Mortal Man and Death Child
CW/TW — parental death, mental illness, suicide, childhood sexual assault, emotional abuse
My dad is dying.
That’s all I can think when I see the skinny legs that he’s covered with layers of sweatpants and jeans, hanging limply in front of him as he sits on the ground of our driveway. His brand new walker, all shiny metal in the darkness of an Ohio winter night, is standing next to him. He’s lost the ability to walk recently due to numbness in his legs. The doctors don’t know why.
There’s a sense of tragedy that I know should be there. But it isn’t. Instead, I’m pathetically wishing it were me.
Part I — Diagnosis
My father was diagnosed with heart failure some time during the four years where I only spoke to him on major holidays. We stopped speaking regularly because of my resentment at his refusal to help me when I lost my job in 2016.
I also found it harder to speak to him the more I thought about the role that he played in my childhood. Rather, the realization of the emotional neglect which caused me to struggle in adulthood to find relationships that felt safe and available.
I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder at age 18 after I was hospitalized for trying to kill myself by overdosing on Tylenol. But, I never got to the pills. Instead, a teacher came to my house to alert my parents after text messages I sent one of the few highschool friends I had.
When you are ill and have no idea why or how, the suffering can feel impossible. Diagnosis can feel like relief when someone can scientifically classify what is affecting you.
On the other hand, my father’s second diagnosis, neuromyelitis optica, means almost nothing to doctors who don’t specialize in neurology. Because the disease is so rare, doctors hear the diagnosis then quickly turn back to something much more common that they can understand: heart failure.
My dad is dying from two diseases, and as someone who has wanted to die, I know that the “process” of dying can be quite difficult. Knowing this burden is how I found myself working every day to be there for him in these final days. I try to be there for him, despite the emotional beating I know I will receive for doing so, because our relationship as father and child is not a positive one.
Part II — Treatment
My father is groaning in extraordinary pain when I lift his legs out of his house shoes and put them in a bucket of hot water and Epsom salt. There are not many people in the world equipped to deal with their elderly parent’s sore ridden legs and feet. I know that among my siblings, this is something only I would ever do.
I desperately want my father to feel better because I understand what physical pain can take out of you. I understand pain. I know what unbearable pain is.
I feel closer to my father than I ever have in life through this commiseration of pain.
As I help get his feet out of the bucket and check in about how much the heat helped, a wave of shame washes over me. I’m caring for my abusive father as though he were the kind of father who provided unconditional love. I’m rubbing cocoa butter into his cracked skin, pressing hard, hoping the pressure will relieve some tightening that is a standard feature of his autoimmune disease; Yet, deep down I know he doesn’t deserve my kindness.
I remember my father’s response to the abuse and trauma I experienced at the hands of family members: cold assumptive force. He expected me to cope because there was no other option. He expected me to be silent because it was better for him. Then, he wouldn’t have a broken daughter to concern himself with.
But, I was a broken daughter. I am a broken daughter.
I’ve been in therapy off and on since that hospitalization. I’ve been on medication for depression and anxiety. My treatment plan has involved CBT, DBT, and a mixed modern version of psychotherapy, focused on complex-trauma-disorder and dysthymia.
Even after four years of incredibly hard work with a therapist I really like, my mental illness feels like a lifelong disease. My depressive mind never heals fully. It adapts to the treatment I give it.
This past October, I changed the dosage of my antidepressants for the first time in years, and while most depressive symptoms have been hunted down by the serotonin reuptake inhibitors, it doesn’t change the reality of my mind being home to a traumatized child who reacts violently to triggers. The triggers are everywhere these days because I’m in my childhood home, the site of all the abuse that has made me consider death many times.
It’s the kind of serious contemplation of death that once you start, you can never stop forever. It opens up as a possible solution every time life is hard. It tempts you, lusty as ever, to just die because then there’s no more pain and suffering to live through.
The traumatized child and my “recovered” adult brain clash over and over about living like this. Whether to live anymore at all.
I finally understand my father’s feelings of futility about his own treatments.
Part III — Prognosis
Whether his heart stops, or his spinal cord finally attacks itself to the point that it no longer sends signals to his major organs, my dad is going to die from these diseases. He’s going to die, probably soon. Or later, if my sister is correct in her assumption that only the good die young and our dad is much too terrible to die in his 60s.
I keep saying he’s going to die because I have a habit of dress rehearsing traumatic events. Even though I know there’s likely no such thing as “preparing oneself” for all the big feelings that will come with the death of a parent. There’s also that I am a daughter and he is my father. There’s also the emotional abuse. There’s also those rare moments of happiness from childhood that I fear claiming because I don’t want the picture to look unreal.
Reality is hard to reconcile when you’re dying. Or, when you want to die.
The last time I truly wanted to die was last year. It was an unseasonably warm day in January. I was standing on the 125th Street platform of the above ground subway station in Harlem after visiting a friend and crying for at least an hour. I was deep in the process of revisiting a traumatic event from my childhood, the full weight of which I had repressed for over 23 years. The full weight of the knowledge had me thinking about hurling myself in front of the train. I thought long and hard about how it might feel to just end it there, to let myself get crushed by the train as so many people do every year in NYC.
I knew that the threat of that event was long over. I knew that I had moved 6000 miles away from that threat 10 years ago, but still it had affected everything about my life ever since. That’s why they sometimes say surviving sexual assault can be worse than being murdered in the process. You’re forced to live with the death of another, happier life in your memories and imagination. How cruel to force a child to live with the emotional weight. Perhaps that is why more than anyone, I understand all the feelings that come up when you’re dying and there’s nothing you can do but face it. Know it. See it. And my own father sees the death on me because he was there that night — the night of revelation that my cousin had molested me and he expects me to push forward through it because it’s what he would do. It’s what he’s always done.
I’ve known since I was six years old how to survive death.
My dad is dying. I was dying. I might still be dying, depending on how you look at it. To be mortal, is to always be closely aware of death. I understand that death conceptually for “normal people” can be terrifying. That’s probably why despite everything in my fraught, or at times, average relationship with my father, I want to be here for him.
If I can harness my strange relationship with death to help my father cope, then here I am, and I will.
