My father's going to die soon. He's in hospice, and has been for over a week, and the nurses who are working with him constantly say that he may not make it through another night. They've been saying this for over a week, of course. The difficult part of this situation for me is watching it and not having too many feelings about it. After all, my father has always been a mean, abusive alcoholic, and while many people would say, "Yes, but he's still your father," this simple fact of biology can't do anything to change the ways that I think of the man. The fact of the matter is that I can't remember many times at all when he actually acted as a father. Instead of encouragement, he gave criticism and condemnation. Instead of support, he provided neglect. Instead of closeness and intimacy, he remained constantly aloof.
And of course, the alcoholism exacerbated all of these problems and turned our childhoods into nightmares. I really don't want to go into the kinds of things that used to happen, but suffice it to say that I often wonder nowadays what my life might have been like if I had grown up with loving, nurturing parents instead of having to find my own ways through life from a very early age.
My goal here isn't to criticize and condemn. Rather, it's important for me to look at the situation objectively so that I can understand why I have no deep feeling of loss when I think of my father passing on. When he dies, he'll be gone, and I'll be left with a vast number of memories that aren't pleasant at all, and very few memories that bring forth positive emotions.
And that's okay. I really don't want to be one of those people who would support someone come hell or high water no matter what kinds of awful things that person does. I don't want to be a person who speaks at a funeral and tells others that this is a great loss and that he was a great man when the truth was quite different. We're somehow expected to look only at the positive and forget the negative, and while I'm more than prepared to forgive--and I already have done so--I'm not willing to lie about the person that this man was. Lying would affect me and my own peace of mind, and it wouldn't help him a bit.
After all, most of my success in life has resulted from me doing my best not to be like him. He's served as nothing but a negative role model, showing me how not to live my life if I want to be a happy, fulfilled person. From watching him--and not from him--I've learned how not to treat other people, how not to abuse alcohol, how not to be completely self-centered, how not to insult and belittle others, how not to emotionally harm and manipulate others. When all is said and done, though, I've learned in spite of him rather than because of him. Both my brother and sister, on the other hand, followed the path he modeled and became alcoholics and drug addicts themselves, and both of them died rather early deaths.
Trust me, I do feel compassion for the man. He lived a very unhappy life that was often tinged with what seemed to be desperation. I feel very sad that now, near the end of his life, he's dying friendless and alone. We won't be having a funeral because there would be no one to come other than my mother and I. But my feelings of sympathy can't change anything about the life he led, and it's my sincere hope that by observing the ways he lived and the results of those ways, I may be able to help others to avoid ending their lives in the ways that he's ending his.
