“As you grow old, Elie,  you start to realize that you can do almost nothing to influence anyone’s particular stay in their own private hell,” said the skeleton of my father.  “Every person lives in the situation they need to live in, for a variety of entangled psychological reasons.   Just like you can’t truly know anybody else’s demons, and a fear that threatens someone else to death may be nothing to you, the personalized hells people find themselves in are largely beyond rational discussion.   I’m sure you’ve realized this by now.”  

I have, obviously.  Terror is the subject we are least likely to be able to talk about.  We are all geniuses of self-justification.  Everyone believes they are doing what they must do, in the face of what they are up against.

“Not only that, Elie, the devil in each person’s hell provides just enough tenderness to make leaving impossible, that much and not a drop more.  Each hell is perfectly tailored for an exact, personalized fit.  Women who stay with men who abuse them, it’s always the same story.  ‘He showed such remorse…’, ‘he is the only one who truly understands me,’ ‘he really loves me,’ ‘he can’t live without me…'”  

“Think about this, Elie, when you felt most terrified as a child wasn’t I great about calming you down, reassuring you?”  

Yes, you did seem to have a talent for soothing us when things were really scary.  

“Right, so I showed you that concerned face, that empathy and kindness I usually withheld.  You could see my love, my capacity to be a caring person, a supportive father.  Then, as soon as the crisis passed, it was back to business as usual.  I blamed you and your sister for everything.  I raged at you both. I used my superior arguing skills to back you into corners in a crazed attempt to never be wrong, about anything.  My skin literally cracked open from time to time, from the pressures of my life, and I had to be hospitalized.   I told you that your acne was the hatred pouring out of your skin.  ‘Nice, dad…’ I can imagine you saying back then, though of course, you responded angrily to the in-your-face outrage, as most people would.   To this day, and be honest, your sister still believes that you and her being born ruined mom’s and my lives.”  

I don’t want to go very far into what anybody else feels in this account.  This conversation is between you and me.  But your point is well-taken.  If my sister and I had never seen your capacity to be a loving father, it would have been much easier for us both to tell you to go fuck off, permanently.  There would have been nothing in it for us.   The kindness you sometimes showed when we were most worried was enough to keep us hoping we were not alone in our moments of greatest vulnerability.  

“It’s like a pitcher who doesn’t have a great fastball, showing it once in a while in a strategic situation, just to set up another pitch, to keep the hitter honest, off-balance.  Look, Elie, I obviously feel bad about all this.   My mother, may she rest in peace, and I still can’t phrase this, really… let’s just say she was not a very tender person.   But she always called me ‘Sonny’.   You should have heard the heart-breaking way she said it, that American term of endearment coming out of her Yiddish mouth.   Every time she called me that I felt a tiny flush of tenderness, just enough to keep me from turning my back on her for good.”

This is how monsters do it, then.   They show you just enough tenderness to keep you on the hook.   They play on your need for mercy by letting you have just a taste once in a while.  You took good care of your mother in her final years, I’m sure.  

“Of course I did,” said the skeleton.  “Just like you and your sister took good care of mom after I died.  There was never a question of that in our family.”

 Suddenly the air gets chilly.  It’s hard for me to hear the phrase ‘our family’ without thinking of history, thirteen years before I was born, when all but four or five of my grandparents’ large generation were slaughtered.  

“Let’s not go there today, Elie,” said the skeleton.  

We were talking about personal hells, how about this one?  Thirteen years before I was born, as many of grandma and pop’s twelve siblings who were still alive were marched to a ravine on the northwestern edge of Vishnevitz, babies in their arms, holding children by the hand, mom’s first cousins.  

“I get it, Elie, believe me,” said the skeleton quickly.  It looked like he was about to try to whistle.  

While two hundred miles north other agents of hostile states were plowing your mother’s entire settlement into the marsh across the Pina from Pinsk, with no trace today.  

“Yes,” said the skeleton, “I know.”  

“Recursive, recursive!  Neurotically recursive, this endless rumination on some horrific thing beyond digestion,” said the imaginary psychiatrist, popping his head up from a patch of clover near my father’s grave.

“Shut up!” said the skeleton and me in unison.  

“He does have a point, though.  This is a historical reality there is nothing you can do anything about.  It’s almost incomprehensible,” said the skeleton.

Except that it happens over and over and over in human history.  Look at the poor children in Yemen right now, to take one example.  Does anyone know why our ally is starving them to death, with our help?

“Not an unreasonable point,” said the skeleton, peering down the hill toward the nearby Hudson, invisible through the trees.