Travel Reference
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and over that my mother's illness robbed me of a just childhood, had made her the focus
of the household and not my brother and me.
Did he think it hadn't occurred to me, I asked my father, that I took as much care of
my mother when I was a child as she was able to take care of me?
Did he think I hadn't noticed that my friends never gathered at our house? Why do
you think that was, Dad? Because it was a household focused on coping with a disease,
that's why, and not raising children. Tell me, Dad, do you think it's a normal thing for a
fifteen-year-old boy to lift his mother out of a wheelchair and put her to bed? Or to pick
his naked mother up off the floor after she's fallen off the toilet and is lying sprawled and
helpless in the bathroom? You think that might have an effect?
Why did he think I was almost fifty years old and hadn't been able to sustain a rela-
tionship? Guess what? The example in front of me was that if you fall in love and commit
yourself, you end up drowning in responsibility, burdened by pain and obligation. Why
did he think I'd been in therapy for fifteen years? Why did he think I'd been treated
for depression, including a handful of episodes that were legitimately debilitating? Or
maybe he thought that was a normal life.
I had kept my depression from him for years, reasoning that he had enough on his
plate with my mom, and letting him know only after my shrink told me I had to. He's
your father, she said; you should let him have the opportunity to act like one.
“Do you remember when I told you I'd been depressed and had been taking medica-
tion?” I shouted at him. “Do you remember what you said? You said 'Well, I hope you're
feeling better now.' ”
“I don't remember that,” he said.
“I'm not surprised,” I said, with a sneer I regret to this day. “I fucking remember it.”
You won't be shocked to learn that he reacted with something less than equanimity
to all this. You're blaming me, he said. You think I was a lousy father. You think I failed.
And you're telling me this the day after we buried your mother? He snorted.
“Your brother turned out all right,” he said.
“Yeah, well, congratulations,” I said. “But check with him before you take it to the
bank.”
This went on for a while, bile and vitriol spit back and forth. I don't remember all
the words we said, just the fierce resentment at how we'd had to spend the previous
forty years that we were now, with nowhere else to direct it, aiming at each other. That
morning I was the son, a chip of the old block, of the unbearable man my father had
lately been. It was an appalling, hugely distressing couple of hours, and we were both
wounded. It ended finally in a truce, part mutual understanding, part exhaustion, part
unwillingness to stay angry.
