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It was February, and I drove through Athens into the heart of east Texas with a cold wind blowing dead leaves and debris across the highway. The sky, dark and moody, mimicked the turmoil in my heart.
“Just talk to him,” Jim had said. “There is much you have to say and you won’t have many more chances.”
“You just don’t f*cking get it, do you?” I blasted back at him. “He has Alzheimer’s. It’s late in the game. He doesn’t even know my mother most of the time, much less me. What possible good is this going to do?”
Jim smiled, and placed a hand on my shoulder and gently squeezed.
“Just talk to him.”
I cursed him again but made the commitment. I thought he was out of his mind to hand me this as a task. But the man, part friend, part brother and all mentor was seldom off the mark.
Nonetheless I cursed him some more as I drove on, watching the buildings in the small town give way to bare trees and farmland.
I had no idea at all of what I was going to say. My father, at least when it came to he and I, had, in a way, always had Alzheimer’s. He was always there, and not there at the same time. I spent the first eighteen years of my life living with him, often sitting in the same room, but he was a million miles away.
His idea of fatherhood stopped at disciplinarian. A product of the great depression, a military career and two wars, his edges were cut in granite, his hand even but forged in steel. And his tolerance for nonsense, as he called it, nonexistent.
The only real gentleness I ever saw in him was with my mother, whom he loved beyond words. But that tenderness didn’t translate to his sons. He had three boys and all of them were to become men.
In my home, his word was the law, as surely as if it had been carved into stone tablets and carried down from the mountainside. He taught me, sometimes brutally, the importance of hard work and discipline. His affections were almost never spoken. They were considered to be implied in the lessons he taught.
Honor. Work. Obedience. Especially obedience.
And it was the obedience, of course, that I ultimately refused to embrace.
That refusal was a source of chaos in my home. It earned me the lifetime ire of my brothers and the stern disapproval of my mother. It eventually pushed me out the door and into the service, the quickest escape I could find. Despite all the circumstances, I can say, largely with thanks to my father, that I left with my head high. Anyone raised by that man would have a spine, if nothing else.
But the echoes of all that family combat lingered, and were still with me as I pulled into the driveway and shut off the car.
The last time I was there was for Christmas. It was a time of pleasantries and a temporary amnesia of past conflicts. Just as it always had been since I left home. But of course this wasn’t like other Christmases. My father had a disease that was literally rotting his brain. He sat in the corner watching a TV that wasn’t turned on while we opened presents.
My heart sank as I watched my mother open one wrapped in red and green striped paper. She untied the ribbon and took off the card which read TO: Ann FROM: Jerry, with love.
It was her handwriting.
She opened the box and pulled out the robe, a long white drape of thick terry cloth. She hadn’t bothered to remove the price tag when she wrapped it.
“Oh, look,” she said, “He got me a new robe. Isn’t it pretty?”
She got up and went to him, then leaned down to kiss his forehead.
“Thank you, sweetie. I just love it.”
He never took his eyes off the TV set.
As I got out of the car I cleared my mind of that memory and went to the front door. This was going to be hard enough without thinking about Christmas.
When I got inside, the sight of him drove a spike though my heart. Almost all of his hair had fallen out and even his eyebrows had become thin. It had happened so fast, and my mother explained that this sometimes happened as people got into the final stages.
He was seated in his easy chair. His chest and stomach were covered by an apron. And then I noticed that the apron was fitted with strands of thick fabric that ran behind the chair and were tied together.
My mother saw me looking at him in disbelief.
“It was necessary,” she said. “It was either that or send him somewhere. He has taken to turning the burners on the stove and pulling everything out of the fridge unless I am here to stop him. I’ll leave it on while I am gone, but you can take if off if you want to. Just don’t leave him alone, even to go to the bathroom, unless he is tied in.”
Her words battered my brain and my heart. Suddenly, my memories of him were in a much different light. I was enraged at the loss of strength in him; that strength I used to fight so hard to resist. I wanted to rip that goddam apron off of him and shred it. I wanted to shake my fist at God and curse him for the shell of a man that was tied to a chair in front of me.
I wanted my father back. Even if he was a father I never really had.
My mother interrupted my internal fit when she picked up her purse and keys. She had never asked why I wanted time alone with him, she had just agreed without comment. We never spoke about it after that.
“He doesn’t talk much,” she said, as she opened the door, “But he can still surprise you. He has these…moments. I can’t explain them.”
And with that she was gone and I found myself thrust into the most profound silence of my life. I stood there for a small eternity wondering what to do. The room felt like a vacuum; time suspended and hanging still in the air. I shook myself out of it and untied him.
I took a seat on the sofa just adjacent to his chair and he got up. I watched him go to a set of bookshelves and run his fingers along the wooden edges. He sat back down and was up again just as quickly. This time he went to the front door and jiggled the doorknob. He didn’t try to open it. He just seemed to like feeling it rattle in his fingers.
‘Oh God, Jim, what do you have me doing here?’ I asked myself. And somewhere in my struggling thoughts, the answer was whispered.
Just talk to him.
When my father returned to his chair again, that is exactly what I did.
I won’t tell anyone everything I said to him. That was between me and my father. But I will say that I left nothing unsaid. I covered every heartache and every disappointment. And I made every apology I could think of. There were many. And I told him the secrets of my heart that I could have never told him before. I talked and talked. I wept and talked some more.
How long this went on, I don’t know. But what I do know is that the whole time I was talking he never got out of that chair, which is to say that he never stopped listening.
And then, just when I thought I was done, I found myself reaching for his hand. I took it in mine and held on to it like a little boy.
Tears ran down my face like rivers and my breathing shuddered and hitched. I swallowed and managed to say the only real thing of importance that I had come to say.
“I love you, daddy.”
And with those words every wall that had ever been built in me tumbled down. Every chip I carried on my shoulder fell to the ground and every bit of manhood that I had used to prop myself up through life gave way to a heartbroken boy that had been voiceless for a lifetime.
I looked up through my tears and studied his eyes. I couldn’t believe what I saw. He was looking back at me, directly in the eyes, and he seemed to search my face for who I was.
He wanted to know who I was!
And then a small light came into his eyes. But it looked like a fire to me, burning with the fury of the greatest human spirit. And then he spoke, as though it was a lifetime earlier, and shook me to the very core of my soul with his words.
“I love you, too,” he said. “I always have.”
For whatever reason, for the first time since my arrival I heard a clock ticking in the background. It seemed to thunder in my ears as I sat there, stunned and shaken, trying to wrap my head around the magnitude of the moment. And just as what had just happened began to register fully, I saw him slipping back into the void of his shattered mind.
‘No! Come back! Come back!’ raced through my mind, but my pleading was too late. He got up from the chair, his hand sliding from mine and went toward the kitchen. This time I got up and lead him back to his chair. I sat with him in silence till my mother got back home.
The winter weather chased me back to Houston the next day. The clouds were no less dark, the trees were just as bare and lifeless.
But it was not the same drive as the drive up. I left the radio off and listened to the chilly wind howl around my car as I drove. I watched the ribbon of asphalt come at me and disappear behind like bad memories. And I carried with me a gift from my father, the man who had just given me everything I ever needed.
My hand was steady on the wheel.
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Originally Posted by The Backward OX
