“Well, you know, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, as a couple of vultures turned lazy loops in the picture postcard sky over his grave, “what I should have been doing, all those years, instead of justifying my insane rigidity, was developing some fucking insight.   Instead of understanding the importance of real intimacy with those I loved, and empathy, which makes every mercy possible, I was pushing an eternal agenda of self-defense, trying at all costs to make myself feel safe.  I was obsessed with being ‘right’.  That, I see now, is the mark of someone who will only become wise too late, if at all.”  

Better late than never, isn’t it?   

“Well, in my case, it was a few hours before I died, when I was trying not to be crushed by a lifetime of regrets.  How’s that for too fucking late?  Too late for your sister, who never heard a word of my regrets.  How could I tell her?  She just sat by me, knowing I was dying.  What could I say?   In your case, I don’t know, maybe because you always fought me…  I think it was a kind of shock to me how gentle you were in a way.  I mean, you had a right to be mean to me as I was trying to feel better about my misguided life at 2 a.m. the last night of my life.”  

Friedman asked me, right after you died, if I’d told you to go fuck yourself.  “Did you let him have it?” he asked.  I was completely bewildered by the question, I literally had no idea what he was talking about.   That room at the hospital where you died really was like the cathedral, or temple, that Eli’s cousin Shep Nuland described in How We Die.  I felt it, a kind of awe, as soon as I walked in.  I knew immediately that none of this was about me– it was about you.  

“Well, as a dying person that’s what you hope for, it turns out.   In our lives we often don’t see each other, we talk by rote, responding to what we think the other person is about to say, based on our past perceptions of the person rather than on what they are actually trying to say.  We often don’t hear each other, see each other, feel more than a shadow of what the other person is feeling.  You lie there dying, helpless at last, and you hope for the chance, once before you go, for someone just to really listen, to ask short follow-up questions when they don’t understand, to hear you.  I have to give it to you, Elie, I felt heard as I was trying to make my peace.”  

Luckily for both of us, I guess, I’d just reached a point in therapy where I truly grasped that if you could have done better, you would have.  I came to that point maybe a month or two before I got the call that you were about to die.  It wasn’t like I truly forgave you for being such a destructive father, but I really understood that it wasn’t my fault, or my pain to carry anymore, that you were a very damaged person.    I had started to learn to let go of my anger at the wasted potential of someone who was, in many ways, a very fine man.  

“Piece of shit as a father, perhaps,” said the skeleton, following the flight of the vultures with sightless eyes.  

Fair enough.   The thing is, a piece of shit who nonetheless instilled very important values in both of his children.   My love of animals, and connection to them, my anger at those who torture and kill them for fun or profit.   My hatred of racists and bigots of all kinds, as well as my reflex to oppose bullies.   My engagement with the world of ideas, with history, my love of conversation.  My love of soul music, Sam Cooke.   Animating themes of my life.  How do you reconcile those things: piece of shit father who taught me much of what I value most?  

“Well, there’s a fucking mystery for you, Elie.   I suppose that’s how the world works, really.   How much of it is clean, a fair transaction where both parties wind up with what they want out of it?  If you’re lucky, you get it once or twice in your life.  I only wish I’d had the insight to realize how important gaining real insight is.  Isn’t that what this book of me is really about?  You’re searching for insight, to put your own life, as well as mine, into perspective.”

I heard an interview with a former Marine sergeant who’d come back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD.   We think of that nonchalantly, oh, guy was in a war zone, his friends were killed, he killed a bunch of people, including a couple of children whose bodies he saw for the first time after he’d riddled them with bullets, yeah, naturally he’s got PTSD.   We say it like it’s nothing, a statistic, a problem.  But the individual who suffers from it is in very real agony, often puts a bullet in his own head.    

This Marine, TJ Brennan, recently wrote a book about invisible injuries, like his traumatic brain injury.  He tells Dave Davies “my tbi manifests in a very physical way for me, though it’s invisible to a lot of people, so it’s easy for people to discount invisible injuries…. they’re very, very real to the person suffering from them, like depression, or mental health problems.  They’re invisible to others, but they cripple your life.”   I heard this while biking down the beautiful Hudson river bike route to Sekhnetville.  I had to stop to make a note of it.  

“It struck you as a moment of insight.  Good for you.  I get it– you were abused as badly as a kid who gets the belt buckle every night but in a way that never left a mark on your body.   Same injury on your child’s soul, Elie, with the benefit that the person who inflicted it can say ‘you’re fucking insane, you little drama queen, I never laid a fucking finger on you.’  The same goes for anyone else you might try to complain to, whiner.”  

I have nothing to add to that, except for this great, insightful thing  I heard from the filmmaker who worked with Bill Genovese, the much-loved little brother of Kitty Genovese, as Bill doggedly worked through the brutal murder of his sister fifty years ago.   The result of their collaboration was a great documentary called The Witness.   They started off figuring it would be a six month project, maybe a year.  It took eleven years to complete.  

James Solomon, the filmmaker, lost his own older brother, the person he admired most in the world, at some point during the filming, giving him sudden, deep empathy with Bill Genovese’s obsessive quest to reclaim the life of the older sister who had loved him so much.  Her life had been erased by her horrific, sensationalized murder.  Bill, to the puzzlement of his family, was determined to get to the bottom of her murder, to remember and recreate her life, beyond her victimhood in the last moments of that life.   In a wonderful interview with Brooke Gladstone, Solomon says:

Over a half century this man is determined to reclaim his sister, her life, from her death.  What Bill does, in the film, is reveal a person that we all would feel, gosh, I really wish I knew her.   It’s, in my estimation, the ultimate love story.