In the end, or rather before the end, my father's mental illness killed his relationship with me. After he reached a certain age, I found it impossible to communicate with him. I visited him several months ago. He does not see me. He looks through me, as though I am just an abstract idea. He talks at me rather than with me. His face is a mask, he conceals what he really feels, what he really thinks, because his mind has many unpleasant thoughts and feelings, a beehive of little demons that must be kept in, lest they sting and sting. Once when I spoke with him for five hours into the wee hours of the morning he started telling me that a stranger he passed in the mall was spying upon him using an electronic listening device. When I went to bed that night I wondered whether he would come into my room and stab me, because maybe I was spying on him too, maybe I was in league with them, maybe I was actually the stranger, using a clever disguise to appear as his son.
His mind today thrives upon anger. He is always searching for something to get angry about. He is never willing to admit the slightest fault. He demands that everyone pretend as though he is always right and always perfect. I think it is a coping mechanism that helps him deal with his depression. So he will die alone having written me and possibly my brother out of his will because he is angry at us. He is always angry at either my brother or me. I cannot remember a time when he was not. He sought to use his will as a tool to manipulate us, except I refused to be manipulated. If he writes me out then so be it. I feel like he gives a lie to all the things he used to say and the things he used to swear. More often I recall the bad things he did to us, the lies he said to us. Less do I recall any good.
I remember when I was a boy, my father instilled in me the fantasy that we were special, that our family was special, that he was special, and that I was special, but I came to find out later that none of that was true, rather we were ordinary and powerless and poor and humble in abilities and resources, and as for our family, well, it was dysfunctional due in large part to his mental illness and the poor decisions that he made, and now our family is thrown to the four winds, for Mother at last acquired the strength and wisdom to leave him, and today he is not even willing to speak to his own children out of pettiness and spite, a pattern he has followed off and on for decades, for his whole life. No, we are not special in any way, and I am glad the line ends with me, I am glad I was cautious, because there is nothing really worth going to the trouble and expense of replicating, as I look around the world and observe so much genius and creativity in others. My father was proud without a basis for his overweening pride, and as a youngster I absorbed this pride and claimed it for my own, but now I feel different, I question the basis for this pride, and feel humble. I feel empty also and think that much was random and meaningless. It is a strange thing to recall being close to one's father long ago, and knowing now that he wouldn't even answer the phone if I were to call, because of his sickness of the mind. For years I thought my life's achievement would be an autobiography, or at any rate a derivative book of some kind, but now I realize that no one would read it in the first place, because autobiographies are for the famous, and there's nothing remarkable about us, we were just another family living in a certain period in a certain area. I prefer allowing my memory to decay and fade, for dust to pile upon the dust. To disturb old ghosts again is not my wish, nor do I want to preserve in words those who don't deserve it. So he will fade into darkness and I will follow in due course and that will be that. When I look back I see so many lies, so much nonsense, none of it was important at all.
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