My friends’ parents are dying. We have reached that age. On Facebook, my friends post grainy photos throughout the years, fawning biographies, stories about a particular moment or adage that best brings their parent to life. These posts are affecting me in a way I hadn’t expected. I have considered myself parentless for some time now. My mother died when she was forty-seven years old and I was twenty. She’d been diagnosed with breast cancer ten years earlier, and though she lived the vast majority of that time in a gritty, determined, hugely active way, her battle with metastatic cancer was the central fact of my adolescence. She’d been sick for half of my twenty years when she died. My father, however, is very much alive. He just had his eightieth birthday. In preposterously good health. We have not spoken in six years. Even before that, our relationship was torturous.
The fight that ended our relationship—or, to say it differently, the last conflagration of many that our relationship lurched between—started with a letter my father wrote about my youngest daughter Anna. We had just returned from our usual week-long Christmas visit to South Beach where my father and stepmother had retired a decade prior with much self-congratulatory fanfare about it being the hippest, happeningest, wildest and craziest place in the country. The letter was addressed to my wife, Lauren, and myself.
“I understand that Anna is only six years old.” My father began. (All emphases are his.) “I will repeat that a few times in this letter, simply to emphasize that I do comprehend the appropriate frame of reference and the appropriate base line. And, at the risk of stating the very obvious, I do love her dearly.” For the sake of this essay, I will leave out long sections of my father’s letters. I would like very much to show you all of my dad’s letters, so you could see for yourself how methodical and relentless he is, a retired General Counsel for a good-sized St. Louis company, but that would amount to close to a hundred single spaced pages. He went on to thank us for our efforts “to intervene relative to Anna’s behavior…” Then he said:
Owing to Anna’s behavior, I felt quite low and out of sorts for big chunks of your visit. And, I have continued to feel quite low and out of sorts for more big chunks of time during the four subsequent days, which now add up to about ten or eleven days of frequently feeling quite low and out of sorts. Naturally, my feeling that way adversely affects Suzanne, who truly busts her butt—and does so joyously—for our visits with you and the girls.
That’s a lot of feeling low and out of sorts to put on the shoulders of a six-year-old, who, I still feel eager to add, was up past her bedtime every single night of our vacation.
I am not in any way unhappy with you. On the contrary, I saw your repeated efforts to put a stop to the multiple instances of beyond-the-pale-of-six-year-old behavior.
A little later, in a part that I found especially galling, he evoked my dead grandfather, my mom’s father.
Grandpa Goldstein was as pure, good, and generous a person as ever walked this planet. But, he had a grumpy, grouchy side to him, often manifested without regard to who was present. It was unthinkable that any of his eight grandchildren at the age of six—or at any age—would ever have directed toward him even one episode of Anna’s type of behavior here last week, much less her string of episodes.
Now perhaps it’s not fair and perhaps it’s beyond the scope of this particular essay that this mention of my grandfather particularly got to me, but it did. I adored my mother’s father, I regularly begged to go to his house, and my father was not wrong in his description of him. My mom’s three siblings and their families (my six cousins) ate dinner at my grandparents’ house every Sunday evening. We made it about once a month, and each time my dad would expound on how crazy it was to expect us to make that 25 minute drive from our home in St. Louis proper to the far suburb on a regular basis. I imagine there is a realization that all children have at some point—of a life outside of their own where things are done differently—but these moments stand out in nauseating crystalline relief for me, I think, because my father was so categorical, so sure of a Right Way to do things that made everything else Wrong, that it came as a real shock that there could be any other way. It struck me hard when I realized that, no, it wasn’t crazy, it was actually kind of nice, being enveloped by this loud and loving extended family once a week. I would have loved it. Another thing about my grandfather: it was made apparent to me on several occasions that he was not so crazy about my dad. And one more thing: my maternal grandparents took my cousin Jeff and me on several vacations with them over the years. Jeff and I together, to this day deep in middle age, egg each other on to escalating heights of daring and delinquency. On our Bar Mitzvah trip we dropped soaked toilet paper bombs on passing cars out of our windows in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. They made a satisfying splat visible from the 18th floor. On a grandparent spring break, we drove a security guard’s golf cart into the ocean. Yes, my grandpa let us have it on the occasions we got caught, but I doubt Anna will ever, as long as she lives, approach the misbehavior of my cousin and myself. I’m proud on both counts. And my grandfather would have absolutely spit his martini across the room at the idea of a grown man writing such a letter because he’d been made “low and out of sorts” by a six year old.
Back to my father’s letter about Anna. Skipping down a little.
And, the situation, bad enough as it was here last week, was made even worse by the fact that the behavior appeared to be so willful, conscious, deliberate and purposeful. It certainly lacked any appearance of being spontaneous or situational.
“Willful, conscious, deliberate and purposeful”—the behavior of a just-turned six-year-old. This will be an attribute of my father’s letters for the next couple years that feels particularly galling—and more than galling, just plain wrong—this assignation of malicious or hurtful intent, first to six-year-old Anna, and then to Lauren and myself, to what was really just an effort to get him to back the fuck off a little. It strikes me that there’s a crux of the matter here—any effort to get my dad to back down or back off, to respect a personal boundary, is inherently malicious.
After suggesting a series of steps “in reverse chronological order” for how we should address this with Anna, and proposing “after much painful thought” that he and Anna may need to be separated if the behavior persisted, he wrote:
That brings me to the subject of what is in Anna’s best interests, whom I do dearly love. If it is she who behaves obstreperously, but it is I who departs, my view is that her “victory” is most definitely not in her best developmental interests. If she can prevail over Grandpa Ogre, she may decide to take a run at someone else, in or out of her family.
This part particularly got to Lauren: “Take a run at?!” The letter goes on. I wish I could have the sense of humor to laugh at it.
I wish to make clear that this is not about me. I am not a thin-skinned or hyper-sensitive person. And, it simply is not my job to read tea leaves or to sniff the wind, so that I can anticipate that a child who always preens, primps, and postures for photographs more than anyone of any age that I have ever seen, will suddenly turn on a dime and become overtly rude about picture-taking.
He concluded with a one-line paragraph of characteristic pathos. “All this has hurt me more than I can tell you. I love you all more than I can describe.” He signed it “Love, Dad & Henry,” which, in his typical precision and eccentricity—or, his eccentric precision—is how he always signed things, to acknowledge that he was Dad to me and Henry to Lauren. Notes to all four of us, he signed “Grandpa, Dad and Henry.”
The letter was postmarked January 3. I know how my father works. He logs long continuous hours at his desk when he has a project (always) and he would have set himself this day as a deadline. The next day, as he had announced to all of his family members via a mass email, he would go in for significant cosmetic surgery: a brow lift, an eye tuck, what’s called a repositioning of the fat under the eyes.
It is hard to explain the feeling that washed over me when I read that letter. My hands shook. I felt a nauseous bottoming out in my gut. We had been exhausted by the trip to South Beach as we were always exhausted after spending time with my father. Lauren and I worked hard to make our family of four work on our educators’ salaries in Chicago, an expensive and difficult and very cold city we moved to when I got a tenure track position eight years before and where we didn’t have a single family member or any deep roots. Like many middle class American families with two working parents and young kids, I suspect, we often felt fairly near the ends of our ropes. We’d needed a vacation. And these trips never felt like vacation. They felt like a constant tug of war against the needs of two young kids and my dad’s rigid schedule and relentless activity and endless, endless exclamatory talking. My father had two conversational modes around us, both with him at the center of the conversation: he was either holding forth, exclaiming in a nearly orgasmic way (to use my now 16 year-old’s language)—usually about the marvels of South Beach—or he was grilling somebody, asking question after question, until he invariably got to the thing you should have been able to answer, but couldn’t. Acquaintances were universally charmed—“he was so interested in what I do”—but it was uncanny how often I’d see him drill down to the point where you were stumped about the very thing you knew best. He’d then rephrase the question in a bemused way, “So you don’t know if Maria Montessori was familiar with Freud?” he’d once said to my wife, a Montessori teacher of 20 years, a subject my father truly knew nothing about. “They were both writing about child development around the same time. Both in Europe.” He’d shake his head quizzically as if he might yet jar loose that piece of knowledge that surely must be in you somewhere. Actually, there was a third conversational mode: where he was trying to get us to plan the next activity, pushing to schedule and do one more thing, trying to nail us down.
Even now as I re-read the above paragraph a part of me objects: that just sounds like the standard issue griping of someone who simply doesn’t like his dad. It is all I can do—still—not to listen to this part of me that wants to normalize my father. Because here’s the thing: unpleasant as it often was, we were willing to persist with the above status quo, or something very close to it, pretty much indefinitely.
This trip we’d been especially run ragged trying to run interference between my dad and Anna. Trying to gently get him to back off, even distract him, when he was all relentlessness, all the time. Trying to get Anna to “be nice” and “behave” for his sake when the truth was we sympathized with her “obstreperousness” fully. In what we now know was a precursor to the letter, my father had sidelined us in his condo’s open kitchen to discuss “the behavior of your second born.” This struck a particular nerve in my Montessori school teacher wife, talking about a kid within her earshot. The lack of respect. We each said, “Anna does better when you let her come to you.” We might as well have asked him to flap his wings and fly.
