Take these broken wings and learn to fly
Dad and Zac are gone. Within a few years of each other. With Dad we’ve been on the edge for a long time. Expecting the worst and getting surprised each time he would keep on going. The main reason he held on as long as he did was due to Mom’s excellent caregiving. She worked every day to get him to all his appointments, try new specialists and treatments, constantly managing his medications and fighting with the insurance companies and health care systems. It is overwhelming what she was tasked to do. Her entire life for the past several years was consumed with caregiving. It is, in many ways, a relief that he is gone and not in pain anymore.
My grief for the loss of my dad is complicated. I am both sad for the loss of the man he was and angry about how he treated us. He was clever, very creative, and a man of great imagination who could talk endlessly about whatever project he was working on. He was also an angry alcoholic who was abusive to everyone in my family. He made all my Halloween costumes growing up, worked on every science fair project, helped me with homework and read many great books with me. And for my whole life, he would get drunk and say mean shit all the time. My angry Dad was physically abusive to my brother and I watched him smack Zac around for most of our childhood. One day it was so bad that we were crying on the bus to school and the bus driver called Child Protective Services and they investigated my Dad for abuse. He was a little more careful for a few weeks but the anger always came back.
He loved sharing music with us and would spend afternoons playing record after record for me and my brother, giving us a 60’s and 70’s musical education. He made large-scale experimental rockets and would launch them in the desert with other rocket enthusiasts. I even joined him and made some of my own rockets. He helped me not feel afraid to pull things apart and try to fix them. Because of him, I have some self-sufficiency in fixing things around the house and with my car from time to time. I think much of my own creativity is a tribute to him.
Dad made it clear he was disappointed in both Zac and me and I think he never really tried to understand us as adults. He did not approve of or understand my career choice; he wanted me to be a doctor and when I came to the realization that was not my path, he was bitter about it. Over the years, Dad’s anger and rudeness caused multiple rifts in the family, He would get angry/drunk, say awful things and stop talking to his family and what few friends he had. Zac and I stopped talking to him for years.
As with so many things in life, multiple conflicting things are true simultaneously. His loss brings up all the feelings of wishing he had been a better father and mourning the positive parts of him that will always be part of who I am. He was an asshole and his behavior caused deep trauma in each of us and our family relationships. I confronted him a few times and it felt good to speak my mind and practice setting boundaries. For that reason, he made me a stronger person. He was annoyed in his final years that I did not call him or text him and I did that to maintain my peace. I don’t regret that and I’m also glad we had a few good visits in the past two years. I will always carry these conflicting feelings for my Dad. These deep feelings of sadness are for the things that could’ve been and for how my Dad never found a way to deal with his anger. I will not carry that lack of self-awareness forward. I’m breaking that now.
