Memorial Day, 2011

My father died on Memorial Day ten years ago. Ten entire years. It feels like yesterday and a lifetime and everything in between. He died after a Quixotic fight with pancreatic cancer; a fight that everyone but he knew he would lose. I will never forget the look on one of the many doctors' faces when he said that if he could just get through x or y procedure and put some weight back on, he'd be back in the game. He weighed about 90 pounds at the time and the expression on the doctor's face was a mixture of disbelief and pity. My proud father never told his clients he was sick. He didn't allow anyone to talk about what would happen next or how he felt about his life being cut short. We saw occasional glimpses of his anger or sadness, when he would lash out at one of us, usually my mother, followed by remorse. We could see that if he opened up enough to let us in, there was so much emotion buried there, so much he could have shared with us and unburdened himself of, but mostly what we saw and felt was a wall of denial. If there is one thing that I want to take from his death, it's that denying the truth is not the answer. Facing it and dealing with it, in all of it's bloody imperfection and pain, is infinitely better.

People, in their well meaning efforts to be comforting, say that my dad would be proud of me. That he would see this bright, artistic, well-intentioned life that I am carving out for myself and be proud. I am absolutely certain this is not the case. I don't say this with a "woe is me" attitude at all. It's simply the truth, without denial. My dad would not be proud of my life. He would be and was extremely disappointed by it. That is not to say that he didn't love me. I'm relatively certain that he did. But pride is a different thing. He looked at my artistry as a pastime that I would grow out of. He felt that I was fiscally irresponsible (which is odd, considering that my financial challenges actually began after his death.) He disagreed with me politically. He abhorred my lack of religion. My failed marriage was more than sad, it signified my failure to be a moral human being. He absolutely believed deep in his soul that I was or will actually be descending into hell and told me so point blank. So, what I then ask, is whether or not his pride in me is what matters. If it is, I can find moments where my work transcended his disappointment and he saw me as a professional worthy of respect; his reaction to my singing at my sister's wedding, catching him bragging about a certain Phantom performance, an impromptu recital in his hospital room. There were these isolated moments and I do treasure them, but they are not the reality of our relationship. That exists somewhere else.

My dad was funny. He was smart and biting and incredibly entertaining. He looked like Fred Astaire. He loved opera and politics (well, Republican politics) and meeting new people. He loved to run (something that we do share) and ski and travel. Above all, he loved to fly. I think he felt immortal or closer to God or something when he was piloting a plane. His greatest joy would have been to see me as a fighter pilot in the Air Force. Seriously. My friends who never saw his anger adored him. My friends who did, well, they never came back to the house.

He was demanding and unforgiving and self righteous. He was a fundamentalist Christian in a Jewish family who ended up with two Atheist children. He loved animals and sadly never met his granddaughter, whom I am absolutely certain he would have been utterly in love with. He believed that the gun in his bedside table was safe and that the world was not. He loved garlic. A lot.

I have a lot of unresolved issues around my relationship with my father. I wish more than anything that he was alive so that we could work them out together. I believe, maybe irrationally, that we could have gotten to a place of understanding and mutual respect. He did with his own father. He was eventually able to tell his father, after 40 years of deceit, that he had converted to Christianity. If he was capable of that, I have to believe that we could have gotten to a point of truth in our relationship. We could have, if he had been open to it, gotten there when he was ill, but he wasn't, so we ran out of time. On Memorial Day, and on this one in particular, that is what I mourn; the lost opportunity to know each other as adults.

All of this being said, I did love my dad. I will never forget the overwhelming feeling, as I watched the towers burning on Sept. 11, 2001 that if only my dad were still here, this unbelievable event would not be happening and everything would still be ok. When the world was falling apart, I wanted my dad and in that moment I knew that our bond was still there and always would be, even if he thought we would spend eternity in different places. I can't wait to prove him wrong.