Our first daughter, Callie, was an almost preternaturally easy kid. Though she wouldn’t like me saying it now, she was a people pleaser as a little kid in the way of many first-borns. She had gotten along with Grandpa because that’s what she thought was expected of her. And his intentions were mostly good, we said to ourselves, weren’t they? Lauren and I limited the number of activities; we brought things for her to play with and took her away from the restaurant table when she couldn’t sit still any longer; we plied her with snacks when we inevitably ended up on his beloved dinner-after-10 p.m. “Latin schedule”; we told Grandpa that she was too tired for bedtime stories when he begged to follow us back to our hotel room after a long day. Inside the back cover of a parenting workbook we often consulted when Callie was young, there are two pages of notes Lauren and I wrote on the airplane on the way home from Miami after a visit. This was from a time when we were still hopeful for the grandparent relationship. Though Lauren, especially, believes in routine for kids, Lauren and I are not particularly planners; we are not rule makers—or followers, for that matter. Bedtimes have always been approximate in our house. What I’m trying to say is that we would not have written this all down if we were not at wit’s end. There is no mention of Anna in these notes, so Callie could have been no older than four. The handwriting and language are Lauren’s: diplomatic, gentle, with a Montessorian’s encouraging direction. “We need to make sure we are not always following our own agenda, to consider her needs and simpler desire to be with you in any way. She doesn’t care about exhibits or art openings. Building a sand castle can be fun.” (My father hates going to the beach and on the rare occasions when he deigns to do so, he makes a grand production of it with commentary on each and every little thing, the sun protection we must all apply, the snacks somebody else must prepare, the placement and arrangement of towels, chaises, umbrellas, sun hats, etc. Coming from our busy Chicago lives during Christmas break with little kids, plopping on the beach with minimal fanfare often appealed to us a great deal.) Under the word Guidelines, Lauren has written: limited outings with a 3 hour max, the nap stays intact, at home by 8:30 for bedtime. In the margins, she wrote: “We enjoy a lot more if we are not constantly negotiating.” And in another place: “Our hope is that Dan/Lauren do not have to re-cover these rules each visit/outing.” In the bottom corner of the workbook page is something I’d forgotten: “Also, limit sex innuendo/commentary. Remarks on women’s bodies. Fat, skinny, breasts, FMN shoes1, etc.”
Though she was utterly exhausted after time with him, with our help, Callie did well. But Anna is a different kind of kid. She is an inveterate prankster, with exquisite comic timing, even at a very young age, but with a keen sense of fairness and not doing harm. She is sensitive in a way that isn’t immediately apparent and still sometimes catches us by surprise. No one besides my father has ever described her as badly behaved (“beyond-the-pale”), but it is true that she has an acute sense of when she is being put through the paces for someone else’s sake. And she doesn’t take to it. She doesn’t suffer fools. She has an uncanny knack for getting to the heart of the matter. She’s never particularly needed to be the center of attention, but she almost physically recoils when others do. In other words, she and my father were a terrible temperamental match. As a toddler Anna had spoken her very first complete sentence in South Beach, on the outdoor patio of a bustling Italian restaurant, while my dad was holding forth. “Stop talking Grandpa.” My father missed it entirely, but Lauren and I noted it with wide eyes.
Anna had been changed by our most recent trip to South Beach. You could see it in her face. She felt discouraged. She felt like she could do nothing right. Worst of all—for a Montessorian or an idealistic parent of a young child—you could see that she didn’t trust her own impulses, her own reactions. To Grandpa. Over and over Lauren and I asked ourselves: were we being too sensitive, helicopter parents? But my father had been laid “low and out of sorts” for two weeks because of their interactions and he was a rich, retired, grown-ass man on his home turf, following precisely his usual schedule.
I’ve read enough to know that what I felt holding my father’s letter was a trauma response. The response to a trigger, in today’s vernacular. Frankly, this is not a way I’m comfortable thinking of myself. I was a 47 year old man with a house in the suburbs, two kids who looked up to me, tenure at a major university. I ride my bike nine miles each way through Chicago traffic to work—one year I did it all winter, face-masked in subzero temperatures, foregoing only two days when the roads weren’t yet plowed. This is the way I want to think of myself. I don’t want to feel triggered by a letter from a 75 year-old man.
[Even thinking this way is problematic, I know, to suggest that being traumatized is a form of weakness. I know. I’m trying to communicate the state of my psyche.]
This would probably be the place to admit (yes, I am conscious of the word choice) that I have struggled with some form of depression since high school. I have taken anti-depressants on and off since my mid twenties. Mine has never been the incapacitating can’t get out of bed variety. I have always been able to fulfill my minimum duties. I have always been able to work out and even laugh with friends. In fact, I suspect it’s rarely apparent to others. Because it’s not always even obvious to me. But the nagging trickle of self-doubt becomes a torrent of not measuring up that rages just underneath everything. And everything becomes uncomfortable. The procrastination that plagues me most of the time becomes so all pervasive that even the most basic tasks are carried out (yes, I am conscious of the passive voice) in a perpetual last-minute frenzy that precludes conscious awareness or any deep feeling.
I responded to my father’s letter quickly and angrily. I have included the entirety of my letter here. Looking back maybe I would change some things. But this is what I wrote.
Do not ever send us a letter resembling the recent letter about Anna. If we get a letter that addresses the personality, behavior, psychology or emotion of a member of our family, we will read it only so far as is necessary to get the gist of the letter and then we will throw it away. We will not respond. Lauren and I are equally adamant on this point. If we want your parenting advice, we will ask for it.
We have no interest in discussing the content of your recent letter. Suffice it to say that from its premise and the fact of its existence down to its prescriptions, and most harmfully, its descriptions of Anna, we find it bizarrely off-base, inappropriate and hurtful. We are sorry you were hurt by the recent visit, but you simply may not try to assuage your hurt by lobbing a grenade into our busy home. We will not allow it.
We will try you for skype midmorning Saturday, February 1, depending on the time of Callie’s basketball game. In the meantime, if the girls ask to skype on their own, we will certainly make that possible, but otherwise, we need some time without contact for our feelings to cool.
I am struck now by my second sentence above. How prescient it would turn out to be; how unable I’d be to actually to do it. For the next year and a half, he would write one letter after another that belittled and mocked and denigrated the personality, behavior, psychology or emotion of Lauren and myself. Since it was now Lauren and me who were denying my father what he wanted, he would address his vitriol at us. If only we had been able to do what I said and not read the letters that followed.
I am also struck now by my last paragraph about skyping as this would be the immediate sticking point. For years we skyped with my father and stepmother every weekend. My father sent us an e-mail around 2:00 a.m. Thursday night to give us a couple options for skype times—either Saturday or Sunday, usually at 11:00 our time, noon South Beach time, around the time on my father’s beloved Latin Schedule, he was ready to face the world. (“How nice it must be to think the sun comes up when you open your eyes,” Lauren had joked for years.) On a couple occasions we lobbied for different times so that we weren’t homebound in the middle of a weekend day with young kids, or just because with our busy work lives, we didn’t want to plan out our weekend ahead of time, but we’d get some long point by point rationale, often with serious pathos—Suzanne’s Sunday morning yoga was essential to her health and well-being as a seventy-something—as to why that wouldn’t work. The suggestion that we’d try them when we had a free moment, and they could do the same, just like we communicated with the rest of the world, was seen as insulting, as if we were asking them to spend the weekend sitting by the phone. As with most things with my dad, it was easier to give in. At the allotted time we’d all four get in front of the computer while they sat in front of theirs and we’d talk, usually for about 45 minutes. My father told his what-a-wild-and-crazy-life-we-lead-in-South Beach stories or grilled the girls about what they were up to. From the email scheduling to the posed-portrait enduring of the thing itself, we hated these skype sessions, but Lauren and I put on a good face. For the sake of the grandparent relationship. For the grandparents’ sake. Callie followed our lead, but, as would be characteristic, Anna was a tougher sell. Her attention—when she was two and three and four and five years old—predictably waned. She wandered around, she played with things in her hands, she was often more interested in clowning with some aspect of the computer or camera itself. We devised strategies to keep her engaged and for a time, we’d ask her to behave, to talk to her grandparents or show them a somersault or play something on her keyboard, but not for terribly long. This couldn’t have been further from the Montessori ideal of following the interests of the child. So, eventually, we’d tell Anna she could go do something else. In what would be a precursor of things to come, my father breathlessly announced his relief one day after we had relayed an encouraging kindergarten report as he was just sure she had ADHD or autism. Also in a precursor of things to come, we were furious, that she would be pathologized for not behaving for him. Nope, she just didn’t like sitting through things that were deathlessly boring. But we held our tongues.
After my angry response to father’s letter, he wrote back apologizing—in the first part of his response. Then he went on to trample right over the boundary (in the language of these kinds of things) we’d tried to establish when we said we’d talk to him in three weeks.
However, from our end, we do want to maintain our normal communication with our granddaughters. That does require that you facilitate it, even if you choose not to remain on the call once you have placed it to us. (Naturally, our preference is that you do remain on the call.)
So, we would like to Skype with the girls at or any time after 11 AM your time on Saturday or at or any time after Noon your time on Sunday. Please let us know whether you will make that possible and, if so, the time. Callie seems capable of handling the Skype “controls” if need be.
Then he typed a line across the page and switched gears.
The saddest and most enduringly painful aspect of this matter for me is that it is another reminder that I have zero reservoir of goodwill with you two. Whether it is a minor episode of my bad conduct, or fortunately an extremely rare occasion (like this one) when my conduct is seen by you as outrageous and egregious, I should have learned by now that I will not be cut any slack. Little or nothing will be waived, overlooked, blown off, or dismissed with, “This is truly horrible and Dad/Henry is being a total inconsiderate and thoughtless asshole, but that happens sometimes with him. Let’s just move on.”
