Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for my Father

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#16<br>There’s a certain meditation that’s supposed to teach you compassion. I believe it comes from the Buddhists, though I am not enough of an expert to say. You take four people — yourself; someone you love; someone you don’t know; someone you dislike — and you make the same four wishes for them all, over and over. Happiness, safety, health, peace. The way I say it is:<br>[PERSON] deserves to be safe.<br>[PERSON] deserves good mental health.<br>[PERSON] deserves good physical health.<br>[PERSON] deserves to accept themselves as they are.<br>I don’t say “happy,” because no-one is happy all the time, and I don’t say “peace,” because more than once I have heard people wishing for someone to “be at peace” as a passive-aggressive way of hoping they’ll go away or die. I say “deserves,” because it foregrounds justice. Even if I hate you, I can admit that you don’t deserve cancer, you don’t deserve to be hate-crimed, you don’t deserve dysphoria or depression or self-loathing. You deserve to be a basically healthy and well-adjusted person, and hey, if you were, you probably wouldn’t be a jerk.<br>This practice doesn’t force you to like people. It equalizes them. It helps you to see that the person you love and the person you hate and the stranger are all just people, same as you are, and that all people deserve sympathy, because life is hard.<br>Well: I do this a lot, every day if I’m having a problem with somebody, but in all the years I’ve been doing it, I never tried including my father. I couldn’t hold us both on the same plane — if I loved him, I would have to hate myself, and vice versa. I would have to decide if my father was someone I loved or someone I hated or a stranger, when really, he was all three.<br>I did do it for him eventually. But we’ll get there. We have time.<br>#15<br>My father died in a hotel room, having been evicted from every apartment he ever had, and fired from every job he ever had, and having alienated every single person he might stay with. It took the management a while to realize that he wasn’t coming out of his room, and it took a while for the police to locate anyone who knew him.<br>He was one of eight children, and those children are close to each other — his mother, who he told me was either dead or permanently institutionalized, in fact lived to age 95 and went to live with his sister when she couldn’t work — but he cut them all off. He had two children; I stopped seeing him when I was sixteen, after a failed intervention. My brother held on longer, but he got to a point where he needed a full team of therapists to keep him together, and each and every one of those therapists told my mother that there was no chance of my brother being remotely mentally healthy as long as he was still in contact with Dad.<br>My mother was the last person to speak to him, because he actually never stopped calling her up to scream at her. Every time he hit a rough patch, he would wheel around and try to make himself feel better by beating up on Mom, and she could have blocked his number, but she didn’t, and I don’t know why. She tells me that in their last conversation, he told her that everything was her fault — that he had gotten fired again, that his kids wouldn’t talk to him, that he had ended up this way, alone, with nothing.<br>I said, ‘we haven’t been married for thirty-five years,’ my mother told me, ‘there’s no way any of this could be my fault.’ And he said, ‘oh, yes it is,’ and he called me a bunch of names and hung up.<br>One of the problems he had, in the last years, was white matter disease, which can lead to vascular dementia. It had a relatively early onset, probably because of the drugs. Most of his health problems were because of drugs. When I was eleven he had a “nosebleed” that put him in the hospital for weeks, and he nearly died, and he told us all a story about how as a young lad he had a misadventure and fell face-first into a pit, but the pit was metaphorical, as it turns out, because what the nurse told my mother was that he did so much coke that his nose caved in.<br>So it was hard to tell how bad the dementia was, because of the drugs, because he was incoherent most of the time so how would a degenerative brain disease even register, but when she told him the divorce was thirty-five years ago, it might have come as a surprise. Maybe he thought that he still knew us, that he still had a chance with us. Maybe that’s why he called.<br>#14<br>In the days after I found out, I would do something ordinary — cook a meal, or work out, or kiss my husband — and I would think this is the first meal I’ve eaten since my Dad died. It was a sad, eerie sort of feeling. So then I’d try to cheer myself up: You don’t know for sure that it’s the first time! I would tell myself. It might have taken weeks to find him!<br>Well. That didn’t really work. The day I got the call, I had been writing about Valerie Solanas — about second-wave feminists, really, and how so...