TheBanyanTree: It's Over

[Linda DeMerle]

We were at the state fair on Saturday, when my phone began ringing. It was my brother, Martin.  Kevin asks,

“What does he want?”

I suppose I could have told him had I answered the phone in time. I called him back, cautiously, since contact from him usually results in my being expected to do something I’d rather et glass than do, but I did and there was no answer. I had a feeling. Hm.

Once home, I did the unthinkable and pulled down the menu on my smart and sassy phone to see that he had called again, but even more surprising, so had my brother, Don. Okay. It’s going on.

Don, first. He is the one I am closest to, he is the sensitive and sardonic one with a rich gallows humor that gets me. Calling Don back confirmed my suspicion. Dad, their father and my stepfather since I was about 2, had died.

Don and I were and are noticeably calm and unemotional. Kevin says,

“Is is sort of like closing the book on a long agonizing story you’d rather be over?”

Something like that. We didn’t say much, Don and I, we both already know how the other thinks and has felt all the way to our darkest corners about Dad.  My sister-in-law, Mary, has told me that I am the only one he talks to about these kinds of things. Probably because we understand one another, our experience turned out to be far more similar than I could ever guess, where our siblings, Martin and Joan, got a different Dad. Over the past 20+ years, Marty got relegated to the redheaded stepchild table, also, but after Dad’s second wife died a few years ago, he decided he was going to be in Dad’s life whether Dad wanted it or not. Dad didn’t want it and did what he could to hurt and dishearten Marty, but, Marty took it like a grown man with an infantile father and was even feeding him on his last day. It was then he discovered that Dad hadn’t been eating, drinking, taking meds properly or answered his phone for his follow ups from last month’s trip to the ER where he was diagnosed with work-related cystic fibrosis and.

This week was 25 years since our mother died. It’s been on my mind…25 years on August 25th…maybe it was on his, too.  Marty says, no, Dad was just thinking he was “beating the system,” once again and this time it backfired.  They got him to the ER by ambulance, got him into bed, changed IV’d up and he was gone.

I feel pretty detached, having not been a part of his new family for much of the past 23 years. He remarried and gained 3 adult children while he proceeded to either ignore or insult his own until most of us just gave up and went away, raising our kids without grandparents. We also raised our kids without the terror or a drunken, cruel patriarch and so all of the lonely holidays turned out to be something different…a sacrifice to pretending that everything was okay while he fawned over his new family and pointed his crooked, smashed finger at the rest of us with one hand and whiskey in the other. Backing me, a grown woman, married, with children, into a corner with his fist. Wrestling a three-year old to the floor and slamming their head onto it, followed by explaining to me his philosophy of discipline through the door I locked him out of.  Taunting a a child was he scooped ice cream from a five gallon tub.

“You want this ice cream? You can’t have any of this ice cream. This is grandma’s ice cream.”

My mother had begun to protest and try to reason with him.  Me? 

"I hope it makes you feel like a man to deny ice-cream to a three year old, because it’s the closest you are ever going to get.”

I wasn’t afraid of his fists, anymore. I was a mother, damn it, and if there is anything brings out the car-lifting adrenaline of a mother, it is a threat to her child.

So, it’s over. I am not going to calling hours because I am not very interested in hearing people who don’t know the real him talk about what a cool “man’s man” they think he is, as a cousin likes to put it. I have no interest in being scolded by people he’d delivered a sob story to about how he never sees his children. 

I’d told my husband that if they decided to pull out all of the stops and give him a Catholic Mass, as they did for his previous wife, I was not going to sit in the little mission church of my childhood where I sat with God on Sundays and then went him to his brutality and listen to lovely eulogies after all he had done to my mother. That’s been decided against, so I can manage the whose-whatsit that’ll go on at the funeral home. 

My brothers are removed and enraged, respectively. I’m at peace that it is over.

LL