I’ve been unable to write this until now - two years and one day after the fact. Yesterday was the second anniversary of my father’s death and, even though this much time has passed, I was still uncertain how it was going to flow. What I can report is that while I am still adjusting to my new normal, it doesn’t seem as imposing and harsh, somehow, as it has even as recently as six months ago.
I’ve wanted to write this thread since he passed. I just couldn’t/wouldn’t allow the words to rise to the surface. I’ve still got horribly mixed feelings about him; I’m still angry with him some of the time. Not as often as I was, but still . . . and it’s more pronounced by the fact that so many memories of my life that include him are not all that good. Throughout my life, he could be a handful, oftentimes not in a positive way.
The end came about so fast and hard that parts of it are surreal to me. My younger son and I went to see him in August of 2008 and, although he was as good and healthy as he could be given his known health issues, I somehow knew that it would be the last time I’d see him the way I knew him. I was so certain of that fact that I documented it here, two months prior to the visit.
Five months later, he was admitted into the hospital. Thirteen days after that, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Four months and seven days later, he died.
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Knowing in the way I knew seeing my father in 2008 would be the last time I’d see him healthy,
for me for the most part, comes with being sensitive and an
empath.
We feel things a bit differently. There’s a knowing and understanding that goes beyond the obvious and what’s on the surface that can, sometimes, be overwhelming and, more times than not, leave its mark on us.
It’s not about being otherworldly, I see it the way I do physics. Everything leaves an imprint, things happen that leave marks in/on people, time, and space; energy affects matter. Empaths and people who are more sensitive tend to feel these things more acutely. I’m finding that some of the more subtle and nuanced differences between Highly Sensitive People and Empaths are that HSPs feel things (outside stimulation, the brunt and meaning behind people’s words and how it affect(s) them, and how other people’s moods affect them) more acutely; empaths, on the other hand, feel these things too but it goes a step further, I think.
We, as much as is humanly possible, often feel, not just understand, what others feel emotionally. And as much as we’ll allow ourselves, we sense the depth of that emotion, not only what the person exposes outwardly. A seemingly simple concept, extremely hard to explain precisely and even harder to help others accurately imagine or understand. And although many think they can, it’s like someone saying they know what it’s like to be anything other than what they actually are. A bear can only imagine what it is to be a bird and vice versa.
Empathy is a feeling of another's true emotions to a point where an empath can relate to that person by sensing true feelings that run deeper than those portrayed on the surface. People commonly put on a show of expression. This is a learned trait of hiding authentic expression in an increasingly demanding society.
An empath can sense the truth behind the cover and will act compassionately to help that person express him/herself, thus making them feel at ease and not so desperately alone.
(Source)
“Your father was a holy man, Dreaming.”
I heard this quite a number of times in the days that followed his death. People smiling and patting my hand as though they were comforting the daughter of someone who, in their mind, most definitely had a strong connection with God. Maybe they were right - maybe he was a ‘holy man’. It’s not for me to take away what they believe they saw in him but that is not how I knew my father.
What I will say is that I knew him long before they did. I knew him long before he grew to be the man they’d come to know and love. I will say that my father was a life-long Catholic and attended mass regularly (meaning Sundays and holy days) for most of his life. In the years after his second wife passed in 2002, he was at morning mass every day, barring very few. He rarely, if ever, doubted his faith or his beliefs aside from a time, approximately eighteen months - give or take a few, after my mother left and divorced him.
I bore witness to most, if not all, of the soul-rending and gut-wrenching experiences he was put through and put himself through to get to the place he was by the time these people who thought him ‘holy’ came to know him. While they knew him for approximately 7 of his nearly 78 years, I knew him for over 52 of those years. And for 41 of those years, I was made privy to more of his confidences, intimate feelings, and thoughts than probably anyone else, save one or two people - maybe .
For me, it was a position I oftentimes did not want to be. All too often, these moments proved to be awkward, embarrassing, humiliating, and, at times, inappropriate, depending on what he’d decided he wanted to share. I hated being the secret-keeper then and I’m not all that fond of it now. It wasn’t only my father who found me to be ‘a good listener’. I’ve been placed in this position by far too many throughout my life. It tends to go with being an empath - people, especially hurting or broken people, tend to gravitate to us.
These days, I limit myself. People see it as my being stoic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. What I’m actually trying to do is protect myself and attempting to keep something for myself. When people find that I truly ‘get’ what they’re feeling, that I really understand, they ‘vampire’ (drain) me without meaning to. Times that by more that one or two people? And the empath can be left with no reserves left for themselves. Oftentimes I was left with nothing to deal with my own complicated life.
My Dad would confide things in me that he didn’t want others close to him to know because they might not have liked that particular side of him, or might not have agreed with or approved of his thoughts/opinions/point of view on whatever the topic, or his POV may have even angered them or hurt them deeply. It was a risk he wasn’t willing to take.
I was the one who knew how my father honestly felt about most things, contrary to what he said to others. The only other person who might know some of the things I’ve been made privy would probably be a priest.