Over the years, I have clung to the hope that this is not true. But, this time, more emphatically than ever before, I must try to abandon hope, recognize facts, and get the point through my thick skull. The context of the broader relationship will not be considered at your end. Plainly, no relationship history, no aspects of the present relationship, no consideration of the impact upon Suzanne, no notion of forgiveness of elders for their blundering and insensitivity, will be taken into account by the two of you.
My father and I were never close. We played ping pong together. I was always grateful when he came and got me on a Sunday afternoon to play, a break in the long hours he sat so entrenched at his desk that his forearms formed mottled grooves in the wood. I was grateful when 2 out of 3 sometimes became 3 out of 5. We had a dank, dusty concrete floor basement that occasionally flooded to three or four inches deep and it’s one charm was the green ping pong table. My father played a close to the table style where he hit nothing but backhands. Over and over he blocked it back, without generating any pace himself. It was, like most things about him, infuriating to me. I flailed and hit forehand slams so hard they hurt my shoulder and as I remember, we stopped playing around the time I got good enough to beat him consistently.
Though I was just as eager to play tennis with him, I enjoyed it even less. I don’t remember us playing much when I was young, and the relatively few times we played were in high school or later, after I was a stronger, more athletic player than he was. Even holding back, I hit the ball considerably harder than he did. Though I’d beat him handily, he would celebrate winning a single game as if he’d won Wimbledon. He’d trot around the court in his prim tennis whites and 70s style white headband pumping his clasped hands overhead. I should have been able to be amused. Typically, I’d beat him 6-1, 6-1 and he’d crow about winning both sets. Since he didn’t hit any winners, any game he won was a result of four unforced errors on my part. And since I’m someone who can’t help but care about how I’m playing, I’d already be annoyed when we reached this point. Still, I should have been a bigger person. The last time this happened, it was in South Beach, after his retirement, which means it was not terribly long ago.
But the thing I remember most about my father from childhood is that he wanted me to go to Harvard. My father had gone to Harvard Law School and with an eye toward my eventual application, no doubt, he had gotten himself on the St. Louis interview committee for applying high school students. How he loved when those high school seniors would sit with the three interviewers behind the glass sliding doors in the formal living room we rarely used. How he fussed over those thick application folders—coyly keeping them confidential—at dinner beforehand. He had a little routine he liked to regale us with at dinner, about a Chinese immigrant family whose first born son had been accepted at Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and MIT but not Harvard. “Halvahd Numbah One!” My dad would say, imitating the furious Chinese parents. He bobbed his head emphatically and let his face take on a slack resoluteness. It was a routine and we were meant to laugh at the immigrants’ single mindedness and my father’s bad accent (he would have scoffed at the notion he was being prejudiced), but no one was more single minded than my father, and the message was clear. “Halvahd Numbah One!”
We ate dinner together five nights a week at 6:30 p.m., exactly as a family should. Friday and Saturday nights, my parents went out, religiously. My parents had an Oscar and Felix Odd Couple vibe that was, I suspect, a regular source of tension, but often they could play it to nice comic effect, my loud mom, all sloppy in-your-face bluntness, my dad rigid and structured and precise. For years, my father took a folded piece of white stationary out of his breast pocket at dinner and set it besides his fork. “Memo…Henry S–” was embossed in bold at top. Underneath, he had written a numbered list of things he wanted to talk about at dinner. Surely there was something lovely about this, a father keeping track during the day of the things he wanted to share with his family. Could we blame him if those things so rarely interested us? Almost all the items on his list would have something to do with achievement and meritocracy and getting ahead in high school and college and life—in a way that circled back to…”Halvahd Numbah one!” Often enough, the numbered items had to do with Harvard explicitly. (The place is pretty regularly in the news.) The number of entering freshmen with perfect SATs; a multimillion-dollar gift to the endowment, a new scientific discovery. At some point, my mother, my sister and I—in our joking/serious way—forbid our father’s numbered lists at the dinner table. We would not have a prescripted conversation! A couple nights later, after noticing the same sudden jumps in topic, I spied on my father during his extended pre-dinner toilette. He was memorizing his list in front of the vanity in the downstairs bathroom. He thought this was hysterical: we couldn’t very well forbid what he had in his head, could we? He found my irrepressible fury all the more amusing.
I said above that my mother’s battle with breast cancer was perhaps the central fact of my adolescence. Getting into and going to Harvard was a very close second. As part of a gifted after-school math program, I took a math SAT in fifth grade (the same year of my mother’s mastectomy) and scored a 680. In fifth grade. I worked harder in high school than I have since—including the more than two years I spent at Yale School of Medicine. Every activity, every summer in Spain or Antigua was done with Harvard in mind. Theatre was to be one of my main extracurriculars, but the biggest production at my swanky suburban private high school was a musical and I didn’t sing. So my father insisted I take singing lessons. I hated it. What’s more, as kindly Mrs. McGovern, who sat next to me on our piano bench in that same rarely used living room, would surely attest, I am very nearly tone deaf. Finally, I refused outright. This is one of the first really big blow-ups that I remember having with my father—already a small man, he was crouched in fury as he chased me up the front stairs of our house. It was the first time I remember consciously having that particular thought—that maybe ours wasn’t The Exact Right Way to Live.
But my father never beat me. He didn’t molest me or a lock me in a closet. He didn’t drink or abandon his family. I have said these words to myself many times over the years. I catch myself saying them sometimes still.
There’s a metaphorical contrast in the two that appeals to me: my mother’s cancer an inexorable march whose every step was the embodiment of chaos; Harvard, on the other hand, was an equally fixed endpoint, that provided at least the illusion of control—if I did all the right things, I could get to where I was trying to go. Often the two were at odds. On a couple of occasions, my younger sister and I discovered that my father had written all of our teachers about our mother’s cancer—at least once about a specific development that we didn’t yet know about ourselves. He asked that they be sensitive to what we were going through at home lest our school work suffer—he asked explicitly that they consider it when it came to grades. My sister and I were furious. We insisted he never do it again. But he did.
When the time finally came, I applied early action to Brown, the trendy school in those days. A couple of my fancy private high school’s college counselors were flat out furious at me. They tried to talk me out of it. “We all know you’re going to Harvard—don’t take someone else’s spot.” Since I felt pretty certain at that point that I actually preferred Brown, this could only have come from my father. One of my teachers actually asked me if I was applying to Brown to spite him. I didn’t think I was. My father’s response when I got into both schools was curious. “It’s entirely your choice,” he said so indifferently he sounded bemused. “But Harvard will make an impression on people wherever you go for the rest of your life that no other school will.” So you think I should go to Harvard? I pushed. “That’s entirely your decision, I’m just telling you the reality.” I visited both schools again. I spent a rainy couple days at Brown with a mopey guy that I’d known vaguely in high school, and I spent two glorious sunny days at Harvard with one of the most beautiful girls in the class above me in high school (and at Harvard). I was happy that it felt like a decision I’d made on my own. And, honestly, I felt happy that it made my father happy. He serenaded me with “10,000 Men of Harvard” as I loaded my summer camp trunk into the back of a taxi.
It is a strange thing to fulfill someone else’s dream for you when it’s not also a dream you have for yourself. I was pretty unhappy my first three years at Harvard. My mom was dying—maybe in a couple weeks, maybe in a couple years—and I carried that knowledge around with me almost visibly, I suspect. In those days of one answering machine for five suitemates, I obsessed over our haphazard way of relaying messages and regularly started fights about it—for fear that I would miss the call. The procrastination that had plagued me since at least the beginning of high school meant that I pulled all-nighters before every single major paper I turned in during college and I regularly fell asleep in class. Academically precocious as I was, I’d been tortured since junior year of high school about what I would do with my life. I don’t think I know anybody who was as tortured by this issue for as long a period of time as I was. I knew medicine was the career that my father wanted for me, though, as with Harvard, he would rarely say so explicitly. As with Harvard, it seemed to pervade the very air we breathed.
My mother died November 18 of my Junior year of college. The actual end was mercifully quick. My father insisted that I fly back to Harvard the day after her funeral for the three days before Thanksgiving, so my grades wouldn’t suffer. I argued, but as always, it wasn’t worth the fight. I was taking an extra class that semester. I still remember my grades from the semester my mom died—an A, 3 A-‘s and a B+—I’m both proud of them and ashamed. My father announced, in one of his letters, long before there were these letters, January 1, six weeks later, as his official “Begin dating date.” Two or three months after that, Ellen Harris, a dear friend of our mother’s who we had always considered fun, but fairly loony, had moved into the house where my dad and sister still lived. My sister and I were in a kind of shock, but we had a deep sense of wanting things to work out for our father. Ellen had an annoying little yippy dog that she fetishized. It was an issue between my father and her. My sister and I joked about pushing the dog under the tarp of the covered pool, making it look like an accident. We wanted things to work out for our father. When Ellen moved out, my dad went into a depression. This is how I thought of it—“went into a depression.” In the last couple years of her life, my mother had let me know that this had happened to my dad on a couple of occasions in their marriage. “I told him that if I had to physically get him up and dress him myself I would, but he was going to work,” my mother said to me. Spring break of my junior year, shortly after Ellen left, I sat with my dad in chaises next to our still covered swimming pool and he told me about the revolver that he had stashed away in a safe deposit box in case he needed to commit suicide. My father, the urban liberal—I had never known him to handle a gun. The key was in a third location so that he could not act impulsively. But my dad never acted impulsively. I begged him to give me the key or tell me the location, but he refused. My mom had been dead less than six months.
