I am reading an excellent, thought-provoking book by that title right now.   Written by a psychiatrist,  Jeanne Safer, who specializes in delving into and writing clearly about uncomfortable subjects others don’t often think or write about.    

“She wrote Death Benefits, didn’t she?” said the skeleton of my father.  The man always had a memory like a steel trap.  

Another excellent book, one I’ve often recommended to friends in grief after a parent’s death. In that book, most likely, the kernel for this Book of Irv.  She convinced me, with Death Benefits, that we get valuable gifts from even a miserable parent, and that we should take a grateful inventory.   More than that, she suggested that the relationship with a difficult parent continues after their death, and that it can be a much more nuanced, mutual relationship than the difficult parent was capable of while alive.  

“The People rest,” said the skeleton, making a lawyerly gesture of finality with his bony arms.  

“I know I said this while I was dying, but I am so sorry we didn’t have these kinds of back and forths when I was alive.  But, again, I was too fucking angry all the time, and the demons on my back kept digging their sharp spurs into me.”  

Whatever, dad.  Everybody has their shit.  The thing she brings up in Forgiving and Not Forgiving is that it is perfectly OK to not forgive, counter to the unanimous urging from virtually every quarter, that only unconditional forgiveness is healthy.  

There are many situations, things we commonly call abuse, that do not call for forgiveness.  If the abuser is not contrite, continues to snarl at the victim… well, fuck ’em.  Seriously, the only thing to do is to get the hell out of their reach.   It does nobody any good to pretend to forgive someone who will just do the same thing again, and be falsely forgiven again, and do it again. 

One of Safer’s patients tells her “I didn’t forgive what she did to me, but I’m not angry about it anymore.”  She is speaking of her cruel, unloving mother, now gone to her reward.  

“Well, unfortunately, I never got there with my mother, who was cruel to me when I was a boy, and unloving, and who all I could say about after she died was ‘אָלעוו-האַשאָלעם’  ‘may she rest in peace.’   I think now, now that I am dead and wise, that I should have worked to get a handle on my rage at that furious little tyrant, Ah-lahv ha-ah-shaa-lam.”  

Looks like Arabic when you spell it out that way, doesn’t it?  

“Another story of senseless hatred between brothers, the Hebrews and the Arabs.  Although, if you read the Bible you will see the ancient roots, the frankly stolen birth right, the Biblical origin of the story of Jew as the eternal scoundrel.  With the connivance of his scheming Jewish mother… what a goddamned world, Elie.  In a way I’m glad to be watching it from my bed on the hillside.  The greatest show on earth, the struggles of you puny, clueless earthlings.”  

Kind of creepy, dad, for a skeleton to express such superiority, just because you’re dead.  

“Let he who is dead cast the ultimate stone,” said the skeleton.

“Besides, let’s be honest here, Elie, and state the obvious once again.  I’m a ventriloquist’s dummy for you.   At one time I thought it was ridiculous when you first propped my bony form on your knee and began moving my stiff jaws, mimicking my style.  But I soon loosened up about the arrangement, and I have to say, it’s been quite rewarding having this long overdue conversation.”

Clearly, I feel the same way.  I’ll tell you, though, and I know we’ve discussed this, but no matter how well I set out some of the dilemmas of your life, and the tragedy of it, the humor of it (you continue to be a funny bastard, dad), its historical scope and the way your experience illuminates the more than eight decades you struggled to bend the moral arch of history toward justice, it means nothing unless I can sell it.  

“Don’t sell yourself short, Elie,” said the skeleton sympathetically, “it is the same achievement whether you sell it or not.”  

No.   Unsold it’s just a tree falling in the woods with nobody to hear it.  Elegantly and mightily struck, perhaps, but ending with a silence I could not bear at this point in my life.

“Elie, nobody knows at what point in their life they are at,” said the skeleton.   “This could be the beginning of the happiest period of your life.  Or that foamy piss you observe every day, the protein you’re spilling, possible serious kidney trouble, could be the writing on the wall — the writing could say: OH SHIT, I AM GOING TO THE E.R. AND I’LL BE DEAD THIS TIME NEXT WEEK.”   

