Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [23]
After my dad was diagnosed with cancer, he used the time he had left to take everyone who mattered to him out to lunch or to dinner. The last thing he did before he died was his taxes. The morning he died, I went into the bedroom where he lay and sat next to him. I looked at him. I had no real sense of the man who lay in front of me. I had no sense of personal loss, that I had somehow been diminished. The body in front of me might as well have been that of a stranger. There was no connection; it was like the experience I had had when I examined the picture of my sister.
The lives of the dead set examples for us. It makes sense that having a sister die when I was only three left me afraid of a lot of things. It explains why the unexpected phone call is always bad news. It accounts for why, until I became a father, I was many times filled with an emotion I could articulate only as “the nameless dread.”
An incident that is emblematic of my outlook at the time I became a father arose late one Wednesday morning. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the scariest day in Jewish theology, when God writes down what will happen to you in the next year based on your piety and observance of Jewish law. Jennifer and I had gone to services at a local university, and when they ended, we walked to our car only to find that we had received a parking ticket. That seemed a disastrous omen for what awaited us. I was shaken and angry.
Three days later, we got our stork call.
As one of my cousins described it, the boys literally, and on many levels, brought new life into the family.
When I became a father, I felt about as ready for the responsibility as would someone with a degree from a culinary school who has just been hauled on deck and told to steer a ship. As it turns out, the only way to learn how to be a father is to become one. I am grateful that my father inculcated certain core values that have proved to be beneficial guides, but I recall no open, candid conversations with him about serious personal issues. However, I can remember several moments when I learned how not to act — such as how damaging and counterproductive it is when a father loses his temper. My most disappointing moments as a father have been when I felt that I had acted too authoritarian and interjected anger into the moment. I would feel keen disappointment that I had become my father. His anger had driven me away; it had created a wedge between us. I desperately did not want my children to be afraid of me.
And certainly nothing that I have learned over the past thirty years of being a lawyer is of any use in being a father. One of the things drilled into new lawyers is never to ask a question to which you do not know the answer, because it could potentially damage your case. Of course, as a father you don’t always have that luxury. Sometimes you have to ask questions you don’t know the answer to, even if the answer might well be something you really would prefer not to hear.
When Noah and Dan were born, they were named by their birth parents, respectively, Thaddeus and Basil. (One of our friends suggested that they were given these names so that when they were adopted and given “normal” names, they would be eternally grateful.) One day in fifth grade, it was Noah’s turn to be Star of the Week. Sooner or later, every kid in his class was given the opportunity to tell the others about his or her life: siblings, pets, what Mom and Dad were like, what their parents did for a living. So, Noah being Noah, I figured his birth story would be a part of what he told people. When I picked them up at school that day, after they had climbed into the backseat and gotten buckled in, I asked, “So how was your day, boys?”
“Great,” Dan said immediately.
“Fine,” said Noah curtly, almost dismissively,