My father would meet Suzanne the following summer and she would move in very shortly thereafter, less than a year after my mother’s death, and though I was taken aback by how quickly it had happened—and how different Suzanne seemed from my mother—I was deeply relieved.
After my father’s letter apologizing/ignoring our boundaries/saying it really reflected badly on us, we decided Lauren should write him back, from the two of us. All we wanted was to be done with him for a few weeks, to recover from our vacation and assuage our hurt over what he’d said about Anna. We knew the girls wouldn’t want to skype without us. Maybe Lauren’s calmer voice would get through. My wife teaches six to nine year-olds. She has a wonderful warm smile, and rarely loses her temper. In our twenty-five years together, I’ve never known her to fight openly with anybody besides me. She generally gets the benefit of the doubt, and she deserves it.
Dear Henry,
Thanks for the apology. We will talk with you February 1, depending on Callie’s basketball schedule.
Love,
Lauren and Dan
My father responded quickly.
Dear Lauren and Dan,
Thank you for your acknowledgment last night of my apology. Apparently, though, it was not sufficiently abject or groveling, because it resulted only in a reaffirmation of your position. You have an interesting interpretation of what it means to receive an apology, make peace, and close the books.
So, this time around, your cutting off Suzanne’s and my contact with Callie and Anna is “only” for one month. If I ever commit another offense, what will my and Suzanne’s punishment be?
You have now embraced one of the most toxic of all actions in family relationships: parents’ denying grandparents access to their grandchildren because the parents are angry with the grandparents. It’s well known, and it’s about as poisonous as any action could be.
You “need a little break from contact” (your words). You “need some time without contact” (your words). Never mind our needs. Never mind the grandparent-grandchild relationship.
You two are obviously on a tear of your own for your own self-satisfaction, without regard to the injury, pain, or deprivation suffered by anyone else. You should be very pleased with yourselves for demonstrating such unwavering resolve and determination following an apology. You “win”.
You have eloquently confirmed what I wrote in the second part of my previous e-mail: history and relationship count for nothing in your book when it comes to me. And, now, we can add apologies to the list of what counts for nothing. Our punishment drags on, as you dribble it out, one day at a time, with no probation or parole.
Love,
Henry and Dan
The last character of this letter is an interesting typo. Interesting, partly because it is so rare for him to have typos at all. And, well, that’s my name. He wrote Dan when he meant to write Dad. Freudian? The two letters are not close together on the keyboard.
After my mother died I received a handwritten letter from her, a page and half scrawled on a yellow legal pad. The truth is that the letter predates her death by about two years. Probably in the ebb and flow of her cancer and treatment, she thought she was going to die two years before she actually did. But of course, it took on the import of last words after her death. It is a lovely letter, complimentary, warm and knowing. It is hard not to note the contrast with my father’s letters in that way, but in every other way as well. Hers is handwritten, sloppy, full of fragments, with words crossed out and carroted in. In a part that reads like premonition of the agony I’d put myself through, she wrote, “You should have great success at whatever you choose to do and choose wisely. Pick your future with care. Choose a profession or a job which you will enjoy—find fulfillment and one which uses your special skills. Pick what you want—not what others force on you.” It is an interesting thing to write in the second paragraph of a final letter to one’s son, written when I was a freshman in college. I mean, no one would actually literally force anything upon me. The part that gets me the most is the next paragraph: “Continue your loving ways. Someday you will find yourself a wonderful girl and will be a Daddy. Both as a husband and a father, you will be fantastic. In fact, I would suggest lots of kids—if you can afford them.” (I would have liked lots of kids, but we started late and we can’t afford them.) The last paragraph begins: “Keep up your personality—help Dad deal with things and with you.”
I have tried to help my dad. When he wanted to travel to Puerta Vallarta—the same place we had vacationed four or five times with my mother—thirteen months after her death with Suzanne and her children, I worked hard to talk my sister into going. When he took us to the same restaurant in the hills overlooking the city that we had been to with our mom—when we sat in the same spot overlooking the dance floor and he asked the band to play “Cuando Caliente el Sol,” the song that we knew to be my mother and his song, when he led Suzanne to the dance floor, my sister and I sat at the table with Suzanne’s son and didn’t say a word. The truth was I barely held it against him. He is as ordered and structured a person as I’ve ever met, and totally unprepared to live alone; of course, he would desperately try to slot a new person into his old life. When the following spring, he wanted my sister and me to fly home to St. Louis just before my college graduation for his wedding, I again tried to convince my sister. When she refused, my father flew out to Boston to convince her. (She had joined me at Harvard.) He reserved a conference room in the Charles Hotel for the “meeting.” He showed up with his characteristic yellow legal pad full of numbered points to make his case. My sister was forty-five minutes late. She would not relent. My dad and Suzanne got married without us in a small ceremony June 2 the day after my birthday in St. Louis.
It felt important, helping my dad. Shortly after I had left medical school and moved to Arizona to get my MFA in creative writing, my dad told me that he was depressed. I sat down and wrote him four or five pages about how meditation had helped me. (In retrospect, it is impossible to imagine my dad meditating, but I was still flush with having discovered it myself.) He seemed truly touched by my response. He thanked me profusely. I checked in on him regularly. About a year later, living by myself in a subletted retirement home in the desert outside of Tucson, I sat outside on the deck overlooking the barren desert and told him that I was struggling myself. He said that he hoped I would get the help I needed. He never mentioned it again.
Again we decided Lauren should respond to my father.
Dear Henry,
We are not trying to win anything. We simply ask that you respect our wish to take a ‘time out’ for a couple of weeks. We are quite sure that your relationship with the girls is strong enough that it will not be affected. We will talk with you on the 1st.
Love,
Lauren and Dan
And my dad went crazy.
Dear Lauren and Dan,
I accept your decision (it is not your “wish”), in your Sunday morning e-mail, “to take a ‘time out’ for a couple of weeks.” I do so solely for the purpose of trying to put an end to this mutually painful horror show. (Incidentally, while of very little significance, it is not “a couple of weeks”; the consequences of your decision will result in a total of one solid calendar month of zero contact. I say “very little significance” because the issue is not duration.) And, yes, we do look forward to talking with you and the girls on Saturday, February 1.
But, no, to respond directly to what you said, I certainly do not “respect” your decision to continue the blackout for its full announced duration, for at least five reasons:
First, it deserves no “respect” because, regardless of the length of this blackout, it is still your wildly disproportionate nuclear response to what you called (perhaps with total justification) a grenade. Second, it deserves no “respect” because you seek to minimize your blocking grandparent-grandchild communication with your desperate, glib, and presumptuous stab at justification, “We are quite sure that your relationship with the girls is strong enough that it will not be affected.”
I feel the need to point out that—as with the last letter—he is directly attacking my wife. Yes, we talked about the note before she sent it, but it still came from her email address, signed by her. Those are her words. He is quoting my wife back to us for the sake of picking her apart.
Third, it deserves no “respect” because you have repeatedly (and understandably) proved your inability to address the fact that your decision is a unilateral decision made by two people, not the six people involved. Fourth, it deserves no “respect” because you are both more than sufficiently educated, intelligent, and insightful to know that using the grandparent-grandchild relationship as a pawn in parent-child relationships is as clear a no-go area as there could possibly be.
Fifth, it deserves no “respect” because any mention of Suzanne, and the effect of her being made an incidental victim of your decision has been studiously omitted from your e-mails. That omission is also entirely understandable; indeed, what you could say? That she is mere collateral damage? As you know perfectly well, she is a complete innocent, who has devoted herself body and soul to Callie and Anna. She has had no role in this correspondence. She did not even know what was occurring here during the holidays until I told her two or three days after your departure. She cried uncontrollably.
I would never have thought you two capable of such apparent callousness toward Suzanne. Frankly, I still don’t believe it, and I view it as an aberrational one-time emotional overreaction which is completely unrepresentative of who you are. (That is exactly the way I hope that you will view my awful letter.)
The irony of that last parenthetical…
I blundered very badly in sending my letter, and I cannot imagine that I would ever again be so stupid. I was in a world of deep hurt and excruciating pain; the episodes on the final night drove me into a downward spiral which I was unable to arrest. My heart still breaks every time I pass a picture of Anna in our apartment. But, all that emotion is the worst possible foundation for letter-writing. I should have known better. I have tried, with no effect, to apologize.
So, quite understandably, you wrote back to me, “Do not ever send us a letter resembling the recent letter about Anna.” That is very well said; it is clear and concise. I get it.
Now it’s your turn to get it. Let me use your perfect phraseology: Do not ever interfere with Suzanne’s and my grandparent-grandchild relationship—not for a month, not for a minute. Do not ever threaten to do so. Do not ever even think about doing so. This innocent-grandchildren-as-pawns retaliation stunt occurs infrequently, but it is certainly well known. It always turns out to be devastating and disastrous for all concerned—far worse than the offense, far worse than anyone could ever have imagined.
I understand and accept your line in the sand; it’s perfectly fair, reasonable, and appropriate. Now, you two need to understand and accept my line in the sand.
After a few more paragraphs, he again signed it, Love, Dad & Henry.
