Category Archives: book of irv

Stab 1 — Call Me Ishmael

Thirteen years before I was born they killed almost everyone in my family.  Though I was always told not to worry about it, I did worry about it.   

My father, a perceptive man with a degree in history who could tell a pretty good story, might have sat down and tapped out an illuminating account but he is dead now too and can’t do much these days.  Before the end, when he could have been writing this all out, he was busy reading several newspapers every day, walking the dog, napping.  I am the last one in my line left to tell the story, including how they killed nearly every one of us, continue to kill so many of us.

My father left it to me, in his final, grandest joke, to grapple with the increasingly slippery ghosts of this story.  

We do not give a rat’s perfectly formed buttock for men who grapple with slippery ghosts, I know that as well as anyone.  I myself smirk whenever I pass such a man. You will hear no cluck from me if you slam this heavy tome shut now.  I will try to make it worth your while, that’s all I can tell you.

Life goes on, and, even if it won’t, this is a true golden age for episodic television, great actors are performing well-crafted dramas that move with insight and cunning from one emotionally fraught moment to the next, gathering momentum as they go. We binge watch now, many of us, and are relieved, on demand, of everything else while we do.

So I’m writing the account my father, a dreaded and articulate man, might have written if he ever wrote anything down. A hesitant hunt and peck typist who occasionally gave long speeches in front of groups, he never prepared his remarks on paper. He prepared them carefully in his mind, you could hear that at once from the organization of his talks.

He’d glance down at notes, but they’d be a few words on the back of an envelope to remind him of where he was in his thoughts. He had this wonderful facility, like the way the Romane (Gypsies) have always learned music.  See the shape of the song clearly in the air, in the mind, let the flourishes fall where they’re called for. The matter of style.

Style is also how the most unspeakable civilities are carried out, routinized, turned into mere artifacts of history. Read Dred Scott and you will appreciate the power of style to carry the day. That Chief Justice, smoothly working the levers of the law to assure everyone that under our law, and with the best of intentions on everybody’s parts, a Negro is still a Negro.

(that’s it for tonight, boys and girls, end of first stab)

De gustibus

The young musician often played for her father and was always dismayed at his lack of reaction.  He showed no pleasure, no appreciation, nothing.   He sat, politely, and never said anything afterwards.

Many years later, as he was dying, he said to his daughter “I’m sorry, I just never liked music.  Any music.”  

She blinked at him, and he added “it wasn’t you, it was me.”  

A light went on in the room, a glow of important insight illuminated the death chamber for a moment.  In another wink, the old man was gone.

Childhood Memory (flashback to 1963 or 1964)

My mother, seeking to protect her sensitive, fearful oldest child, urged me not to see the movie scheduled for the hotel ballroom that evening, “Let My People Go”.   I knew nothing about the film, except that all the teenagers at the convention would be seeing it.  I was seven or eight, and curious, and I wanted to see the movie, which was the only thing to do that evening anyway.

“You’re too young to see these things,” my mother told me tensely, “when you had nightmares about Tarzan I could show you pictures of the actors, assure you it wasn’t real.”   Which was true, she’d gone to the library and found books that proved her case.  After her photographic proof that the actors who played the savage cannibals wore regular clothes, drove cars, laughed, played with their own kids, spoke English, the nightmares in which my mother, like Jane, was struck down by a cannibal’s hurled spear, stopped.  

That strategy had also worked a few years earlier when terror of another flood like in the time of Noah, vividly depicted by a children’s book illustrator with an Italian name my mother always recited in connection with this story — ah!  Tony Palazzo!– kept me awake at night.   She drove me past rows of houses on the beach and my fear succumbed to Reason.  

“But these things in the movie really happened, and not that long ago, and they were horrible, and I don’t think you’re ready to see them.”   And she was right, but having been told many times by my childish, blustering father that I was not too young to start acting like a man, goddamn it, I was determined to see the move come hell, high-water or spear throwing cannibals.

The movie started innocuously enough, woodcuts and old paintings, mosaics, pictures of ruins, a narrator detailing the ‘lachrymose history’, as I’d later come to know it, of the tireless persecution of the Jews.  There were the pyramids, built by Hebrew slaves, a familiar story to me, nothing shocking there.  The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians, not a trauma to me, I thought smugly to myself.  The subsequent exile, I was young to grasp how traumatic this might have been.  The Romans destroyed the rebuilt temple, OK, that’s a shame, but I didn’t like going to temple anyway.  

The movie was clearly building to something, I was not too young to miss the terrible foreshadowing as the persecution and exile of ancient times became a steadily heavier drumbeat.  Now some crude depictions of Jews put to the sword during the rise of warlike Islam, pretty bad, but just drawings.  In Christian Europe, meanwhile, the Dark Ages had descended, harsh, brutal lives lived under the pall of monkish ignorance and superstition, and the Jews to blame.  By the Middle Ages the Jews were entrenched in collective Christian consciousness as the crucifiers of Jesus Christ, the son of God and the Christian Messiah.   That we were blamed for killing the Messiah came as a shock to me, I’d always thought the Messiah hadn’t come to earth yet, that once the Messiah arrived the hearts of children would be returned to their parents, forgiveness would be universal and there would be no further violence or cruelty, no death.