As I said, my Dad was a devout Catholic and very active in his church; he had a family of friends there who he became close with, people he’d come to love and who had come to love him. They were “his group”. They were his friends. They’d visit the sick parishioners from his church in hospitals and in nursing homes and bring them the Eucharist.
This group of people I met only briefly in 2008, became my father’s caregivers and his angels of mercy in the end. I’m ever grateful for all they did for him and all they became to him.
My father didn’t believe this kind of love could come from friends or acquaintances. He just couldn’t fathom it. Growing up, it was made clear that only blood relatives or a spouse could love and care for someone in that capacity and, no matter what, family took care of family. In his view, anyone outside that scope didn’t really give a damn, no matter what they said. Near the end of his life, their kindness and love would overwhelm him and reduce him to tears. It completely staggered him to discover how wrong he’d been.
For most of his life my Dad believed that nice guys finished last and he raised me to believe the same. From early on I couldn’t conform to these views; he showed little to no understanding or compassion and made his thoughts about it very clearly known.
The long and short of it is that my life with him was a mixed bag. He and I were only fairly close for about 18 of my, (at the time of his death) 52 years.
I didn’t appear in his life until three years after he married my mother. Even as a child, it was clear that my mother was the center of his world and of her world. His mission in life was to make and keep her happy which all too often became an embarrassing and humiliating display of the impossible.
I realized at a tender age that some couples should not have children and my parents were one of those couples. My father had no room in his life for anyone other than my mother and my mother had no room in her life for anyone other than herself. I learned early on to know my place, keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, never to question things or ask for more than what I was given, and most importantly, stay out of their way as much as I was able. The two of them together was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
He worked hard to try to present some degree of wholesome, healthy, and normal to extended family, friends and neighbors. And when I was very young, it seemed these people believed it to some degree. As a child, I never understood how my mother’s rants, which carried out the opened windows and down the street in the summer, seemed completely ignored by the neighbors. It wasn’t until I grew up and moved far away from that life that I discovered, some of the neighbors ‘saw’ more than they let on. I also learned that I have no idea what normal is.
My father was a hard worker, a laborer in one of the steel mills in the area, which helped define the Steel Valley of Pittsburgh from the late 1800s to the early 1980s.
And he was a hard drinker. This was an endless point of contention between him and my mother throughout all the years that I lived in their home, from as far back as I can even form a memory.
My father idolized my mother, his love for her bordering on obsessive.
My mother was and still is difficult - controlling, harshly critical, and cuttingly judgmental of anything that conflicts with her vision of how things should be, whether it be things in her life, my life or my father’s life; in our home or in the lives or homes of friends, family, or neighbors; even something taking place in some remote village halfway around the globe if that something caught her interest. She was, and often still is, quite vocal about her views to pretty much anyone who’ll listen. And unfortunately, my dad shared much of that same mindset until he lost his second wife in 2002; he was just a bit more selective about who he chose to share his views with.
When I was a child, I watched as my father tried to comply with, then eventually to acquiesce, to my mother’s never-ending and ever-changing demands, but his sobriety was the one demand he couldn’t grant her. I grew to understand later in life that, at the beginning of their life together, he drank in spite of her, but as the years passed and grew progressively worse between them, he drank, in large part, because of her.
As a child, when left alone with my Dad, he’d take me along to the bar. When left alone with my mother, she’d take her bitterness and unhappiness out on me - something I never made my father aware of until about three years before his death.
And this became his life: working and drinking . . . and vacations for a week about every other summer at one of the Atlantic coast beaches until I was in my very early teens.
I try hard to reach back in my mind, to sift through the years that I spent living in that house with him and my mother to find some warm and happy memories. I can honestly say that it’s pretty much impossible to do. At least half of the weekends and holidays in the years I lived there ended with my father drunk and my mother viciously angry about it. Bitter and cruel arguments that sometimes lasted days pepper all the happy memories that I can recall, so I hold back on detailing them with anyone. Ever.
Of the fond memories that I do have of my growing up years relating to my father, nearly all of them are of my father and me at the shore - Wildwood, Atlantic City (before it became a casino resort), Ocean City (NJ and MD), and Virginia Beach.
We’d get up early, he and I, as the sun was just rising up out of the ocean, low in the sky and brilliant in its beauty and we’d walk the shore for a mile or two. I liked these mornings best. Just us walking - me, hoping to find a beautiful shell or two that hadn’t been broken on its way from the sea floor to the beach we were walking.
Some mornings, the gulls would gather overhead, calling out loudly to be fed. Some of the people there would throw bread up to them or cut open clams that they’d gathered in small buckets and toss them some tasty bits.
Sometimes we’d rent bicycles and ride the length of the boardwalk back and forth.
Some of my favorite memories are of early evenings spent on the boardwalks. How I loved them. Browsing the little shops selling souvenirs. Blown glass animals, and glass windchimes tinkling gently overhead as the ocean breezes wafted into the shops; shiny black lacquered and delicately painted, musical, oriental jewelry boxes that opened to a multi-mirrored backdrop for the slowly spinning ballerina in the forefront.
