One Year On
On Monday it will be a year since my father took his own life. Since his death I have been thinking about writing about it, but felt the barrier of years of professional discipline insisting “what is the purpose of this piece? What do you want to convey?” I still don’t have an answer to those questions, and yet I feel I must write, so here it is. I think it’s just to bear witness, a process I believe in wholeheartedly, and to help me with my grief. But if you want to see the roots of my feminism and why I believe the personal is political, it’s here too. I’m not trying to give you a lesson or a message, but if you get something from reading, I’m glad.
How do you grieve for someone who hurt you profoundly, repeatedly, and tore your family apart? Who was also deeply intelligent, cursed with mental illness, incredibly funny, and when he could be, loving? I don’t know and really it’s a pointless question, because what I do know is that death happens to us all, and grief just is, and it will be. It is a physiological process as much as anything else that we dress it up as with our culture and plethora of abstract ideas, and our art. It is moving through me and with me, and I must and want to travel with it.
I used to explain my father thus: A terribly bright man, he was not mentally stable although we had no diagnosis for many years. But what I knew was that he really couldn’t handle the daily stress of life and the pressure would build in him relentlessly; that he suffered from deep and terrible bouts of depression, and he was never satisfied. All of this largely deserved sympathy and help. The only trouble was his coping mechanism was violence – physical and verbal and often sadistic – against his family, especially my mother.
Nothing in our life was very far from the clichés of family violence. We lived on eggshells interspersed with unpredictable periods of happiness, as we continued on through each cycle of compression-explosion-reconciliation- and trying again. Each cycle left its mark.
I learnt that when you grow up in a house of violence and fear, you’re inculcated, through collective silence and shame, into believing somehow your experience is unique. Armour shattered by the sudden death of a friend, when I finally confessed the truth to a high school counsellor, she held my gaze while she drew the cycle I had endured for 17 years on a piece of paper in seconds, and asked gently, “is this what happens in your family?” I nodded in relief and horror. There is nothing special about family violence, unless you count society’s role in keeping it taboo and enduring.
Lyn, that same counsellor, took my call from university over a year after I’d last seen her, when I realised I had to get out and needed help. “Hello Imogen”, she said. “I have been hoping you would call”. Those are still possibly the best words anyone has ever said to me.
I found out subsequent to his suicide that my father had been diagnosed with bipolar (I don’t know which type) about four years before his death.
The diagnosis is tangible and comforting, and I wish we’d all known sooner. I wish there’d been some point in my childhood after one of his threats to kill himself, or after he systematically threw mum into walls, or after he beat my scrawny 11 year old brother until he begged, or after he kept me up all night before my exams vowing he’d see me fail and working fat and miserable and alone in a corner store, or after he calmly told mum he would kill her children if she ever told anyone what he did; – that somehow professional help had been sought by my tertiary, medically qualified parents and we had all ventured down the path of trying to heal, out in the open.
But it didn’t happen. And of the few things to stay constant other than the cycle of violence was my father’s repeated refusal to ever fully admit what he did to us, or ask forgiveness, or make reparations.
After I finished university and my mother finally left him, the bouts of severe depression became worse, and dad did seek help. Over the last decade of his life he had several stays in treatment centres, including electro-shock therapy in the later years. With my mother safe and interstate and my brother overseas, the last years of our relationship involved me looking after his house and finances, and then him, once he came out of his first lengthy round of treatment. There was memory loss from the electro-shock treatment leading to paranoia, and two serious suicide attempts before our relationship deteriorated under the weight of his inability to cope.
A year later at 25 I wrote to him, explaining as calmly and fairly as I could why I could no longer have him in my life. Aside from the issues of family justice centred on his continuing denial, there was also the blunt truth that his presence was inexorably eroding my health. Twenty plus years of conditioning are not easily undone. He wrote back full of victim-hood and steadfast refusal, and we did not see each other or speak for over seven years.
One morning driving to work I received a call to tell me that dad had suffered an aneurysm, and was in emergency awaiting an operation. I spoke to my brother. Dad had a 50% chance of surviving, and was asking for me, so I went. Heavily drugged he was still relatively lucid, and clearly elated to see me. I met his second wife and ignored her pointed comments, and he and I exchanged small talk.
As he headed into the operating room I told him I loved him, and I still can’t tell if it was a lie. It is hard not to think that if he had not survived that operation, his last memories would have been of his loving second wife and his children with him, and while it would have been tragic, it would have been a good death.