The torturers and hooded Klansmen of the Spanish Inquisition stood out to me, the auto de fe, trial by being burned to death, was truly horrible.  Things quickly escalated from there, pogroms, the music got more tense, and soon there were some black and white photographs.  In Russia, blood libels against Jews, claims that Jewish monsters killed Christian children to make matzoh on Passover.  This made no sense to me, even an idiot knew that matzoh was basically flour and water, where did the dead Christian child come into it?  A photograph of a grim French military man, falsely accused of treason against France and executed, though everyone in France, and everywhere else, knew he’d been set up because he was Jewish.  Theodore Herzl’s photograph, with that beard practically begging to be carved in marble, the dream of a Jewish State and now the filmmakers kicked into high gear.  This is what they’d been building up to.

Centuries of persecution of a small, decent people, driven from their homeland, vilified and hated everywhere they settled, expelled from Spain and every place else, murdered with impunity– there was only one solution: a return to our homeland.  This would not be without struggle, in part because those on the land that would be our homeland considered it their homeland, not ours.  Deals were made, land bought, proposals made, unmade, snags hit, navigated, more snags.  Nobody, it was clear by now, was in any hurry to help the Jews.  

Meanwhile, more killing of Jews in Europe, persecutions in the Arab lands.   Suddenly, oh boy, there’s a familiar Jew hater– Adolf Hitler.  I had a feeling he’d show up in this shit show.  There he is, dancing a mad jig after the fall of Poland.  Turns out this ‘jig’ was the creation of Allied propagandists using a technique I myself would use decades later, repeating a sequence of frames over and over and speeding them up to achieve a desired effect.  These propagandists took a one second sequence of Hitler laughing and stamping his jackbooted foot and repeated it enough times to create a convincingly mad, cackling dance.  I knew nothing about this trickery, an insignificant detail in context, as I watched in rising horror.  

The violins on the soundtrack began weeping more emphatically.  Then, as I looked around me at crying teen-aged faces in heavy cigarette smoke, there was the footage, shot by the Nazis themselves, of exactly what my mother had cried to try to stop me from seeing.  A terrified boy my age with his hands up, savage beatings, Jewish corpses lying on the sidewalk.  This was terrifying imagery.  Then there was the guy with the wheelbarrow, on grainy black and white film, moving resolutely forward.  The giant wheelbarrow was filled with jiggly, rubber looking skeletons.  He was wearing a cap and smoking a cigarette.  He came to the edge of a huge pit, upended the wheel barrow and dropped the corpses down a chute.  They wriggled down the ramp, landed on top of hundreds more naked dead skeletons.  

I ran up the aisle through the crying audience, got to the elevator, to the room, saw my little sister’s shocked face as I burst into the room and, a second later, projectile vomited.  My mother hugged me, crying, and said “I told you….”

The Spirit of Rosh Hashanah Past

My father grew up in an orthodox Jewish home, in ‘grinding poverty’, as he always phrased it.  My mother’s cousin, whose family moved many times during the Depression to get a free month’s rent here and there, told me a few years ago “we were poor, but your father’s family was really poor.”  I don’t doubt my father’s childhood was a nightmare.  He was still clawing his way through it on his deathbed in a Florida hospital seven decades later.

His tyrannical, violent mother was the religious one.  I don’t know that his father particularly cared one way or the other, though he swept the synagogue for a dollar or two a week.  My paternal grandfather was described to me as eternally deadpan; his face simply two eyes, a nose and a mouth.   My father’s mother would give generously to the synagogue, even though they had almost nothing themselves.  Nobody there was in any position to question this practice.    

My father became less and less religious over the years.  Bacon started being cooked in the house at some point during my childhood (he didn’t eat it) and eventually, and much to my disappointment, somehow, he tasted pork in a Chinese restaurant.  He liked it, though, to my knowledge he only did this once.  Growing up we’d hear: I’m so hungry I could eat ham!  Something he got from his days in the army when Corporal Israel ate side dishes at meals of ham.  Like many modern American Jews, he took the High Holidays seriously, bought his expensive ticket and sat and stood and sat (“please be seated”) and stood (“please rise”) all day at the services I found so hypocritical and meaningless.  

My mother had no use for religion, although she proudly identified as a cultural Jew, could not have been mistaken for anything else, really, except, maybe, ethnic Italian.   My sister and I stayed out of the synagogue too, for the most part, after experiences there that probably turned off many to the rituals of our ancient religion.  I often said my experience at Hillcrest Jewish Center Hebrew School turned me into an anti-Semite, though that’s an overstatement for effect.  The heart of religion is good.  I’d have to think the heart of every religion is.   The practice is where the trouble generally comes in.  

I have a few friends who take deep comfort from the rituals of religion; I don’t.  I cannot look past the dark side, the crimes and bloodshed so many avowedly religious people take part in, with the monomaniacal self-righteousness that comes from believing God smiles on their horrible acts.  The examples are too well known to require any listing here.   But the experience of wonder, of gratefulness for the many gifts of this world, the impulse to create, to be gentle, to laugh, to share, to care, to repair what is in need of fixing, all these are encompassed by most religious teachings.  

The religious background I had was Judaism and my values were informed by its stories.  There are two Jewish holidays I find very meaningful and that have shaped my life to a great extent.  One is Passover, the holiday that commemorates the eternally incomplete journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the world.  A Jew is commanded to retell the story at the seder, an ordered meal that sets out a template for the discussion of values.  This was always a serious discussion in my childhood home, as it is at the seder Sekhnet and I now attend every year.   The value expressed is realizing there is no difference between the children of the rich and the children of the poor and oppressed.  

We are encouraged to take the lesson of our people’s persecution to heart: to identify with the stranger, the other, the underdog, the slave, the oppressed, and reaffirm our commitment to fighting for justice for everyone.   I find this holiday very meaningful and important.  It has probably influenced me more than it should have, I haven’t separated out the symbolism to the extent most practical people do.  

