About My Dad

    In May of 1995, Dad turned suddenly when a co-worker called out to him from behind, and when he did, he passed out and fell down. They quickly took him to an emergency room of a nearby hospital and determined that he had blockages in his carotid arteries. While they were doing an MRI of his carotid arteries in his neck and head, which were mostly blocked, the MRI accidently showed them something unexpected... it picked up on a very large tumor in his brain.

    It was surgically removed, and after pathology identified it, he underwent chemotherapy and radiation for the primary tumors that were in his lungs. He actually had some remission, and did quite well for the better part of two years, however, it was not long before other tumors started appearing.

    I was living away then, and coming home regularly to see about him. When I came in early spring of 1997, I could tell he was much worse than he had been the previous Christmas. I took him to have a re-evaluation of his condition, and from the symptoms I described to the oncologist, he knew immediately to do another MRI of Dad's brain.

    The radiologist circled a dozen tumors, however, I could see that there were many many more. I told the oncologist I never wanted Dad in pain again, for the remainder of his life, and that I did not want him anxious or in fear, or nauseated. I then got him on home hospice care. He was kept very comfortable for the remainder of his life, which was about 4 months.

    I was his primary caregiver, with lots of help from my husband, my brother, one of my sisters and her husband who would "spell" us completely every Friday evening until Sunday evening. Another of my sisters would call me daily and no matter how dark my mood was or how bad things were going that day, she would make me laugh. She also would take me away as often as she could, to lunch or just to her place, just to relieve the stress of always being the caretaker; and did so for our other sister who helped looking after Dad as well.

    It was a difficult time, but also a time when my sisters, brother and I pulled together, along with my husband and my sister's husband. We kept our stress levels down as much as possible by laughing alot... making jokes about things that would not ordinarily be funny, and were sometimes downright morbid, but it kept us sane.

    Dad was an alcoholic, in denial until the day he died. People who are addicted to alcohol or other substances almost always refuse or resist medical care, as they are protecting their addiction and do not want to be "found out". If he had not been doing so, and had regular check ups, his cancer would have been found much much earlier, and he might have beaten it.

    Ironically, he supervised a maintenance crew at one of the biggest, most well known cancer hospitals in the country. He always said that if he ever got it, he would not go through the treatments, as he saw what that was like and believed the treatments to be worse than the alternative. I guess it is easy to say such things until you are actually standing in those shoes.

    I am the oldest of six children, I have four sisters and one brother. I was my father's "parent" child... at a very early age in my life, it became my responsibility to worry about the things he neglected because he was drunk or hungover; to entertain him when he came home drunk so that he wouldn't wake up my mother and cause an argument; to entertain him until he was drunk enough to pass out in order to keep him from insisting that my mother wake up which would inevitably cause a fight; to stand between them and try to keep the arguing from escalating when he did wake her up; to cook for him at all hours because he seldom showed up at dinner time; to nurse him through his hangovers.

    These arguments always had a familiar cadence to them. They started out with the name calling, moved on to each party loudly proclaiming to be the injured party and why; from there moved into the lack of money to support six kids, and ended with the awful inevitability of threats on the part of both parties to leave the other.

    As a child, I thought he was the "sun and the moon"; but I mostly thought that he was the only person standing between my siblings and myself and certain death at the hands of my mother. She became totally out of control and nearly beat us to death for any small offence, be it small or big. I lived my life in total fear of him and my mother splitting up, because I thought the only thing that actually kept her from killing one of us was that eventually he would show up at home and do a head count.

    During this time my mother, who had six children by the time she was twenty six years old, fell into a terrible depression. Normally, she was up before dawn and by the time we got out of bed, the house smelled of Clorox bleach and Lestoil and Pinesol and Tide laundry detergent. The house would be squeaky clean, there would be several loads of clothes hanging on the line, and she would be standing over the ironing board with piles of laundry waiting to be ironed and another pile already neatly ironed and folded. There was a high shelf over the kitchen sink where a radio sat, it would be playing country music.

    When she became overwhelmed with the hopelessness of things, and she fell into this depression, she spent about a year lying in bed. She slept too much, and when she was not asleep she was reading True Love magazines and barking orders at me to bring her a Coca Cola or cook her something to eat and bring it to her in bed; to feed the younger children, to sweep, mop, wash dishes, dry dishes, put dishes away, wipe off the table, give someone a bath, iron something, do something do something do something.

