When Grief is a Relief

“We think your father is dead.”

The doctor from the hospital informed me after identifying himself when I picked up the phone. Like a normal person, I gasped after hearing those fateful words no one is ever truly prepared to hear. But, unfortunately, that’s where normal ended, as it was not that my father might have passed that I found disconcerting — I was relieved — but that the doctor didn’t seem to know for sure.

“You think he’s dead?’’ I asked for clarification.

The doctor stoically continued

“What would you like to do?”

Huh? Me? ‘What would I like to do?’

A flash came to mind of fans who wear player’s jerseys to games as if they were ready to go in should their idol get injured. I wasn’t a medical professional, so was confused and now overwhelmed as my father’s fate could possibly rest in my hands… “To be, or not to be?”

“Would you like to come see him?” the doctor asked. “Oh… The hospital isn’t close,” I explained. “It’s 45 minutes away without traffic;” and it was rush hour in dense suburban New Jersey. “I’ll come right away, of course, but is he dead or do you think he’s dead?”

“I’ll call you right back.” A minute later, after I imagined he watched the seconds tick off on his watch, the phone rang again. “He’s dead.”

I told the doctor I would wait until after rush hour to come to the hospital.

Grief is more complicated when a relationship is complicated.

In his day, my dad was a prideful healthy man who obsessively — as in the disorder — worked out and ritualistically ate healthy his entire life. 3 raw broccoli crowns and 4 baby carrots every day at 5pm as hors d’oeuvres along with his one clean martini. “Bon Appetit.”

Unfortunately, later in life both his mind and his body deteriorated due to vascular dementia. He had just completed his second stint at the Old People Pound, the subterranean Frederick Wiseman-esque psych ward in the bowels of Bergen County Regional hospital where they temporarily house demented and discarded elderly after he, a 90-pound weakling, assaulted an assisted living attendant.

Due to his aggressive behavior, he was kicked out of the assisted living residence so during his fourteen-day stint I found the only place that would take him which was an hour from our house. He was transported to the new facility and arrived sick. He was then taken to the hospital closest to the new facility.

After processing the news of his death, I called my husband who reacted like a normal person, and then my mother, my father’s very estranged co-dependent ex-wife, who lived in Florida. As she is hard of hearing, I yelled into the phone, “DAD’S DEAD.”

My mother was initially shocked and then berated me for not properly conveying to her how poor his health had become. This is a woman who had wished him dead on many occasions and had demise fantasies… I’ll call the FBI and inform them of his two social security numbers…

My father, who had been in my sole (‘tag, you’re it’) care for the past six months, health, had rapidly deteriorated.

Seeing the glass half-full, my typically pessimistic mother found solace in the fact she was no longer a divorcee, but rather a widow. She patronizingly said as a statement rather than a question, “You’re not planning on having a funeral.”

Before I could respond, she continued. “Your father did not believe in funerals. You know, he was not a religious man. And besides, funerals are very inconvenient.”

“We’re doing some sort of funeral. We need closure, Mom” I said calmly.

But she did not hear nor more likely did not listen and became effusive. “What we do here in Florida is have Memorial Services!” She enthusiastically pitched the idea. “We can pick a date that works for us all. You know, we don’t get together enough. I suggest we do it in Scarsdale” — where we grew up — “in the summer. We had some good years there. Invite all our family and friends, and share only the happy memories…”

Emphasis on ‘some’ good years and ‘only’ happy memories which there were, but my parents had a toxic dysfunctional cat and mouse narcissistic marriage. My mother also had no healthy parent/child boundaries: “you know your father and I didn’t have sex on our honeymoon.”

Their volatile marriage ultimately ended in a nasty divorce thrown at us like a curve or rather screwball in Missouri after seeing the St. Louis Arch, on a cross country family vacation when I was 11.

“Kids. When we get home from vacation, your father and I are getting divorced.”

When we got home, the divorce had been forgotten — although each claimed to have Crossed the Rubicon on several occasions. It finally happened when I was 40 — after my dad went bankrupt.

My father had been a wealthy man. Like Donald Trump, a more famous narcissist, he inherited money that he invested in Real Estate. We lived in Scarsdale, an affluent suburb of New York City, had a pied a Terre brownstone on Sutton Place in Manhattan and a summer home in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Like Donald Trump, my dad loved lawsuits, donated money to charities in exchange for adoration and attention, and lost most of it when he got into the hotel business. When his professional pride was gone, the emotional abuse got worse, and eventually, he had a psychotic break. That’s what can happen when malignant narcissists fail.

I was at a crossroads when my father was particularly irrationally verbally abusive. I finally accepted there was no hope. I called a psychiatrist friend for a consultation versus therapy. He sagely said that if I couldn’t disassociate and could no longer find humor in it, I could cut ties with my father and still be a good daughter.

I got the absolution I needed.

I had already detached as came to terms that the mean words were meaningless. I understood that he didn’t process feelings/emotions like most, but it stopped being funny. My father demanded honor from his children rather than love.

