of this place call them. Yet, for too much of what lies within them, the forests and the streams that meander through them are not like the truly barren and remote areas of other states. Elsewhere—in the Adirondacks, for example—my son has learned to respect what was there before so many of us had shown up and disturbed the rest quietly enjoyed by tracts of land such as these. Here, my son is disturbed by what he sees on Pinelands trails near the neighborhood where he had done much of his growing up.

The suburban woods are not like unadulterated forests that my son has explored during summer camps, in another state, with chiefs and fellow campers. These local woods go down to the man-made lake and are subsumed by the waters imposed upon them. They have in them the evidence of kids getting away from their parents and getting away with drinking and making a mess. These woods are littered with the shotgun shells of hunters hunting and with the last of construction debris tucked away among the cedars, so that highway travelers are not affected by the eyesore (even though the hikers are).

These suburban woods have trails through them, but seldom far enough from nearby homes to not see those homes. These woods are in such close proximity to the highways that in them is heard the roar of tractor trailers and the loud humming of tires beneath the commuters eager to get back to their nests, some hour’s drive from the urban northland.

These woods are quite adulterated. They are full of the tracks of off-road bikes, ATVs, and SUVs, which may explain the lack of any other kind of tracks, save for the dogs that walk through the woods with their owners. They have in them the remains of the work of developers who have opened up a swath of land for a new street and new homes, only to abandon the project once they had gone bankrupt, without the funds to give the land back to the earth, if that were possible.

These are the woods that ask for some sort of recompense, but do not demand it from passersby or from those who have not maintained a demarcation between their own world and that of the oxymoronically named Pine Barrens where I live and where I tread. They do not demand, for their credo is one of Live and let live, in response to those who soil their soil with the stains of another world.

These tracts of sugar sand and moss, pygmy pines and pitcher plant, red fox and red-tailed hawk intrigue but a few who would take them for what they are. For those who have heard the wild calling them, these patches of land have become an irritant to their souls, rather than a retreat for the soul disquieted. What might have been a peaceful sanctuary has instead become a place where the teen party-ground sits as undisturbed as the pitch pines that shade the abandoned beer bottles and spent campfires. Yet the pines are disturbed, nonetheless, for I have seen the indigenous pines, cedar, and sassafras struggle to compete for sunshine with the many introduced bits of discarded civilization that have invaded the territory of the natural.

Further in, though, beyond the suburban woods is a deeper, cleaner place. Here, in The Deep, one comprehends what is not known in that earlier space where the wild is comingled with the tame. Here, one discovers that the suburban woods, as contaminated as they are, offer a layer of wooded insulation between suburban life and this new place, further in—where sanctuary is findable, reachable, and habitable.

The sanctuary gives the soul a momentary and needful respite, a chance to leave some things behind, or else bring them here to leave them here, in a peaceful place where they can, of themselves, slough off naturally. There, in the every-day physical world that you have left in the care of others is the rat-race, the world of schedules and deadlines, commitments and follow-through, and conflicts outnumbering resolutions.

Yet, here, where the soul can quiet itself, is a refuge where wooded peace supplants the anxieties that permeate the left-behind world, and one learns that the journey to this safe harbor is worth the trip, even if the trip must be undertaken through the zone where the natural and the unnatural cohabitate.  Here is where one can be fully immersed and fully wild, as wild as the barrens themselves.

In this deep, you know how to return to the world that you typically inhabit. You know this because the world you left is right over that hill over there, or just through that path over there—the path or hill that brought you to your wooded refuge, after crossing through the intermingled region that had earlier disturbed you.

You know how to return and you know that, in your private sanctuary (or, so you think it’s private), you have the choice to go back to that civilized place—for you can clearly see the way back, though it clearly feels better here, in the deep. Or, at least this has been my experience in these Pineland woods, where life is refreshing and tolerable.

What is not refreshing, and frankly unnerving, is what lies even further in, beyond the safe zone, where landmarks no longer show the way out. Here, in the place that is Too Deep, once you have lost sight of the way out, your choices are limited, because, for all you know, you may be here for days in this place of inner darkness, where you are doubly insulated from where you had been.