As was the last thing written on your wall.

“Florida doctors, Elie, the greatest in the world…” said the skeleton.  “On the other hand, I always told you the chickens of my unhealthy lifestyle would come home to roost.  Overweight my entire adult life, eating steak every night, almost no vegetables, no exercise, overwork, not dealing with my lifelong anger problems, not finding loving ways to relax and interact with my children, who I loved very much but nonetheless couldn’t help but torture…. you know, that’s not a life for a person who doesn’t expect sudden death.  When I got the news, six days before I died, it made sense, it was really not a shock.  My only question was ‘what took so long?’  The skeleton looked around, seemed to sniff the autumnal breeze.

“Well, listen Elie, I know your hands are sore, and you had strange spasms last night in both of them that shook you up, and you’ve been typing in furious overtime the last week or so, so let’s leave off here.  In the end, do you forgive me?” said the skeleton.  

I don’t forgive you, and I know this will sound hard, but I don’t forgive you for not forgiving yourself.  If you’d been able to do that, everything else would have gone more easily.  That’s the thing I don’t forgive you for, can’t forgive.  

Everything else, of course I forgive you, dad.

Camp Tel Yehuda, the national camp for Young Judaea, the Zionist youth group my father had long worked for as his second job, was located by the Delaware River in Barryville, New York.   Who Barry was nobody knew, or even where exactly the town of Barryville was in the late 1960s and early 70s.  

There was a German restaurant called Reber’s, a mile of two from the camp, in what we thought of as downtown Barryville, if there had been anything else downtown with it.   Across a little metal bridge from Reber’s was Shohola, Pennsylvania.  Shohola had a little general store and possibly also a post office.   There was probably also a post office in Barryville, beyond Reber’s, and maybe even a store of some kind.  But if you needed some little item from a store, you went to Reber’s, hung a left and clanked over the Delaware to Pennsylvania.    

We were told that Barryville had once been an epicenter for the German-American Bund.   The Bund was an organization for Americans of German ancestry, a group that comprised more than a quarter of the white American population during World War Two.  The Bund made its voice heard in large public demonstrations when people, particularly Jews, began defaming Time Magazine’s Man of The Year for 1938.  By 1938 Mr. Hitler was very controversial, and taking a lot of shit for things he was doing to make Germany great again.    Hitler, for his part, originally had expected that America, with its large, proud Aryan population, and its many Anglo-Saxons, who were almost Aryans, would join Germany in helping end the menace of world Jewry.

Some of the locals who worked at Camp Tel Yehuda displayed an attitude that seemed a bit more what you’d expect in Mississippi than a few hours from Jew York City.  While I never directly saw anti-Semitism from any of them, one or two skated close to the line as they did their jobs in the Jewish camp.  Stories were told in camp of the local Klan types who drove the dark roads in the heavily wooded area, hunting deer, drinking, hating Jews.   Thankfully, I never had any encounters with these types.  

My parents spent quite a few summers at the camp, my father as the director, my mother as the registrar.   I attended a few sessions there as a camper, made a few lifelong friends, learned rudimentary Hebrew and eventually, since many of my good friends were going and I had little interest in college at the time, flew off for a year in Israel after High School.  At the very least, I figured, I’d come home bilingual.

When I returned from the year in Israel, speaking Hebrew to a lying, criminal Israeli cabbie named Sarfati who drove me back from JFK, it was summer and my parents were up at camp.   I got a chance to betray and enrage them almost as soon as I touched down, but that is a story for another time.   I went up to Barryville not long after I got back and my parents and aunt and uncle took me out to a restaurant several miles from Barryville where this memorable vignette unfolded.

The little town may have been Pond Eddy, I don’t recall, I’m too lazy to look at a map, and what difference does it make anyway?  It was a restaurant with a salad bar.   We sat at the table, my parents and I, along with my aunt and uncle.  My sister may have been there or she may have been a camper at T.Y.  that session.  I don’t recall any other customers eating there while we had an early dinner.  It was full daylight outside, I remember that.