    We lived in a four room railroad flat apartment, but we only lived in three of those four rooms. The way my mother kept a roof over our heads and food in our bellies at that time was by sharing the apartment with the landlord, who had been born with cerebral palsy and contracted polio early in his childhood; he lived in the fourth room of the apartment, which would normally be the living room.

    I cleaned his room once a week, made his bed daily and packed him a cheeze and mustard sandwich sack lunch which he took with him to his job at Good Will Industries five days a week. He also took supper with us, and for these services, he paid my mother a small weekly sum of money, plus we lived there as part of the payment for taking care of him, rent free and without having to pay for electricity, gas or heating oil.

    It was not a "white picket fence" neighborhood, it was a part of town that had at one time been a residential neighborhood but had been mostly taken over by factories and bars. The street we lived on was a four lane major thoroughfare across the street from a railroad yard where during my very young childhood, the Barnum and Bailey circus used to load and unload onto trains when leaving for and returning from their tours around the country. The side street which intersected with the four lane was Rail Road avenue, and was one lane one way in each direction on either side of the railroad tracks which were in that area raised about ten feet off the ground. The main street we lived on passed under the railroad tracks through a small tunnel.

    My point about the location where we lived is that there was not much to do there for children, not a terribly safe area to play outdoors although we did sometimes, but mostly we stayed indoors, and in an apartment where we occupied three rooms, one of them being the kitchen and the other being our parents bedroom, that meant we spent long, dreary hours packed into one small bedroom which had one small window.

    We did not own a television, although the landlord did, and we were occassionally invited to watch with him, usually on Sunday nights, when he returned from visiting his aunt and cousin who picked him up on Friday evenings. We would sit in a row on the sofa and watch Lassie, followed by The Wonderful World of Disney, and before she became so depressed she could barely get out of bed, Mom would call us each one by one to come to the kitchen where she washed our hair in the double sink before the school week started on Monday. thinking about it now, I can smell Prell shampoo and Tame hair detangler.

    School was an altogether different kind of hell than my homelife. My father was Catholic, although he did not go to church, not to mass nor to confession, nor to any event that took place in church such as my first communion ceremony. He totally disregarded all the church rules such as the one about not eating meat on Friday, and basically was very scornful of the entire subject of church and God.

    My mother was raised Baptist, and looking back now I find it hard to understand why either of them were adament about sending us to Catholic school, and to church on Sunday, since neither of them attended.

    It was actually cruel and unusual punishment to send a child to Catholic school under such circumstances. The nuns were, for the most part, mean and abusive anyway, but they seemed to particularly delight in verbally punishing and humiliating me in front of the other children for my parents' "sins". The nuns also seemed to think it was sinful to be poor. They firmly believed in corporal punishment of all kinds, and spent a great deal of time whacking us around with rulers, yard sticks, and small wooden dowels with a ruber tip on one end and an eye ring on the other by which to hang it on the wall when they were not using it to point at the blackboard or to hit a child. They also spent a great deal of time and energy dragging us around by our ears and our hair. They actually were counter productive to their supposed purpose of educating children because when a nun was standing behind me with a stick, I could not think of the answer to any question... all I could think about was when was she going to hit me with that stick.

    I spent the greatest part of my time during those years trying to pray my parents' souls out of hell, and begging and bargaining with God, the Holy Mother, and all the saints and angels to try to keep my parents together and my family from breaking up. It was an obsession with me, the breaking up part especially, as I said earlier, I was afraid my mother would literally kill one of us if my father wasn't coming home occassionally.

    Besides the constant praying and bargaining, I did a lot of what I know now to be obsessive compulsive behaviors... avoiding the cracks in the sidewalks, counting objects as I walked to and from school, touching every lamp post, street sign and parking meter as I passed. My one pleasure in life at that time was that I loved to read, and was allowed to go to the library, usually on my way home from school or on a Saturday morning.

    Eventually I began having what I now recognize as panic attacks. At the time, I thought I was dying... suddenly felt as if I could not breathe, and as if I were having a heart attack because of the way my heart pounded so hard in my chest, I could feel it in my entire body. Anything could set it off... from the cloying smell of the incense in the small church attached to the school to the rythmic ticking of the large, industrial clock on the wall of the classroom.

    My first instinct when I had these attacks was to run for an open door or window, seeking air, but I was inevitably chased down by nuns, great abundances of material of their habits flapping as they chased me, making me think of large, fearsome birds. When they caught me, as of course they always did, all that material added to my feeling of smothering and caused me to struggle wildly to escape. I learned years later that they thought I was trying to fling myself from the classroom windows or down the church steps, and their determination to prevent this was as strong as mine was to escape.