Once you lose your way back home, you can no longer just exercise your choice to return home. You are now unmoored, without an anchor, and set adrift in the sea of your own forgetfulness, no longer sure of where you have been or where you are going, because suddenly everything is alternately familiar and unfamiliar.

Between you and home is the place where you had enjoyed solace and peace, away from the stressors of everyday life. There is also that place, passed through on the way in, which had marked the edge of surburbia, where you had first entered in and noticed that your world had intruded upon this world that you had hoped would be left alone—as you now are: alone. You are disoriented and suddenly no longer tied to civilized life. The peace you had known, just a short while earlier, has been robbed from you; you are no longer at peace, but are frightened for your life.

Beyond the area of safety, the anxiety that you had thought you left behind, in the restful place you had left behind, returns. It returns with a vengeance.

You find that what was once a wanted and even needful place of rest has instead become a place of terror, where the horror of the situation must be pushed aside long enough for you to attempt to once again find your bearings, if at all possible, so you can get yourself out. And you hope and pray that it is possible, because you quickly realize that the Pinelands are a nice place to visit, but you’d really rather not spend the night, if you could help it.

When you go too deep, you find that the Pinelands are like any other wooded area. You see that this place is polluted at the edges, and inviting further in, but still further in is the place where, if one isn’t prepared, one’s life may be on the line.

This is what my step-son learned, not long ago, when venturing off of the main path and then the secondary path, to find that there was no third-tier path he could follow, to find his way back to his bicycle. What he (and his mother and I) had thought would be for him just a bike ride to the state park aptly named Double Trouble turned out to be a seven-hour adventure.

This was a time that was supposed to have been spent by him reading a book in a park and returning home; instead, it was an afternoon of police in their SUVs blasting their sirens until he could follow the sound back toward the main path and out of the thicket, beyond the stream that he had fallen into. We later learned that, after losing his orientation entirely, he passed the same tree stands over and over, as everything began to look, as he said, familiar, but not familiar enough to lead him to the way he came in.

This is also what had happened to me, also not long ago, when my son had said he was in some nearby woods, and I found his bike as evidence of that intention, but couldn’t find my son. He knows what he’s doing in the woods, Pinelands or not, but he wasn’t where I had thought I might find him. I followed a path, along where he might have been, and found some high ground to yell for him. And yell I did, yet with no answer; the woods were silent.

Then, I noticed that the sun was creating longer shadows and daylight was getting scarce. The woods were no longer quiet. Or so I thought. What sounded like a growl was possibly getting closer yet not visible enough to identify itself, nor did I want to see whatever it was. I was now no longer concerned just for my son’s safety, but also for my own, quickly remembering how I got to that point in the woods and glad that I knew the way out.

My son was later found and returned home safely, like his step-brother before him. As it turned out, my son was in another part of the woods, and returned comfortable, calm, and cool. But I had another experience. By proxy, I had felt that possibly my son, as experienced as he was, had met his match. I had also thought that I was on the edge of that same experience, myself.

The situation reminded me of a classmate who had drowned in the ocean after her daughter had gone out too far beyond the breakers. I had wondered, perhaps unjustifiably, if this circumstance would have become like hers—if my son or I had proceeded further in, beyond the point of no return and into the heart of the darkness before me.

In the heart of the Pine Barrens, as with any other densely forested area, I know that beyond the place where the soul is comforted lies a place that can rock the spirit of the man who enters therein. As I was in the woods I am also with myself. I battle the inner darkness within me that lies beneath my inner comfort zone. I wonder about that place, thinking there is a Kurtz in there, waiting for me, beckoning me to submit to him.

The Measure of a Man

As cynics go, my father was a model citizen. He never missed an opportunity where he could say something like “They’re all crooks,” or “they’re just in it for the money.” Nothing at all could restore his faith in humanity. He was a constant believer in man’s inhumanity to man.

