Namaste, Bitches!

"SMITTY" A Different Kind of Father’s 

  Day Story       ______________________________

I had a close friend that committed suicide on Father’s Day nineteen years ago. He hung himself on the fourth floor of the Architecture building on the University of Colorado campus with a climbing rope I helped him pick out years before. I hadn’t seen him for a couple weeks before it happened but randomly, a day or so earlier I spotted him through my car windshield as he went past on his bike at a stoplight. We made eye contact, he gave me an odd look and then he was gone. 

His roommate at that time had a brother that worked at the same restaurant we both worked at during that time. In a bizarre twist of events, that brother—our co-worker—committed suicide the following Father’s Day.                     

Suicide.
On Father’s Day.

There’s simply no way to misread that message.

I used to return every year to the very spot that it happened. Then I’d return home and call my own father to wish him a pleasant father's day. It became a yearly tradition until the day I moved away.    

Fathers . . .            

I remember having a conversation with a couple of friends that I grew up with long after we’d grown up, and coming to the realization that all three of us had seemed to make the same decision at some point in our lives. We had all decided somewhat unconsciously, you see, that none of us ever had the desire to become a father. I suggested at the time that perhaps my decision to not have children came from the fact that I never, ever wanted to end up becoming the father that my father was to me. They both, with some initial reluctance, eventually agreed that it was the same for them. I still believe this to be true. Apparently, so do they. And my brother, also. The total child head count among all of us still remains at zero.

Fortunately, I lived long enough to get past the blame and anger that I directed at a father that did the best he could while he was still alive.

Thanks, Dad, for doing the best you could . . .

         ___________________________________________________________

My relationship with my father was a strange one.

I would imagine that anyone that had a relationship with my father for any length of time might say a similar thing.

It wasn’t always like that.

This, I imagine, is the second thing that those that knew my father might say. Their relationship with my father was strange and it wasn’t always that way. 

My father, you see, had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at a fairly young age and at a point in time when relatively little was known about the disease. Both of these details are critical in that they significantly altered the way that he chose to confront his sickness and the manner in which he went about revealing the diagnosis to his family and the rest of his world at large. Which is to say, not at all. 

He was thirty-something, in the prime of his life during the free-wheelin’, orange-brown-and-mustard-yellow shag-rug and gloomy dark-wood paneling nineteen-seventies, and though he knew very little about what to expect from the strange disease I’m sure he was hearing about for the first time, he somehow reached the conclusion that the best course of action was to shut out the rest of the world and lock the knowledge of his diagnosis away like some kind of shameful family secret. With the exception of my mother, complicit, I’m certain, only by circumstance, my father’s parents and perhaps one or two close friends, no one else learned of his diagnosis until many years later.

It turns out, of course, that shutting out the vast majority of a support system in favor of protecting one’s self-image while betting the odds against a devastating disease and its progressive probabilities was not without consequence. Add-in experimental medications with noxious side-effects to a pre-existing temper, mix those together with the inevitable stress of trying to cope with rebellious teenagers, money troubles, marriage problems, apathetic employers with little regard or understanding for the effects of a then-practically-unheard-of disease and Voila!, you have the recipe for a perfect storm.

And sadly, it was my father that was going to go down with the ship.

It was actually my mother who finally sprung the whole ‘M.S. thing’ on me one random afternoon during a particularly nasty episode of my fuck-the-world, you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do, self-indulgent, self-absorbed teenage years. The news of his disease and the timing of the delivery certainly felt like a punishment at the time, and in the brain of a hormone-riddled teenager: blame.

And then, though the cat was finally out of the bag, so to speak, the metaphorical cat was strangely left to wander among our family unreserved, mostly ignored and rarely if ever spoken of. Essentially, by father’s implicit demand, we all went on pretending as if we didn’t know about his disease and became intimately complicit in the seemingly more socially acceptable ruse that he was merely suffering from ‘back problems’. 

