That thing where the guy you've been married to 40 years suddenly starts watching Fox news and embraces conspiracy theories. Was it in there the whole time? What was it doing until now? The Dad is complicated.
There is my pre- older brother's death dad and my post- older brother's death + aging dad. I don't know what is most real (they all are?) or the percentages and ratios of real. But there's a definite how it started versus how it went.
How it started. We were neither friends nor enemies. We were two people amongst six people in a house. After they divorced he was a monthly-or-so weekend visit.
The truth is I have no sense of my parents as parents. I recall no child rearing strategy at all. I don't recall being prepared for life in any way, or taught a single life skill. And then I had to go to college. I was vastly unprepared, how did I even get into one? Did I apply? I went. I was quickly lost. I'd scheduled classes at 7 a.m. I sat in lecture halls that were concert halls, a professor the size of a pea walking in from off stage, opening his notebook, reading for an hour, walking off, never once raising his head.
I'd gone to three junior high schools, and then four high schools in three years. We often moved in the middle of school years, we moved to different states and coasts. I got an A in Algebra 1 on one coast, walked into Algebra 2 on the other coast, and during the first day review of what we should have learned the previous year recognized none of it. I would soon be failing all my math and chemistry classes, and was so overwhelmed with being lost I would begin to fail all my classes. This is how I entered college, and lost came quickly. I discovered marijuana and then lots of it so that I would become unable to make my 7 a.m. class. I gave up on all my classes, I dropped out by default. I told no one and then the semester ended and now what?
I ended up 2,000 miles away in my father's one bedroom apartment. A veritable stranger with a small bachelor pad. I slept on the couch for a year or two. I got a job at the local grocery store, went into counseling, tried to put my life back together? Endeavored to cobble together a life. I commuted into the city (NY) and took some classes. He would get another job, I followed. A two bedroom rented house now, a yard. He was working now with a guy who had a nephew at the school I would eventually attend. The classes were small, the school manageable. I excelled. I would graduate cum laude. I would graduate on a graduate scholarship earned as an undergraduate. I would graduate with a final 4.0 semester (which always previously alluded me, there was always one B) - while also cleaning houses for work. I would move into NYC, get a job, carry on.
My father and I talked weekly, a habit begun when I moved into NY and which continued to the end of his life. I would come to understand had he not been there at that moment of lost I'd most likely not have made it. He saved me.
Then my brother died, but it's not that easy.
Much like my mother's sister, after their father's funeral, would declare my mother unfit and hated, there would be a similar moment late in life during a dinner with my father and his brother. "She ruined those children."
Grown, it would come to express itself as polite disregard; we weren't angry at each other, we just walked away. From it, from her, from each other. It was the only way we could maybe eke some crap modicum of life out of our lives. My oldest brother, it didn't destroy him. He got the worst of it, saw the worst of it and he prevailed. While we all sank or barely swam to varying degrees, he was the ideal my father would most be able to connect with: both graduates from the same ivy-league-like college, both executives at large companies. He married his college sweetheart, a relationship that would have gone the distance. He accomplished all the things my father held as his own measures of "success."
I did not know my brother. He was Other my whole life, I was never familiar with him. But in very different ways I am most like him. Meaning, I'm not a TOTAL loser. Of the four brothers, I'm the second most human. But the graph is like Brother number one plotted way up there, a massive distance ensues, and then me only slightly above the remaining three graph points. "the tallest of the pygmies" I believe is the phrase, if that is still OK to say. Also he left when I was 13. He stayed behind to graduate high school one move, as I would also do one move a few years later, saving me from my fifth high school. As an adult I made the conscious decision to leave him alone. All I could offer was the ghetto he'd so brilliantly escaped. I couldn't bring myself to be that selfish. I saw him some holidays. I idolized him from a silent distance.
