Father

Why do you want to write about your father?

First, let me say that I simply seem to. You obviously want explanations, I assume to judge the wisdom or even morality of them, or my character as illuminated by them. I cannot tell if that’s overbearing on your part, but I do know that I am having trouble introspecting about this, and the concrete fact that I want to write about him stands alone in my mind, and although it’s unsupported by arguments or ideas, it’s almost starker and looms larger because of that.

And in fact, I don’t even want to try to talk about reasons. I will be unable to avoid the language of therapy, which should already be passé and therefore is even now leaden: cliches of jargon, unsound and repudiated metaphors all palpably on their way to being discarded. The word “toxic” will sound like the word “groovy.” My father would’ve liked this rant!

Why?

I think my father and I shared a tendency towards eternalism. In his case, I think this is because the eternalist view is both largely true —every deluded era really falls for the same things; somehow, nothing changes— and because it is under-attended to. There is profit of various kinds to be had in pretending the present is unique or novel, and we flatter ourselves to think we are different than our ancestors; it is the youthful narcissism of the now. Our societies are adolescent; our politics is adolescent psychodrama, all about who we are. Psychology, as a field, exemplifies these tendencies: every generation develops new language to call some things “bad” and some things “good,” develops devastating critiques of the prior generation’s theories and verbiage, and sleepwalks in its implicit (and usually insufficient) psychological paradigm, unable to discern its arbitrarity. It’s fashion that thinks it’s physics. I think he’d have agreed with that, although he’d have insisted on noting that psychiatrists had saved my life and the life of my mother several times over. What can I say?

Did you agree on a lot of things?

I gather this is somewhat common: when I was young, no, and we fought bitterly; I was often disrespectful and pursued ad hominem lines in our debates. I suspected those who differed from me, particularly on questions culture had informed me were beyond discussion, of being immoral or stupid, and I sometimes treated him thus. As I got older, I agreed with him or understood him on more and more issues. By the end, I’m not sure I could tell you many things we disagreed about.

On most of these points, I changed. And as with most people, in changing I felt I was becoming truer to myself. For example, if I had opinion A because of a value that “I want to minimize harm to the innocent,” I came over time to agree with him that opinion C reflected a sounder analysis of and set of predictions about the matter; that is, I didn’t vary my values significantly, but where they led changed as I learned about the world, and I came to think he’d done a very good job of thinking it all through. I cannot imagine how he tolerated me in my youth.

Were you close?

I think so. My family is somewhat cold, or rather: we are warmest to strangers, coldest to one another. My father was intellectual and “in his head” most of the time, an unselfconsciously deep man concerned with deep things that didn’t make for small talk. He kept to himself to a remarkable degree, although he was always breezy in interactions. I find his inner life impossible to imagine, although we talked very often and at length. But we talked about ideas, developments in the news, philosophy and literature; interwoven in these things were some personal reflections and stories, but he had no confessional impulses I was aware of and didn’t attempt to exteriorize himself in any way. I often feel like an unstable system which needs to release or unburden itself onto others (or into writing); I think he was self-contained, psychologically homeostatic.

Didn’t he kill himself?

Well, yes. In his last years, he was no longer in equilibrium. He was very concerned about aging past the point at which he could accurately assess his quality of life. He found decay extremely unpleasant. But more than these things, he had developed a dependence on benzodiazepines, prescribed to him by a general practitioner for insomnia. After a few years, as often happens with these drugs, his natural anxiety had skyrocketed due to constant, unsustainable chemical suppression and he needed a very high dose not to be overcome by truly physical symptoms of panic, as well as black despair and fear. He couldn’t sleep; he couldn’t think well or focus, and had “the zaps,” and he was unwilling —in his mind, unable— to endure quitting. And anyway, he didn’t think there was much time left for him before his decline was intolerable.

Was he right?

As I told him, it wasn’t my assessment to make. I shared my opinion: that he could indeed recover and would likely have several years of excellent function ahead of him. He thought I was being Panglossian. He may have been right, or he may have been in the grips of an addict’s despair. I’ll never know, never, never. We talked about it all a lot, and corresponded at length about it. I did what I could. He shot himself last year. He’d always been by far the least troubled member of the family.

Well, what do you want to say about him?

