My father, for lack of a closer example, and being dead, also, a perfectly cooperative one, never recovered from the traumas of his childhood, which were many.  

He appeared urbane, had a series of pretty good jobs, with some prestige, bought a nice home, had the respect of many people.  He had a great, dark sense of humor, he was witty, and very well-read.   He could converse intelligently on just about any subject.  He was affable and had an easy rapport with children.   He loved animals and took good care of any he came across.  The only tell of his early traumas was his need to fight and to win every fight.  

He was Fred Astaire in an argument, very light on his feet, smooth, quick, almost impossible to imagine anyone doing it better.  If you were not the object of his arguing it was hard to find fault in his smart, stylish ability to dispatch an opponent easily.  He never seemed to break a sweat or exert any effort at all.

His need to win every argument was the giveaway I noticed fairly early on.  I tried every way around it, since I hoped for more out of our relationship than an occasional laugh and the inevitable bludgeoning arguments, but until I was in my 40s, and had learned something about reining in my emotions, I had little chance of success.   I spent years piecing together the clues to what had made him this way; they did not yield themselves easily.   In the end, and aided by my discoveries, I was as good as the old man at making my points.  Law school put the finishing touches on it, because as much as anything else law students are relentlessly drilled in the smelly art of prevailing.   The prevailing party wins it all in court, the other party loses all.  Elegant in its simplicity even if grotesque in many of its implications.   

The old man needed to win, and if you were keeping score, he seemed to win virtually all of the time.   There was a cost attached, but he was glad to pay it.  A punchline of sorts will give you the point I am hoping to make here, if  I prepare everything for you correctly.  

My father’s first cousin Eli was American born (his mother died giving birth to him) and a rough and combative character who was incredibly warm and funny if he loved you.   If he didn’t love you he had no hesitation to thunder, turn purple, and possibly bash you in the face.   He did this even to people he loved, sometimes, though he and I got along well.  Our frequent disagreements sometimes turned his face purple, brought white spittle to the corners of his mouth and a ferocious panther-like expression to his face, but we never came to blows or stopped talking to each other.  “Eli and your mother fought all the way from Georgia to New York,” my father once cheerfully said of a car ride up from Florida.  Nobody loved each other more than Eli and my mother did, or fought each other more passionately.

Toward the end of his life Eli gave me some crucial background into the hitherto inexplicable behavior of his Aunt Chavah, my father’s mother, towards her oldest son, my father.  He did this to give me some insight into my father, and it worked.  Eli had gone with his father to the dock where a ship brought Chavah from Europe and they picked her up in his truck.   It was love at first sight.   Eli was a handsome young man and Chavah, the aunt he was meeting for the first time, was a red headed beauty who loved him immediately.    Her older brother, Eli’s father, was not as loving, even though he’d paid for her passage from Europe.  She was expected to work off the debt as a servant in his house.  

Her indenture went on for a few years, and would be continued after she had children and moved back to Peekskill (my father and his young brother dug their nails into the snake plants they were forced to dust, in an ongoing attempt to kill the succulents).   During her first years in service there she fell in love with the Jewish post man, also a red head.  He wanted to marry her, but Eli’s father broke that up.  “His bitch-on-wheels second wife would have lost her slave,” Eli pointed out.  

A few years later, when it was past time for her to marry, they arranged a marriage as mysterious as they come.  I have no idea who made the match or how the two sides even met each other.  The groom was a man from a primitive, dirt floored farm near Hartford, Connecticut who most considered dull.   Eli described the deadpan face of this man who died before I was born as “two eyes … a nose and a mouth”.   He then imitated a face that was just that.  

Eli insisted his uncle by marriage was very funny, and incredibly subtle, he’d simply had the life beaten out of him by a cruel and violent step-mother who hit him in the head with heavy boards and whatever else came to hand.  According to Eli, my grandfather had mentally checked out at a certain point to save himself.  The way Eli told it, he seemed to be the only one who could see this inner life in his new uncle.  My grandfather Eliyahu comes down to me as a tragic man who, having endured a very hard life, and great abuse from his step-mother and then his reluctant and furious wife, died young of liver disease though he never drank alcohol.   

Chavah, who had always had a temper, seemingly went into a permanent rage once ensconced in her horrific new life.  They were incredibly poor, even by the standards of the day in the crowded slums of the Lower East side.  After her illiterate husband lost his herring delivery job when the horse who knew the route died, and he returned at the end of his first day with the new horse with a wagon-load of undelivered herring barrels, Eli and his father drove down to NYC and picked up the hapless little family:  pregnant Chavah, Eliyahu and their little son Azrael, usually rendered Israel.

That one and a half year-old taken to his new home in Peekskill was my father, and terrible damage had already been done to him in the airless little slum apartment he was born in.  His mother had already given birth to a girl, a still born.  The baby may have lived a day or two, nobody alive now can verify this.   The newborn baby was dead and buried and then some time after that my father was born.  Chavah was tiny, my father was a huge baby.   Chavah hated her husband and seemingly carried a long building grudge against this large baby as well.  Whipped him from the moment he could stand, preferred method rough burlap wrapped power cord from her iron across his baby face.  Whap!   Stop looking at me, she might have screamed, in Yiddish.  Whap!

