“Okay,” said the skeleton of my father, “I can see you’re determined to imagine the conversation we would’ve had if I’d been alive after that talk where I expressed my regrets, apologized for the first and last time, had the insights I should have had decades earlier.  All right, I’ll go with that.”

 Mighty white of you, dad.  

“Well, it’s the least I can do,” said the skeleton, “and as you’re fond of saying, ‘I’m always happy to do the least I can do.’  I’ll pick up the White Man’s Burden here.”  

Along Cortlandt Road, a stone’s throw from my father’s grave, a car with a bad muffler farted loudly by.  

“Poetic, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “Anyway, listen, I think somebody should address the pathos of this situation — of you sitting alone in a room inventing a conversation with your father that you believe should have happened, one you think others might be interested in reading.  Obviously you can’t address the poignance of that yourself.”  

That goes without saying.  

“Well, like I told you as I was dying, I never saw anyone really express affection, show love of any kind in the home I grew up in.  I simply had no example of how it was done, no clue how to do it myself.   I was raised in the most dire psychological experiment you can imagine.   We lived in grinding poverty.   My mother despised my father, my father lived in fear of my mother’s rage.  My brother and I were on our own in a way you and your sister would be hard-pressed to imagine, as bad as you may think you two had it.”  

Suffering isn’t a competition.  

“No, it’s not.  That’s not the point I’m trying to make.  You remember how impressed you were with Martin Buber’s I and Thou?”  

I do, in fact.  I thought it was an illuminating way to view the world.  Buber said you could address all creatures in a mutual, relational way, which he called I-Thou.  An I-Thou relationship treats fellow beings as unique individuals with a soul, the equals of yourself.  This relational view sees others as fellow reflections of God, souls to connect with and interact with.  It is also possible, and more common, to see people, animals and things as a series of instrumentalities, as ‘its’, things to be used without regard to their needs.   The relation in this case is one way: I-It.

The I-Thou relationship is a mutual recognizing of and addressing the equivalent of yourself in the other.  The I-It relationship is a practical, materialistic one in which the other is not a sentient self, like you are, but a mere instrument for your use, an instrument without a soul or any legitimate needs of its own.

“Well, the I-It relationship extends far beyond the crass materialism that is so familiar to us all in our consumer culture, it’s also the way an adversary sees an opponent, in the most ruthless scenario.   You can’t be indifferent to a war against people who are just like you, who suffer the way you do, whose innocent children cry out in a way that breaks your heart.  To wage war you first have to demonize and dehumanize the enemy, make them into an alien Other, faceless Its you or your allies can bomb, burn, gas, drone, machine gun, machete, whatever.    That’s the first order of business before you can kill people en masse, reduce them to an abstract thing to be despised.  It works on the individual level too, of course.

“My mother, in order to whip me the way she did, couldn’t see me as fully human, as a little soul the equal of herself.   She’d have to view me as a thing, an object, a stubborn, inanimate obstacle to her happiness, a whipping boy, literally.   What does the human long for?  That look of recognition of his human-ness in the eyes of someone he cares about, an appreciation of his uniqueness.  

“This is becoming complicated, and I’m aware I’m blurring a simple enough concept, but getting this across seems crucial to understanding the tragedy that was my long life.  It’s really the essence of all human tragedy, Elie.”    

A car turned off Cortlandt Road and crunched down the long gravel driveway not far from my father’s grave.  The driver and her passenger were about to visit a grave, leave two stones on top of a granite slab inscribed with a dead loved one’s  capsule biography. Their arrival made no difference at all to me or the skeleton, neither of us were actually even there.

“You know, I think about it now, how cruel I was to you and your sister, and it seems like a miracle to me that somehow your little souls weren’t crushed.”  

Don’t worry about that, our little souls were crushed.   The good news for me was a kind of optimism I got from somewhere, a faith in the healing powers of a little soul.   They call it neuroplasticity now, sometimes, the brain’s ability to heal the lesions and neural disruptions caused by adverse childhood experiences, by trauma.    

“I’m glad you got that from somewhere.  What’s the most important thing a parent can give a child?   A sense of safety, a sense that they are loved, and heard, and protected.   I never knew how to impart that to you guys, Elie, though I know that you and your sister, at least sometimes, felt those things from me.   Maybe mom did a little better, I’m pretty sure she did, at least in your case.  I like to think I was okay in an emergency, you know, that your sister and you were reassured by me sometimes, knew you could count on me when it mattered most.”  

Yeah, you were good at that.  You kept calm and philosophical when we were afraid or upset, you could be very reassuring.  I mean, sometimes.  

“Of course,” said the skeleton.  “Most of the time I was the one strafing you two with a metaphorical tripod mounted machine gun, which, now that I think of it, I think you have to admit is better than if I’d used an actual machine gun on you two.”

Granted.   We’re both grateful for that, it goes without saying.  

“Well, obviously you are going to have to dig deeper into this issue.  You see, this book you’re trying to write is the direct outgrowth of your natural and eternally thwarted desire to have a real dialogue, an I-Thou conversation you deserved to have.   It’s no accident my story is emerging in the form of a dialogue.  I was…” the skeleton sniffed, turned his head on a creaky neck, “well, you know how I was.  Like I told you, I never experienced that kind of connection with either of my parents, with anyone in my family, really, with the possible exception of Eli.”  

Who scared the shit out of you.  

“Yeah, he scared the shit out of me, but I also always felt loved by him.”

That’s no small thing, dad.  

“Yop, I know.”