So. Adulthood has now arrived.
The old joke goes "An adult is someone whose parents are dead."
That would be me, now.
I got word about 40 minutes back that my father had quietly died in his sleep.
This was not AS much of a surprise as it might've been otherwise; about 2 days ago before he was released from the hospital to go back to the rehab facility where he had been staying, I talked with his doctor. He told me that they had managed to diagnose a narrowed ventricle in my father's heart, which COULD be fixed, except that was not an option (due to the pre-existing "No Extreme Care"-policy in place which my father had long ago agreed to, plus the fact that he was almost 82 and his Parkinson's was beginning to really hammer him)....
So, he's gone.
That's it.
And even though I hadn't thought of it in that way, the last time I saw him almost 2 weeks ago WAS really the last time I would ever see him. In that respect, he died knowing his kids were taking care of his affairs. In some ways, now that I think on it, the fact we came down there and handled as much as we handled almost gave him permission to let go.
Now comes the work on both my part and my sister's part of dealing with all the "closing" paperwork - for those of you who've had to go through it, you know what I mean. Luckily, there is only a small, small fraction of 'stuff' that we will need to take out of his apartment - just a few family heirlooms. Everything else (clothing, furniture, and the like) can be given to charity, because neither of his kids have any use for it, nor do we want it, either.
Without going into too much of a War-&-Peace-length story of my relationship with my father, let me say that I did respect him for everything he managed to accomplish in his life - being a WW2 vet, getting a degree from college, starting a family, keeping us all fed, clothed, and housed during some pretty scary, momentous times of upheaval and uncertainty here in this country (i.e., the uproar that was pretty much the entire decade of the 60s through the late 70s, with the economy going all over the place, the race riots over the hill from us [more or less] in Watts, and all the rest of the weirdness that went on then). We never really lacked for much in a tangible sense - he saw to that.
Where I 'parted company' with him (so to speak) was with his parenting style: basically, he ruled the household like an 18th-century paterfamilias: children and wives were to be seen but not heard, and his rule WAS The Law. He recycled much of his own upbringing, although he was not as cruel as his father must have been with his own children, nor was he a closet alcoholic like his own father. He never beat my sister, because she was his only daughter and daughters were NOT to be as much as swatted. I, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky. Let's just say I had enough beatings (for my real or imagined sins) by the time I was 12 to last several lifetimes.
The end result was, I respected him, but I did not really love him -
he beat that out of me by the time I was an adolescent.
He never really understood me, either - I was always the quiet, more-interested-in-learning-stuff-on-my-own kind of kid; beyond being a runner in junior high and high school, I never had much interest in athletics or sports. The older I got, the less we were able to talk about anything because we really had so little in common.
Am I sad?
Hmm.
Well, in one way, yes -
sad that he was never able to overcome his crippling sense of his own shortcomings (real or imagined - plus, he had a nasty case of Short Man Syndrome, which didn't help matters: at his tallest I doubt he was taller than 5 foot 3). His inability to really express his inner feelings without fear of retribution or ridicule really limited his interaction with almost everyone he came into contact with throughout his adult life. Both he and my mother gave up any thought of having a career in music after they got married (they both could sing very well and play instruments, too), in order to pursue the 50s-era American Way Of Life:
2 kids, a house, a mortgage, and all that went with it.
Unfortunately, my father became almost pathologically cheap the more he went through his married life - so cheap, in fact, that my sister ended up having to pay for her own braces and jaw surgery/dental work because HE didn't see the need for it and it was (of course) too expensive. Well, gee - if he HAD taken care of it when she was a teenager, it would've cost barely $1,000 bucks, and solved much of her jaw problems before they had a chance to get started. But ohhhhh noooooo, HE didn't see any reason for it and besides, it was too expensive. We also almost died of heat-stroke coming back through the Arizona Painted Desert one summer vacation because we did NOT have any air-conditioning in the car - needless to say, his wife and kids refused to go on vacation the next summer UNLESS the car was air-conditioned, so he grumbled a lot but finally parted with the extra $100 bucks to have A/C in the next car he leased.
I could go on with many other stories about how cheap and miserly he was (with no real reason behind it), but..... nah. You get the picture.
In another way, I'm actually still angry, to an extent, with both of them -
angry because sublimation was the name of their game, and in the end, they had nothing to show for themselves beyond the most common of accomplishments. Tthey never managed to develop their own selves and abilities due to whatever sick and twisted hell their own childhoods put them through, and grew up with a carefully concealed sense of having little to no self-worth. They feared so much in this world that they did their level best to instill that fear into their children, and were thus totally confused when those children rejected fear and went about their own lives, accomplishing a lot in spite of all the stumbling-blocks they (our parents) had put in their way.
Like I wrote after my mother died, so it is with my father.
He is now no longer in any pain, no longer confused, and finally done with his anger.
Whether he is truly "at rest", no one is able to say.
Ave, Atque, Avatque.
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