Eli, by then 18 or 19, and in their house all the time, had seen it himself many times.  My two year-old father cowering as his mother rattled the drawer by her seat at the kitchen table where she kept the heavy, stinging electrical cord.  “By then all she had to do was rattle the drawer and your father would….” and he imitated a terrified boy, standing at rigid attention, cringing as he waited for a few lashes in the face, averting his eyes.   I had a sudden, immediate insight into why my father was so relentless about never losing a fight.   And a flood of sympathy for the poor bastard that had been impossible to feel when he was bullying and hectoring and paying any price to win.  

I tried to hint at these things the next time we met.   “Eli’s full of shit!” snarled my father.   “Ask his kids what kind of father he was, he is so full of shit.  His kids hate him.  Sure, listen to his twisted version of history, he’s a great historian, he knows everything, he’s the expert on every subject, a man of great insight into everything.  A fucking bullshit artist — did he tell you about the many millions he made that he was screwed out of, always somebody else’s fault?  I’m sure he did.  His fantasy stories will answer all of your questions.  He’s a fountain of wisdom,”  and so forth.

And now the punchline, of sorts, that you have been so patiently awaiting.  After two years of inexplicable fatigue, my father found himself, the first night of Passover, waking from a nap unable to move and severely jaundiced.   My mother who had been heating up matzoh ball soup and getting ready to serve dinner,  called an ambulance.  The ER doctor knew immediately what the learned endocrinologist, hematologist and cardiologist that my father saw several times a month had been unable to figure out:  this patient is in the very end stages of terminal liver cancer.   He went into the hospital on the first day of Passover, a holiday of eight days, and was dead before the holiday commemorating the perilous journey from slavery to freedom ended. 

On what turned out to be the last night of his life I visited him in the hospital, stood by his deathbed where I found him waiting to talk.  After the pleasantries, and after he asked if I’d brought the digital recorder (we were both glad I’d left one there in the care of his wonderful nurse) the first thing he said was:  

Eli hit the nail on the head, everything he told you was true.  Only he probably didn’t paint it as dark and nightmarish as it really was…  

Then, the man who had insisted all his life that childhood was something an adult leaves behind in forging his own independent identity and life, said:  my life was over by the time I was two.  You don’t recover from that. 

I have been over and over this terrain many times, probably told versions of this very story a dozen times right here on this gratuitous blahg.  I’m thinking about it now because I had a reminder yesterday of the essential incomprehensibility of much of human behavior, particularly our own.  

An old friend expressed dismay that his loved ones sometimes don’t seem to realize that he has nothing but the best of intentions, no matter how else it may appear.  It saddens him that his old friend, and his wife, cannot easily see his good will and instead misconstrue things motivated by the best of intentions as antagonistic or hostile.   Those actions he intends to be supportive that are sometimes misread as provocative, a vexing human mystery.  

 As for my father, he expressed his very sincere regret that he hadn’t explored the many gradations of life instead of seeing everything as a black and white zero sum fight to the death.  He mused momentarily and sadly about how much richer his life, and the lives of those he loved, would have been had he seen the world in all its subtle variations.

He expressed this sorrowful insight perhaps seventeen hours before the sun went down and, in the orange and pink embers of a beautiful Florida sunset, the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital window, his last breath went out and no more came in.

Got to get this done in five minutes or less, finish the crucial work I can’t get to, be done with a series of invisible bones crosswise in my throat.

I spent my childhood often blamed for things I had no control over. Motives were ascribed that were not my motives.  I had to defend myself, at times, for things I hadn’t even done.   This was the work of my traumatized father, primarily, with the able assistance of my almost equally traumatized mother.  I am not complaining about this, merely stating how it was for my sister and me growing up.  My sister claims it was worse for me because I fought against it.  I don’t know if it was worse for me, I know it was bad enough for each of us.

Attempts to get the whole truth on the table: denied.   A child hasn’t all the tools to counter a determined and brilliant adult adversary in partnership with a loyal adult ally, also of great intelligence.  Over decades these tools can be acquired, along with a certain amount of insight, but it takes a lot of work and it can take a lifetime.

Fast forward 45 years or so.  Father on his deathbed says to his son, his lifelong adversary: you were right to feel betrayed and I was wrong to betray you.  I am so sorry I was such a brutal prick.  I am amazed that you seem able to forgive me.

The son says:  you did the best you could, I realize now that if you could have done better you would have.

The father (with a sigh):  I wish I’d been mature enough to have had this kind of talk with you fifteen years ago.  

Long pause.  

Now, if you will excuse me, son, I’d like you to help me die.  I have no idea how to do it.

“Nobody does, dad,” I told him.  

Ten minutes later I closed his dead eyes with two fingers of my right hand, then handed his oxygen tube back to the nurse who had silently come back into the room.