Three days after this letter, my father sent us another email asking us to commit to dates for their summer visit. They made a grand swing every summer, visiting four children and their spouses in three different cities. The longest stop, as always, would be Chicago, partly because Suzanne’s son and his wife lived here as well, but more, I suspect, because of our daughters, the only grandchildren.
Dear Dan and Lauren,
The rest of the gang has now approved the attached program.
I am, of course, aware that we have had a few other things going on between us. But, I believe that we share a desire to get back to normal.
So, we hope very much to hear back from you within the next day or two. The rationale from your standpoint for the Chicago dates is in Paragraph 2 of my Monday evening e-mail, below.
Love,
Dad and Henry
This had always been an issue, my father getting us to commit to dates long before we were ready, visiting for far longer than we wanted, but again, it had always felt like an accommodation we could make. But not now. We were reeling. We were in a state of constant agitation from his letters. Lauren and I deliberated. We couldn’t imagine it. Nine days. Of him holding forth. Of him grilling the four of us. Of scheduling. Of protecting Anna. After these letters he’d written us. Could we tolerate three days? Four? Five?
It is a familiar metaphor, the frog in the pot of water unaware of the gradually rising heat until the water is boiling and it is too late. My father is remarkably convincing when you’re inside his pot. He’s charming. He’s magnanimous—on his terms. Out and about, he is relentlessly cheerful. It can be hard not to get caught up in his certainty about the Right Way of doing everything. It is so, so much easier not to resist. And I’m afraid, it’s true, that we were seduced by some of the baser things. He flew us to Miami, put us up in South Beach at the Villa Paradiso. It wasn’t luxurious, but it was tropical art deco and, Christmas week in South Beach, it was far more than we could afford on our own. He took us all out to grand dinners. He and Suzanne fawned over the girls, and showered them with gifts. I was especially susceptible to all this—it weighed on me that my career choices meant that my daughters would not grow up with some of the luxuries that I’d taken for granted. It weighs on me still, far more than I’d imagined when making these choices. But it was more than that too. Lauren and I are not overly serious people, but we took parenting seriously. We took parenting classes before the girls were born and read books to course correct throughout. Lauren nursed both girls on demand well past their second birthdays. They slept between us in bed for just as long. She was able to take both girls to work with her, teaching with them on her hip or while they played on the floor nearby, nursing in janitors’ closets. And when she couldn’t take them to work, my flexible schedule meant I could be at home. Callie saw the inside of a crib for only minutes at a time; I don’t think Anna ever did. We barely even used a stroller. We carried them in our myriad of slings. Or we walked at their pace. I don’t mean this to proselytize or judge or contribute to my generation’s parenting wars at all—I suspect there are plenty of ways to skin this cat—only to say that assessing and meeting our girls’ needs was what we were all about. And Lauren and I had both had close, meaningful relationships with grandparents. If the water was hot, we thought we could stand it, if it was good for the girls. Even if it was occasionally scalding. If we could protect them. Wasn’t my father’s relentless attention some kind of sign of love? Now he was accusing us of using our girls against him.
But I know now that in my case, it was more than all that as well. It was deeply psychological.
It is hard to express how much we labored over how long a summer visit we could handle. It took over our conversation, our lives. We consulted with friends and therapists—both of us had our own at this point. After much deliberation, we decided to be as generous as we could imagine. Lauren wrote:
Dear Henry and Suzanne,
As the temperature plummets, It’s hard to believe that summer will ever get here. We have looked at the dates you have given us. We can do a visit of 6 consecutive days during the time you have planned on being in Chicago. As always, we look forward to seeing you.
Lots of Love,
Lauren and Dan
Maybe the “consecutive” was a mistake, but we knew that if we saw them for days here and there, the days in between would be consumed by them too—by his constant negotiating for more, trying to push the boundaries—it needed to be cleaner than that.
My father was livid.
Dear Lauren and Dan,
Thanks, but no thanks, for your generous allocation to us of “six consecutive days” during our intended nine-day visit.
My dad then went into the rationale for the proposed nine days—Suzanne also having a child in Chicago. Then my father recounted a visit three years prior. “I’m sorry, but we have already seen this movie. One visit to Chicago like the one three years ago is exactly one more than we ever needed or will ever need. A second such visit is out of the question.”
I think of this visit as the Tenure Visit. When my dad first proposed the August dates during a January phone call, I had told him point blank: “Dad, we can’t have visitors then.” The proposed time was two weeks before my tenure “tub” was due. This was the critical date in an excruciating year-long process when I would turn in a plastic tub of files—everything I’d written, everything colleagues and students had written about me, every syllabus and course evaluation, every iota of service, creativity, teaching over six years of my life all had to be in the tub—to be evaluated by my colleagues at the Department level, then by a committee at the College Level and finally by the Board at the University level. If I was not granted tenure, I would have one year before I had to leave. For all practical purposes in a humanities department like English, having been denied tenure at one university, I would not get hired at a comparable institution; it is no exaggeration to say that for me, this would have meant changing careers. I was in my forties, the primary bread winner, with an eight year-old and a three year-old and a two year-old first-ever mortgage. What’s more, over the past year I had made the very painful discovery that a significant cohort of my department, including the Chair at the time, did not want me to get tenure. I had come into Academia through a side door—an MFA rather than a PhD—and I had no experience with the politics of an academic department. And I had played some things not just naively, but stupidly. My Teaching was solid, but I have real time management issues, and I had always put my own family and my own writing above such things as committee Service. And to my great disappointment, my Publications, though above minimum requirements, were not necessarily strong enough to make up for my middling service and my idiotic impoliticness. And contrary to my abiding life philosophy, my Generally Good Intentions had exactly zero currency in this realm. In other words, I was already in the most stressful time of my professional life when my dad proposed the visit—a time that was humbling and painful on multiple levels. (One of the people lining up against me was someone we had counted in our nascent core of Chicago friends; Lauren and I brought her dinner after she gave birth.) And I knew this time would only get more stressful until it peaked exactly when my dad planned to visit.
I was actually shocked that my father would not take no for an answer. Growing up, nothing had been more important than my father’s work. There was a near sacredness to it. Over a series of heated phone calls, I was determined to stay strong. We couldn’t have visitors then. Period. But eventually he wore me down. As always. I was incredulous. Whether rightly or wrongly, I sincerely felt this would put my job—my livelihood, my career, my family’s well-being—at risk. Why couldn’t he see that? Why wasn’t that the end of the conversation?
So my father and Suzanne would descend upon us during the most stressful weeks of my professional life. Under the best of circumstances, Lauren and I jokingly referred to each visit as a “the siege” or “the occupation.” Now, a week beforehand, I panicked. I was working around the clock, trying to get a couple of additional publications, politicking, shaping and reshaping my twelve page personal statement. I told my dad, we simply could not do the number of days proposed; it would have to be a shorter visit. Unlike our final fight, this one did not take place in writing, so I am hazier on the details, but in three or four highly pitched emotional phone calls, my dad said they weren’t coming at all. Lauren and I begged him and Suzanne to come anyway—just for a shorter amount of time. We begged. It all took up time and emotional energy I didn’t have.
Finally, they did come for a shorter than proposed visit. Predictably it was a disaster. My father constantly pushed for more time with the girls. At one point, in the midst of an extra errand they had created for Lauren handing off a car seat during the middle of her work day, my dad confronted Lauren in a parking garage. He is a former corporate lawyer who marshals point after point against you; she is an elementary teacher who rarely argues with anyone. She was late to a meeting at school because of the confrontation. And she was shaken afterward. So I spent a long afternoon during the most stressful time of my life debriefing with my wife about my father. And Lauren insisted (understandably) she not be left alone with him for the rest of the visit, so now I had to be present at all the various handing off and recollecting points with the girls—all on my dad’s schedule of course.
I eventually did get tenure. The college committee actually reprimanded my Chair for presenting a case against me in a way that made it seem personal because it did not match the record. To my great humiliation, the vote was mixed at the Department level, but unanimous in my favor at both the College and University levels. But for the better part of a year, that result looked unlikely; my closest confidantes in the English Department were suggesting that I enter the job market, though they knew well I would not find a comparable position.
Now, my father was saying that we couldn’t subject him to that horror again.
The pattern of the past week certainly speaks volumes. First, while you allowed the girls to telephone and thank us for the shipments of holiday gifts, you dispensed with your usual (and appropriate) practice of taking the telephone yourselves for a few minutes to add your thanks to the girls’. Never mind that Suzanne—whose existence, much less acknowledgment of her relationship with the girls—has yet to be mentioned in any of your correspondence. And, never mind that she happily devoted hours to packing and sealing the boxes, and hauling them to the Post Office. But, I do understand your silence about Suzanne; it’s pretty hard to mention, much less address, the issue of innocent victims.
Second, you were unable to relent and compromise to allow a Skype call this weekend, (i.e., one weekend “early”). And, now, third, just to wrap up the week consistently, comes your Friday e-mail, proposing in substance that we allow you do to us again what you did to us three years ago. In every visit, we try to be scrupulous about heeding all your wishes, which always makes us a little nervous if we get caught in traffic. But, now, five months in advance, you’re granting us access for 67% of our visit, even right down to a lawyer’s fine point of “six consecutive days”? No way.
For all these reasons, we are skipping Chicago entirely this summer. We will invite Alex and Susan down here. And, if you will consent to it, and if the girls are interested, we would be delighted to have them come here. Younger children than they travel alone. And, if absolutely necessary, we can arrange for some combination of one or two of the four of us to escort them in both directions.
These are irreplaceable years. I hope that you are satisfied that you are acting in the girls’ best interests.