After he survived the operation he was devastated that I would not come to see him. Nothing had changed for me, and I realised beyond my own needs, this meant I could quite possibly kill him. Having had his aorta split from brainstem to groin, recovery involved keeping his blood pressure as low as possible for nearly 6 months, and I could think of nothing I could bear to talk about that wouldn’t raise it.
Dad’s survival included the diagnosis that he harboured another potentially fatal brain aneurysm that could go at any time. Unable to cope, his violent behaviour resurfaced, costing him his second wife, who died two years’ later from cancer. Dad was left cut from her will, financially imperilled and fighting her children to stay in his house. Only my brother maintained a relationship. He was very ill, mentally, and as far as I can gather nothing in that time was anything other than a misery for him and my brother to endure.
Too many people see life simplistically and in absolutes, so I’ve faced scepticism my whole life when I’ve said I don’t hate my father. I didn’t and still don’t. Equally I find those who extol forgiveness usually just as simplistic. My first comment on talk-back radio was to Radio National’s “Life Matters”, featuring two experts in forgiveness and many stories of terrible wrongs and trauma done to people, who then tried to forgive. As I listened to a woman left paralysed by a drunk driver break down on national radio over her inability to forgive the man who hit her and drove off, I rang the call-back number full of anger.
I told them that it was all very well to talk about forgiveness, but so far their entire program had not once talked about the role of society in addressing wrongs and facilitating forgiveness. I spoke of how I felt it was profoundly unfair to ask victims of traumas deemed crimes by our society to not only survive and succeed after such experiences, but to also find the wherewithal to forgive those who had done them wrong. I spoke of my father and how many years on in the face of his denial of responsibility, and in the absence of a community judgement of his behaviour, it was too much to ask me to carry that burden as well. I remember the silence at the other end of the phone; and a dear friend’s mother telling me she heard me and I was the only one who made sense, and she finally understood.
To this day I still hold that view, and it was part and parcel of my internal dialogues on whether to see dad or not. I wrestled repeatedly with going to see him, constantly aware that there was a high probability of him dying and I would not get another chance.
But the simple truth was as soon as I got close to resolving to contact him, the anxiety and accompanying heart palpitations, night terrors and insomnia would renew and the worst memories would all come flooding back. I had always known that alive or dead, my father would never rest easy with me, that there was never going to be a resolution. But in our years of separation, the solace I found was that the distance meant some of the good childhood memories did, finally, come back. I chose them.
I remember the man who without fail listened to the Goon Show with us on a Saturday and was uproariously funny; who never once showed me anything but acceptance and love when I told him I was a lesbian; who gifted me my ability to articulate and love of language; who passed on his passion for a well-tended vegetable patch; and who was without fail a gentle, compassionate and skilful healer of animals, who taught me to cherish this bright little planet of endless wonder we share with them.
I remember the father that gently hugged me the week after my friend died and told me of losing his only brother at just 17 and I could talk to him any time. I still also remember that same man only weeks later holding me by the throat against my bedroom door, shaking with rage because I hadn’t smiled at him since she died. I chose to give space for the first man to come back to me.
Dad’s job in his last year was as the part-time vet for the dog’s home, where he spent the vast majority of his time putting down unwanted dogs, regardless of sickness or health. Knowing how much he loved animals, I wish I couldn’t imagine what that would have done to him. I wish I had known; just as I wish had known he was back in the clinic and on suicide watch months before he took his life.
My fathers primary career was a vet, and as a child I often helped him. I watched many times how the common drug used by vets to put animals down works. So I know it acts very quickly, limbs loosening almost instantly and death comes in seconds. My father euthanized himself with this drug. The constable told us he was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of red wine, and looked peaceful. I went to identify his body, in part because I don’t believe anyone should have to do that alone as my brother would have had to, and because I needed to see him.
I don’t have words for the sorrow I feel that he reached a point where ending his life was the only relief he could conceive. Some in our family have rationalised that he was going to die from the aneurysm anyway, so it was more like a clear choice in the face of physical illness.
I know that the illness above all was in his mind, and he probably felt utterly unloved and unwanted in this life; and I’m not sure it really matters whether you see the second part of that sentence as separate or different from the first.
I acknowledge and carry my part in dad’s final days, just as I carry the rest. An atheist like me, he did not believe in the afterlife. I can only hope, in the last few seconds that if dad had any thoughts, they were of release, and if by some quirk he glimpsed something else, it was a sweet hereafter.
lizhumphrys
tammois
Thank you for writing this powerful piece, and sharing your experience. I was very moved by it and by the suffering of all parties involved.