I was at that time skinny as a Whippet.  I was a skinny teenager, but also, had just completed a month-long intensive course of dysentery during the end of my time in Israel.   It was hubris that brought about my weeks unable to keep any food in my body.  I had eaten all the things we were warned not to eat, the fly speckled shish kebab in the Old City, fresh berries that flies also loved, other delicious but allegedly dangerous foods.  By the late spring, after several others had been afflicted with stomach troubles,  I foolishly thought myself immune.  Turned out I was not. This became clear when  I woke suddenly in the middle of the night, stomach full of daggers, running down the hall, hunched over, barely making it.

I’d been better for a few weeks by the time I got back and my appetite was in full effect.  I finished my salad and went up to the salad bar to get some more salad.  The short, stout maitre de smiled at me.   She was nursing a drink and she may even have winked at me.  Then my mother got up to get some more salad.   My mother was quite heavy at the time, as she had been for most of my childhood.   She could have by then been considered obese, I suppose.   It was not until after her beloved husband died, and what she called The Widow’s Diet, that she lost the weight she’d been unable to for many decades. 

When my mother reached the salad bar the maitre de turned mean.  “Haven’t you had enough?” she snapped, as my mother was about to put some pickled beets on her plate.   My mother recoiled as if she’d been slapped and she fought to hold back tears.   Suddenly all this Nazi stuff I’d heard about the area was palpable.  I remember thinking “what the fuck?”  and having no doubt this snippy maitre de was an anti-Semite.   I looked at my father across the table from me, his lips were pressed together and he sat perfectly still.  

My uncle jumped up at once, like an angry rooster, and went straight over to the maitre de.   “That was a very disrespectful thing to do!  You owe my sister-in-law  an apology.  If you weren’t a woman … I’d take you outside and teach you how to treat your customers!” he snarled, not sparing a bit of sprayed saliva.   The maitre de stood her ground, smug, clearly not cowed by this empty threat from a slight, middle-aged Jew.  

There was eventually a muttered, almost convincing apology to my mother from the maitre de, but the meal was pretty well ruined.   We stayed, and ate there, I’m not sure why, thinking back on it.   I remember clearly my father’s silence, and it bothered me that it took my uncle to stand up and take my mother’s part.  My father later explained that the bitchy maitre de had been drunk, if not also a little crazy, and, yes, probably an anti-Semite.

The only other thing I recall is the tipsy maitre de, in an attempt to, as my grandmother Yetta would have phrased it, “make nice”, coming up behind me and putting her hand on my shoulder.   She asked me sweetly if I was enjoying my food.  I answered by roughly shrugging her hand off my shoulder.  She took the hint and backed discreetly away, the ice cubes in her glass gently clinking as she went.

When my mother finally died the long death she never wanted to talk about, I had a moment.  Alone in her apartment the night after she died, I walked into the little dressing closet to the side of her bedroom, looking around at her things.  

There was the shelf of photo albums she’d assembled, sitting high on one wall.  There was a shelf with other books in there.   Her robes and house dresses hung on a rod on the opposite wall.   The tiny room smelled of the powder she dusted herself with, it smelled like her.   I stood there suddenly unable to take my next breath.

I never had a moment like that in connection with my father’s death.   On the drive back to the hospital in the early morning hours of that last night of his life, I felt my throat close up slightly as I waited for a light to change near the hospital.  I felt close to tears.  The feeling passed quickly and was replaced by the feeling that I had a duty to do and needed to be calm and centered to do it.

It makes sense, though, the difference in the intensity of the pain I felt. I was much closer with my mother than I’d been with my father.   My father had never told me how much my first cousin Ann smelled like me, as my mother had.   My father and I were not aware of each other’s smells, except for the bad ones.  

I was always surprised whenever I noticed the color of my father’s eyes, which I noted for the last time before I closed them forever. They were the color of a cold northern sea, somewhere between green and grey.  Or they were a pale hazel color, close to the color of the bullrushes of a salt marsh as the cool weather descends.  It was hard to tell, since the eyes were rarely shown directly to anyone, were apt to shift away at times you might have otherwise noticed their color and they were always displayed behind the thick glasses that corrected his 20-400 vision.

