My Dad
Warning: the below material is rather brutal and not for the faint of heart. Stop reading if it bothers you.
The most complicated relationship that I have ever held with anyone else in my life was the relationship that I had with my father.
My early years were filled with physical and emotional abuse. Some days were good and my father was loving. Some days were bad and we learned to try to be invisible. My mother says that we sometimes went to Sunday School and she was embarrassed because we had bruises on our backs and our buttocks.
My father was a chemist for a local paper mill. At some point he landed a better job working for a company in a small town in Eastern North Carolina. He went on ahead and started work for the company while we finished out the school year. At some point during the year he suffered a mental breakdown and ended up back home. He was committed to a local private hospital and I remembered going there with my brothers. I have tried to go back and find this place, but I think that it was replaced by a park. I remembered that it had a miniature golf set of holes out front and there was a grand entryway with two large staircases inside.
The company in Eastern North Carolina said that my father could come back to work, but only if he agreed to go to a psychiatrist once a week in Greenville. The whole family would pack up once a week for the drive. I learned that I would get motion sickness if I attempted to read or concentrate while the car was moving. If I could see where the car was going, then I would be OK. I generally learned to do my homework while in the waiting area for those days.
One week in the spring of 1967, my father returned from one of the sessions and announced that he had lost his job. The company had the psychiatrist inform my Dad that he no longer had a job at the paper company.
He went and drove his Camino truck back to Texas and we finished out the school year. After the moving van picked up our belongings, we drove back to Texas, but my mother decided to visit a favorite uncle of hers that lived in Florida.
We eventually ended up at my mother's parents farm in East Texas. My Dad was waiting for us there. It wasn't too long before we realized that he had again lost it. My mother had him committed to the mental institution in Rusk. I remembered that we used to laugh at the "crazy people" that were in that institution. Suddenly, it was no longer funny.
My Dad received electric shock treatments while in Rusk.
My mother eventually landed a teachers job in Corpus Christi. My Dad's parents managed to bail him out of Rusk and he found work at a Cement tube manufacturing company in Hillsboro.
There was once while we lived down in Corpus that my Dad's family came down and demanded visitation. My mother resisted, but it was in the divorce papers that there was supposed to be some visitation and access.
By the time that I went to college, my Dad had lost the job in Hillsboro and started working in the Maytag store that my Dad's father had started after WWII. He was his most lucid while I attended college in Houston. I would come into Pasadena during the weekends and my Dad would wash my clothes in the store. We went to movies. He told stories. One of his tricks would be that he would start up some story based on something out of the news. The story would start out plausible enough, but eventually you would get to a point that your jaw would drop because you realized that you had been had. It was a great fib. Made up. It was relatively benign and a joke to him.
At one point, we went over to my brothers house and he lost his cool. I froze as I had instinctively learned to do while growing up. At that one instant, he learned what damage that he had inflicted upon us. He left.
When I went to work for the computer company in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, we drove up there in a VW Dasher wagon that I purchased when I got the job. The car that I drove my senior year just wasn't in that great of shape to be able to make the trip. We left my wife's Sunbird back in Houston and we drove up to that job. Sometime around September, 1978, my Dad drove the Sunbird up to Bloomington, MN, where we lived and he flew back to Houston. We took a weekend trip before he flew back. We went to the waterfalls north of Duluth that we had noticed on our trip up to Thunder Bay during the Labor Day weekend. We walked up and down the area around the falls.
When we later moved back to Houston, my Dad was back in a pattern where he would be committed, get on his medications, get released from the hospital, stay clean for awhile, then stop taking the medicine because "he could control it". Eventually he would either go into the depression or go into the manic state. While in a particularly bad manic state, my grandparents would have enough and commit him again.
My wife saw him in one of those particularly scary moments of the manic madness. It really scared her. I believe that she was pissed off at me at the time. I don't believe that she remained pissed off at me for long.
We generally saw less and less of him over time. The warm and gentle person that I had known briefly was gone. When he was in the depressions, he would stay in his home and not see anyone.
At one point, my uncle had him checked into a normal hospital because he had stopped taking care of himself. He was supposed to go into one managed care place, but he eventually ended up at another.
My kids never really got to know him. To my daughter, he was just her crazy grandfather. My son has no real memory of him at all.
When we moved to Austin, we would occasionally come in to town to visit my brother and check in on my Dad. There was a big family gathering one Saturday over at his place. He allowed us to stay for awhile, but he only seemed to spend time with my niece and her son.
We drove over the next day and I brought him a McDonalds burger. My wife and the kids stayed with the car and she parked it. I took in the burger to my Dad. He thanked me for the treat and told me goodbye. The visit lasted all of 30 seconds. This was the last time that I ever saw my Dad.
On December 10, 2004, he developed problems with his heart and was hospitalized. That day I had a team outing with my coworkers at the Oasis on Lake Travis. It is a really cool place that overlooks the lake and has a great view during sunset.
I got a drive back to work to pick up my car and drove to a Christmas party that my wife's work was holding. While I was stuck in traffic, I received a call on my cell phone from my cousin. She felt bad being the person to tell me that my Dad had passed away. I was in a state of shock for awhile. I was the only one reachable and I had the duty of informing two of my three brothers and my mother of my Dad's passing.
My brothers and I had to sign papers that authorized the cremation that was my father's wishes.
We poured his ashes into Galveston Bay around April or May 2005.
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