One year on my birthday, well into my adult years, my parents took me to a restaurant.  It was probably a pretty nice place, my father and I may well have been wearing sports jackets.  Assume we were.  

At some point during dinner, maybe while we waited for the appetizers, my father reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a few folded pages.  “You have a pen?” he asked me.  

I always have at least one writing instrument with me and I produced a pen. The papers he wanted me to sign were a Health Care Proxy and Living Will.  He’d had them drawn up and made me the proxy in the event he was incapacitated, and in a life or death medical emergency.   I said something like ‘what the fuck?’ and he explained.

“I thought you were the perfect person because if I was hooked up to life support you wouldn’t hesitate to pull the plug,” he said.  

 “If you were on life support right now, I’d pull the fucking plug,” I may have said.  I signed the papers, my father took them, folded them, put them back into his pocket.  

“Hell of a nice birthday present, dad,” I said, “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“As I’ve told you many times, you never have to thank me for something like that.  It’s my pleasure.”

Nothing else about that long ago birthday dinner is at all memorable.

There is a popular factoid out there, probably true, that most murder victims are killed by people they know.   It makes sense, if you think about it.   If you’re about to snap and take the extreme step of murder, why kill some random person if there is someone you know well enough to really hate?   Many murders, we are told, occur within the family.   Murderers no doubt feel justified killing some supremely provocative person close to them who has long been fucking begging to be killed.

Listening to a friend’s story last night about troubles in her family I thought of a familiar scenario.   The parents are at odds, the children are in the middle, or off to the side.   The kids naturally get drawn into the drama between the parents, forced to take sides, console, shoulder the blame for their parents’ misery, act as human shields when things get particularly ugly.

In most cases this is not a recipe for how to raise a murderer, except in cases where the parents frequently cut each other with razors, or beat each other bloody, during particularly rancorous fights.   Violence like that would up the ante, increase the chances of the child growing up with enough fear, insecurity and rage to become a killer himself.

Violence against others, widespread as it is, is less common, I think, than violence against the self.   In 2016 there were more deaths in the U.S. by opioid overdose, around 60,000 (a record for overdose deaths in the USA), than by gun violence, and that includes the tens of thousands of annual suicides by firearm the NRA angrily insists should not be included in gun death statistics.  You’ve heard the phrase “you are your own worst enemy”?   Dig it.   Be aware that you are one of the most dangerous motherfuckers out there, to yourself.  Keep an eye on that, my friend.

Much of what we suffer from is not our fault.   It doesn’t mean we don’t have to deal with our problems, mercifully, but it’s not our choice to suffer in many of the ways we do.   It’s not on us, bad as it also is for us, if we didn’t learn resilience from a family that had no clue about it.   We have to learn it by trial and error by ourselves, with great determination, over the course of decades.  If we are lucky we find a good friend or two who is on a similar journey, it helps greatly to compare notes and track progress.  Picture what kind of life skills you might acquire coming from this family scenario:

Mom is hardworking, reliable, tense, often short-tempered, or downright mean, to Dad.   Dad is not hardworking, but he is very affectionate, funny, supportive and sweet.   If you’re feeling afraid or insecure, you run to dad, who takes you in his arms, massages your shoulders, makes you laugh, makes you feel better.  If you need anything else, you go to mom.  Mom always comes through with whatever you need, no matter what.   Mom would walk through a hail of bullets for you.  The mystery is why this great person is often such a bitch to Dad. 

Picture the endless possible good reasons that Mom is such a bitch to Dad.   Dad gets drunk and rapes Mom once in a while, for example.  Or Dad is a serial adulterer and bad liar about it.   Maybe Dad wants Mom to catch him and that’s why his lies are so sloppy, so transparently stupid.   Maybe Mom has kept Dad out of jail by paying back money he stole in doomed embezzlement schemes, maybe more than once.  Could be huge gambling debts, or money stolen from a dead father’s credit cards.  Maybe he keeps getting popped for petty crimes of some kind and Mom keeps bailing him out, even the best shoplifters get caught once in a while.  Maybe Mom walked in while Dad was banging the baby sitter when you were a baby.   Maybe Dad, in a moment of rage, threatened to murder Mom’s family and then come back and burn her, her children and himself to death? Whatever fucked up scenario you can imagine, fucked up people, no matter how otherwise wonderful they are, regularly do very fucked up things.

But the statistics say that children of divorced parents have worse future life outcomes than the children of intact marriages, no matter how bad.  I’m not sure about the wisdom of that, but it’s a common belief.  I think there are marriages so toxic that everyone is better off, including, or even particularly, the children, when the hideous farce is over.  But say Mom believes that the best way to protect her kids is to project a healthy relationship between her and the husband she has many excellent reasons to be angry at much of the time.

Now this requires some complicated footwork.  The children must be shielded from their father’s dark side.   It would do nobody any good, reasons Mom, to have Dad admit that he is a serial embezzler, cheat, liar, fraudster, gambling addict, pornography addict, an immature person incapable of accepting fault, apologizing or changing, whatever the fucking thing is.  So Mom keeps the dark secret for everybody.  Nobody needs to know her issues with Dad.  It makes her ashamed, for one thing, which is a powerful reason for keeping secrets.  Some people refer to this kind of Mom as The Martyr.