The other holiday I find profound and valuable is the New Year tradition of seeking forgiveness and releasing others from our anger.  We are commanded to make amends with those we’ve injured in the past year during the ten days of repentance, between New Year’s Eve and Yom Kippur, when our fate for the coming year is metaphorically sealed by our imaginary protector with the long beard, the Creator, blessed be He, who created everything miraculous and, because he is all merciful, left humans to figure out what to do about the Hitlers, Stalins, Pol Pots, Cheneys, the raping priests and bloodthirsty preachers.  

The blessings are all from God, the man upstairs; the curses of mankind, as theodicy concludes, are all the result of humans’ misuse of the free will generously bestowed by the Holy Name.  Yeah, yeah.   Fuck all that shit.  The part that interests me is the tradition of righting our psychic accounts at this time of year.  We are supposed to honestly search our lives over the past year for times we have behaved badly, acted wrongly, hurt others.  It is our duty to humbly seek to make things better, to apologize, forgive, offer peace instead of further bad karma.  Prayer and good intentions won’t do it, we have to humbly approach humans and keep our vows to act better.  

It is far easier to see the harms others have done to us than to take an honest inventory of our own hurtful actions and cruel inactions.  I see this more clearly every year as I ponder.  Also, how hard it is to forgive the unrepentant, even as I am challenged to sincerely repent for things I’ve done that I can’t imagine were as hurtful as they may well have been.    

I always think of one Yom Kippur when I went, as usual, to meet my father outside the synagogue after a long day of fasting and services, everybody ashen faced and bad-breathed, trudging off in the gathering darkness with quick, tottering steps to break their day-long fast.  I walked down there as services were getting out, met him and we walked back home, less than a half a mile along Union Turnpike in Queens.   I had a long list of bad things my father had done and would never apologize for, including many terrible failures that had undermined my sister and me over the years, but I’d formulated it as one thing I needed to put on the table.  I’m sure I’ve written out this story before, but I’ll offer the fast version of it here.  

I am reminded of this because my closest friend, a very good man, about the best man you can imagine, has too much pain from his mother’s long betrayals to find it in his heart to truly forgive her for her considerable limitations.   I don’t hammer at it often, though I’ve brought it up over the years, he will be gentle with her as she lays dying, there is no doubt, and it is a shame the healing won’t start until then.  Life is a very painful matter sometimes.  

Anyway, the particular Yom Kippur I’m describing my mother was putting the finishing touches on some no doubt delicious dinner and I sat across from my father in the living room.  I had fasted, as I always do on Yom Kippur, not in fear of God, if there is such a thing, but because it is a good practice, and I always think I should do it more than that one day a year.  If we never feel hungry how do we remember what it is that much of the world experiences every day?

My father was a brilliant, adroit and witty man.  He used these skills brutally much of the time.  His humor had a sting to it, more often than not.  His skills in constructing arguments were used to build impregnable walls around his vulnerable childish heart.  He regretted these things on his death bed.  But walking back from the shul that Yom Kippur he was silent as a sphinx, cautious, waiting to defend himself against anything I might say.  

What I said when we sat in the living room in the little house I grew up in was that I was glad to hear his fatherly advice, provided he stopped using it as a delivery system for his hostility.  I would no longer tolerate being reduced to the sum of my faults while listening to the harsh things “your friends are too spineless to tell you.”   Whether my friends had spines or not, I needed to be treated respectfully by my angry father.  I told him if this did not happen we would no longer have the pretense of a relationship.  I reminded him of my many attempts to make peace with him and he fought as hard as he could not to give a millimeter.  I was determined, and undeterred, and in the end he agreed that he would try to do better.  We broke the fast.

“That’s what you have to do with a bully,” my friend would agree, “be direct, do not back down, do not give in to fear or anger.  Keep pushing the fucker back, it is the only thing a bully understands.  Good for you.”   So, for the next fifteen years or so my father and I had a superficially better relationship.  

At the end of that fifteen years he revealed, during an argument in which he was for the first time overmatched, that he’d only pretended to change his feelings toward me, that if he ever told me what he really felt it would do “irreparable harm” to our relationship.  Checkmate, Dad, have it your way, you win.  And for the last two years, as unbeknownst to both of us he was steadily dying from undiagnosed liver cancer, we kept things cooly superficial.  In the meantime I realized how damaged he was, and that he could not do any better, that it was up to me to make some kind of peace with it.  I made some kind of peace with it, lucky for both of us it was a couple of months before he started actively nosediving toward death.

As he was dying, of course, he lamented his lifelong inability to be truly open to people, to experience real intimacy, to express love.   “I wish we could have had this kind of conversation fifteen years ago,” he said weakly toward the end of the last conversation of his life, “but I was just too fucked up.  It’s my fault, I felt you reaching out to me many times over the years…”.  I recall thinking at the time what a modest and pathetic wish that was– thirty-five years of senseless war and fifteen years of peace.

Of course, I’d take it now, fifteen years, five years, one year, a week, another 24 hours.  There is not time enough to heal certain wounds and it is an uncertain process at best.   We are all left to heal ourselves, as best we can, and to stay open and caring to those who share our best hopes for a good world.  There is no time to struggle with drowning souls determined to take us with them to the nightmare depths as they irrationally defend their right to drag us with them, but the time for healing– very important time.

Why would it bother me?