Little shops filled with tee shirts galore and seashells of every size and color. I loved these places and would get lost in my thoughts while I’d hold the shells gently to my ear, listening for the sound of the ocean or watching the glass blowers making their delicate figurines of glass, sometimes with crystals or semi-precious stones, beautifully detailed.
I’m grateful to my father for making those times possible and, especially, for instilling in me a love for the ocean and the wonder that it continues to hold for me.
These are the memories I try to hold close. Just snippets though, because even these vacation memories were sprinkled with some degree of unpleasantness. I learned early on, there’s no separating the good memories from the not-so-good ones; they’re hopelessly entangled; trying to separate them is futile.
After I married, I worked hard to try to keep a healthy separation between my life with my sons and my love for them, and my parents. Through their divorce and both of their respective remarriages, I watched from a distance. We’d get together at times, but I tried hard to keep a watchful eye on the mood and temperament of any occasion. Self-protection and survival is how I saw it and protecting my sons from being exposed to as much of what I grew up with as possible was most important. We’d see each of my parents, but I monitored these visits as carefully as I was able and tried to keep them to a fairly rigid time frame.
My father and I reconciled our relationship when I was about 35. Even so, I set boundaries with him and over time I let him into my life as little or as much as I felt comfortable. As time went on, I allowed him and his second wife to spend time with my sons. I made it clear, he was never to drink around them and to my knowledge he complied with my wishes.
It was always that inseparable mix of good memories entangled with the bad ones that blurred things for me. I never lost sight of the man I grew up with; the hurtful things he’d said to me over the years, whether drunk or sober; the father that he wasn’t to me in that time; the things that happened to me right under his nose that he chose to ignore; and the things he didn’t protect me from because he was either working, drinking, sleeping it off, or not around.
I was not about to let him hurt my sons as he had me.
In those next eighteen years, he and I became as close as was possible given the damage that’d been done. He proved to be a good grandfather to my sons. For this I’m grateful - my sons loved him dearly just as he did them.
In the end, his choice was that me and my sons not be made aware of just how sick he was. He and I spoke on the phone twice a week just as we had since he’d lost his wife in 2002. The strength of his voice belied the extent of his illness and side effects of its treatment. And he forbid his church family to tell me the truth. So, while I knew he was sick, I didn’t know how sick.
My younger son and I went up to PA one last time - a week prior to his passing. “It’s time,” his primary caregiver, Ann, said when she called. What I learned in that last visit was that even he didn’t even know why he was as hard on me as he was throughout my life, most especially in my teen years. He couldn’t remember why he had been as controlling as he was back then and he couldn’t remember why the things he held on so tightly to were as important to him as they were back then - these things that were meaningless in the greater scheme of things, that he nagged me incessantly about for most of my life.
I stumbled on this knowledge by chance during that last visit; it wasn’t something that we sat down and discussed. Just one of those little things that he used to be a stickler about that he’d neglected to do. When I went to do it, he told me not to worry about it. And I chuckled and asked if he was kidding as it was something he’d done and wanted done my entire life. He responded, “It doesn’t matter. I can’t remember why I needed for it to be that way.”
That was an eye-opener.
In the last four to six weeks of his life, he had begun behaving like the man I grew up with. Mean, defensive, and sarcastic at times, picking apart the things I’d try to say and being inappropriately accusatory of things and situations that only existed to him. Because I wasn’t made aware of how sick he was, I had no real way of knowing if his temperament and behavior was cognitive, part of the chemo side effects, or if he’d just gone back to being the man I grew up with and the man that I’d distanced myself from. It wasn’t until I went to see him that last week prior to his death that it became more clear. That said, even now looking back there are times that I’m torn. I’d trusted our reconciliation and his apology. I’d believed that things had become better between us . . . only to have the past reach out of the murky darkness and rob me of at least some of that trust and belief.
In hindsight, Ann, the closest of his church friends/family, feels badly that I’m left with this. The truth is, his friends and caregivers were simply respecting his wishes in not telling me the extent of what was going on. I respect that. Hell, it’s what I’d want. But I still struggle with it, which is probably a lot of why I couldn’t write this until now. And it still reads sloppy, rambling, and ham-handed to me. My head knows that, in the end, his behavior was the cancer or the chemo or a combination of both. My heart just can’t fully accept it, at least not yet.
I still have his phone numbers programmed into my phones.
I love you, Dad. As best I can, I love you.
There’s someone here I want to thank for all her love, help, and support through this entire difficult time. Cronesense, thank you. Our near-daily email exchanges meant the world to me; I don’t think I could’ve survived this, along with everything else I’ve been dealing with in these last two+ years, without you. I’m eternally grateful.
On a final note, I’d like to say that I didn’t write this seeking advice; I wrote it to purge myself of some of what I’ve been feeling. Please, just for today, hold any advice directed to me. I know this is just something that I’ve got to put time and distance to. If I seem quiet, it’s because I am.©
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