Losing My Father

My father passed away on Saturday, August 24th at 9:24 p.m. from cardiac arrest that followed multiple organ failure that followed an off the charts sugar count that followed willingly untreated diabetes. Zooming out far enough, my Dad was felled by the same disease that vanquishes many an old man from the old world, stubbornness. If I am being completely honest – and I don’t know why I am being completely honest with you, lovely strangers, reading this for whatever reason – a part of me thinks that he wanted to go. Why else would he refuse to treat an illness he knew he had? This is hard to comprehend for us, health obsessed Americans weaned on the cult of toxic positivity. Why toxic? Because behind positivity lurks fear. Fear of the gruesome and inevitable facts of life. We like to blame those who don’t take care of themselves. It is no-brainer to us, and a must, that one should. But, really, why should one? A part of me thinks that perhaps my Dad was tired of life, the monotonous, boring, one-dimensional life of a man who gave up his promising career in Belarus so his children could have a better life in America; who never was able to master the new language, and who for over three decades confined himself to a square mile or two of a Russian-Jewish ghetto of Brooklyn from which Manhattan and Mars were equidistant.

My Dad was sweet, kind, and distant at the same time. When you were in his presence he was engaged, but as soon as the door closed behind you he was out. No phone calls, no messages. A true Soviet issue male who largely lived in his head. I knew my Dad and at the same time I did not know him. I knew his temperament but not his thoughts. I knew his history only in piecemeal stories of petty thieves, communal apartments, and that time he came close to bionetting an antisemitic bully in the army. His own parents passed when he was young, a child of World War ll. What he went through, I cannot fathom and he would not let me. 

And did he know me? Somewhat, the way a parent knows their child. But on some level I, too, might have as well lived on Mars. I am not complaining here, and I have no regrets. It is what it is. I’ve always loved my Dad, and I still do. I’ve made my peace with being misunderstood years ago, when I read what the literary critic Harold Bloom told the Paris Review interviewer about his own parents, “They were Eastern European Jews with necessarily narrow views.” Amen.

In any case, this essay is less about my Dad and more about grief. Writing is cathartic, an attempt to manifest a beach from a handful of sand. I am writing this after the mandatory Jewish tradition of a seven day grief period I called My Own Private Shiva has ended. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all people are happy in the same way, but all grieve differently. That is because grief is a deeply private affair. Even when you grieve together, you grieve alone, just next to each other. There is nothing wrong with that either. It is simply that your thoughts are your own and they race through your head with such speed and ferocity that to share them is beyond exhausting. The good thing about grief is that it lets you be comfortable with your emotions. It also gives you a new level of understanding Leonard Cohen.

Grief does unite a family, and that has been heartening. I remember watching Inside Out with my then-11-year-old daughter, who, as a consummate American child, could not understand why a person needs sadness. She understands now. Because sadness feeds empathy and brings people closer together. We Jews have laid a special claim to sadness, which I don’t think is fair to other peoples. And yet, there is history, etc…

Grief reminds me of my husky, who is technically a dog, but who is more like half-cat half-racoon, who comes and goes as she pleases, and who mostly makes demands on you when she is hungry. But when she does make the demand, there is no stopping her. You can command her to sit til the cows come home; her mind is a fully loaded freight train with failed brakes. And so grief comes and goes these days as it pleases; in the shower, during a meal, in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of a song. Music is truly a godsend and has been with me through my grief like an old friend. And grief is a reminder that I have friends, true friends, starting with my wife.

Last, but not least. Death really makes you feel how silly, in perspective, most of our lives are on the daily. Our petty squabbles, petty grievances, petty fights, the nuisance that our emotions are. I will end with a cliche – apologies – but given the circumstances, dare I say, only love truly matters. It just takes two to understand this, which most of the time seems like a nearly impossible task. My Dad understood. One could hardly ask for more. R.I.P.