    My odd behavior brought on a string of visits to doctors offices and a number of diagnoses, ranging from schizophrenia to the belief that I needed to be removed from my father because I worried excessively about his drinking habits. It was not the drinking I worried so much about as the possible results of the drinking, which I feared would be my parents splitting up.

    When I was eleven, my worse fears came true. My mother got enough of a grip on herself and her depression to get out of bed and go find herself a job. She went to work at Remington, assembly line work making ammunition, and saved enough money to buy seven bus tickets. This was even worse than I could have imagined... when I worried and prayed for them not to break up, I pictured her forbidding him to ever come home anymore. It was not until the last couple of weeks before the event took place that I realized she was taking us away from the only place we had ever lived in our entire lives.

    It took us three days and four nights to get from Bridgeport, Connecticut to Shreveport, Louisiana, where my mother was from and where her people still live. We arrived there on Halloween, and moved in with my mother's parents and her youngest brother, who thought we were "smart mouthed yankee brats" who needed to learn some manners and respect, which he taught us at every opportunity. He did this by slapping us in the face hard enough to knock us down if we "got smart mouthed", or if we forgot to say "m'am" or "sir", something we had not learned because it was not customary on the East Coast where we came from. To make matters worse, they were not happy to have us, and from arguments I overheard between my mother and her parents and brother, they seemed to think she should "get shed" of us, which I correctly guessed meant to "get rid" of us, as if we were a litter of unwanted puppies.

    It was uncustomarily cold in Shreveport that fall and winter. We moved over Christmas from the first cold, drafty house to a second one which was in a neighborhood more populated with other kids. Being Christmas time, those kids were out until all hours, playing with firecrackers and other loud fireworks. Fireworks were something I was used to seeing at the Fourth of July holiday, set off over the ocean at Seaside park. We could see them clearly from the back steps of our home in Bridgeport, but could barely hear the distant booms, it was nothing like what the neighborhood children were playing with constantly. To me, with the hostile atmosphere in the cold house, and the constant fireworks outside, I felt that I had been dropped into a war zone. The fireworks sounded like gunfire to me and it was all I could do to keep from taking cover whenever one went off close. I could not sleep at night for the sound of them. To make things worse, the people in the house next door had a dog tied to their front porch which barked incessently. I thought it ironic that we were told we had to be very quiet and not disturb the people in that house because the father of the family that lived there had just died. I wondered what kind of noise we could possibly make that would be more disturbing to them than the dog barking day and night as fireworks went off constantly.

    Over Easter vacation we moved again, this time to a house by ourselves, and a considerably better house than either of the ones we had lived in with my mother's relatives. For the first time in my life, I actually had my own room, a room at least as big as the one six of us had shared in Connecticut. The house was large and roomy, and more importantly, it was built solidly with insulated walls, unlike the wood shacks we had lived in with her relatives.

    Looking back now, I cannot imagine how she managed. I know my mother made only $55.00 a week, working at a factory that made childrens swingsets. I know this because we were so hungry by Friday evenings that the two and a half hours between the time I got out of school and she got out of work made enough of a difference for it to be worthwhile for me to walk to the factory after school and pick up her paycheck and cash it at the bank, then on to the grocery store to buy food.

    Before we left Connecticut, there was always meat on the table for supper. Sometimes hotdogs, sometimes meatloaf, sometimes chicken, always something. After moving to Louisiana we rarely saw meat... or cold cereal. We lived mostly on beans and rice, or peas and rice, pancakes, oatmeal and cornmeal mush, peanut butter and jelly. On Fridays we would have tuna sandwiches. I had never seen a dried pea or bean until we moved to Louisiana, and I could barely stomach them. I could get free lunches at school, but I could stand being hungry better than I could stand the terrible way teenagers treated those who were unfortunate enough to be impoverished. Almost as soon as we moved, I made a friend who sometimes invited me to stay for dinner at her house, and I did occassionally, but not too often, as I felt it was bad manners to eat at their house too often. That girl remains one of my best friends to this day, nearly 40 years later, as does another girl whom she introduced me to.

    My mother worked, I went to school, and cleaned the house, and did the laundry, and took care of five younger kids as best I could. A few years after we went to Louisiana, my father followed us there. He and my mother resumed their fighting and arguing, he continued to drink. I tell people that my parents spent about 15 years engaged in divorce.