My father never bought products made in Germany.  It was because of German industry’s involvement with the death camps.  IG Farben paid the SS $1 a day for slave laborers from Auschwitz, they were marched from the death camp to the nearby factory until they couldn’t be profitably used anymore, then they went into a gas chamber.  Mercedes-Benz, according to my father, a student of history who read the NY Times every day, built some kind of killing machine (I forget exactly what he told me), possibly the gas chambers or ovens for The Final Solution.  I may have them confused with BMW, who also used slave laborers from the death camps.  The drivers of both brands, to this day, tend to be unyielding at crosswalks, I’ve noticed.

“Is it right to hate the children and grandchildren of people who made money working for Hitler?” I asked, a bit rhetorically, when I was in high school.  

“It’s justified,” said my dad, “and I hate them.”   

“Would Viet Namese people be justified, 50 years from now, in hating us and boycotting American made products because of what the government of the USA did to their parents, grandparents, their countryside?” I asked him.  

“Yep,” said my dad.   I think he was right, too.  Particularly if you live in a democracy– the government speaks for the electorate.   In spite of literally millions turning out to protest Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Bush’s march toward war against Iraq, our government visited hell on that nation.  Do Iraqis have a right to hate America?   You bet your ass they do.

One of my problems is that I never get over certain things.  I find myself thinking of the calculated and bogus case that was made for raining death and destruction on the population of Iraq.  I think of how President Obama generously turned the page on recently committed American war crimes, while justifying his own highly classified murderous practices.  

The final “evidence” of the connection between Saddam and 9/11 that was trumpeted by the Bush Administration was from an al-Queda prisoner we’d secretly shipped to Egypt to be tortured.  In order to get the torture to stop al-Libi said Saddam was training al-Queda in the use of poison gas and other chemical WMD.   When he was released by the Egyptians he immediately recanted, admitted he told them that to make the torture, the super-super enhanced interrogation, stop.  Yet his information, extracted under torture, was the lynchpin of the entire falsified case for invading Iraq.

Then you have the war, the debates, the traitors, the people who hate our freedom, freedom on the march, torture redefined as necessary to use against people who hate our freedom, we call it “enhanced interrogation” now and we only did it a few times, destroyed videotapes of the worst of it, pretended (as Cheney continues to) it had extracted “actionable intelligence”, though it’s highly unlikely it ever did, classified memos relating to its use, blah blah, economic disaster in 2008 orchestrated by powerful elites who profited handsomely from systematic fraud and were never punished for any of it …. so really, who today can be expected to get excited about this paragraph?

 There is a sad postscript to the story. Al-Libi is the only “high-value” detainee who was not sent to Gitmo for eventual trial before a military tribunal. Instead, he was quietly turned over to Moammar Gadhafi’s henchmen in Libya, and just days after being visited by Human Rights Watch, was found hanging from his neck inside a Libyan prison. His family believes he was murdered to cover up the true story of what happened to him. We’ll never know the answer to that, but we do know with certainty that an American president used bogus intelligence from a tortured detainee to make a false claim to the American public and to the world.

source

Ho hum.  Maybe some day I’ll grow up, I can only hope.

Maybe the DU was right after all

The old man was wrong, but maybe he was also right.  

He believed, after couple of decades working optimistically toward progressive social change, that hope for change was for suckers.  Our deepest fears, prejudices and hatreds, he concluded bitterly (as he’d suspected all along), were beyond reason, will and the most ardent desire for change.  

We fought this back and forth for years and I won’t recount the tedious exchanges I’ve already set out on this blahg and elsewhere.   He was wrong, clearly, things do change, as do people and their reactions and ideas.  He was right, though, that on a fundamental emotional level most people are set, blessed or doomed, by their genetics and programming.  

“That’s a depressive line of thinking, son,” a kinder, wiser father might say.  

“Maybe so, pops, but I’m looking at your own life, my life.  I’m granting you a measure of correctness against the position I argued for so many years, that people can, and do, change for the better, if they work hard enough at it,” I would reply.  

“Would, should, could,” said the kinder, wiser father wistfully.  “When you’re dead you’ll hear how poignant all those words really are.”  

It won’t take that long.  I recall the state the old man used to get into when he misplaced the change from his pocket.  He’d be beside himself, cursing, unable to get over his anger at himself, over the 43 cents he couldn’t find.   He’d received the change at the dry cleaners a few hours earlier, taken it out of his pocket when he changed his pants, goddamn it, and if I didn’t put it on the dresser where I always put it, what the fuck did I do with it?!  Goddamn it!!  He’d be inconsolable as he stomped around the house in a rage at himself, looking on all the end tables, the kitchen table, the bathroom sink, in the basement, upstairs again.

 “Losing 43 cents was the same to him as his favorite dog, or one of us, being hit by a car,” my sister pointed out correctly.   The loss of control of any kind was a lightning rod that electrified him right back into the center of his worst fears.  

“Easy for you to say,” he said.  

I suddenly think of the wallet I lost on the circle around the retirement village my parents lived in for their final years.  The wallet had dropped out of my cargo shorts pocket on to the road as I spoke to Sekhnet on the cell phone carrying the bicycle upstairs at 2 a.m.   I didn’t notice it was missing until the next morning when I went to get dressed and take a drive to visit friends.  No license.  No wallet.  Several days of desperate hope, checking with the security office over and over, until piecing together that the angry redneck security guard I’d disrespected a week or two earlier, and who’d been on duty that night, had found the wallet, had a good laugh seeing my photo in it, harvested several hundred dollars from it and tossed the rest in a garbage can somewhere.  Three or four years ago.  Randomly, the image comes up and punches me hard in the face, the stupidity of carrying my wallet in those baggy pants for a late night aerobic session, of not checking for the wallet when I came in, etc.  

