(1)
My father died early last month (on the 7th of November).
Please - no tears. I didn't shed any. There was none of the usual sadness at the passing of a parent. In point of fact, upon receiving the email from my brother that our father had died, I turned to my significant female partner and broke into a wide smile, leaped up and danced joyfully around the room.
I had been looking forward to his death for many years. I promised myself that, upon hearing of his demise, I would 'break open a bottle of bubbly'. When I first said that, I still drank fruit juice (I had stopped drinking alcohol -- and therefore champagne -- 25 years ago) and I thought that would be a bottle of sparkling cider. But now I live on an even more restricted diet and the only liquid I drink is water; hence, I shared sparkling water with friends, to celebrate his death. A close friend in my congregation, though, suggested that a more appropriate toast would be, not about his death, but about my being given my freedom from the potentiality of his physical attack. That felt much more appropriate to me as well.
(2)
You see, in my case, my father and I had had, throughout my life, a most problematic relationship. I wanted, my whole life, to love my father -- and yearned to feel that he loved me, in the nurturing way that love is most positively expressed -- but that just wasn't possible.
My father was a violent man, shut down emotionally, who only knew how to connect emotionally with his sons by beating them with his fists. I spent the whole of my life -- from infancy forward -- in abject fright that, at any moment, with no relation to much of anything, I might be subjected to his violence.
My father was a sadist and a pedophile, at least with his own children. I'm quite sure, from years of therapy and dream and conscious memory, that he raped me, either anally or orally (or both) at the age of 9 months, and periodically several more times until I was 10 years-of-age. And he beat me savagely for the most minor of infractions, and often for no infraction at all -- only motivated by his personal psychic discomfort of the moment and his ability to lash out at his sons whenever he felt like it.
I was one of three sons [no sisters], but as the youngest, I was the one most subjected to his violent outbursts (an observation that even my brothers have acknowledged was true). By the time I reached high school, I was taller than our father (he was 6'2", and by the time I was 16 years-of-age, I had reached 6'8") and therefore was potentially in a position to defend myself. But, by then, my brothers had headed off to college and I was the only one left at home, for my senior year.
You must understand: I was like the elephant with the chain around its leg as an infant, who later, when he is bigger and stronger, only has a flimsy rope to hold him, who doesn't break away because he's been trained to obey. I was absolutely terrified of my father. That last year of high school, when he savagely beat me 3 - 4 times a week [during our 'talks' in the basement], he let me know, on many an occasion, that "if you ever get to thinking you're big enough to fight back, I can always use a baseball bat." And I knew he was insane enough to do it, so I never did fight back.
What was amazing is that he thought that his frightful violence toward his sons constituted love. He often said "I wouldn't beat you if I didn't love you." I would have been quite willing to have been loved a whole lot less, based upon that definition of love!!
(3)
He was a man of complex inner emotional conflicts, low self-esteem, and his own internalized gender confusion. My brothers and I were subjected to continual tirades about 'being stupid', no matter what we did or accomplished. When my brothers later became quite successful attorneys, our father continued to tell them they would never amount to anything. He told me, literally thousands of times, that I was "just plain stupid", which drove my already low self-esteem into the gutter and left me, for many years thereafter, with a craving to learn as much as I could about every possible subject, so deeply frightened was I that other people would think I was stupid. (Generally, I managed to overcompensate, to the point that I ended up intimidating almost everyone with my breadth of academic knowledge.)
As he was savagely beating me with his fists -- and the metal end of his belt, a favorite weapon for him to use -- he would often be screaming at the top of his lungs "Be a man! Be a man! Be a man!" like some sort of mantra. What occurred to me, in clear tones in my mind, was that if that behavior constituted 'being a man', then I wanted to have nothing to do with being a man. Which, of course, placed me in a quite confusing gender quandary: I was, biologically, a man, and yet the primary modeling, for me, of masculinity, was this frightfully violent and insane man who was my father. I was left, for many, many years thereafter, with a quite deep questioning about my own maleness, which only began to be healed when I discovered the men's wellness movement in the mid-1980's.
My mother did little to intervene in these outbursts, and in fact, often motivated them by coming up with equally illogical infractions that "your father will hear about when he comes home." Quite different from being a protector, my mother, in her own fear and chronic dissociation, ended up being an enabler for his violence. (So deep was her denial that for many years after our father divorced her, every time I would talk about the frightful degree of his physical violence, she would exclaim "Why have you never told me this before!" Every time! As though she had never heard it before that time.)
(4)
By the time I was in my senior year of high school, even in the midst of all these beatings, I was taking psychology courses and becoming quite clear that my father was profoundly insane and a sadist. Why didn't I fight back? Other than the 'baseball bat' threats, he was also a military officer (U.S. Air Force) and I knew that if I were to call the police [the military police, since that last year of high school we lived in military housing], they might arrest him, but that upon his being released [there were few, if any, laws against parents beating their children back in the '60's], he would have come home and literally have beaten me to death, since his military career would have been toast due to such an arrest. So, as painful as the beatings were, I didn't fight back or call the police out of a paradoxical sense of self-defense. The other point I would note, as well, is that all the other boys I knew whose fathers were military officers were being regularly beaten by their fathers -- that was just the 'ethic' among many military personnel for 'disciplining' their children.