How it went. Remarkably, there are things my father and all four sons share. We are all homebodies. We are all introverts, maybe not my younger brother. We live in our heads, we live internally. When my brother died my father retreated. And I could see his brain going at it, rehashing over and over the existential monstrosity of my brother's childhood, how this extraordinary kid got the burden of all that was thrust on him only to have been robbed the payoff - the luxury of actually living the life that is finally yours. I could see my father's guilt building. I could see the guilt become desperate, and more. This would be the unraveling of the man who saved me and I would unwittingly become the target of that unraveling to the end, our relationship forever redefined.
Suddenly, my father wanted the (remaining) family to be close, to be a "family," something we historically never were. Until this moment no one, including my father, had ever thought our polite distance an anomaly necessary to resolve. Now in our late fifties, early sixties, embedded in our lives - whatever they might be - my aging father wanted a different family.
There were three sons, now. Brother #2 is three years older than I, Brother #4 three years younger. (Brother #1 was 4 years older than I.) 2 is thoroughly unavailable beyond his own bottomless needs, 4 disappeared into the ether of his mother. I was still there. I maintained my weekly phone call and as he aged I stepped up the visitations. Because of this, all these things, my plot point on the graph, the burden of resolution to deliver a new family was placed on me. The burden of family realities he was so guilty about once placing on the shoulders of my brother he was now placing on me. And because I would not deliver - it was an undeliverable task - the resentment towards me thickened and bloomed.
There was a visit once, we were gathered at my father's, it must have been a particular birthday. My oldest brother is still alive, he is in remission. Relapse is not on our radar. I am sitting in the living room with my him and his wife and my father. Everyone else is otherwise occupied. I know I'm the slob in the room, I always do. One slob, three icons.
The reason I spent some time talking about how my college career started versus how it ended is this moment here. I own my past, I own the drugs, I own the fall. Also, I turned it around. That also is true. I did not go to the prestigious college my father and brother shared, and I never had a career or the ensuing WifeKidsHouse (thank god). While I would eventually leave school with more accomplishments than my esteemed brother, I knew it would never count in the same way.
But now I am in the room with my idols and my father decides this is the exact perfect time to bring up my failed college career. He reviews my series of failures, details, and then askes me, "I mean, what were you thinking?" Nothing I'd known about him up to this moment could have clued me that this moment could ever occur. From the start of his opted walk down memory lane, a slow burn of embarrassment, shame, humiliation, and heavy anger oozed. By the time he was done, by the time he really nailed it with ... was I supposed to actually answer that question? I did not. I managed to tersely-but-calmly squeak out something about how I also turned it around and preferred to focus on that. I quietly excused myself.
I don't know why this was necessary for him, but it was. I never forgave it or him for it. It would become something he would build on over the years, and it would accelerate after my brother died.
That he was angry at me for being the one who lived is too easy and also not a terrible thing. I'm angry it was that brother and not me, he was remarkable. The remaining brothers are clearly disposable. It was punishing me for it, increasingly, that would become difficult to endure, and holding me accountable to an impossible task. As with my mother there would be no witnesses, this would become, remain, my burden to carry alone.
The burden of acknowledging the effects of our childhood but still judging our lives as failures and then punishing us for those failures. I would see how he never told stories about our successes, how our handful of thirty-plus-year-old failures were recycled every gathering, the arc never evolving or growing up. I was fighting to survive the horror show of a childhood minus a single skill and my struggle was a punchline, over and over, paraded in front of the only people I cared about, rubbing my face in it. Yes, it should have been me over my brother to die, it would have been my only success.
In the end he was just a dying old man. I called him every week, it'd been years that I actually engaged with him. His relationship was with the narrative in his head, the actual me was incidental. I swallowed his burgeoning disappointment and downright meanness. I would eventually step up my visits to every few months, spending thousands of dollars a year I did not have, to sit by his bed and keep him company. I was never short with him, never impatient or disagreeable. My last conversation with him he was confused and difficult to understand. He kept saying, slurring, over and over, "Who told you?" I'm not sure to what he was referring. I got the phone call two days later at 3 a.m. His service was Father's Day. I went, I came home, I never talked about him again.
