I’d wake up in terror frequently as a kid, heart pounding after a nightmare.   I developed a lifelong reluctance to fall asleep during those years.  I’d lie awake in bed with elaborate fantasy scenarios playing out in my imagination.

“Well, the escapist fantasy is understandable, it was better than thinking of those guys in the attic, over your bedroom, maneuvering that giant wheeled guillotine up there,” said the skeleton of my father.  “You thought one night to reverse head and feet, to avoid being decapitated, you turned around in bed, then realized, with a shudder, that your feet would be chopped off, which was almost as bad as losing your head.  Curled up in a tight ball didn’t help either, you realized that being chopped in half was pretty fucked up way to go too.”

I guess my choice was an image like that, and the bad dreams that followed, or the even more horrifying recognition that I was a little kid in the hands of a real life madman.  

“A real life madman?  Isn’t that a bit harsh?” said the skeleton with an exaggerated sniff.  

Harsh it is, harsh it was.  As a kid you have no way to make sense of constant hostility focused at you.  I suppose the nightmares were my way of somehow trying to make some kind of sense of  it.  I can only imagine the nightmares you used to have as a kid.

 “I have no memory of them.  My waking life was nightmare enough,” said the skeleton.  “You know, I take your point about the nightmares, I never thought of them that way.   You recall I used to reassure you when you woke up drenched in sweat.   It’s fairly easy to reassure a frightened child that he’d only had a bad dream, that he was awake now, everything was okay.  The underlying reality that gives rise to nightmares — you’d better live a long life, dedicated to steady interior research, if you expect to get any useful insights into that.  I gave you a gift the night before I died, did I not?”    

Yeah, you did.  

“I knew it was important to you that I acknowledged that I’d felt you reaching out to make peace with me many times over the years, and that I, not you, had been the immature asshole.  You, from an eerily early age, were trying to be the flexible adult, I was always rigidly trying to be the invulnerable two year-old.   That’s an unnatural situation for a child to be in, a disorienting role reversal.   I knew it would be useful to you to hear me admit you’d been right all along in your approach, and that I’d been the fucking idiot.”

Hence those early years of frequent nightmares, other faceless terrors.  I was surrounded by fearful shit, hostility that defied any rational explanation but was always presented with the irrefutable evidence of its rationality and I had no ability to grasp that irreconcilable contradiction, until I got older, and got more and more angry about it.  

“Well, there is an undeniable use for anger,” said the skeleton.  “It provides adrenaline, it fuels the ability to fight.  It may never allow any insight, or the possibility of positive change, but in a pitched battle, it can be helpful to remain angry.  Look, the many bad things that can be said about anger aside, it’s preferable to depression.”

Depression is anger turned against the self, they say.  Which makes a certain amount of sense, if you think about it.   Anger grants no quarter, no pardon, no excuse or mitigation.   Anger is unipolar– I am right, you are an asshole. Imagine that force turned against yourself.   Every thought is immediately answered by an internal voice that tells you, harshly, “shut the fuck up!”    

“Your brilliant, borderline psychopath classmate in law school gave you the exact term for that, ‘internalizing the victimizer’.  That’s how it’s done, Elie.  You hear the voice over and over as a kid ‘everything you touch turns to shit’, ‘you may win this battle but you’re going to lose the war’ — all the rest. It becomes a self-running script you start unconsciously reading to yourself whenever you face a stressful situation.  

“There’s a common cure for that, of course.   Work.  If you think keeping yourself constantly on the clock doesn’t work, think again.  It worked for me, no time for self-pity or self-examination, I had a second job I had to get to. Your mother, who you believe was depressed for much of her life, got up every morning, made breakfast, took a shower, went off to work.  She didn’t fall victim to it again, in a big way, until I checked out and she spent five years mostly alone at the end of her life.  Which, of course, anybody could understand would be depressing.  It’s lonely to be a widow.”    

Yes.  At the same time, a few days before she died, when I managed to get her an appointment for physical therapy– which they’d denied on the bullshit grounds that she was too demented to recall the therapist’s instructions– she was visited by a nurse and two other women from the hospice.   They went into the bedroom to speak with her.  I was in the kitchen, out of earshot.  Suddenly I heard them all laughing.  The nurse came out with a big smile as they were leaving and said “whatever you want to say about your mother, she is certainly not demented.”   They were still chuckling as I let them out on to the catwalk.

 “And the relevance of this little reminiscence?” said the skeleton.  

Yes, it was understandable that she was depressed, particularly toward the end of her death from that wasting, pinching, painful cancer.  At the same time, she still made a room full of women crack up.  

“Well, some of the funniest people in the world are the most in pain,” said the skeleton.  “Doesn’t take being George Dubya Bush to realize that, does it?”

No I suppose it doesn’t.   You were, are, a very funny motherfucker, dad.  And in the most pain.  

“Yop.”