“Depressive thinking, son,” the compassionate skeleton of my difficult father said softly.  I need to get screened for depression, though I haven’t much hope that anyone can help with it, certainly not a drug, beyond the placebo I already take.  I’ve made an e-inquiry with my health insurance provider and a robot wrote back telling me how to find a doctor with a specialty in mental health care on their website, no referral or paperwork required.

It’s a depressing thought, finding a doctor to screen me for depression, even though the Affordable Health Care Act apparently covers me for it.  The doctor is most likely to prescribe a drug shown to be better, on a certain blind test, than the placebo that was 84% as effective as the patent drug overall.  You can read a wonderful scholarly article that lays out the whole psycho-pharmaceutical industrial complex here. 

“Do you sleep more than usual?” the doctor will ask.  

“No,” I will say, and I have the data to back it up on my fitbit profile on the computer.  The average of  seven hours is steady going back two years.

“Are you exercising less?”  

“No,” the five to six miles I walk a day is pretty steady across the time I’ve worn the tiny pedometer.

“Have you had a change in your eating habits and weight?” the doctor will ask.

“No,” I will say.    

“Do you ever think of suicide?” the doctor will ask.  

“Not as an option for me, no,” I will say.  

“Why is that?” the doctor will ask.  “If my life was like the one you describe yours as I would honestly have to at least consider it as an option.  Why do you think you close your mind to even considering that?”

The doctor I go to might not necessarily be quite that moronic going through the checklist of diagnostic symptoms, but these would be among the questions asked to screen me for depression.   The thought of reading the list of two hundred names of unknown doctors to pick the one I might consult with, hoping for a doctor of great insight, is like buying a lottery ticket.  

“Better not to help yourself at all?” asks the skeleton who raised not a bony finger to help himself, before he fell into that predictable long-term state.  

All of the time honored, proven ways of beating back depression, vigorous exercise, cleaning your place, making and keeping to daily to do lists, require an energy and optimistic sense the depressed person is often hard pressed to muster.

Sunday afternoon, chilly, the short days of winter creeping up.   Outside Sekhnet’s plants shiver under the flapping plastic covers she’s tucked around them.  The clocks have been turned back.  The only sound is the ratlike tapping on these metallic keys, clack, clack, clack-clack.  The clicking is a comforting sound a person could almost dance to.  There is a certain music in it, I have to say.  I say it.   Having said it, what now?

 

The possibility that most of them are sadists

On his deathbed he expressed tormented regrets, spoke for the first time of things he’d found impossible to talk about, tried to make his peace.  “I must have been insane to believe I was doing something good when I machine gunned those people into that ditch.  I pray that God will forgive me, for that one, at least,” he said.

“You did the best you could,” his son said, “God will understand.”  He gave the old man some water.  “Besides, since when do you believe in God?”  

“It’s not God so much I believe in now, but justice.  It seems impossible that there is no reckoning for the bad things we do here.”

“It is our pain that makes us do the bad things we do here,” said the son.  

“Pain also brings forth the best of some people,” the dying man observed sadly.  

The son nodded, heard the rest of the old man’s unspeakable confession.  He listened with special attention to the detailed apology for the years of truly regrettable cruelty to his own family.  Knowing that death was about the dying man’s needs and not his own, he mildly told him he would have done better if he could, closed the old man’s eyes after the dying man breathed his last.

At the time he thought of this belated conversation as a blessing to both of them.  Years later he realized the blessing had probably been much greater for the old man, being forgiven and let off the hook as he opened up, for the first and last time, to express his regrets for the pain he’d caused.  He’d given the man an easier death.  “Why was I so mild, letting the old killer off the hook?” he sometimes wondered.

Eventually the son looked at patterns in his own life, questioning his largely unnoticed attempts to be mild above all else.   Mildness is easily mistaken for passivity, which is widely hated in a competitive society where people are judged largely on their ambition and accomplishments in the marketplace.  He wondered if he’d been unconsciously attracted to people like his father, collected as his friends a group of unrepentant sadists who would possibly be filled with regret on their deathbeds, but not a moment sooner.   Had he surrounded himself with smiling but angry friends who were the least equipped of anyone to understand his desire to be mild, the first to point out what a pussy he was when he got in a tight spot and resisted lashing out, as any self-respecting person would?

“It’s an oversimplification to call us sadists,” said the dead man from his grave.  “Do you think we derive pleasure from defending ourselves and our righteousness at all costs?  It’s a reflex to protect ourselves, first and foremost.  It’s not about sadistically taking it out on our victims, for our pleasure.  We feel they would have done it to us if we didn’t strike first, so we hit them hard to keep them off balance.  It’s paranoia, maybe, but not necessarily sadism.  The entire pleasure, if any, is in not being victimized again.  Plus, we are completely overwhelmed by our own demons, it’s not about others, it’s about us.”  

The son was sick of hearing the dead man’s opinions, but they had to be considered nonetheless.  “On the Asperger’s spectrum is probably a better way to think of some of them.  A chap who calls to report on and get solace about his problems but seldom inquires about his friend’s troubles.  ‘Ah, but your troubles are well known!’ he’ll exclaim, full of bonhomie, then back to his recitation, the reason he called.”  

“I have to talk to you, at least you listen,” one tells him, “nobody else lets me talk. Do you have any idea how painful it is not be be listened to?”  

“I never worry about you,” says another, truthfully, but oddly nonetheless.  

