My father

I’m not sure if my father remembers that my second daughter died in my belly. I’m not even sure if he remembers that I was pregnant.

Little Bea and I visited my father today. He suffers from primary progressive mul.tiple scler.osis. He has been wheelchair bound for the last seven years. He lives in a nursing facility outside of the city about an hour and fifteen minutes from where I live. My sister and I see him once a week, to take his laundry and have lunch with him. We watch our babies crawl over his electric wheelchair and dance for him. Cheering and yelling at the Price is Right, and joking about everything, we just try to enjoy our time with him. He is paralyzed now on one side of his body, he has trouble with his speech and swallowing. I have to translate what my father says for most people who talk to him.

When I last wrote about him, I was so warmed by everyone’s acceptance and love for my father. My father drove a forklift. That’s what he did for money, worked in warehouses driving forklifts. He can pick up a nickel with one. I’ve see him do it. Ingenious that man. He is very skilled at Le System D. He worked in a frozen food warehouse. And on those days when my mother wasn’t sure what to do with me between driving my sister to ballet and shopping for the week, she would drop me off at the huge warehouse where my father would emerge from the freezer in a full snowsuit with icicles hanging off of his mustache holding a broken box of Pudding Pops.

He worked his ass off. I won’t lie, I resented how much he worked. Thirteen hour plus days. Weekends. He didn’t want to drive a forklift forever. He didn’t go to college. He went to Vietnam instead. So, he worked hard. He finally became general manager of the warehouse. Ultimately, quitting that job brought on his disease. The type of MS my father has is tempered by cold. His symptoms flare up, confound and destroy him in the heat. His late hours at the warehouse masked his symptoms until he quit his job, a year after my parent’s split. They split up, and my father got sick, and more depressed. My mother admitted that she thought my father was drinking a lot at the end, but the truth was he was suffering from the beginning signs of his disease, symptoms very close to appearing drunk and depressed.

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The day after I returned from the hospital, after birthing my stillborn daughter, my father asked me when I was coming to see him. He asked me when I was bringing his laundry to him. I hung up and wept into my hands. And my sister took care of it. She took him laundry, saw him and spent the holiday with him, while I recovered from birth. But birth, dead child…he still needed his clean clothes. He still needed his clothes.

I have been bitter about people who did nothing. Yet I have a vast well of patience and acceptance of my father. Maybe that is why, because so much of my emotional forgiveness is spent on him some days, I cannot tolerate insensitivity from people who are well enough to know better.

My sick father. My dead daughter. One is enough.

Still, I have my moments where my patience is threadbare—worn so close to the surface of my open wounds that I feel I am bleeding anger onto my father. Even with our four kids screaming, my father will look at us, my sister and I, and ask us to fix the sheet on his bed, or stack his t-shirts straighter in the drawer. He will then ridicule our children’s crying, “WAAAAH HA HA.” It enrages each of them from the smallest to the biggest. It reminds me of my childhood where crying was mocked relentlessly by my father. My eyes sometimes well up, and I feel overwhelmed and so very young again. I want to scream obscenities. I want to turn around and leave and never go back. Then I think, “This is a luxury, Angie. It is a luxury to be annoyed with your father.” It means I see him enough to be pissed off at his self-absorption. Guilt, in that moment, is not my primary emotion. Anger is better than guilt.

There was so much I resented about my father. He withheld his praise. He was withdrawn and depressed. He was critical and teased us to the point of bullying. He didn’t tolerate anything out of place. Not. One. Thing. It ruined whole nights, sometimes whole weekends, if our school bags were left next to the couch when he got home from work.

Last night in bed, I stared at my incredibly intricate ceiling. Guilt encompassed every ounce of my sleeping energy. I want to take care of him all the time. I want him here, and I know I can’t do it. I’m not capable of caring for him in the ways he needs. I wish I were stronger, more selfless, more capable. That is the big guilt. The small guilt is, well, smaller. See, he had called yesterday morning, and I didn’t hear it. I didn’t check my cell phone until I was in bed and realized I didn’t have any idea where it was. He wanted to chit chat. My phone was in a pocket in the laundry. How fucking selfish am I to not keep the phone near me? Tears rolled down my cheeks.

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He cried when he talked to me about Lucy in the tender days following her birth, even as he asked about his laundry. He asked me how I was doing. He sounded concerned. Now, he tears up when I talk about her, like he forgot that I was mourning my baby and more importantly, he forgot he was mourning. But mostly, he just says to me when I see him, “How’s the new house, Ang?”

I’ve owned my home for three years, and always say, “It’s great, Dad.” And tell him about our latest home improvement project. We haven’t traditionally talked much about emotions—my dad and I. My father once said to me, “I’d kill myself, Ang, if I had the balls to do it.” I was haunted by that sentence for more than a decade. Angered by it at times. Compassionate about it other times. But our talk has mostly been dominated by football and car repair, taxes and hard work, movies and television. We avoided conversations about politics and college. He didn’t ever care if I went to college; in fact, he often told me that he thought college kids were self-important and devoid of real-world knowledge. That I graduated from college didn’t much matter to him. Now, we don’t talk about football, or cars. He sometimes asks me, “How is He doing?” And I know who he means. He means my husband Sam. He can’t remember his name, but he remembers that he likes Him. And really, is the name part that important?

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The first time that I felt like an adult I was driving my father home from work, and he cried. “A bathroom. I need a bathroom.” And I panicked. I never had seen my father so afraid. We were driving, surrounded by cornfields. If the closest gas station was ten miles, that would have surprised me. But I floored it, scared for myself. Scared for what could happen. I couldn’t bear watching my father soil himself. I sped in that way you do in the country, which means you drive 45 instead of the speed limit, and my father wept, repeating, “I’m going to wet myself.” He wouldn’t let me pull over into a cornfield. He wanted the dignity of a bathroom. We just made it to the gas station, and I watched him drag the dead weight of his leg into a bathroom. Those scenes are part of my everyday relationship with him now, but then, when I was 25 and no other adult had ever counted on me and I could be a fuck-up for as long as I wanted, it was a devastating day. The second time I felt like an adult I was calling funeral homes to cremate my child.

I hold his hand some days, and say, “I love you, Daddy.” And his tears well up, but I cannot take away his illness no matter how much I love him. No matter how much.