When my parents divorced, my father moved to Arizona ‘to make a name for himself.’ He had a website called congressabuse.com and was suing John McCain over campaign reform that made better cocktail party conversation fodder than an actual legal action.

He got indignant when we did not make significant financial donations to support his cause. He had disowned my sister who flatly refused to make a donation. My $1000 check was returned as it was a paltry insult. He imagined his case going to the Supreme Court and being a front-page story in The New York Times. How could his kids be so disloyal?

He signed emails “King Lear.”

As dementia started to kick in — although my mother claims he was never the same after he spent a night in a Tucson jail for being in arrears to her, he started donating money to ‘the Nigerians’ (scammers) that I learned about from the Homeland Security Officer who called me one afternoon. I explained to him that my dad had mental health issues. He told me that my father was one of the rare few that had made actual human contact with them and enthusiastically wanted my permission to pose as my brother to attempt to nab them.

He had my attention. It got funny. I said “sure!” Officer Don kept me posted on the progress of the sting. I’m pleased to say that thanks to my father, H.S.A. arrested and arraigned ‘the Nigerians.’

My dad’s first fourteen-day stint occurred when he was traveling to Boston from Arizona to visit my baby brother — the only sibling, at that time, to actively engage with him. My dad made a scene in Logan Airport and was swiftly arrested.

Note: If you fear someone is a threat to themselves or others, bring them to an airport as that’s the easiest place to get them admitted to a treatment center against their will.

I drove to the Boston hospital to visit my dad and consult with the medical professionals on a solution. He was released before I had a plan in place. My brother picked up our father who demanded to go home. My brother brought him back to the airport and he returned to Arizona. I was incredulous, but tough love can be hard.

Back in Tucson, my dad got picked up a couple of times when he got lost going home on the bus. As I became, unbeknownst to him, his de facto guardian, the Tucson hospital who admitted him told me that if he got brought in one more time, my father, an esteemed member of the Syracuse University board of trustees would become a ward of the state.

I orchestrated an intervention to have his young housekeeper fly with him to New Jersey for Thanksgiving as an excuse to get him back East and placed in a safer setting.

They landed in Newark.

He started to get agitated and demanded to go home. He did not want to see his insolent daughter. I did not want him locked up in Newark, so encouraged the housekeeper to get him into a cab ASAP. We got him safely to a hotel for the night.

The next day, I asked my husband to take him to the mall while I called the local assisted living facilities and scheduled placement interviews. After a fast hour, my husband called:

“I lost your father.”

“What?”

My husband explained that he turned his back for a second and he disappeared. We had a Silver Alert situation. I asked my husband what he did.

He said: “I called you!”

I called mall security. The police came, and fortunately, my dad was quickly located. The police officer asked my father if he wanted to leave with his son-in-law or go to the hospital. My dad chose the latter. That was his first stint at Bergen Regional County Hospital.

I again consulted with our psychiatrist friend, who comforted me by saying, “Dementia overrides mental illness, it’s a leveler, so the good news is that your dad is no longer crazy, he’s simply demented like many seniors.” Actually, my dad said only poor people are crazy, the wealthy, like himself, are merely eccentric.

“We are not doing a memorial service. We are going to have some sort of funeral. I’m thinking Williamstown since Dad purchased plots there — “ My mother interrupted, “Your father hated Williamstown and alienated everyone there by the time we left,” she informed with superiority disgust. “If he had his way, he probably would want to be buried in Arizona — after he left me to ‘make a name for himself.’” She snickered patronizingly. “It’s going to be in Williamstown,” I said with calm decisiveness.

“I’m not going.” And she hung up.

I notified my sister and brother who were shocked, sad, and eager to help. I took charge. As the eldest, it was welcomed and expected.

I delegated tasks; my brother, the closest to my father and most affected by his passing was to write the obituary for the New York Times, and my sister, the most connected to Williamstown, would oversee scheduling a graveside burial and organizing a small luncheon for our immediate family and friends that my parents had from their time living there. The luncheon would take place at the hotel my father had proudly, boastfully, manically built (and then was later sold by the bank at 10 cents on the dollar to its current owners).

My mother had a change of heart and booked her flight.

My husband and I went to the hospital. We told them that my father wished to be cremated, and quickly found a funeral home in town that could pick up his body and then drop him off at my house a few days later in a can. I imagined a Maxwell House coffee can full of ashes, but the remains were delivered in a simple tastefully wrapped box that I put it in the trunk of my car.

At the graveside, my family all took a moment to say something short, positive, and meaningful about our father and use this as an opportunity to forgive, forget and bury our wounds…

I profoundly said, “It is what it is.”

Then we retold a family favorite story of my grandmother’s funeral, my father’s mother, who had passed during our childhood — the only other family member funeral we all had attended.

When her casket was lowered into the grave, my father’s estranged strange brother and his wife threw golf balls into the grave — my grandmother was an avid golfer. As the sound of golf balls loudly bounced on the casket, my aunt and uncle — Jews — crossed themselves and softly chanted “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust….” as the golf balls continued to endlessly noisily bounce.