I remember him as a jaded pessimist, yet there was a time, before I had reached adulthood, when my mother’s family and friends could tolerate him and he wasn’t quite so crotchety. He wasn’t the life of the party, but he could at least attend the party and appeared to want to attend, anyway.

That’s how it was with his kids, as he recorded some of the fun times in our lives on 8mm film; although, after a while, he seemed to not want to add much fun, either in person or on film, but instead just review the documentary evidence. With the adult friends of my parents, it was another matter, as vague, overheard objections seemed to either cloud those friendships or end them altogether.

When my mom passed away, Dad may have been in the early stages of Alzheimer’s—or, he had gotten to some other point. His pessimism was functioning as a computer’s operating system handles a PC: he appeared to be hard-wired to operate that way. He did later develop Alzheimer’s, without a doubt, but whether he had it at my mom’s deathbed, or to what degree, is unknowable. With her dying, and his life appearing out of control, he drew an assortment of incoherent conclusions, as he separated himself from reality.

Mom was dying of a gastric abscess, with breast cancer somewhere in the mix, also. During that time, Dad seemed to have everything to complain about, believing that no one was living up to their obligations. His regular intake of alcohol wasn’t helpful, either.

Mom’s hospice care was set up; they didn’t come often enough, he said. Mom was dying of an ulcer that was found too late, but he insisted that the oncologist come to the house; she, of course, did not. My ex-wife (my wife, at the time) reinforced what the hospital’s internist said: Mom had just a few days left. “What do you know?” was his response; “You’re just a nurse.”

My mom wasn’t helping, either. As she lay dying, she isolated my father even further. After she soiled herself, one night, my wife—with years of her own hospice experience—cleaned her up, making her feel more comfortable than my father had. Mom denigrated him one final time, telling him to be more like my wife: “Be gentle, Jay, like she is.”

When Mom finally did pass, my father wanted to get back at the world for taking her. He also wanted to get back at himself for allowing her to go the way she did.

The no-show oncologist got paid in tiny increments; he wrote her checks for $6.66, since he considered her the antichrist. My wife was another enemy. He believed she murdered my mom, since she administered morphine for pain relief and—ipso facto—she died, as a result; he later tried to sue her, to take away her license to practice nursing (My thought was, Never mind, Dad, that this woman supplied half of your grandchildren’s household income).

To get back at himself, he tried to kill himself. He attempted in front of his therapist, which was a relief to the rest of us—since he could then get immediate help. He wouldn’t admit that it was a suicide attempt: while drunk, he tried to drink the bottle of morphine that the hospice service failed to collect. Everyone around him considered it an attempt.

Dad said that he didn’t set out to end his life; he was just testing out a theory. He only wanted to see if the morphine would have killed him. That way, if the morphine did kill him, he would then know that it also killed Mom. He would then, if blame could be levied from the grave, have further reason to point the finger at my wife for my mom’s death. That’s how the blame game was working.

This was the aftermath of losing my mom. Later, with the Alzheimer’s obvious, Dad needed to be placed into an assisted-living facility. The time between these two phases of my father’s life were five years of tension.

I was torn between loving my father and protecting my family from his accusations. Weary worn, I opted to create and maintain a separation between the cynic and the nurse.

I made it clear to Dad that I had to consider my immediate family over him and that he wouldn’t be seeing his grandchildren as long as he was going to use my wife as a scapegoat for his wife’s passing. Nonetheless, he would still call every once in a while and ask about occasions we once celebrated together, as a family, and wonder if we could all get together again. He had no idea what I meant when I reiterated to him No.

Through the interim years of him being on his own, I called him infrequently. I thought about him a lot. That’s about all I could do—think about him, and wonder what was happening to him and why he had dug such a hole for himself.

I knew that he was basically alone, even though my needy brother was with him. I wondered what had crept into my father’s soul. Something undefinable was preventing him from eventually making a clean break with the past, and with the wife with whom he had finally been able to reach some amicable accommodation, in a relationship that was never noticeably comfortable.

After about five years into this quiescent relationship came the diagnosis. It was then up to me to somehow place a cynical, eighty-five-year-old, alcoholic, Alzheimer’s patient into an assisted living facility.