There was one with a great sense of humor, an unappreciated person of great talent with an even greater need to be right, who decided the best course, when he was trying to be funny, was to look at him with a slightly disgusted expression and slowly shake her head.  Why laugh at his attempts to make her feel better when it was so much easier, and so much more satisfying, to make him feel like an asshole?  Nobody ever gave her anything.

He was able, without rancor, to shed the most destructive of these old friends when the time came to cut the ties.  No need to curse or express disappointment, it was a rational act of delayed self-preservation.  If a friend acts consistently hurtfully, is unrepentant and ignores requests not to behave that way, it is time to take your leave.   Wish them well and head for the door. Few will wrap their arms around your legs as you go, experience teaches that their pride always prevents this.

As a result of being more selective in his friendships, there were days when the only voices he heard were his own, often asking himself out loud who the hell he was talking to, and the dead father’s voice.  It was a heck of way to take a vacation, but better than fighting, he reasoned.

He could see the old man as a strong young man, setting up his machine gun, hear him cursing the people he was about to shoot, and going about his business feeling quite justified.  “These people were scum, they’d have done the same to me in a second, if they could have,” he said, acrid smoke hanging in the air, his accomplices shoveling soil into the ditch.

My father’s take

As a boy, when I first learned of the Nazi period, and saw black and white filmed documentation of the worst of their handiwork, I vomited.  An appropriate response for a nine year-old that seems as appropriate now, almost fifty years later.  Some nightmares followed and then, the reality that Nazis come to power from time to time and lead mobs to do unspeakable things, and that many enraged sociopathic types scattered through daily life are glad to do their personal versions of these things with whatever power they can amass, became the background of my life. The continuing news from all over the world, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, El Salvador, East Timor, Syria and too many other places to list, keeps the reality alive and sickeningly well.

Hitler is supposed to have reassured his colleagues, some time before the meeting in that villa in swanky Berlin suburb Wannsee where the Nazi brain-trust secretly worked out the best way to go about the “Final Solution” — a plan that sounded like a possible public relations nightmare to some of them — “Don’t worry, gentlemen.   After all, who today remembers the slaughter of the Armenians?”   An excellent question, Mr. Hitler.  What about them?   He was speaking twenty-five years after the massacre of an estimated million Armenian souls, by the Ottoman Turks.  

It is now a hundred years later and the story of the genocide against the Armenians (the word ‘genocide’ was coined, in 1943, to describe what was done to the Armenians) comes as a surprise to most people who hear of it.   I myself knew very little about it, beyond the death marches, mass starvation, concentration camps and the fact that German officers witnessed, sometimes in horror, the brutal deportations carried out by their allies, the Turks, during World War One.  Then ambassador to Constantinople Henry Morgenthau wrote of the sickening slaughter, and how it was smiled on by Ottoman officials, in terrible detail.   The ongoing massacre was apparently regularly written about in the NY Times and widely deplored.  But the world was too busy strafing and gassing each other, and cheering the carnage or dying of typhus, to notice as trainloads of Armenians, packed in cattle cars, were taken to concentration camps where they could be gathered to die more efficiently.  

Today genocide is so common we use the shorthand “Ethnic Cleansing”, a phrase almost as innocuous sounding as “collateral damage”, the shorthand for that unfortunate externality of war, the murder of non-combatants like babies, five year-olds and senior citizens.  In recent years revisionist “scholars” have been claiming the Nazis didn’t really kill people in death camps and surely one day there will be those who deny these other sickening atrocities ever really happened.  Like the state-sanctioned mass killing of the Armenians, though it clearly happened, it’s very controversial now, to some.   Tutsis mass murdered by Hutus? What?

I saw my father cry twice.  Once was at the seder table where he was overcome while dedicating a cup of wine to those slaughtered by the Nazis.  His face turned almost purple as he struggled not to cry, and he wept suddenly and violently before quickly pulling himself together.  My little sister and I watched helplessly as this etched itself indelibly in both our souls. 

“Those people were abstractions, for Christ’s sake, you can’t claim that we were personally effected by Hitler, we never knew any of those people, their letters just stopped coming one day, that’s all, it didn’t effect our family,” my father insisted dismissively (and ridiculously) years later when I brought up the murder of our entire extended family, on both sides.  He had been a twenty-one year-old Jewish kid stationed in Germany immediately after the war, a war that had wiped out his mother’s entire town and his father’s as well.  Of his feelings about being there he said little, though my sister can also tell you the name of the little dog they adopted on the air base, Schickelgruber, and what happened to the poor mutt when it got under the moving wheels of some heavy vehicle, maybe a plane.

I have always been given to brooding, and thinking too much, it must be admitted.  “Think less– do more!” is a mantra I would do well to get in my heart, like today when I am writing this instead of researching and writing things much more practical and badly needed.  Still, reading yesterday, for the first time, what actually happened to my grandmother’s large family, and my grandfather’s, and seeing the names of family members in survivor accounts, chills me too much and I cannot do otherwise. 

Marched to a prepared ravine on the northern end of town, after two years of random killing and death by starvation, ordered to undress (but for some reason to leave their underwear on) and lie face down, they were shot and covered with dirt by local haters who were paid in the clothing of the murdered to make a devilish layer cake of fresh corpses and earth.  Then another terrified group was ordered to undress, lie on top of the previous thinly covered layer of dead bodies, be shot, another layer of dirt, more bodies, repeat as necessary until, by the time I was born, all that would be left of the local Jews was a canyon full of loose bones on the outskirts of Vishnevets.  Among them the scattered bones of every member of Sam and Yetta’s families who were still alive in August of 1943.