In her house everything is always fine.   I grew up in a family where much was hidden.  At the same time, and though we fought viciously about it, there was some kind of commitment to being truthful with each other.   The honesty only could go so far, but we were all trying to be honest, as far as we understood things.   That value on honesty was a positive thing I took from a very hard situation.  It inclined me to search for explanations, for puzzle pieces that would help me make sense of the whole.  I am grateful for it, fucked up and painful as the surrounding circumstances were.   There was always an impulse to truthfulness, a value placed on candor, although it was also part of a terrible ongoing war in a very dark setting.

Picture the difficulty of growing up in a house where fundamental things are tightly guarded secrets.   If honesty is off the table, everybody has to agree not to seek the truth, or even imagine the many kinds of mischief and wickedness that flow from that agreement.    If there is violence that is hidden, treachery or exploitation that is covered up, the children in that house are unlikely get much insight into how to maintain an honest, intimate relationship.   They haven’t seen a healthy relationship between their parents, only a mysterious and perplexing riddle featuring a cool, laid back Dad and an indispensable, totally dependable and loving Mom, who unaccountably gives Dad an unending amount of shit.  

These children will likely be flummoxed when trying to form intimate relationships of their own, because intimacy requires mutual trust.  Mutual trust is not the same as a mutual agreement never to reveal secrets the couple considers shameful.  Trust is open, and impervious to fear, hiding shame is closed, and full of terror.   

I see this kind of shit, my brothers and sisters, the harm done to the children of people who decide to live this way, and it makes me want to weep.

“Uh… you’ve skated about as close to that line as you can comfortably skate, if you want to call any of that comfortable,” said the skeleton of my father.  

Yes sir.  Time to unlace the skates and get on with jotting down another great vignette starring you that I just recalled.    

“Well, get to it then, motherfucker!”

It struck me today, in considering what loose strings remain in my attempt to weave a coherent tapestry of your life, how these last few pieces fit together.

“About fucking time…” said the skeleton of my father.

I’m able to walk again in recent days.  I’m walking longer and longer distances.  While I was walking today it hit me.  It reminded me how walking seems to help the mind puzzle over things.

“Way to rub it in, putz,” said the earthbound remains of my father.

I’ve got to set this down fast, it’s complicated and elusive, yet elementally simple.

“Aren’t we all?” said the skeleton with a sigh. 

One essential connection eluded me.  You and I are having this fairly relaxed discussion, one we could have been having all along.  I never doubted my mother’s love for me, though she was also capable of flinging mighty mountains of dung at me.   The last piece of the puzzle was suddenly right there in front of my eyes as I walked up Broadway. 

I can’t explain it, and you did your best to obscure it, but I felt loved by you, on some level I can’t really describe.   If you have the love of both of your parents, you expect people to love you, find it odd if somebody takes a dislike to you.   If you have the implacable hatred of either of your parents, your odds go way down, you’re more likely to have your doubts.  If both of your parents hate you… I don’t even want to consider that.

I described the repetition compulsion — an irresistible need to replicate the same fundamental trauma over and over with new players in the old roles.  Many unhappy people do it in various forms for their entire lives and never see it.   I think of my old buddy Friedman, the best ready example.   Every relationship went through the identical dramatic arc: fascination, idealization, disillusionment, misunderstanding, betrayal.  It was uncanny, the motherfucker must have had a hundred of these in the years I knew him.

I noticed in my relationships with some of my closest friends a real, and eventually sickening, psychological resemblance to the abusive relationship I had with you, dad.  And I say “dad” with italics for purposes of that previous sentence, dad.   

“I get that,” said the skeleton.

I placidly took abuse from some of them that I would never have taken from you.  Doing this unconscious psychic work, I suppose.  I took an amazing amount of shit from the talented and self-hating Speed, for example, while he taught me guitar and music theory.  The music I was most drawn to, for him, was shit that was beneath contempt.  Nonetheless, he was unstinting in expressing his contempt.  After years, and learning a good deal from the musical savant, I finally had enough.   Same with Friedman. 

I realized shortly after you died: fuck, I have to take this shit from my father, there’s a psychic pay-off if I can get to the other side of it.  At the same time, there was no possible pay-off for taking shit from an implacably unhappy prick who had no insight into his own misery.  I was better off having someone like that as a stranger, addition by subtraction.   A beautiful thing, to remove a cancerous relationship from your life.

“You understood that fairly late in your life, but better late than never,” said the skeleton.  “You remember how much shit you gave me for doing the same thing?”   

You never explained the necessity of instituting that fall from grace in a way that made any sense to me.  You never took the time to understand it yourself, just went into a rage and began swinging your broad sword. 

“It was my way,” said the skeleton, with a hint of coyness. 

Yeah, so anyway, dig this.  My mad friend Andy, the one who fought with his wife, Hitler, over the Atavan? 

“A very bright and quick-witted fellow,” said the skeleton, “although the mirthful malice glittering in his eyes was also clear to me.” 

