My Dad is Dead
In this later portion of the month of July heralding in the time of Leo in the year 2008, I find myself in the sad position of having to begin mourning the death of my father. What makes this especially strange and disorienting for me is the fact that he is still very much alive, but in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease in which it seems like his ability to move around and to eat by himself is at long last winding down. He is often in and out of the hospital for various ailments that involve the shutting down of his connections between his brain and his body. He is having grand mal seizures even though he is on anti-seizure medication. He is no longer able to walk on his own; it seems like only yesterday, however, that he was carrying groceries for my mother and washing a few dishes. The two of them would walk down a short hill to a market close by to their home in Espoo, Finland and shop very slowly and deliberately for food items.
My mother, Taina, is my father’s sole care provider now and due to some of her own neurotic proclivities, my sense is that she has suppressed her noticing of the steady decline within my father’s general condition. Both my parents reside in the cold clime of Espoo, Finland and I am their only child.
As for myself, I live in Burlington, Vermont – ironically not so different from Scandinavia in both temperature and climate. My wife and I are late bloomers and are just now getting our own acts together in our mid forties. My wife’s father is already deceased.
Back in Finland, my mother still today seems to interpret my father’s guttural utterances as real speech and the fact that he wears diapers and soils them as a simple adjustment in lifestyle. I guess that this could be viewed as a powerful kind of lasting love – yet it is still sad because it seems to involve many levels of fantasy and misperception on her part. My sense is that she doesn’t know that he is going down for the count very soon. The fact remains, however, that the person that I knew as my father has been gone for almost a decade now. It is frustrating for me because I don’t consider myself as having been a very together twenty something. When I was in my twenties …wow!... that would have been the time to have had more serious conversations with my father and to have asked him about those life defining issues that had defined our early family experiences together. It was too late to ask my father these kinds of serious questions even ten years ago when I was 33 because it was obvious that he was no longer completely there. His personality had patina all over it and his answers to my inquiries were blunted and listless. There was no real wisdom in him to impart anymore.
What makes this process of grieving for my father strangely complex for me emotionally is that for years I was angry that just when I had reached some real truths about my own very flawed childhood and youth – he had already begun to diminish like a flickering light bulb in a David Lynch film. The bastard had escaped my complicated questions – not that he had done this on purpose, it’s just that the illness seemed to really come on at a strangely perfect time for him. He was drifting out of harbor when my well-stocked boat was finally beginning to come in. It is hard not to be resentful of this dynamic that on some level went his way. There was never a reckoning between the two of us.
When I turned forty years old in 2004 I was particularly ready to call Juha on his anger, his foolish going along with my crazy mother’s plans and desires and on his hyper criticalness of much of our early family life. These topics were fated never to be discussed by Juha and me, however, because his mind was long gone by the time I had arrived at an understanding of these dysfunctions. I am not sure if I had wanted him mentally healthy in later life for purely selfish reasons, so that I could debate him and win, or so that I could simply let fly with a few of my own points of pain from my upbringing. Regardless, I was never to have any of these conversations with him because his mind and personality were already floating out to sea in crackling iceberg-like chunks.
My present therapist seems to think that all of these conversations and barbed questions about my childhood actually being put to my father wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway for any of us. My father was who he was -- an angry and scared little boy who would take chances on new ways of life only to find most of them relatively difficult to sustain. Juha was smart and good at being “under the gun” and I think that he was by nature a friendly guy; this was the part of his personality that I could best deal with. His defending of abused animals and bullying human behavior was a thing of beauty for in this act I could see him as a strong and just man who would launch into action even against larger foes. He also stoically held my hand when I cried at my fiancée’s funeral in 1997, but there was no way that he could really relate to the hugeness of that particular loss for me. He never asked me the simple question of “Will you be able to go on?” The double Libra that I am would have wanted to hear such an honest, direct, and loving question. Instead, I had to fend for myself and decide on the answer.