Abstractions.

Talking to My Son After My Death

Eight, almost nine years in, I’ve learned a few things about this death business, and though I don’t think often of life, as such, in the way that living people do, I am slowly moving forward.   I have been able to hear certain conversations and have plenty of time to muse about them, all the time in the world, literally.   Yesterday you spoke of my attitude on my death bed and it struck me as poignant, the way you believe in certain things, and I’m going to address some of those beliefs now.

We had a life long debate about whether people could really change themselves.  Your upbringing was hard, I was there, I saw it from the beginning, before the beginning.  I played a big role in making that upbringing hard, of course, and am acutely aware of the obstacles I placed in front of you and your sister, how much heavier than necessary I made the rocks you push up the hill of your lives.  

We cannot know, in some cases, what it was exactly that made our parents monstrous in the way they were.  The stories from Europe were shady, muddy, obscured by smoke, and filth, and terror, they ended in the murder of everyone left there.  I never got any details of how bad my mother’s life, may she rest in peace, was in that benighted little hamlet she left twenty or so years before it was wiped out by the Nazis.  You found out, through diligent research, that she used to whip me in the face from the time I could stand, so something that was done to her filled her with violent rage.   I appreciate the times you’ve said it’s a testament to my character that I never whipped you and your sister in the face, that it would have been understandable.  I did equally terrible things, we both know.

As for our almost forty year debate on whether people can or cannot fundamentally change their natures, I have a few things to say.  Problem one was our adversarial relationship, which largely foreclosed meaningful dialogue, and that was my fault.  I projected many things on you when you were a baby and it set things in a very bad cast.  I thought, for instance, that the way you stared at me from your crib next to the bed was accusatory.  I can see now that this was an insane point of view.  It came from my own carefully repressed terrors.  The world is full of terrors, especially if your caregiver was a violent enemy.  I have to apologize again, though I know you will say it’s not necessary.  So we have the adversarial relationship standing in the way of a real discussion, turning it into a black and white fight to the death.   The next problem is one of framing, the definitional problem.  How do we define meaningful change?  

It was your position that changing your outward behavior and reactions is a significant change for the better.  I always countered that you may change how you act, but never how you feel deep down while you are acting.  This is a clever debating tactic, perhaps, particularly if deployed with the skill I had to deploy such arguments, but beside the point, I can see now.  It also effectively ends discussion of the nature of meaningful change.  Of course how you react is significant, and changing your reactions is hard work.  Of course you will have the same feelings deep down.  Or maybe not.

I heard you say yesterday that the most recent troubled old friend you had to take your leave of (remember how you used to condemn me for casting people over the side?  I guess you understand now that it is sometimes necessary to do this) left you with different feelings than past leave takings.  You said you have no anger toward this person, just sadness.   That’s real progress, I think, on an inner feeling level, and I found it credible, too.  I salute you for this.  

The insight that you may have been left with a sixty pound boulder to push up the hill, difficult but possible, and your former friend a hundred pound one, difficult and impossible for a person to roll, is probably correct.  On many levels you continue to make progress, and on some fundamental levels she has made very little and is still very angry, critical and a bit ruthless– to herself and everyone else.

But the reason I set bone to paper today (no pen here in the grave, sad to say)– and I am conflicted about it now, is to address your feeling that I had changed on my deathbed, and so gave the final proof that people can change.  Deathbed conversions are a cliche, of course, and they are a cliche because they happen so often.  We are faced with the finality of death only once, no matter how many times we may fear it in our lives, when it actually approaches there is no mistaking it.  When the end is near nobody can predict how they might react.   Some see it as a blessing, and I have mixed feelings about that, although, to speak plainly, death has been pretty good for me.  It’s true my consciousness is a bit hard to express now, and I can’t guarantee further communications, or even the end of this one, but in some ways it’s not bad.  No worries, for one thing.

But anyway, what you saw as proof that I was capable of changing can be chalked up to the Grim Reaper grinning at me next to the bed.   Your sister was probably right– if I’d have known about the liver cancer six months earlier, as opposed to six days before I died, I probably would have still waited until that last night to tell you the things I finally told you.  Who knows?  Your construction is more generous, that I would have come to those final realizations much earlier, have lived those last months differently.  Due to the collective genius of Florida doctors we will never know.   Your manner was indeed different in that hospital room, and I have to admit, your kindness to me, the way you kept trying to let me off the hook as I was apologizing to you for the first and last time, may be seen as proof that you were right about people being able to change for the better.

I don’t bring this last point up to undermine the progress you have undoubtedly made, at least I don’t think I’m doing that.  It may be that we actually can’t change after all, though.  Maybe I will always have to undermine you, in some way.  

You told me, in the last real conversation we had, your last attempt to open a dialogue two years before I checked out, that my milder reactions to you had greatly improved our relationship, even if the inner feelings were the same.  That I respected your wish not to be constantly bad-mouthed, often in the guise of giving fatherly advice, meant a lot to you, you told me.  You offered this as proof that even I, someone who did not believe in change, could make changes.  

At the time desperation forced me to be cruel.  I actually laughed, scoffing at your naivete, telling you that my superficial change in reaction merely masked unchanged inner feelings.  I drove the nail in by adding that if I ever honestly told you what I really felt about you it would do irreparable damage to our relationship.  You could see that as just my desperation talking, and that would be fair, but I also didn’t have the insight to know any better.   Which is a deeply embarrassing thing to have to admit now, almost nine years after my death.

