The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [93]
The next time my dad reached for the wooden pipe between our seats, I asked him not to smoke.
“Why not?” he asked, struggling to sound calm.
“Because then I can’t talk to you,” I answered. It was one of the few times I’d let my father know that he’d disappointed me.
We were quiet for many miles, both of us staring fixedly at the road. “Well, if you’re not going to talk anyway,” Dad said, and he lit a bowl with a motel matchbook, steering with his elbows.
My parents divorced when I was two, and my dad moved from Vermont to Massachusetts. My sister and I spent every weekend with him for two years, staying with my mom in Vermont during the week. Bedtime every Friday night was a ride in Dad’s car between Brattleboro and Newton. We listened to one Raffi tape after another. I remember the first time I heard the song “Five Little Ducks Went Out One Day.” When the little ducks set out to go “far away” from their mother, my thumb went straight into my mouth. By the time the mother duck went, “Quack, quack, quack,” and no little ducks came paddling back, my round face was covered in tears. Dad must have noticed in the rearview mirror, because he sang along loudly with the last line, “The mother duck went, Quack, quack, quack, and all of the little ducks came back!” But by then it was too late. He pulled over and lifted me out of my car seat. “It’s OK,” he said. “They all came back. The ducks are with their mommy now. They all came back.” But my sister remembers that he was crying too.
My dad’s father—a preacher and a drunk—left when my father was three. He took off in the middle of the night and wasn’t heard from again until thirty years later, when my dad’s aunt called to tell him his father was dying. He had a month to live, maybe less, and he wanted to see his son before he died; he had thought of Dad often throughout the years, she said, even though he’d been too much of a coward to contact him. Would my father like directions to the hospital? “No thanks,” Dad said, and hung up the phone.
When my mother told me that story recently, I was struck by the difference between my struggle with depression and my father’s. I grew up with a father who was around, who listened. In high school, when I had the same dead look in my eyes too many days in a row, Dad noticed and set up an appointment for me with a therapist. After several sessions the therapist asked me, “Do you think it’s possible that your depression is your way of loving your father?”
There may be truth to this, but it’s also true that my father’s love is all that has prevented me from feeling unbearably alone during the darkest periods of my life. When I think back on my time in Paris, I remember a constant cosmic dread so pervasive that I’m unsure I would have survived it had I not had someone to call who would fully understand what I was going through.
The last night my dad was in France, we went to a Bach concert at the Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris. “I’m assuming you don’t want any grass?” my father asked before we left his hotel room. I said no, and he didn’t bring any.
We sat in the front row and smiled for two hours. When it was over, we were the last ones to stop clapping. Walking around Notre Dame afterward, my dad confessed that he had not wanted to come to Paris when I’d first asked him. He’d been so sad himself for the previous few months that he’d doubted he could help me. He was just tired of every day being so hard, he said.
“But it’s OK that we both help each other?” he asked. “That’s OK, right?”
His blue eyes and freckled cheeks looked so fragile, so like my own, that I had to look away before I spoke. “Yes, of course, Dad. Of course.”
Care Taking
Elizabeth Brownrigg
When age and dementia undo her friend Julia, Elizabeth Brownrigg discovers that true compassion sometimes means setting boundaries. Helping another doesn’t mean hurting yourself, and when that’s happening, no one benefits. But it’s a hard lesson to accept when all we want to do is help.
On a cold, rainy afternoon I sorted through Julia’s papers. There were