What I want to do is beyond my capacity. Ideally, I’d write a portrait of the man. I value little more highly than art or writing that apprehends an individual, and I’d love to write about him if I could really write about him, and very well. Instead, I can only write about myself, or write a performance of a self, as his memory orbits around me: my inescapable self-centeredness is the last way I fail him, I think. Maybe someday I’ll get it together, grow up. He was interesting. He was very mild, but he had a touch of the macho in him: he was capable, for example, of getting into a fistfight as an adult with a colleague who called him an asshole. Still, he liked to quote Logan Pearsall Smith: “People say life’s the thing, but I prefer reading.” And he did. Near the end, he told me he couldn’t read anymore; by the time he reached the bottom of a paragraph, he’d forgotten the top. He attributed this to senility, I to the drugs, and we agreed to disagree. But I knew it wouldn’t be long then.

Was he an asshole?

Certainly not. He was almost always quite nice and polite. He did have something I don’t quite know how to name; my mother used to say it was a “Teutonic” disposition —she grew up in Germany and did not care for the German sense of humor— but I think of it as having something to do with amusement. My father was amused in confrontations. He had a tendency to smirk, especially when interactions were heated. I think he probably struck many people as someone who felt himself superior, although I never saw or heard anything to suggest he did. But he looked like he did. And because he didn’t need people —wasn’t grasping like me— and was confident in his judgments —not insane and therefore self-doubting, like me— he wasn’t at all concerned with how he came off in such moments. If anything, I think, he enjoyed being able to get under the skin of e.g. police officers or administrators.

He wasn’t angry or uncaring or selfish or rude or mean, but his smirk was absolutely outrageous. Something my mother particularly tired of was his rather preppy sense of humor: he enjoyed ribbing people the way that fraternity brothers do. I will never forget his fondness for saying, after I’d ranted about someone I disliked, “Gosh Mills, would you say you hate them,” a joke predicated on his observation that I said I hated people with ludicrous frequency. I think he found me a little ridiculous. I was, and anyway he made me laugh. He was very funny; people would refer to him as “a wit.”

What else?

When I was a young boy, we’d go to the beach in Mississippi and would stay in Bay St. Louis. In the afternoon, we would eat Popeye’s and he and my mom would drink beer and doze, while my sister and I waded out hundreds of yards from the shore in the shallow, warm Gulf water, atop a dredged, nearly-flat seafloor. You could go so far that you couldn’t make out people on the beach behind you, but the water would only come up to your knees. My memories of these trips are now dream-like, and I don’t attend to them often; but I should, because I think they were happy times.

There was a streetlamp across the way from us that I said seemed to have a face, and for a long time after he’d tell me stories at night about it; in these stories, the streetlamp and I had various adventures together, a concept I now find amusingly original. I remember one in which I was journeying to the center of the earth through a deep hole I found in the lawn —probably an idea he got from my habit of digging foxholes wherever I could— and I encountered monsters or demons of some kind; I was about to be overwhelmed by them when the streetlamp arrived and pulverized them, hammering them down one by one, just in time.

It’s very hard for me to imagine the father I knew devising surreal stories for a young boy; the man I came to know was on the other side of something in his life that made him quite different, less playful, more fundamentally adult. Maybe he simply got older, or the many tragedies and tribulations of our family changed him in some way. His brother died in 1986; I know it affected him gravely. Recalling this era of our family is difficult for me; as I remember it, we were very happy and innocent, whereas just a few years later —certainly by the time I was 12 or 13— we were neither happy nor innocent, and I suppose I have to admit we perhaps never were again. I don’t know.

Did you all just grow up?

I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I’m hung up on: I don’t know. I still cannot see my parents clearly; I still don’t understand our life together. One of them is dead and I realize that not only do I not understand it, I will only understand it less from now on; witnesses are disappearing. One’s family is possibly the best place for learning epistemic humility, if one rejects cheap, contemporary, readymade nonsense like Freudianism and instead —after attending to the details and the shifts, the densities and the spaces and finding no stable purchase amidst the memories and sensations— admits defeat. The more I examine it, the less I can say about it. No one knows what life is about.