The emotional effects on the other hand—effects that had been showing for years without any real discernible boogeyman to point the finger at until then, were becoming impossible to ignore or pretend-away.  As my father spiraled further and further into self-pity, self-loathing and all-encompassing self-consciousness over his imminently-deteriorating physique he became increasingly reliant on a parental style that seemed to favor spur-of-the-moment reactions over any real thought-out ‘strategy’. Most times that reaction was anger and most times time the anger was amplified ten-fold by the ultra-high doses of Prednisone that I would later learn they were experimenting with at that time to cope with the effects of his disease. 

               *                      *                      *                      *                      *

One could reasonably argue that despite the hasty conclusions of a selfish teen, ‘blame and punishment” were not necessarily the primary motivation for my mother ultimately revealing my father’s secret to me, but rather she had reached a point when she felt desperately compelled to make an appeal for support on his behalf. Perhaps her own as well.

By then, sad to say, it was far too late. His refusal to reach out to any of us for help earlier-on fostered an inexplicable inability for any of us offer it and his denial to include any of us in his struggle cultivated a puzzling impotence to be included. And mind you, even though everything was finally out in the open, he still refused to speak freely to any of us about it. Instead, he came to rely heavily on an uncanny aptitude he had acquired somewhere along the way to both subliminally shame those around him when they couldn’t intuitively sense what he needed while synchronously denying that he needed anything at all.

By then the physical effects were simply impossible to overlook. At the behest of his implicit appeal we continued to overlook them anyway. In the span of just a few years we witnessed as he made the progression from simply walking with difficulty to walking with the support of a cane, from walking with the cane to struggling with the assistance of crutches. And strangely we were all supposed to pretend like we didn’t notice.

Eventually I moved away to college. In my absence, his physical deterioration continued on unencumbered. My father made the final, independence-killing progression from crutches to a wheelchair in seemingly no time at all. Several years later the disease would pound the final-nail-in-the-coffin of his independence and sentence him to live out the rest of his years in an electric wheelchair.

When all was said and done, in the end, my father’s disease and his slow, gradual plummet into depression and self-despair mixed with unpredictable mood swings exacerbated by the stranglehold of his neurotically guarded self-image would claim his career, his marriage, his independence, his self-esteem, his finances, most of his friends and most of the relationships with the remaining members of his family.

              *                      *                      *                      *                      *

After the divorce my father made to the decision to return to Georgia where we had lived as children and he clearly equated with happier times. I offered to make the nine-hundred-mile journey down the east coast with him and though I wasn’t initially aware of it, there was, lurking deep-down in my subconscious, a secondary, ulterior motive for agreeing to the trip.

The realization of this secondary agenda came bubbling to the surface just days before we left and imprinted such dread in me that it took those days and the first few hundred miles down the New Jersey Turnpike to come to terms with.

The source of my dread, you see, fixated on the realization that I would, for all intents and purposes be trapped in a stuffy, silent prison on wheels for days with the man that I’d spent the greater part of my life fearing and avoiding; had truthfully never known, had never really understood, had never fully accepted and was never was accepted by. More importantly: I was choosing to be there precisely for that reason. Yes, I had gone and backed myself into a corner and unwittingly set the overly-ambitious, overly-zealous goal of attempting to crack the man that as far as I knew had never been cracked by anyone, anywhere, or at any point in time—wholly because he believed there was nothing that needed to ‘be cracked’.

My mother, years later, would confide in me that my father, in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage and in a gesture that might be considered romantic by anyone who didn’t actually know my father, asked her to run off with him so the two of them could start over. She heard him out, thought his offer over for a day or so and came back with only one demand. The demand was this: my father had to be willing to go for counseling.

He spent only moments in deliberation before he stubbornly refused her counter-offer on the grounds that he ‘didn’t need any God-damned counseling’. 

           *                      *                      *                      *                      *

We were somewhere around Richmond when I finally began the conversation. If it shocked me that I finally willed myself into a tête-à-tête with the man whom existed as a mystery to me all my life and for whom I was, no doubt, a mystery as well, his response shocked me all the more. You see, in my boldest, most heart-felt wishes, I truly believed that at least some part of my father had longed for this same conversation. If he did, he certainly never let on.