I can remember my mother’s eyes very well, they were dark like mine and my sister’s. I remember her many facial expressions.  I remember the way she smelled, even now.  I think of my father’s eyes, and their elusive color, and I recall the thought that drifted away as I fell asleep last night.  It was about the difficulty of ever truly putting yourself in another person’s place.  

I had entered my father’s death chamber in the way I’d learned was right: like I was entering a holy place, a temple.  In the opening of How We Die, the author, Eli’s first cousin on his mother’s side, mentioned this, and the feeling of reverence one should have approaching a person close to death.  The time and place were all about my father leaving this world, and, whatever my issues, I was on hand to help him however I could.  

We were both aware that he was dying, though neither of us knew the exact moment, but the clock was ticking loudly and his voice was getting weaker and weaker.  He had waited up for me, hoping I’d arrive for this last conversation.   He’d told me earlier the day before that he wanted to talk to me, that he was still gathering his thoughts.   This was the time for that talk.

At one point, underscoring some difficult thing he was trying to express, he said that he’d never expected to find himself here.  The reference threw me for a second, I had a hard time making the connection.  

“Find yourself where?” I asked.  

“You know, where I am now,” he said weakly, gesturing around him at the room, the tube draining ugly fluid from his body, the machines counting his bodily functions.  The most obvious point in the world, you know?

My father, Irv, was not called the D.U., the Dreaded Unit, for nothing.   He relentlessly inflicted tremendous damage, most of the time in a manner subtle enough to make you believe that you were the enraged two year-old, not him.  

As he was dying he admitted, for the first time, that he had been the enraged two year-old all along.  A brilliant one, without a doubt, but an emotional fucking two-year old.  

“My life was over by the time I was two,” he told me with great sadness and defeat as he began to make his peace before he shuffled off this mortal coil.   I had by then learned as much as I could about the childhood he never spoke of.  I knew exactly what he was talking about, how his tiny spirit had been broken.  I was at a point in my life, and he in his, when I could finally react with sympathy, which spurred him to be as open and honest as he was able to be.

To put the blessing of this deathbed reconciliation into perspective, it is useful to compare it to another reconciliation between a difficult parent and long-suffering adult child.

I had a good friend who visited his mother in France almost every summer.  When he came back he’d be in a black mood for days, sometimes weeks.  

“Why do I bother continuing to go to visit that bitch?” he’d say, “it’s Einstein’s fucking definition of insanity.  Every time I go, I expect an insane, ice cold bitch to suddenly become the mother I always needed…”

One summer when he came back I put my tongue into my cheek and asked him if he’d had a nice time with his mother.  

“Oh, my God!” he said, “I did, you won’t believe it.  She was the same, like always, and I was kicking myself for going, like always, and then, the last night, we drank two bottles of wine and she started telling me me about her life.  She told me about the abuse of her childhood for the first time, how she was raped, things I never imagined, terrible shit.  She began to cry.  She told me she knew she’d been a shit mother and begged me to forgive her, thanked me for never giving up on her.   I hugged her and told her it was OK.  We talked until dawn, until I had to get in the cab to go to the airport.  I can’t wait to go back and see her.  I feel like I just found my mother, like I just met her for the first time.  It was amazing, man!”

A beautiful and rare story.  

The next time he saw her, about six weeks later, was after her massive stroke.  His sister called and he jumped on the first plane.  He found his mother lying, filthy and unable to move, in a pool of her own waste, in a French public ward.  He immediately got her out of the hospital into a rented apartment, had his sister stay with her while he rushed back to New York, wrapped up his affairs, and moved to France to take care of her. 

When she was able to speak a few words again she struggled to tell him she wanted to die.  He told her if she still felt that way in a year, he would help her die, not to worry.  But she had to promise, in exchange, to let him help her live.    