Love,
Henry and Dad
P.S. Anna was so cute about her lost tooth and the picture was priceless. So, we are doing what we would do under “normal” circumstances: writing her a note, with a $10 bill, and signing our names as the Assistant Tooth Fairies. Please do not ascribe any other motive.
Lauren and I had a reaction that we laugh about now. We read the letter, we got all fired up to argue back, to say that that wasn’t what we wanted. We actually sat down at the computer together with a head of steam and then we looked at each other and decided that that was, especially after receiving this last letter, just fine by us. He’d said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Ok, then. We didn’t answer at all.
Some time later, he would write again saying he still needed dates. We wrote in as neutral language as we could manage that the issue of the summer had been decided when he wrote “Thanks, but no thanks.”
It is impossible to exaggerate how much we felt assaulted by these letters, how much they took over our lives. I could think of nothing else. I paced for hours, compulsively composing replies. (Not unlike my father, it occurs to me. Unlike him, I didn’t send them.) If only I had been able to do what I said and not read them past the point of their first antagonism. At regular intervals, he invited the girls to visit. We told him that wouldn’t be happening without us, and still he asked again and again, and lambasted us when we didn’t promptly reply. For me, any other kind of writing was out of the question. Somehow, I managed to keep my head just above water in the classes I was teaching. (Thank God I had gotten tenure.) I couldn’t fall asleep and when I did, I woke at 3:00 or 4:00 or 5:00 am. with the phrases “There is simply no way…” or “You can’t possibly believe…” on my lips. There was a strange energizing, obsessive, animating mania to it, but I was miserable.
I felt hollowed out. I felt—obliterated. I felt a bubbling, overflowing, all-consuming indignation and anger. Why couldn’t we make him see that he was doing the very thing that we couldn’t tolerate, the very thing he’d done to Anna in South Beach that had caused her “beyond-the-pale” “obstreperous” behavior? He had focused, with exhausting relentlessness, on getting His Way, everything else be damned, any consideration of what we might want or how we were reacting or how we were feeling—or what we expressly said—entirely irrelevant. Worse than irrelevant, deserving of mockery. Why couldn’t he just take no for an answer? Why couldn’t he back off? Or at least acknowledge what we needed, which was for him to back off? He could have some of what he wanted, probably even most of what he wanted, just not precisely on his terms. Why couldn’t he see this? And this attack when he didn’t get his way, this going after Anna’s character, and now mine and my wife’s—this attacking my wife’s words directly—how in the world did he think that this was going to get him more access to our daughters?
And here entered into my thinking a delusion that I can’t entirely shed to this day—that I could find the words to make him see these things. That if I could just put it a certain way, he would understand, the light would turn on. He would see how much his words hurt. I guess, in some ways, it’s not unlike the flawed logic that must guide him—that if he could just make his point forcefully enough we would see the error of our ways and relent. I countered him point by point in long letters I didn’t send. Just as I am doing here. My therapist assured me that it wouldn’t make any difference what I said, but I couldn’t stop. If only I could find the right way to phrase it I could make him see. (Could one argue, on some deep unconscious level, it was the reason I’d become a writer in the first place?) I thought of nothing else. Didn’t a parent want what was best for his kid? And here I was, telling him that he was hurting me, and still he continued. The obsessiveness of my thinking is difficult to communicate. I was in a constant, all-consuming argument with him in my head.
Before long I would go back on anti-depressants. I had been happy to get off them—had worked hard to get off of them—a couple years before. For the first time in my life, I got a prescription for xanax that my wife and I both used when we couldn’t fall asleep.
Because here’s the thing. It wasn’t just me. Lauren was also decimated by my dad’s letters. The truth was, I trusted my wife’s reaction more than my own. (The truth was, I trusted almost anyone’s reaction more than my own.) I suppose you could argue that Lauren was reacting to me reacting to my father, but I don’t think so. Lauren comes from a family where cordiality is valued. The letters from my father contained more explicit nastiness in a single paragraph than had ever been enunciated in a lifetime by any of my wife’s relatives. She literally started losing her hair. Over the next couple years, Lauren would be diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. This is a complex and poorly understood autoimmune disease that often lays dormant for long periods of time, but it is widely thought to be triggered by stress. Lauren is unequivocal: “I blame him. He flipped the switch.” My Montessori wife, gentle, patient teacher of six- to nine-year-olds, expounded detailed fantasies of murdering my father. “I could hip check him into a bus in South Beach. We could toss him off of his balcony. Wouldn’t be any trouble at all—he’s so light.” She made these jokes in a tone of flippant black humor that we sometimes employ just between the two of us, but still, she made these jokes.
The logical sounding nastiness. The thoroughness of it. The repeated accusation that we were using our daughters—we were at every juncture desperately trying to figure out a way to do the opposite, to maintain the relationship with the grandparents when we couldn’t endure the sight of him. We were shaking mad at him. My father has always had the ability to carry on like absolutely nothing was wrong, to send us the most scathing email at 2:00 a.m. and then on skype the next morning, be all exclamatory pleasantness and smiles. It is not an ability Lauren or I possess—or aspire to—in the least.
Twice we tried setting up the girls to skype without us. We would have liked to stay out of the room entirely—his voice, his presence were that antagonizing to us—but we didn’t feel good about that, not after the way Anna had felt during our last vacation. Not after the way he had written about her. So we stayed off camera. But the girls didn’t want to skype without us. Anna had never enjoyed it; Callie had followed our forced-cheer lead. We weren’t going to make them.
At about this time, it became clear Suzanne got it. She emailed Lauren and me and said that she wanted to talk. She picked a time when my father would be at the gym, “because I certainly don’t want him around.” We were relieved and grateful. We wondered if there might be some way to get through to him, to just get him to stop writing us these letters, to give us a little space to allow our feelings to cool. That night we put her on speaker phone on our bed as Lauren lay on top of the covers and I compulsively paced the length of our Chicago bungalow’s converted attic bedroom. Suzanne sounded entirely sympathetic. She said how sorry she was that we felt so assaulted by these letters. We begged her to make them stop. “What do you want me to do, throw his computer out the window?” She said those words three or four times. Several times she said used the word “powerless.”
We never again heard from Suzanne independent of my father. He wrote that he was glad we had spoken—it sounded like saving face. On at least a couple occasions we received emails from her email address, signed by her, that were clearly written by him. From the word choice to the subject matter to the sentence structure to the formatting and proofreading, their styles are nothing alike. As should be obvious by now, my father’s style is fairly inimitable. Really, I should be insulted. I am an English professor after all. Spotting plagiarism is something I do professionally. But it was so obvious that Callie as a twelve year-old came into my study one evening and said, “Grandpa is pretending to be Saba. It’s creeping me out.”
More than once, we invited Suzanne to visit on her own. We said that she could stay with us. We didn’t know what else to do. We wanted the girls to have a relationship with their grandmother. We wanted her to be able to see her granddaughters. But we couldn’t spend time with my father. And we weren’t sending the girls by themselves to South Beach. Lauren wouldn’t consider it. And the girls weren’t interested. I’m grateful for this convergence—on my own I didn’t know what I would do. On emails in which my dad was cc’d Suzanne wrote back that visiting without my father was out of the question. Like clockwork, though, they continued to invite the girls to visit them without us—even now six years later—over Christmas, Spring Break, during the summer, though we have said repeatedly that’s not going to happen.
I had been proud of my relationship to my stepmother. It felt hard-earned and important. It felt like a generosity on my part and I wouldn’t be surprised if it felt that way on hers. I had a special bond with my mom and to my eyes Suzanne was about as stylistically different from her as I could imagine. My mom’s conversation was pointed and opinionated; I often had trouble following the train of my stepmom’s stories. My mom was always on the verge of a joke—her cancer jokes were legion; Suzanne could take even the littlest thing seriously. She moved into the house where I grew up nine months after my mom died. But the truth is I don’t want to say too much about her here. Suzanne can be a prickly person—I’ve often wished she would be more forgiving of wait staff—but I think she means well. I’ve always thought that. She overflowed with generosity toward our girls. My dad refers to her regularly in his letters as the innocent victim. To a large extent, I agree. When Callie was born, Suzanne anointed herself “Saba” and we all joked that this was a Waspy thing, this grandma nicknaming, but I also wondered if it was a kindness on her part, a way of not insisting on my mother’s role. In turn, we treated her always as Grandmother, not step grandmother. Because of my dad’s relentless planning, our daughters saw much more of her than they did of Lauren’s mother, with whom they remain close. My daughters loved Suzanne as their grandmother.
We blocked my father’s email. But inevitably I would go scrolling through my trash and spam folders to see if he’d written. I can’t explain why. Maybe because he was my father, my only living parent. Yes, some part of me craved a humane and empathetic response, some inkling that he sensed at last how much he was hurting us—or even that he didn’t understand, but that he would simply respect our boundaries. But the far, far larger part of me knew that wasn’t forthcoming. And still I looked. There was an addictive quality to it. I was like oxygen seeking a spark. Eventually, we arranged with some friends of ours, a couple fifteen years older than us, who were warm and wise counsel during this time, to send the letters to them to read first in case there was anything we needed to know. But this arrangement didn’t last either.
Almost compulsively, I showed these letters to a few good friends. I suspect I about drove them crazy. I needed them to say, he was crazy, not me. Universally, they did. (Ok, there was one friend who seemed to think I should just be the bigger person.)