Today during the summer of 2008 my mother still sends me a steady flow of pictures of my father. His face is wrinkled and ashen and there is an unmistakable lost look in his eyes; I don’t see much “soul” in there anymore. I try to imagine what he is thinking or seeing from behind those squinting eyes behind thick glasses. In his eyes I think that I see a tired and wiped out “youth”. Maybe in his reverie he is back in rural Finland during the war years, or maybe he is in New York City attending Columbia University, or maybe he is actually in a world from within a storybook in which fun and good times are being merrily had by all. Possibly he is out fishing as a youngster with his own father.
Whatever the scenario is that he now inhabits, the fiery “nowness” of him (he was a Leo) has been gone for over a decade and really it has been my crafty mother who has led my father around quite efficiently these past fifteen years. She’s kept him alive to be sure with proper nutrition and exercise, but has he been happy for this service? This is a difficult question to answer and it contains many levels ... I mean was he happy (is he happy?) being kept alive or would a quicker demise have been preferable to sitting in soiled diapers and being spoon fed bananas? My mother loves to infantilize him and in a strange way it is a blessing for her that his later years instead of being full of fury over their angry marriage have been about Mommy making food for “little” Juha. Wow! That is perfect. He became the grandchild I assume they both always wanted from me. Her hyper-controlling care giving was finally put into permanent work mode. She had received a care giving project 24-7-365.
When my father retired in 1999 from teaching in an adult education institute in Jyvaskyla, Finland – he was sixty four years old. As I think back to my mother’s fawning over him while on the phone with me as she discussed how he was feted by the principal and faculty of the institute at a retirement dinner, I can’t help but wonder if he had been forced out of that position a little early because he was no longer in control of his once methodically quick mental faculties. From pictures of this dinner event I see a growing dullness in his eyes. He was probably an excellent educator at that point with a specialty in accounting and business management and I felt sadly for him that he was not allowed to age well like some folks get to do; I recently read a review of a John Fogerty concert in Helsinki and at 63, Fogerty is said to be doing the best work of his life on stage! Though an ex-superstar, Fogerty is achieving that real depth of self-actualization late in his career perhaps in the same way as the Rolling Stones continue to do while touring well into their sixties.
This was not to be in the case of my father and for that I am very sad. More and more I believe that my father was put out to pasture as a steady decline had begun within him and I doubt that my mother even noticed it at first. My mother should have seen the decline and brought him to see a neurologist a decade ago, not that anything could have been done. It would have at least been an example of “it is the thought that counts.” Instead, she did nothing and let him drift off.
My mother may have secretly welcomed the slow down; I can’t believe what would have served her better than being gradually able to care for Juha, now as her faux grandchild or some such thing. Probably his resistance to her controlling behaviors went down to zero and my mother was able to transform herself into the perfect dictator a la nurse Ratchet from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. What she said was the law from then on and Juha had to comply.
When my father visited me without the company of my mother in Massachusetts over ten years ago, I remember even then seeing his frailties and this was at the same point in time when I was about to begin psychotherapy during which I would really find out what was going down within the Kaarla family dynamic and how supported I had been in our early family years together. At that point in time I was living in Wareham, Massachusetts; I was 32 and he was 63. During that summer’s month-long visit which began at the graveside of my fiancée, I believe that he felt mixed emotions about me and the funeral although I have no way of knowing what he was actually thinking.
After the funeral I was finishing grad school in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts and showing him the seaside wonders of the Cape (he loved the ocean), I believe that he must have felt some kind of satisfaction from seeing me teaching tennis, playing guitar and recording songs and negotiating the writing of the masters thesis towards my MA degree in Professional Writing from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Though he himself had gotten an MBA from Columbia, I think that he may have sensed that I was getting to be a bit more competent even than he was at negotiating life. It’s not like I beat him at anything, though. His start as a war orphan in Finland was truly terrible and it is amazing that he achieved what he did. Juha had lost all of his family during WW2 and had ended up being shuttled from one location to the next incessantly for his first eighteen years of life. Is it any wonder that his career ended at a master’s degree and a series of disparate jobs? I have no doubt that he would have enjoyed reaching the level of tenured history professor for a major university … but that was not to be the case.