He spent the next few years lighting her cigarettes, driving her around, doing physical therapy with her, making her laugh.  She made a lot of progress under his loving, constant care.   She recovered some of her ability to speak, slowly over the course of many, many months.  She regained the ability to laugh, too. Sadly, I lost touch with him after a while.  It is the most wonderful and inspiring story  about a reconciliation with a difficult parent I know.  

The last-night-of-his-life reconciliation with my difficult father felt to me like a great blessing to us both at the time.  Thank God, I thought, I’d had the chance to hear the brutal fucker apologize, tell me that the long, senseless war between us had been his fault, that I’d been right and he’d been wrong, that he’d felt me reaching out many times over the years but had been too fearful and fucked up to reach back.  

It was certainly a blessing to Irv, as he was dying, to hear his son, calmly priest-like in the face of his anguished confession, telling him over and over that he had done the best he could, that if he could have done it differently he would have.  

I’ve had more than a decade now to consider the blessing to me.

“How’s that blessingy, changey thing working out fer yuh?” asked the skeleton in an eerily perky, more than passing Sarah Palin imitation.  

“You know, it was a great blessing to me, no doubt, and I’m very grateful that you were at a point in your life when you didn’t want to hurt me back.  I have to say, though, I don’t really know that it was a such great a blessing to you, to be brutally frank about it.  

“Hey, if it had come two weeks earlier, maybe, and we’d really had a chance to talk and talk and get to the bottom of some things.  I mean, the way it happened, I kind of went down a checklist of my deepest regrets, expressed each one and you told me it was okay.”  The skeleton gave a little chuckle.  

“Hah, I did notice that long pause after I told you I thought you and your sister always knew that, in a pinch, I was always there for you.  You can hear the silence hanging in the air like pestilence. You hear it continue and continue and then I say ‘well, you can never be sure about that…’ and went on to the next item on my checklist.  

 “I felt like a horse’s ass then, as I said more than once at the time, and I feel like one now– to have waited until I was only hours from my death to start trying to tell my children how much I loved them, how proud I was of them, how sorry I was for putting obstacles in their way instead of helping them find their way around obstacles, as a father who is not insane should always do.”  

The skeleton looked off into the distance, toward the Hudson River that was not far away, but invisible from his hilltop grave. 

The boys would be woken suddenly by their hysterical mother in the black Peekskill night during the Depression.  They were probably already up because there was a loud ruckus going on, voices yelling, thumping, glass shattering in the hall over their heads.  Their mother would send them out into the street with an urgent “gai roof Eli!” — go call Eli!  The little family at 1123 Howard Street didn’t have a phone, so the boys would be sent sprinting to Eli’s place a few blocks away. 

I can picture the little urchins running down the empty street, their feet slapping on the pavement.  While they ran, a drunken Jew was screaming at their father, sometimes more than one.   These indigent, itinerant Jews were sent over to board overnight by the synagogue.  They probably paid my grandparents a nickel or dime to stay there, or maybe the shul paid.  

My grandfather would regard the snarling drunken Jew with two eyes, a nose and a mouth, as if to say “why are you doing this?  What kind of person doesn’t know you don’t shit in a paper bag and throw the bag out the third story window?  That you don’t piss off the side of the bed you’re sleeping in.  Why are you acting like you’re crazy? Just walk down the stairs and use the toilet, like a normal Jew.  How in the world can you be such a jerk? ”  His face, which carried almost no expression, would not be judging them, just mildly registering his incomprehension. 

Eli told me that my grandfather Eliyahu was a big, strong man, well over six feet and well-built, but he was no fighter.   Eli was small, and broad, and had been fighting since he could stand, would be straining against his restraints and fighting from his death bed eighty-six years later.  It was nothing to Eli to throw somebody down a flight of stairs, if the situation absolutely demanded it.  

So when Eli showed up, mad as hell from being woken once again, he’d bark and the Jewish drunks would grab their gunny sacks and get the hell out of the house.  From time to time they’d put up a fight, and Eli would be happy to hold up his end.  

I can only imagine what his two little first cousins must have been thinking on those occasions.