I spoke in monologues. He spoke in what essentially amounted to one-word answers. I droned on and on with questions. He answered casually and aloofly. I babbled on with years of introspections. He countered with shallow, cursory non-sequiturs. I opened my heart. I bared my soul. I empathized with his struggles. I commiserated with his sufferings. I breached the delicate subject of his marriage to my mother and daringly held him accountable for the effects that his disease had on his family—effects I was shocked to hear he was oblivious to and moreover seemed to care little, if anything, about. I said everything that I ever wanted and needed to say. I didn’t hold anything back. I let it all out. Then I went silent.

Surprisingly, so did he.

I turned the floor over to him, gave him the platform and the permission to say anything he ever wanted to say and discovered, sadly, that there was very little there.

With a near-lifetime struggle with an incurable disease, the no doubt incomprehensible experience of watching his body dwindle-away before his eyes, a heartbreaking divorce, financial ruin, the passing of his mother, father, several of his brothers and friends, an ongoing battle with depression and a floundering sense of self-worth it broke my heart to discover that my father had learned almost nothing from his experiences; grew not an iota from a lifetime of exceptional experience. Instead, he chose to cling firmly to his chosen role as a victim.

In his mind he was—and he carried the belief to his grave—the victim of a cruel world that struck him down with a horrific disease (at one point even suggesting that it was my mother that had ‘given’ him the disease). The victim of a self-serving wife that divorced him by no fault of his own. The victim of a spiteful company that fired him unfairly and unethically. A company that he would ultimately spend years in litigation with over what he was convinced—and one or two lawyers seemed to agree with him—an unlawful termination due to his illness; a case that would eventually get dropped several years later. In the end, sadly, all it did was to keep him tethered to his belief that he was a victim. 

           *                      *                      *                      *                      *

Despite my father’s indifference, things changed for me after that. By the time we reached his new apartment in Georgia, I no longer feared my father. I no longer held back from speaking my mind to him. I no longer gave a damn if he understood me and was no longer concerned about trying to figure him out. By then he had made his case and had been tried and convicted by a jury of one from the driver’s seat of a handicap-fitted 1991 Teal-Metallic Mercury Cougar and found guilty of being little more than a sad, selfish, ignorant, harmless old man.

I’ll never know if anything shifted for my father that afternoon. In the end, it didn’t really matter. The entire event, I realized some time later, was never about him. In fact, when I had time to think back over those tense moments spent over-gripping the faux-leather steering wheel of his mid-size American sedan willing myself to break the silence, it dawned on me that the whole episode had actually been triggered by a dream that I had weeks before we left.

In the dream, I was in the opposing role—the role of a father, with a distant, estranged son seated across from me in some random setting knowing the way one only can in a dream that the entire future of our relationship hung in the balance of my willingness to confront it in the moment.

I knew, just as I had in my dream that salvaging the relationship with my father rested entirely in my hands; that he would never be the one to do it. And now I understood the truth: It’s not that he feared the conversation, he just never believed there needed to be a conversation.

A week or so later after doing my best to mitigate a disaster with his moving company, I returned back to New Jersey and left my father to fend for himself. It would be several years before I would see him again.

             *                      *                      *                      *                      *

His life became a mystery from that point forward with odd stories of break-ins, a stolen gun, several almost-fires at his apartment, larcenous home-care workers and regular calls to 911 for purposes as absurd and inane as his inability to get himself into or out of bed from time to time.  A neighbor of his confided in me sometime later that my father had dialed 911 so often and become so familiar with most of the EMT workers that the majority of them knew to sidestep the customary procedure of breaking down his front door in favor of retrieving his hide-a-key and unlocking it.  

             *                      *                      *                      *                      *

After his third suicide attempt my sister and I were forced to fly to Georgia and file for legal guardianship. A local judge ruled from the antiseptic confines of an improvised courtroom set-up in my father’s hospital room that he was no longer safe to live on his own but ultimately denied my sister and I guardianship.