We used to go out to eat a fair amount. My parents had moved to New Orleans from Texas, and loved New Orleans, all of Louisiana, and Mississippi a great deal. I think now that they liked being the sort of people who had off-the-beaten-path favorites, knew strange or interesting or hyper-local haunts (a different matter before the Internet). When he’d drive us to some crab shack, my father would place his pre-dinner cocktail on the dashboard. It was a very different time. There was a catfish joint we used to frequent that had unpainted wooden walls adorned with fishing equipment; there was Liuzza’s, where he salted his beer and the urinals were full of ice; there were barbecue stands along rural highways where he seemed to know how to talk to the large men who worked the grills, whatever their background, but unlike my mother he didn’t endeavor to become friends with them, or anyone else.

Since he died, I rifle through these kinds of memories as though searching for something unspecified; I want to consult the archives; I want to know what I had, what I lost. In many memories, especially from childhood, I cannot really see him; I knew him very well as an old man, but not so well in his prime. It feels like there’s something missing in the record. It’s probably that he is missing —dead— and I too am missing: aging, forgetting, fading.

Do you think more about death now?

No, nor am I haunted by any horror of his methodology or his mortal remains. My mother found him and said he looked peaceful. The police took the gun and the note, lost the note, and tried to give the gun back to my mother, who of course didn’t want it. The manner and details of his death seem incidental to me in comparison to the main facts of his suffering and his absence, both of which are much more painful to reflect on.

Are you angry at him?

Oh, I’m sure. But I don’t care. I don’t care what experts say about stages of grief, or about “confronting” or “closure” or anything else. I don’t want to subordinate my experiences to systems of interpretation; they can keep their concepts to themselves. He warned me that I’d feel guilty, not only because of his suicide but because “all children feel guilt when their parents die,” feel they should’ve spent more time together, should’ve been better to one another, etc. He told me this was unavoidable, but he asked me to remember whenever I felt guilt that he didn’t want me to. And I do, and it helps. I think it was a beautiful gift. He was very thoughtful at the end.

The same principle applies to anger, I think. If I feel angry that he left before he could know my daughter, I imagine that he’d agree that it was a shame and would say the things I’d want to hear; he would. What is there to be angry at? This is the so-called human condition; this is what it is. I want to be equal to it as he was mostly equal to life; indeed I want to exceed him and be equal to life to the end. I don’t know why except that I think he’d be proud of me if I did.

Was he proud of you?

He was. I could tell, and he told me, especially at the end. He thought I was free in ways he wasn’t, which must have been true, but I could never see him as anything than extraordinarily agential; he ordered my world, to an extent, and so I assumed he ordered his. I’m 42 now, and I know that we don’t order our worlds, any of us. I came to this sort of knowledge earlier than he did in his life, and thanks largely to him. My mother taught me to love people and life; my father taught me to love knowledge, wisdom, and the arts (and to respect the affective spaces that arts operated in as co-equal with the spaces that e.g. science operates in). He was educated, but most of his personal culture resulted from his auto-didactic habits. He read voraciously and constantly and widely, from any canon and often systematically; when he retired, he went back to school to study more. I found him exceedingly rational; I think I took his mind for granted, but I did learn a great deal, and especially from arguing with him. He had a knack for revealing the groundlessness of my claims that I found infuriating, because I didn’t need evidence at that age to feel I knew certain things. He was a very smart man, and he used his intelligence usefully, in my opinion, on the liberal arts. I surely learned to do the same from him.

But I don’t think he was proud of me for any of that, particularly; it’s strange, but in some ways, I think he was proudest of my luck. I’m a very lucky person, and he found that totally delightful. Maybe when you’re old, it’s clear that given the impossibility of ordering our worlds or the world, luck is really lovely.

Do you miss him?

I do. I talk to him in my head all the time. Occasionally it’s quite unbearable, hollows me out, seems to break something inside me that much depended on. At other times it feels like some variation on phantom limb syndrome, as though when someone is a structural component of your self, you simply will not stop sending signals back and forth, feeling their presence, relating to them. I’ll confess that sometimes the intensity of the feelings it catalyzes is almost thrilling; thinking about my father feels like touching the void; it feels as though I could “fall in” somehow, perhaps die myself merely by immersing too deeply in his death. Sometimes this has a very visual quality: I will imagine him at his desk that morning and feel as though I’m falling into his mouth, hearing a scream or a gunshot as everything turns black.

Much more commonly it is just flatly sad: simple sadness, still so acute when it comes. One really forgets as one ages that simple, powerless sadness, uncomplicated by reason or restraint or resentment.

Do you have any advice for others going through this?

No, none at all.

Bay St. Lous, sometime between 1983 and 1985.