But the point is, what if my behavior on my deathbed, the way I expressed regret, wished I’d been able to change, see the world in all its nuance and not just as a black and white fight to the death, what if all that was just a show put on to give you a fonder last impression of me?  A manipulation orchestrated by Death, who was approaching on roller skates?  You see, this possibility would mean that I was right, our changes are only acts, and deep down we are the same as we always were.  Some things that torment you mean nothing to most people, it’s the way these things were instilled in you as a young child.  

On the other hand, my stepping out of character to seek forgiveness that last night could be seen as proof that you were right, that by changing our reactions we can change the dynamics that have trapped us unhappily in our lives.  That my relief at seeing you mild, and not angry or condemning me, as you had a right to as I went towards the grave, freed me to act differently.

This is one of those conversations that could go on, I suppose, though, in the ordinary course of things, if two people are not adversaries, certain agreements can be reached and the conversation need not be an ongoing battle over decades.  I still think about my wish, that last night, that we could have had the kind of real conversation fifteen years earlier that we finally had the last night of my life.  Fucking tragic, I know.

My Father’s Death

When I arrived in Florida, a few days after my father’s sudden hospitalization with undiagnosed end-stage liver cancer, a couple of days before he died, my father told me “you’re the only one who knows what’s going on.”   Although everyone around him knew he was dying, and the look on the Emergency Room doctor’s face had made that unmistakably clear to my sister, who urged me to get on the next plane, he was somehow trying to give me credit he’d often withheld.

“I want to talk to you, I’m gathering my thoughts,” he told me a while later, and I bought him a tiny digital recorder to speak into, if he was moved to speak when nobody was around.  He was beyond writing things down, and though he was an excellent writer, he rarely put pen to paper when he was able to.

We were fortunate to have that conversation, the thoughts he gathered were impressively organized, clearly expressed in that scratchy voice he had at the end.  I don’t know if anyone could have written, edited and delivered those thoughts better.  He always was an excellent speaker, and spoke virtually without notes.  Lucky for us both I have always been a night owl and when I drove over to the hospital at 1 a.m. he was awake and waiting to talk.  Turned out to be the last night of his life, he died before sundown the following day.

I am thinking about my father’s death because of something he said right at the end, it may have been the last thing he said.   We were sitting around his hospital bed, he’d become agitated, grabbed my sister’s hand, and mine, and when he let go I got the nurse and convinced him to take a mild sedative, an anti-anxiety pill, atavan, that a friend of mine is fond of.  I assured him it was fast-acting and would only take the edge off, since he was always very concerned with remaining in control and had never had so much as a beer, let alone a mind-altering pill.  Reassured, and feeling desperate perhaps, he agreed to take it and quickly composed himself.

“I’m feeling much better,” he announced a few minutes later, sounding like his old self.  “Why don’t you all go down and take a break and have a bite to eat downstairs, you’ve been sitting here a long time.  Elie can stay with me, it’s OK.”  My mother, sister, uncle and brother-in-law all got up and went down to the cafeteria.  It was dinner time and outside the sky was turning into a beautiful painting of a Florida sunset.  I recall the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital windows becoming more vivid as the light slowly began to fade.  

Two nurses were in the room and one of them said to me “it’s almost time.”  She pointed out that my father’s fingers were turning blue under the fingernails, something to do with the blood no longer delivering enough oxygen to the extremities, apparently a sign that Death is close by.  

“If you pray, now is the time to do it,” said the other nurse.  I told her we were not religious and she took it on herself to sing a Jewish tune she knew.  The African-American woman sang a chorus of Dayenu, a song from the Passover service that indicates we’d be thankful for any fraction of the many blessings God has laid on us. Thinking about it now, the snippet of song was as good a prayer as I could have thought of, though it seemed a bit surrealistic at the time.  She had a nice voice, and carried the tune well, but I remember thinking at the time that it was bizarre.

They helped me take down the railing at the side of the bed so I could sit closer to my father, then silently left the room.  My father looked at me helplessly and said “I don’t know how to do this…”   I assured him that nobody does, that it was OK.  I sat close as he breathed a bit faster for a minute or two, maybe five, perhaps fifteen, and then breathed his last.  His eyes were open, I closed them with two fingers of one hand, like playing a simple chord on the guitar or piano.  It was eerie how natural the movement was.  The nurses returned a moment later and I took the oxygen tube out of my father’s nostrils.  “He won’t be needing this,” I said softly, handing it to them.   I took his glasses and put them in my baritone ukulele case, where they are to this day.

I was amazed at how simple and graceful my father’s last moments were.  I’d been told a day earlier that death by kidney failure, the way terminal liver cancer actually kills you, is an accelerating sleepiness that ends in a usually peaceful death, but it was striking how peaceful that final struggle was.  A friend who read Jewish scripture for years quoted a line from the Talmud, I think, that stated it poetically and true to my father’s death: the moment of death is like lifting a hair off a glass of milk.

“I don’t know how to do this….” rang in my head just now, as I thought of the mountain I am trying to climb, an impossible one, really, for anybody but an exceptional being who is able to recruit exceptional helpers, and I thought to myself, with a sinking feeling “I don’t know how to do this.”   Same phrase.  It struck me.  Now, the same mercy I gave the old man, I extend to myself, if such a thing is possible– “nobody does, it’s OK.”

Either way, there will be the last breath and then darkness.  I’ll be happy to meet angels, and the souls of loved ones who have passed on, but I’m not expecting to.  The only thing to see between now and then is how exceptionally I can climb in whatever time remains for me to climb.