From my lowly perspective, however, my Leo father’s criticalness of me never ebbed during his final semi-competent visit with me. As I showed him a video of my band playing in a large club on a high stage, he kept shouting at the screen and saying that the whole band really needed to move more and that the singer needed to put more of a show on. The video had been shot by my deceased partner who had breast cancer at the time and just getting to that show had been an arduous undertaking for us. My father couldn’t have played a G chord on the guitar to save his life. His criticism of the best group that I had ever gotten together stung like salt-dipped darts and I felt strongly that I would never amount to anything good in this lifetime for always whatever I got together was to be inferior. I am not sure what my father’s rising sign was, but he certainly knew how to launch into stinging criticism.
As my father visited during that summer of 1997, I noticed that there was plenty that I didn’t like about him. For one, there was his “silly drinking”. I call it silly because his drunkenness was never angry or noisy which was fine by me; I don’t like to make a scene either when I knock a few back. I do feel that he would lose control quickly of time and schedules, however, and just keep drinking beer after beer at our favorite pizzeria in Onset, Massachusetts by the name of Marc Anthony’s. The Italian owners loved this skinny pale man because with each gulp of pizza and splash of beer he would exclaim “Erik, this is the best pizza and beer I have ever had.” I did love his boyish enthusiasm, but he couldn’t stop himself from drinking Bud on tap and gorging himself on pizza. It was strange, then, at 32 to have to start in with “Dad, we have to leave now. I have to correct student essays tonight.” I kept having a sense that he could have kept himself more together for me; I had just lost my partner of nine years to cancer and instead of being “aware and alert” as he had beat into me as a mantra during my teen years and young adulthood … he just allowed himself to party down. Maybe that was OK – he was certainly overdue for some kind of a vacation. My mother had henpecked him to death, but I was grief stricken and under the gun at school – why did I have to play older brother suddenly? I thought that he was supposed to teach me how to keep it together.
Perhaps the connection that my father and I share quite significantly is the sense that “We could have been contenders.” Just as Marlon Brando uttered these lines in the famous film “On the Waterfront”, I believe that this idea is one that I sort of received both from my father first hand and then enacted through my own actions in life.
The whole Kaarla family script was, in fact, “If only blank had not happened, then blank would have happened for us.”
There was this crazy belief that we all could have been something great… if only. My mother could have returned to learning something at the graduate level, my father could have held on to one job and found job security and I would have done consistently well in school and become famous at something.
Strangely, I truly do believe that my father could have amounted to something magnificent if his life had contained more resources, luck and opportunities … and isn’t that what all males want? I am not sure that we men necessarily want to be remembered for all time, but I do believe that we want to achieve a competency or skill that makes us feel that the hardships of life are worth enduring and that just like interest in the banks of yore – that our efforts and skills compound and amount to something in the end. Something of value needs ultimately to win out after living out a life.
Unfortunately, the depression that I often suffer from feels that this is just not so for most of us ... most of the time. It feels that for only a few of us our efforts seem to compound and triplicate resulting in something fantastic that may endure the test of time for awhile. Juha seemed to have to battle through private war after private war in order to just stay on the map of life. His efforts never blossomed into some lasting legacy, and finally, even in his last years of mental competency, he was not allowed to arrive at some supreme level of something. Instead, there was only the decline. He ended up in a perpetual down swing.
So who exactly is the person today with the receded hairline, pale white skin, skinny legs and vacant eyes in the pictures that I continue to get from my mother? Is this being still a human in all senses of the word? I wonder if his soul is present or is it imprisoned in a horrific chamber of doom screaming: “Let me out! Let me out!” I wonder if there is a relentless restlessness in that soul to escape the decaying body and mind that is its failing compartment at present. Do I wish for his death? I guess I kind of have to.
