My dad is dying. He has stage 4 lung cancer, it may even be stage 5 by now. He's at the "make him comfortable with pain medications" stage, whichever one that is. My mother is in denial (she is the queen, after all), my brother is spending up their money, getting his inheritance now before someone else (aka me) gets it. It's fucked up. Like really fucked up.
And I'm conflicted. Actually, that's about as 80's understatement as it gets. I'm supposed to be feeling pain, mourning the inevitable loss, holding my mother's hand. Instead, I've visited twice, I've helped a few times with doctor's appointments and various tests and scans.... I know I should do more to be the "good daughter" but I can't move past my childhood. I should be the bigger person, but I just can't. I'm weak. And I don't want to give them the satisfaction of seeing me hurt. I promised myself when I was 16 that I would never ever let them get to me again. It's like his dying of cancer is his last revenge, his last way to get to me. I know that's not it, but it feels that way.
When I was a kid, my father was miserable. He worked for the government and every day, day after week after month after miserable year, with enormous resentment emanating from his core being, he went to work to support his family. To support me. Ours is the classic dysfunctional family and I'm "it". I'm the martyr. I'm the Jesus, made to suffer for their sins, to absolve them of their own failings. Everything was, and still is, my fault.
So as I watch my father dying, from a safe distance, I, too, am trudging along through life. Something I always swore I'd never do, yet here I am. Day after week after month after miserable year. And it makes me panic. I see my father at the end of his life, sitting on the same couch he's been sitting on for the past 20 years, watching the same reruns he's watched since I was a kid... and all I can think about is, I don't want the end of my life to be like that. My heart breaks for him and for all the things he never did, because he chose not to do them. Like hug his daughter. His loss.
And I'm still conflicted. I feel sorry for him. And I feel compassion. Despite his nasty, grumblings and his name calling and the bitter resentment he has towards me because, I'm sure, his cancer is also my fault... I see this frail, broken man, who was frail and broken even before I came along, withering away. Slowly disappearing before my eyes. I see the panic in my mother's eyes as she loses her partner of 50 years. I see the selfish, greedy side of my brother growing with intensity as he watches his father dying, and I know it's how he's coping. It's our family motto... money solves everything.
I want to be angry, I want to blame, I want to detach and say, "well, old man, you did it to yourself". And I can't. The compassion in me is overriding the anger, and I hate it. I want to be angry, he doesn't deserve my compassion. They don't deserve my compassion. Yet something inside me won't let me be any other way.
My father told me one time, in a fleeting moment of very slight bonding, that his favorite song was "Eleanor Rigby" by the Beatles. I've always been a Beatles fan, and when he said that to me, I got it. The way he treated me wasn't his fault. He had been abused. He wasn't equipped to love his family. So as a child, even though I was suffering my own misery, I had compassion for him. I should have been too young to understand, but I still did. It was probably the only thing he and I had in common.
I know I'll never get an apology. I'll never have that moment with him, as he's on his death bed clinging to his last life, where he turns to me and says those words. It's just not going to happen. And I really am OK with that. He was the adult and I was the child, he could have chosen to be different but he didn't. And I can't blame him for that. He did the best he could.
Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles:
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near
Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there
What does he care?
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved
All the lonely people (Ah, look at all the lonely people)
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people (Ah, look at all the lonely people)
Where do they all belong?