My friends suggested that maybe my dad was losing it, an early sign of dementia. Because of the letters’ meanness, I would have liked to think so. But not only did he show no other signs, not only were the letters flawlessly, meticulously written and constructed, the truth was that these letters were entirely in character. In the process of leaving medical school and resettling out west, I had stayed for a temporary period with my dad and Suzanne. The house had brightened under Suzanne. The kitchen had been redone from sticky brown cabinets to shiny white ones. There was a dense lovely array of greenery on the front stairs’ landing. But my dark red, Native American themed corner bedroom was unchanged since I left for college. (Since probably fifth grade.) I would have been 26 at the time, my mom dead six years. I believe I stayed in the house two months, but we all knew that the stay was temporary. I don’t actually remember what the fight was about, only that my father and I yelled at each other. Typically, I did most of the yelling, as my father acted implacably, acted like I was insane. And the more bemused he acted—like the weight of all that was right and true and logical and good in the world was on his side—the more insane I felt. Shortly thereafter, I left for my new life out West. There I received a twelve page letter, “professionally typed by a person not known to our family” according to the first line. My father had included two copies, one for me and one to give to my therapist, he said. It was a good time for me, having finally freed myself from medical school, having begun a relationship with Lauren, and I didn’t have a therapist. When, a couple years later, I did, she convinced me in her slightly woo woo Tucson way to have a little ceremony and burn my father’s letter. Eventually I did just that, but I wish I had it now. I’m sure that whatever our fight was about, I wasn’t blameless, but no one should ever have to receive a letter like that—from anybody, least of all a parent. In twelve (I think I’m remembering that correctly) single spaced pages, my father had taken me apart, piece by piece, like a witness whose character needed utter dismantling on the stand. He had ascribed to me motives that were not remotely true—that I wanted to undermine his marriage with Suzanne, for example. As much as I didn’t connect with Suzanne in those days, as much as I thought it bizarre that a woman so different from my mother could be so precisely jigsawed into her spot in my father’s life, the very last thing I wanted was my dad single again. Toward the end of the letter, he had precisely prescribed the rules for any future visits–never during a “transitional period,” no more than three nights—where I could watch television (the den not the kitchen), how many water glasses I could have out of the kitchen at any one time (one). He had concluded by saying that there would be no further discussion of any of these matters, either in person or in writing. That part particularly got to me. And in the only part not professionally typed, he had signed it, of course, “Love, Dad.”
My good friend, Greg Martin, was the first reader of this essay. “It’s all so sad,” he said, “but you never talk about feeling sorrow.” It’s true. I have never had a clear relationship to sorrow. Often, as an adolescent growing up with a dying mother, I would try to will myself to cry. I would think about her suffering and imagine her dying and I would concentrate the pressure behind my eyes. I had a sense that there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t do it. I didn’t cry in the middle of the night when we stood beside the hospital bed where she was hooked up to the various machines, my sister and I on one side of her, my father on the other, or when we walked out of the room, knowing they would turn her off behind us. And I could squeeze out no more than one or two miserly tears at the Rabbi’s resonant voice during her funeral two days later. Then shortly after moving out West, more than six years later, a fellow waiter at the restaurant where I worked handed me a 100 page photocopy about meditation. And every time I sat down to meditate, heavy tears would slide down my cheeks. Sometimes just from one eye; sometimes from both. The quieter I could get my mind, the more I would cry. It felt good, the release, like something inside of me that needed to get out. But I honestly couldn’t say what feeling accompanied it. I honestly couldn’t have told you why I was crying.
For nearly a year, we kept our replies simple. We said what we would do, little more. No, we weren’t sending the girls to visit without us. No, we wouldn’t be skyping anymore. Or we didn’t reply at all. We were following therapists’ guidelines—being clear about what we would do, not engaging all the heavily emotional sturm und drung. Every few weeks, he would invite the girls to come without us, and then pester us for a reply, though we had told him that this would not happen.
After nearly a year, I lost it. My father had once again attacked something Lauren wrote and I went off. Within a twelve-hour period from night to morning, I fired off four furious emails to my dad. I told him he had Narcissistic Personality Disorder and begged him to take his letters to a therapist. I tore apart the original letter he had written about Anna in the same manner he had dissected Lauren’s words. I told him that it was his behavior that had been beyond-the-pale, that he had driven us so crazy during that South Beach visit, pestering Anna for the hundredth time about an outing that nobody else had any interest in, even while Anna was literally sobbing in my arms after saying goodbye to her cousin, my sister’s troubled adopted daughter who we might not see again (another story, that), that I had frantically searched my phone for a movie starting that very moment, because we knew an air-conditioned indoor theatre was the one place he was sure not to follow us on a sunny afternoon. (“Blech! Blech! Blech!” he had exclaimed.)
I no longer have those four furious e-mails (I think I titled the last two “And another thing”) or the communication from him that inspired them. I deleted them shortly thereafter. But I had sunk down to my father’s level.
He responded with a paragraph email saying that I must be in a very bad place emotionally and that he dearly hoped that I would get the rest and healing I needed on the holiday visit we were about to have with Lauren’s family. For a while then we didn’t hear from him. I actually considered that my furious emails might have gotten through to him.
Then the letter that I think of as The Final Letter arrived (though, of course, there would be letters after). Forty-eight single spaced pages. Fed-exed to me at work for my own sake, my father said, because I might not want Lauren to see it, so damning were its contents—of me, of my person. To be fair, the forty-eight pages included a few pages of the furious emails I’d written him, which he copied and pasted in sections and then systematically picked apart. (Yes, exactly as I’m doing to him here.)
I can’t say I’ve ever read every word of those forty-eight pages, though I skimmed more than enough to get the gist. One Friday night, shortly after receiving it, after some friends had left our home, Lauren poured herself a third or fourth glass of wine and flipped through the pages reading aloud sections from the letter as we sat by the fire. It was an aghast, gallows humor as she cackled and shrieked incredulously at the methodical, meticulous, multi-clausal meanness of it all, the withering sarcasm, the hyperbolic language, the poor me victimization of my father who had only to stop writing us mean letters and we probably would have picked up right where we had left off, putting up with his visits and skype sessions though we dreaded them, for his sake. We were laughing at this point, tipsy, but we had been wrecked by his letters, by the more than a year of this.
The letter is almost Nabokovian in some of its rhetorical flourishes. He composes a page long letter within the letter for me to send to Lauren explaining how I’ve kept her and the girls from any inheritance—a letter from me to my wife, written by him. He quotes King Lear at length. The five paragraphs that conclude the letter also appear on p. 3. “So, I end, as I began.” Since I have not duly accounted for my mom in his estimation, he refers to her dozens of times exclusively as the “Nameless Slightly-Responsible Person.” He calls me “Lyin’ Dan” and accuses me of Kellyanne Conway Alternative Facts. He refers to the handful of close friends and family who we’ve shown letters to in our desperate attempt to gain some perspective and counsel as our “Gag and Guffaw Group”—and then further abbreviates it “G&G Group.” He puts the “therapists” whose advice Lauren and I heeded in quotes. In two triple spaced columns he lists all the people close to him who have died in recent years—including former Attorney General Janet Reno, who was at Harvard Law at the same time as he was, but who he didn’t know at the time, and who I would be shocked if he saw five times in the subsequent forty years. He recounts how terrible I was at my single chore growing up—taking out the trash. He’s right. I was bad at taking out the trash.
He said that he had signed the paperwork to disown me during the summer after our fight began. Even his lawyers had recoiled at this, tried to talk him out, he said. He took this as proof of how egregious my behavior had been—that I had forced him to this. I had fully expected to have been disinherited by this time, but I’ll confess that it came as a shock that it was finalized just seven or eight months into our fight. As should be clear by now, he is as meticulous and thorough a person—and lawyer—as can be imagined, and none of this would have proceeded quickly. He disinherited me without ever once asking if there was something that he could do to make things better. What’s more, my mom and I were close. I adored her. She didn’t make the kind of money that he did, but she worked throughout their marriage right up until her death. I’m sure she had life insurance. And her parents, my grandparents, had been quite wealthy and had been extremely generous to my parents throughout my youth (my parents often referred to my grandparents’ Chanukah gifts as their bonus). Neither me nor my daughters will see any of this money from my mother or her family.
It is hard to pick highlights from 48 single spaced pages. Especially when you can barely stand to look at it. But here are few.
“The balance of this letter is devoted almost entirely to reprinting in full your four emails and my commenting on them. (The black ink is yours; the blue is mine.) Your e-mails are the perfect vehicle for explaining why I hope and expect never to see you or speak to you again.”
“But, before turning to the specifics of your e-mails, I have some general comments:
“You have betrayed every good person and every good experience that has ever been part of your life.”
“So, your purported diagnosis of me as afflicted with Narcissistic Personality Disorder is, like all the rest of your claims, phony. Let me tell you your diagnosis. It’s father hatred. Really simple. Everything else is pure, unadulterated pretext. You persist in trying to put a factual lipstick on the pig of what is really wrong with you. You fail miserably; your flailing efforts are woefully transparent.
“But, certainly, the greatest proof of your pure, unadulterated malice is that you never let me know that my offering a visit to Vizcaya—or, in your hateful eyes, my obnoxious insistence about a visit to Vizcaya—had created a real problem. If you did not have ice water in your veins and stone in your heart in your feelings about me, you would have, on the very first occasion, instantly told me that Vizcaya was a problem.”