Several months later my sister received a bill from the lawyer my father had hired to represent him in the guardianship case. Along with all the other problems that were plaguing my father at that time there were in addition, some tens and tens of thousands of dollars in debt that my father had been racking up.

Even his suicide attempts would turn out to be shrouded in the same mysterious aura that had obscured most of the events of his life during that time. The same neighbor casually suggested that these attempts were not, in reality, ‘life-threatening,’ but rather that my father had figured out at some point that any threat of suicide would automatically land him in the hospital for no less than three days where it would be legally mandated that he be provided with ‘round the clock care on Medicare’s dime.

            *                      *                      *                      *                      *

Eventually, after some convincing, my father ‘agreed’ to relocate to Lynchburg, Virginia where we moved him into an upscale, full-care facility near my sister and his grandchildren.  He fought it every step of the way, cursed, spat and blamed me, blamed my sister, blamed my brother, even found a way to blame my mother whom he hadn’t seen or talked to in nearly a decade. 

He lasted about two years.

Two years before he was kicked out for, of all things, threatening to sneak into the room of a fellow resident that he claimed had 'wronged' him and cutting off all his hair while he slept.

My father, we would learn, had been absolved for a whole host of prior offenses up to that point including his threat to obtain a gun and shoot all those he was convinced had been stealing from him. The list of stolen goods he was holding those mortally accountable for included an old pair of tube socks and a sweat-soaked golf visor he had acquired sometime during the Reagan administration. With his formidable rap sheet, however, it was this: this threat of scalping a fellow resident in the middle of the night that in the collective mind of the facilities’ administration had finally crossed the line.

‘Smitty’, as his poker buddies at the facility had taken to calling him, had made his last threat.

Until the next location.

And the one after that . . . 

            *                      *                      *                      *                      *

From there it was a long, bumpy ride from one facility to the next. Though each new location produced its own inimitable stories, the common thread that bound each of them together was an immediate despise for each new facility and an imminent mourning of the loss of the previously despised. The acquaintances he had scorned and condemned in previous locations became the beloved, lamented war buddies of his past and the nurses and workers he claimed had wronged and stolen from him became venerated friends he revisited to complain about the present ones. In one facility he even fell in love with one of the young nurses and suggested to my sister at one point that it might be time for her to go searching through his belongings to find his mother’s engagement ring.

            *                      *                      *                      *                      *

I made it back from India where I was living and studying a somewhat esoteric spiritual philosophy known as Vedanta just two days before he died.

While my brother and sister stood above him and recited the ‘Our Father’ through tears I sat with a hand resting on his chest and stared into his eyes while his breathing shallowed and the life slowly drained from his body. “Dad,” I whispered to him while he was still reasonably lucid, “are you okay with everything that is happening to you right now?” He nodded just enough to be perceptible and my heart nodded back quietly and smiled.

I deliberately shifted my perception in an attempt to side-step the veil of separation that existed between him and I, and, just as I had been studying in India, saw that the separation between the two of us only existed if I allowed myself to view my father from the perspective of the ‘relative’ reality of our bodies.

In other words, if I believed that my primary existence was that of a body—a body with its specific personality traits, beliefs, ideas, goals—then of course, my father, too, existed as a body—a body with its own history, beliefs, etc.—separate from me, separate from the nurses, separate from my brother and sister, separate from the other patients; a body lying before me during the final moments of a life.

If, on the other hand, I allowed my perspective to shift—shift cognitively—to ‘bigger picture’, ultimate reality, truth—the ‘I am’, witness consciousness perspective—the perspective from which even my own body and my own personality traits are ‘known to me’ as an observer, then from this perspective my father was undeniably not separate from me in that moment nor any other. From this perspective, there was no sadness. No mourning. No sense of loss. No regrets. How could there be? I wasn’t losing a father any more than I had ‘gained’ one. I exist. I am.  My father’s existence has a dependent connection to me as a knower, I realized. The two of us are inseparably entwined and so are everything and everyone else. From this place there was no separation, not only from my father, but from my brother and my sister, from the doctors that stuck their heads in from time to time, from the janitor polishing the floor in the lobby or the woman that sold me playing cards in the gift shop earlier that afternoon.  When viewed from this perspective—the ultimate perspective of truth—there was nothing that was separate from me; nothing to mourn or to be saddened by. 