An article I read recently on The Good Man Project noted that the behavior of my father was undoubtedly criminal. In this more enlightened era, he would have been arrested for child abuse (or at least should have been). But, such laws were few and far between back then, and generally not enforced even if they were on the books. Plus, as noted, he was in the military, which has its own 'code of justice', separate from the civilian courts.
(5)
My father, gripped as he was by the tumult of his own inner psychological conflicts, probably often felt out-of-control in his professional military career. He never got along well with his superiors (he remained a Captain for 13 years -- when the standard term-of-service in that rank was, by his own reckoning, 7 years -- before finally being promoted to and retiring as a Lt. Colonel). The one place where he had complete control was in his family, and there he devotedly practiced a form of out-of-control sadistic terror. My earliest conscious memory was at the age of 4 and it was of one of his terrifying beatings. As a child, I had no choice, out of shear personal defense, but to 'crawl up into myself' and believe, with all of my heart, that somehow, someday, this terror would eventually come to an end. And that I would still be alive when it happened.
Hence, upon hearing that my father had died, it was similar to someone who had been incarcerated in the Soviet Union gulags hearing that Joseph Stalin had died in his sleep.
The analogy is not inappropriate. Living in our home often felt like living in a concentration camp, where terror was meted out based on a wholly irrational random basis. If I had been a juvenile delinquent, some of the rage could have been understood [though definitely not excused]. But I was the most meek and toe-the-line kind of kid, so the violence vastly outweighed the nature of the infractions. And frankly, as noted earlier, the 'infractions' were often manufactured whole-cloth in the moment. It wasn't simply a matter of 'a crazy-making rule structure' where today 'X' was okay, and tomorrow 'X' was not-okay; rather, each day a totally irrational 'event' was created to be the basis for my [and my brothers'] 'having done something that portrayed my/our stupidness' and therefore needed to be subjected to 'discipline' by our father. Objectively, it was about his internalized conflicts, not our behavior, but such objectivity is hard to maintain when one is being subjected to continual, life-long irrational random terror.
(6)
Did I learn nothing of importance from my father? Did he give me no positive messages? Of course, saying such would be a misrepresentation. My father often asked us, at the dinner table, what we had learned in school each day. There was a pro-intellectual emphasis on learning in our household. My father was a history buff and a stamp collector, and I became a history buff and stamp collector (I still enjoy both immensely). My parents encouraged religious exploration and early in our childhoods encouraged us to come to our own conclusions about religion. And I, in response, largely rejected religion until my mid-30's, when I became of Unitarian Universalist, a faith tradition which I have whole-heartedly accepted and continue to rejoice within.
But whatever positive influences my father had on me were negated, in fact so thunderously drowned by the irrational random terror that he exhibited, that I have few positive memories of him nor ever felt much respect for him as a person.
(7)
I have never wanted to have children of my own, given the painful memories I had of my own childhood (and, in fact, have always been and remain quite uncomfortable around children). And though I am "my father's son", am almost a spitting-image of my father, and share his first name, I have never, unlike my father, beaten or raped children, nor have I ever been physically violent toward anyone else.
Frankly, I'm profoundly terrified of violence. Whenever I'm in a situation that even has the barest inkling of possibility of turning physically violent, or whenever I'm around someone, the nature of whose behavior is meant to provoke a strong negative reaction from me, I search for the nearest exit and depart as quickly as I can before the situation gets anywhere near that. Further, to this day, I prefer to avoid 'horror' or violent 'action' films, because they remind me so much of my own childhood, and therefore I get too easily 'triggered' by them.
Whenever I see a movie or theatrical production where a positive father-son relationship is portrayed, or whenever I see that kind of relationship among my peers with their children, it brings tears to my eyes -- not because I had such a relationship and lost it, but because I never had such a nurturing relationship with my father and always wanted one. Every time I foolishly reached out emotionally to my father in hopes of fostering such a relationship, I was subjected to even more abuse, so conflicted was he with masculinity and warm loving feelings.
(8)
Hence, as I said at the start, upon hearing of my father's death, I felt quite relieved. Though I have been taller and stronger than him for many years (and have not had much of a connection with him since 1987, having last seen him at my mother's funeral in 2004), I continued to be, at a deep psychic level, in a state of terror about potentially being attacked by him, for whatever irrational reason, every day of my adult life.
I can finally release that fear. I can finally know, in my 'heart-of-hearts', that I am no longer potentially subject to the violence of my tormentor.
Therefore.... Please -- no tears. No condolences. No "I'm sorry that your father has died." You'd be wasting your breath. And you would be [albeit with no intended malice] trying to demand that I feel a 'cultural expectation' about the death of a parent which has nothing to do with the reality of my life.
Instead, warmly hug me, praise me for my work with adult male sexual abuse survivors and men's emotional wellness, and wish me well on my continued emotional healing.
My father's death is my ticket out of the hall of crazy mirrors. It's time to move forward as a free soul, with a more positive and accurate reflection of myself as a man who is seeking to achieve positive mental health for himself and other men in our culture.