    When I was 15 years old, I knew that my parents were again splitting up, and that plans were being made to put us into foster care. I could not imagine why, after all, I had managed to take care of the kids until then, and I was not about to allow myself to be incarcerated in some childrens' home. I eloped to escape my homelife. I thought that being married would make me legally an adult, and that I could then have my sisters and brother to take care of... after all, why would childrens' services put them in a home when they had me to take care of them? Very bad mistake. The boy I married came from a broken home where his father also drank... but his father physically abused his mother when he was drunk. His mother was a mean woman who went with us when we eloped and signed for him to get married... but apparently hated me because her son married me, and she was abusive to me in many ways although she never put her hands on me. It was not long before her son was physically abusing me as he had seen his father do to her. A year and a half after we were married, I had my son, and two years after that, found a way to escape from my abusive husband, but not until his mother, who helped him to keep me with him, was killed in a terrible car accident.

    I was later fortunate to marry a loving man who helped me raise my son, and who has never so much as raised his voice to me in all the years I have known him, including during a time when he and I separated and divorced.

    By my mid twenties, I thought my father was a weak, selfish, immature, extraordinarily self absorbed man. I grew tired of listening to his sad, repetitious drunken stories. Among those stories was one about how when I was about four years old, he took me with him to buy beer, and I asked for a doll I saw. He told me we could not afford the doll, and I asked him why we could afford beer. The gist of the story was not about feeling bad for me, not even about feeling bad that he bought beer instead of a toy for his child... it was about how sad it made him all the rest of his life because I did not understand why beer was important and a doll was not. He was so self absorbed that he thought I should feel bad about making him feel sad when I was four!

    I also grew exhausted from listening to him carry on about how my mother had wronged him, how he was the good guy and she was just unreasonable and left him for no good reason. He kept this up for many, many years after he was married to someone else, even when he was first diagnosed with a brain tumor and I came home to take care of him, he started in on this sad old song again, and as I had done on many occassions since I was about 18 years old, I told him I was sick of hearing about it, and asked him why he couldnt quit verbally beating me to death about my mother.

    When I came home to look after him before and after his brain surgery, after being away from him for several years, I found that the truth of who he was lay someplace in the middle of my childhood idealistic views and my later very cynical views of him.

    He was much braver than I had believed, and faced the unimaginable with courage, optimism and humor. He was also a coward who went running back to church after he nearly drove me to insanity as a child when he repeately scorned my frantic attempts to get him to go to church. He fought harder for his life and had more fortitude than I expected of him. He had told me many times he would never let the doctors "experiment" on him with their torturous cancer treatments, had even told me many times that if he ever got really sick, he was going to go out on the roof of one of the tall hosptial buildings in which he worked, jump off and "fly" one time, until he hit the ground.

    When I first got him on hospice care, he was happy for the medications that kept him very comfortable, but towards the end, he became anxious about them, and inquired often if I was "pushing him over the edge" with the meds. I always told him that I would never harm him, and not to worry. He would become anxious at night, and although I had some leeway in the amount of medication I could give him, when he wasn't sleeping, instead of poking yet more pills down him, I would put a cassette tape of Irish music in the stereo, and sit with him, holding his hand, as this seemed to relax him.

    For several weeks before he passed, he no longer knew who I was... he mistook me for one of my sisters, even when she and I were there together... by some strange glitch in his brain caused by the cancer, he thought we were both her. Whatever cell in his brain his knowlege of me lived in, had apparently been devoured by the cancer. I found some morbidly bitter humor in this, as everyone in the family called me his "favorite"... not one person in my life seemed to understand that having to be a parent to my drunken father all of my life had not been a "favor"... but a burden which robbed me of my childhood, and robbed me of any camaraderie with my siblings.

    My father lost his sight several weeks before he passed. It was as if his eyes could see, but his brain did not know it. A couple of nights before he left us, I was sitting by his bed, holding his hand in one of mine, and with my other hand, I was lightly tapping my fingers on the back of his hand in time to the music. I glanced over at him and was startled to see him looking at me, as if he was seeing me. I said "I'm dancing, Dad! I'm finger dancing on the back of your hand!" He said "I know! I like it!" This small incident is what I think of most when I think about my father now.

    ***** He passed a few days later, on September 1st, just between Princess Diana and Mother Teresa. I often wonder what he thought when he found himself standing in line at the gates of heaven between those two! : ) Dad was quite the conversationalist... he never met a stranger. He engaged everyone he met in conversation... the mail carrier, waitresses, store clerks, and people he passed on the street. I can just see him, talking a mile a minute to the good Sister and the Princess, as if he found himself in such company every day!