There are several instances where he says some version of this. If we had only just let him know we wanted him to back off. It’s astounding. I can only chalk it up to real pathology—that he didn’t hear us. That he couldn’t hear us. We spent the better part of every visit saying some version of this. Trying to put limits on what he could do with the girls. We wrote notes to ourselves about how to handle it before Anna was even born. It drove us crazy to the point that a trip from Chicago to Florida in the middle of the winter often felt more like a chore than a vacation. It is such a case of up is down and down is up that I have to shake myself. Is it possible that we weren’t clear? I mean, we did try to spare his feelings whenever we could. But then I remember the tenure visit, when I said, explicitly, it’s really upsetting me, I really can’t have visitors then, it’s adding stress to the most stressful time in my life, I’m actually afraid it could cost me my job. I said those things over and over. And it mattered not at all. I remember both Lauren and me saying to him in his condo’s kitchen, “Anna does better if you allow her to come to you.” And I remember our response after his first letter about Anna—you’ve hurt our feelings, we need a little time—and how that apparently reflected badly on us. And I’m able to convince myself…but I guess this is the thing I’m trying to get at—I do need to convince myself. Over and over and over.
“Of course, your insensitivity in your treatment of Suzanne is simply another example of your general insensitivity to the feelings of others. There was the time, following the first step in your tenure process, when you actually were hurt and surprised that eight of your department colleagues voted against you. My instant reaction was to breathe a huge sigh of relief, and think to myself: “Thank Heaven it was only eight.’
How could you be so dumb about and so oblivious to your lack of inter-personal sensitivity that eight people, in the group who knew you best in your professional setting were offended by you—and that you, incredibly, actually didn’t “expect” it? Or did you delude yourself with the view that it was your scholarly work—and not you—that they found inadequate?
Seven voted against. One abstained.
So, toward the end of summer 2014, I signed new estate planning documents which completely disinherited you. Not a nickel. Actions have consequences….
Of course, your blowing your inheritance of X million dollars is not enough to satisfy your full-throated expression of your father hatred. Why not wreak major financial harm on others—namely, Lauren, Callie and Anna as well. You really do not care about the financial consequences to them of your despicable conduct. …
But there is just no satisfying when it comes to putting big bulls-eyes on their backs solely for your own gratification.
“I find it fascinating how needy you are for, and how dependent you are upon, the support you receive from your own personally-selected G&G Group.”
“The simple fact of the matter is that your first response was to cut us off not just from you, but from the girls.
“It all leads perfectly into the Really Big Lie: “no one wanted it to end this way.” In fact, complete estrangement is exactly the way you wanted “it to end.” …
“Then, you immediately embarked upon, and relentlessly pursued, a program—guaranteed to succeed in having it “end this way” of strangling contact between the girls and us. I am sure that, in your smug self-satisfaction, you believe that each time you advised the girls of your latest tightening of the noose, you did so with delicacy, sensitivity, restraint, and discretion. Doubtless it was a model, each time, of how to tell children what a parent has done to them.”
“Good-bye, Dan, my dear, beloved son. I have loved you so completely and unconditionally from the moment of your birth. As though it were yesterday, I remember vividly our obstetrician, John Martin, coming out of the delivery room and say, “Henry, you have a son. And he has all the right numbers of fingers and toes.”
He concludes the forty-eight pages: “I never considered myself your judge…only your parent, eager to be helpful, generous, and loving. I never knew or suspected that would not receive the same from you.” And of course, the only handwritten part: he signed it, “Love, Dad”
“This is not love,” Lauren said by the fire. “This—this—has nothing to do with love. I’m sorry that he’s your dad, but this has nothing to do with love.”
“But he thinks he loves me,” I said. “He thinks he just wants to see his granddaughters.”
“And that is your injury,” Lauren said. “You are able to see his point of view. His point of view is crazy. And he has never in your entire life made the slightest attempt to see your point of view.”
But he’s not able. I know this about him. He’s not capable of making that empathic leap. He can’t even see that there’s a leap to be made. Can I hold it against a blind man that he can’t see? And what of the morality of sharing his letters here? If you are reading this now, I trust that it is in some fairly small venue. Though, of course, it could make its way back to him. Does any of that change the moral calculus? The truth is, I’m not sure I care. He spent so much time and effort saying mean things to me and my family—when we told him he was hurting us. I am fifty-two years old and have spent the last three decades writing with the hope of publication—and I’ve never written openly about my father; I never wanted to hurt him. “Help Dad deal with things,” my mom wrote in the letter I think of as her final words, “and with you.”
After her drunken dramatic reading by the fireplace, Lauren hid the letter from me, but I made her promise not to throw it away. For some reason, I’ve always wanted there to be proof—of what, I’m not sure. Lauren doesn’t need it. She knows how she feels. I had to work hard to convince her to show me the letter for the sake of this essay. It may have been a mistake. Though I still can’t bring myself to read anywhere near every word, skimming still makes me shaky. On the one hand, the fact that it is so manifestly crazy (48 single spaced pages!), so hectoring and mean—so over-written—so entirely lacking in self-insight convinces me that we have done the right thing. On the other hand, it seeps in. After about four years on them, I am again off anti-depressants. (The Xanax still comes in handy once or twice a month when I can’t sleep.) But even at fifty-two, I feel the foundations of my life begin to crumble as he chips away at them. He scores his points, as he seems intent on doing. It is true, for example, that he took us on one gorgeous family vacation after another during my youth—to Hawaii and Puerto Vallarta and Jamaica—that we watched the Six Million Dollar Man on tv tables in our den, that we went apple picking as a family in the fall and rode our bikes around the bike path in Forest Park during the spring and summer. It is true that he has given me thousands of dollars over the years (he does a thorough accounting). What do I owe him?
But he is just dead wrong when he says that I’ve got the severance that I so sorely desired.
No.
Even now, I’d probably accept some limited relationship—if we could see them a couple times a year, for a couple days, maybe even skype on occasion. I don’t think Lauren would. She is pretty certain that he is bad for her health. And, as I have said before, I trust her judgment on the subject of my father far more than my own.
Why do I even want a relationship with him? I’m not sure I can answer that question. Even if we go back to before the Anna Letter, our lives are better without him. We all miss the family travel to South Beach, but not the constant negotiation, the constantly holding him at arm’s length. We certainly don’t miss the weekly skype. Our credit card debt is a little less than his usual gifts over the past six years would have typically amounted to, and our retirement looks different entirely that it did before. But that ship has sailed. I’ll confess there is some part of me—still—that would like a father with whom I could have a real relationship. And some still younger part of me that at fifty-two years old wants his approval—even in abandoning him: you did the right thing; you had no choice. But even here, I suppose I am deluding myself—he is the one who did the abandoning.
“…I hope and expect never to see you or speak to you again.”
He took steps just months into our fight to disown and disinherit me entirely. Of course, he would say we left him no choice after depriving him of our girls, after using our girls against him.
“Good-bye, Dan, my dear, beloved son.”
I want there to be a right answer. A voice from on high. For years—for decades—I had a recurring dream: my father and I facing off in court case; the subject of the case was unclear, but the jury was made up of the entire population of metropolitan St. Louis, our hometown. And the verdict was unanimous, every single person voted in my favor. I want every person in the Metropolitan St. Louis Area to agree. I know what my father’s verdict would be—what a horrible person, son, father, even husband I have been for doing these things. I can reject his answer, barely, but I can’t seem to reside comfortably in my own. And maybe this is the curse of the narcissistic parent…an inability to ever fully trust your own authority.
I suspect this is a ghost that haunts many children of narcissists, so consumed are our upbringings by the all-pervasive fog of the narcissist’s self. That paragraph about Anna echoes deep in my bones, where his well-being is determined by her behavior, without a thought for how his behavior might affect her well-being, even though he is the more powerful one in the relationship, and she the more vulnerable. A developing just-turned six-year-old. But I think I’m being honest with myself when I say that that part of me that wants a real relationship is only a distant flicker at this point. I know it’s not happening. A slightly older part of me is still as incredulous as when I said I couldn’t have visitors the week before my tenure materials were due: I’m telling you what I need; it’s not unreasonable; you’re my parent, you should want what’s best for me. You should at least respect what I’m saying. Honestly, even still, even after all that he’s said, I’d like to be able to give him something, the gift of our family, of my wonderful daughters, assuming they’d be willing. If he could only accept this gift on our terms without saying nasty mean things to us when he didn’t get exactly what he wanted. It would be better than nothing, wouldn’t it? I have very little hope of this happening.
When the girls were little, Lauren and I would sometimes marvel that for all the time we’d spend together, my father just didn’t seem to know us very well. He was always holding forth or grilling us or pushing us to sign off on his next plan. Did he have any idea that we had a nice one-two rapport when telling a story, that we could keep a table entertained? Did he see the respectful way we talked and listened to our children? The ways we were silly together? Could he tell what self-assured, thoughtful, kind, spirited, funny young people we were raising? Clearly, he was entirely unaware that, as a matter of fact, our girls were quite well-behaved, without us ever being parents who talked about “behaving” very much at all. I would have liked my father to be proud of the family and life I’ve built.
Maybe it’s just programmed into our DNA, this desire for a parental bond. I sense my friends’ unmooring as they post about their parents dying. I sense it even in the case of parents who have been incapacitated or diminished for years. In my case, it is a strange unmooring, knowing that the tether is still there, still very much the way he’s always been in Miami Beach, but in my case that tether feels much more like a whip. As much as my psychology will allow, I need to stay out of its range.