This was not, it should be noted, an attempt to circumvent or escape the sadness or bypass the emotions that one typically experiences during such an event but rather an intentional objective shift to observe the event from a greater vantage point. The vantage point of ‘truth’. Truth of self. Truth of everything.

A couple of nurses floated into the room quietly and began to do the things nurses do around this time.

By then I found that I could easily straddle these two perspectives and choose which I wished to entertain at any given moment. These were not experiential shifts, mind you. It was not as if the scene I was witnessing was shifting or changing in any way—my father’s body still lay in front of me, the nurses were still nurses, the doctors still doctors—but rather an intellectual shift. I was something like the experience of walking through a landscape in a dream and suddenly becoming aware that you’re dreaming. The landscape itself doesn’t change, only the understanding of the truth of that landscape.

The teachings from the ashram were suddenly beginning to make a hell of a lot of sense.

I shifted my perspective back to one of a relative reality: the physical scene right in from of my eyes; the landscape in the dream. From this perspective I could clearly see an elderly man in and around the final moments of his life. A man that I recognized as having served the role, best he could, as my father. An oxygen mask obscured the lower half of his stubble-checkered face and the unkempt mustache that had come and gone at various points in his life peeked out irregularly from the corners of the transparent plastic. Thinning white hair crowned his pallid, waxy forehead and was combed forward unintentionally at his temples by the over-sized hospital pillow that had been propped up under his head for days.

I thought back to a photo I had seen of my father as a young boy in Michigan where he had grown up.  He couldn’t have been more than five or six years old at that time. In the photo he was wearing what appeared to be some kind of a Navy soldier’s uniform with broad white stripes running the length of a dropped, robe-like collar and across the width of his chest. A neutral, nearly unreadable look sat impishly on his boyish face and his near-black hair was greased fashionably across his forehead. I imagined him walking to elementary school worrying about poison ivy and bullies and giggling about girls.

Another nurse peeked her head in the door, entered the room and began to remove the oxygen mask from his face and turn off the tank. Deep red creases outlined his sunken, hollow cheeks and nose where the oxygen mask had been. His lifeless eyes stared ahead into nowhere. She smiled kindly and told us to take as much time as we needed.

I smiled back and remained seated with my hand on his lifeless chest while random fragments from his life floated through my memory.

I know he was an average student in high school and shared a bedroom with his brother for most of his life. I pictured him arguing with his buddies, falling in love a time or two, having his heart broken, breaking a heart or two, arguing with his parents over silly stuff and fearing his father just as I had feared him. After he graduated from high school he went on to college, earned a degree, joined the Navy as men of that age did, served his time in the Navy and met my mother on a blind date. Shortly after they met, she got pregnant at a time when ‘good girls’ didn’t and options were few. He ignored the offers of his buddies, however tempting they must have been, to pay for a bus ticket that would ultimately remove him from his responsibility and went on to marry my mother against the wishes of his parents who didn’t hide the fact they considered my mother a ‘whore’. He took a job with a spark-plug company to support his family and rented a small apartment in Akron, Ohio. I remember as a young boy kissing him on his scruffy cheek at bedtime and missing him when he was gone. As I got a little older, he taught me how to throw a baseball and ride a bike, bought me my first guitar, built my brother and I a backyard tree-house, taught me how to tie a tie, to drive a stick-shift and argued with me about Ronald Reagan. Eventually he would—despite how silly it must have seemed to him at the time—send me off to college to study music. 

One of the nurses entered the room in need of signatures.

I kissed my father on the forehead and felt like an actor in a play as I did. My brother watched from the sidelines for cues, it seemed, on the proper way to behave during such an occasion. I wonder if he could sense that I was making it up as I went along. 

Several minutes later the three of us—my brother, sister and I—walked out of the hospital room.

I returned to India some weeks later to continue my studies.

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Dedicated to Ronald Martin Kleinsmith Sr.