I then was able to see in him what I thought would never be seen. With the years that were added to my father’s frame, he lost some weight and gained some wrinkles. This wasn’t much of a surprise. 

I knew he now had a disease of the mind; as such, he talked senselessly and endlessly on one tangent after another:  his work as an industrial engineer; his service as a boatswain’s mate, in World War II; work he had done around the house, including how he had salvaged as many as 100,000 old nails from the old-board bin, in the basement; how he raised his children; how he was raised, during the depression; what he missed about his home town of Bayonne, New Jersey; his work as a jazz pianist, in Staten Island and New Jersey—basically, his life’s story, told as though it were all one disjointed paragraph.

This was how the disease worked. It created loss without the victim feeling the loss. Instead, there appeared to be a feeling that the present made no sense unless it was related to the past, which was then related to still more of the past. But as horrible as it was to see my father losing his mind, it was as much of a relief to witness his former cynicism fading. The blame factory had shut down.

He could smile once again and, whatever was affecting him, I was both glad about it and then felt guilty that I was glad. But the former tension between us was gone, and I saw that he was somewhat trusting of me, now—something he could never formerly do without reservation. He let me into his house and wanted me to stay a while. He let me take him places.

One place I had to take him was an assisted-living facility. I had three trips planned: to introduce him to the place, without meeting anyone; to meet some of the staff, to be interviewed and assessed; and then to move in.

After the second trip, I took him to a psychiatric hospital, to see how he would handle life without alcohol. After two days in the hospital, he was found unresponsive and sent to another hospital’s ER, to be treated for pneumonia.

The next few days were tense, not like the tension of years gone by, but because he was looking like he might not make it. Then, after four days in critical care and three more in a step-down unit, he started to look like he would make it after all, though he was no longer in shape for assisted living. He would now need a nursing home.

When I visited him, he seemed barely alive and looked like his time left would be measured not in days but hours. He was called cachectic by hospital staff, meaning malnourished, and he looked like there was very little left to him. As weak as he was, he seemed to take notice when my wife and I visited him.

The alleged murderer and I spent an hour with him a couple of times, as he was given every chance to recover. On one occasion, we tried to communicate with him but could hardly connect with him. The head of his bed was tilted upward. He could hardly open his eyes. He seemed to smile at each of us; he appeared glad to see us. He wanted to talk, but looked too weak to move his mouth at all.

My wife told him that she forgave him for the things he did, years ago, when his wife was passing and had passed away. I’ll never know what, if anything, registered. I only know that he looked at us and appeared happy to see familiar faces.

I spent that afternoon on the phone with social workers and nursing homes, so that Dad could be transferred out the next day. At about four the next morning, though, I received a call from the hospital. My father had passed away.

I was sad at the funeral, but not grieving. I think that I had been grieving his loss for some years, since the loss of my mother, and had had enough of that kind of thing. Instead, I was mourning the lack of mourners. The total might have been about ten, about a tenth of how many had come for my mother’s funeral.

Since then, I’ve been wondering what to make of this, in the same way as I had been trying to know what to make of him, while he was yet alive. The reason for the no-shows may, in part, have had to do with the seven more years that had elapsed since my mom had passed, and that some friends and family may also have died, as well. That made sense, I thought, but I also believed there was more to it.

I knew that his inherent distrust in his fellow man tended to alienate his fellow man. I knew this because it alienated me from him. And I never really knew how to gauge that alienation until the day of his funeral, in the number of empty seats. Despite how he presented, in his final weeks, he was yet known as a skeptic, a disbeliever in everything foreign to all he held dear.

I now find myself doing what I thought, for a while, I could never do: miss him. I miss the man, compromised as he was by Alzheimer’s disease, who was just happy to see me, apart from hidden agendas, or his expecting one from me.

I miss the father that was finally real to me. This was perhaps the same father who was as real to me as when I was a boy being raised by him. The difference was that I was only permitted a glimpse into how he might have been toward me, as an adult, had the bitterness of middle age not grown up within him as a vine that chokes the life out of the tree that supports it.