Shame On Me

This one isn’t going to be fun. This is about one of the great many memories almost too painful for me to endure. 

At 75, my dad had a stroke. My mother looked out the window of what had once been my bedroom, and saw him lying immobile on the sidewalk in front of their house. When it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to walk again, she checked him into the dreary, piss-reeking Santa Monica convalescent hospital in which my maternal grandmother had died not long before. He’d wanted to come home, but Mom, the queen of catastrophic expectations, was sure that if he did, the house would catch fire, she’d be unable to drag him to safety, and everyone would blame her for his death. He was dead about six months later.

There wasn’t a formal funeral. My parents, loving and thrifty as they were, had arranged for the Neptune Society to cremate them when they departed, sparing me and my sister great expense.

My mother did arrange a little Saturday afternoon farewell ceremony for my dad a couple of weeks after his death. A genial young rabbi came. Neither of my parents had been anywhere near a rabbi or synagogue since my bar mitzvah 32 years before. GYR, who of course had never laid eyes on my dad, intoned a few platitudes. My sister, who’d always been closer to my dad than I, spoke for a moment. I refused to follow suit because of the hopeful, conciliatory look on my mother’s face. She’d made a grand display of her contempt for by dad from the time I first remembered. He adored her, and she hated him for it. I’d never seen her be affectionate with him, I’d seen her recoil from him in disgust a million times. I’d heard her rake him over the coals for nothing at all 10 million. 

in fairness, I recognise in retrospect that my dad was perfectly content with their arrangement. My mother could be insightful, and speculated that any attention – even cruel derision — felt equally pleasurable to him. I didn’t believe it at the time, but have come to recognise that it was probably true. Maybe, I’ve been told by a succession of psychotherapists, I should stop being furious at myself for not protecting him from her when I got old enough to do so. 

No, that’s not telling the whole story. I not only didn’t protect him, but treated him pretty much as I’d always seen her treat him. Shame on me. 

In any event, her not expressing remorse at the little backyard ceremony infuriated me. I wasn’t going to be a party to her little charade. Which is to say that it was more important for me on that pretty Saturday afternoon to defy my mother than to honour my dad. 

Shame on me.

Shame that’s amplified by the little service my sister organised when my mother died. She and I and her third husband, the laconic Texan jock, went to the Kenosha synagogue at which the sister of the progressive former senator Russ Feingold presided. My sister and I were beside ourselves almost from the get-go. When it came time for me to speak, I was barely able to get a word out for crying. Such was my and my sister’s grief that her laconic Texan jock began to sniffle. 

I was livid with myself for having been so effusive for my mother and taciturn for my dad.

I went that night to a Milwaukee Brewers game for which he’d bought tickets some weeks before in hope of the two of us bonding. As if! On one level, letting $80 worth of tickets go to waste would have been anathema to both my parents. But I remember having gone to a ball game the night of my mother’s funeral with the almost overwhelming shame I feel about so many things.