Anyway, Andy bore a striking psychic similarity to my uncle, your brother, Paul, the mild mannered enraged tyrant.

“Damn…”   

Yeah, look, he was one step away from being like you.   He turned out to be your bullied, bullying little brother.   That’s the cunning of the thing, why this last puzzle piece has been so hard to fit in with the rest.  Here’s what I realized.  The fact that I expect to be liked, even loved, is the most infuriating and intolerable thing of all to someone who fundamentally hates himself.  You loved me, but on some fundamental level hated yourself.  How does that work?  You have to destroy me. 

“I hated to do it, you know,” said the skeleton. 

I can’t account for how it turned out, after all the ugly confrontations, the senseless fucking carnage around the dinner table.  I knew that, somehow.  I think even without your deathbed regrets and apologies I knew that you held me in very high esteem, respected me, loved me.  The whole deal.   You remember you once asked us if we’d rather be loved or respected and we said ‘loved’?  You said ‘respected’, like the two were mutually exclusive.  A very reductive and idiotic way to see the world.   

“I stipulated to that as I was checking out, no need to get back into that.”

No need to get back into that.

“Well, you’re certainly not alone there, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father cheerfully.  “Didn’t your man George Harrison have a song where he sang ‘nothing in this life that I’ve been trying could equal or surpass the art of dying’?”

Yeah, on All Things Must Pass.

“All things that live and feel must pass,” said the skeleton.  “The miracle, of course, is that we live as though we and everyone we love are not fated to go the way of all flesh.  We consider our own death only when we’re losing a loved one, or are sick ourselves, up against a life-threatening illness, or surrounded by dying people.  Or depressed.”   

Or standing, for example, in a ravine on the northwestern edge of Vishnivetz, with murderous, drunken haters banging drums and playing brass instruments out of tune.   

“Yes,” said the skeleton, “there’s always that.  There’s certainly no shortage of that in this blessed world.”

My sister and I once discussed the revelations you had during the days you lay dying, the self-reflection, apologies and regrets you expressed to me the night before you died.  I wondered if you would have come to these things sooner, lived your last weeks or months differently, if one of those geniuses had diagnosed your fatal condition earlier, rather than in the ER six days before you died.  I thought you likely would have.  Your daughter was not so sure, she felt it probably would have waited til that last night, no matter how long you knew for sure you were on the Death Express. 

“Well, you know, I wasn’t able to say anything to your sister of any consequence before I died,” said the skeleton. 

You didn’t have any time with her alone. 

“Not only that.  It was just impossibly complicated.  I felt I’d let her down, in many of the same ways I let you down,  but it seemed she was clinging to the few times I was unequivocally on her side.  When I paid the downpayment on her house, when I reassured her at the lowest points of her life.  I don’t know, I wasn’t able to sort out my feelings enough to say anything of any consequence to her.”   

Well, don’t beat yourself up about it.  If you could have done it differently, you would have.

“Hah, the very thing you kept telling me that last night, as I was trying to make you my Father Confessor.” 

Look, in our case, although we were adversaries, there was a long, rich history of at least trying to have an honest conversation.   

“That’s debatable,” said the skeleton. 

There you go.  We had decades of debate, often angry and contentious, but a conversation it was.   

“An attempted conversation, perhaps,” said the skeleton. 

Whatever.  We had a history of trying to talk past our differences. 

“You did,” said the skeleton.  “I was pretty much consistent fending off that shit, as you recall.” 

My point is that we had a lot more practice struggling toward real understanding than you and my sister did. 

“You don’t get a point,” said the skeleton, “have you forgotten how this works?”   

There are times I wish I could forget more. 

“Now you’ve said a mouthful,” said the skeleton. 

Nothing in this life that I’ve been trying, could equal or surpass the art of dying. 

“It’s not a bad thought to keep in mind, if you don’t get too morbid about it, I suppose,” the skeleton moved his lower jaw around in a disquieting way. 

What the fuck is that? 

“Nothing,” said the skeleton, “just going for a cheap laugh.” 

Is it better to know you have a year to live than not to know?

“It’s better to know,” said the skeleton.  “We only get so many years to get this shit right.  Nothing focuses the mind like a good whiff of your own approaching death.   Boswell quoted Samuel Johnson to that effect,’depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’.  Thus saith Jeeves.  I found it to be very true, though I had far less than a fortnight to deal with the certainty of my own demise.” 

If you had a year, with the knowledge of your fatal liver cancer whittling away your remaining days, would you have come earlier to the realizations you did just before you died? 

“A $64,000 question, Elie, I have no fucking idea.  How would I know?”

Fair enough.   

“A sense of fairness is a precious thing, Elie.  I can see that so clearly now.  A precious and very rare thing — simply being fair.  You live in a world where everything is contested, every inch of moral high ground is viciously fought over.   It’s hard to even see the extent to which that operates, while you’re swimming in a sea of it.   Everybody wants to be treated fairly, but extending fairness– whooo, that’s one of the hardest human tricks.  Reminds me of that great Mose Alison song ‘everybody crying ‘peace on earth’, just as soon as we win this war.'”