If I begin to dig more deeply into who I am (or from who I came), I arrive at my father’s father. He was a military man and in my now mother’s residence – there hangs a display case of his awarded war-time medals. He surely must have killed tens or maybe even hundreds of invading Russians in order to have been awarded all of those medals. How many of them were but politicized young boys I dare not even conjecture, but the fact remains that he did some killing and received a military funeral after my father found him lying in the street dead from a heart attack during a Christmas season sandwiched in between the war years. My father’s father was literally fighting for his home and backyard, but I believe that all that killing still carries some karmic weight and I believe that much of it is in my own body and soul.
Even though I would count my own pre-forty years as difficult and not exactly uplifting, I do remember a few times when my father was able to experience that I had, in fact, achieved a few things when I was in my mid twenties – he would have been in his early fifties then. I remember when he visited me in 1993 and I was living in Everett, Massachusetts. This time he again visited me alone without my mother. In preparation for his arrival, I had to paint “the guestroom” as it were.
At the time I was working as a telemarketer by day and playing in the band “Junction 69” by night. Right – the band name had plenty of sexual euphemism. I was platonically living with our stripper drummer/vocalist Louise and a would-be actress by the name of Ruth. Louise also had a two-hundred pound Mastiff by the name of Oscar who followed her around wherever she went. The three of us lived on the second floor of an ugly and ancient three-decker in Everett, Massachusetts. Some Vietnamese folks lived on the first floor. They were timid and spoke no English. On the third floor were probably some kinds of drug dealers who were never home.
In preparation for my father’s arrival, I took it upon myself to paint the extra room that led to a small rickety terrace. I remember having to put layer upon layer of white paint down in order for the room to at least feel clean. This was no easy feat because the floors were greasy and had dog drool and hair stuck to the grime; it was awful, but I endured applying layer upon layer of latex white paint. Eventually, that room got CLEAN and I bought a cheap futon for my father to use as a bed. I remember feeling proud when he visited me because even though rock ‘n’ roll was being played at night and I wore a ponytail, I had a clean-cut day job and at least resided in a livable apartment. He seemed to have enjoyed the visit.
Another especially vivid moment I can remember from my late teen years happened when my father really began to push me towards “proper behavior and life direction.” I believe that I was thirteen or fourteen when my father first laid into me with a particular phrase that I will always remember. He essentially chastised me with: “You are a pleasure seeking hedonist. If I were you I would grab onto work projects with vigor and a do or die attitude.” With this phrase my father virtually set into motion the idea in me that I was no good and a bad human being. Until this day I am paranoid about being lazy or of not being functional at the highest level in whatever I am doing. I attribute this exhortation to the fact that my father had a difficult life and that he was probably slightly jealous of my having a better shot “at this thing called life” – to quote the artist once again known as Prince. In comparison to my father, I truly had a good beginning in life.
When my fiancée succumbed to cancer, I feel that her marvelous brain had checked out maybe a month before her actual death. I could tell that she was truly gone then and cried and cried to a best friend over the telephone. That is when her loss hit me like an ice pick to the chest. After that, there was no going back. Even as she was conscious and even still speaking, my soul cried out for her essence because it had exited the room forever. And I do so believe that most of our essence is in the brain. It was obvious; you could feel it. The body’s death was slow and painful, but not as scary.
I have many feelings about my father, but I feel that much of him left the building a long time ago and really, “the son” in me left the building a long time ago as well. At 43 I am still not a father and I often wonder why this is. For me it seems that I am just as lost as when my father was around and I question what is the meaning of this earthly existence. Since I tend to believe in astrological ideas more than religious ones, I only wish that my father could have gone out more like a Leo for it would have suited his surviving so many hardships and losses much better than the slow withering away into nothingness while my mother changes his diapers.