I agree that it is difficult to see life in black and white. Feelings are often complicated – grief and pain can be intermixed with love and compassion – but trying to understand why someone acts the way they do is always helpful. It doesn’t excuse or condone their behaviour but it does allow a glimpse of their humanity and remind us that people are rarely wholly evil or good.
At the end of the day, we don’t really know why people behave the way they do. We can speculate and draw our own conclusions based on what we know of them, but we will never have the full story of how they came to be who they are.
I read a book about forgiveness once that more or less took this line – forgiving someone who has hurt you is very challenging but it is essential to your well-being. Not being able to forgive means that you carry the hurt, pain and bitterness around with you, further hurting yourself. However, forgiving someone does not necessarily mean that you let them back into your life. If you believe that to engage with that person would cause you more pain and suffering then you can still forgive them but choose not to engage with them. Intellectually, this made a lot of sense to me.
This is not to say that this is what I think you should forgive your father – I would not dream of telling someone who has suffered domestic violence how they should deal with things. I am just offering this as something to consider as your post touched on the notion of forgiveness.
I wish you all the best.
A challenging but moving piece Imogen, in which compassion, pain and hope nudge each other.
It’s hard to question your responses to your father. In the first instance, we must have a care to our own health and those with whom we think we can collaborate equitably. There’s also a fine line between enabling someone to pursue strategies that harm themselves and others and joining them in finding a way out of misery. It’s often obvious which of these one is doing, but sometimes, it’s hard to know.
I agree that hanging on to that which was positive in your relations with your father, rather than that which involved pain and loss, is likely to serve you best. I wish you confidence in look forward, and courage and discretion when reflecting.
Best Wishes
Fran
The thing that really resonated with me from this piece was the need to balance one’s compassion towards others, especially family, with protecting the essential part of yourself that you are entitled to protect.
The pop psychology tenets around forgiveness for its own sake (and ultimately for the forgiver’s sake) coupled with the instruction to ‘surround yourself with positive people who uplift you!’ for a contented life don’t sit well with me. They seem to imply that we should just ‘move on’ from the issue/s as though we are separate from them, as though doing a quick cut and run of the ‘dead wood’ is not going to leave a great big hole inside you where much of the damage has already been done. It’s not enough to just magically disappear the people who are ‘downers’ in your life and replace them with a support network. Much of the time, our family are people with whom we have deep and uncomfortable connections that are not so easily undone. We each have to delicately determine where our own threshold is for tolerating others’ weaknesses. No one else can do it for us. I’ve had people advising me to cut various members of my family off, saying ‘no one would blame you’ and even going a step further and seeming contemptuous of the fact that I choose to maintain any relationship with them at all. Then again other people who see these same family members in a different context may well be aghast at the distance I maintain, steeped as we are in our collective mental image of families as having ‘ties that bind’. My point is that no one can dictate the appropriate path to take, and for me I am less concerned with whether they ‘deserve’ my help/affection than I am with what I can tolerate/withstand whilst trying to be around them. It seems to me that as a society we alternate between compelling people to ‘live your best life’ in an individualistic, self-focussed way, and promulgating the happy family myth of people who are always there for each other no matter what, creating a double bind for many of us.
In terms of forgiveness, there are times that in order to nurture myself I need to maintain the rage. I understand the notion that if you don’t forgive your anger may eat you alive, however I also feel that trying to force yourself to forgive, particularly in cases where the forgivee has neither the inclination nor the ability to admit responsibility or take steps to make amends, is unhelpful. It’s just one more thing that you grit your teeth and pretend do for your health, like maybe if you repeat the mantra that you have forgiven it will become true. It seems to me that forgiveness should be an emotion rather than an action – possibly through self-nurturing, trying to live a full life, trying to maintain compassion and understanding for the human conditiion, forgiveness might then come. But trying to forgive first and then begin healing is putting the cart before the horse in my opinion. Your reflection and insight and willingness to be true to both your own experience and that of your dad’s is inspiring.
This is Imogen (My blog ID if you see me around the traps is Myriad / Myriad74)
Thanks very much for commenting. I think this is the first time I’ve posted something very personal, and in this instance I did so first and foremost because all the good stuff I’ve read on grief as a process recommends finding a way to express what’s going on, and ritual if it will help – and for me writing is the obvious outlet.
I also wanted to bear witness because family violence and suicide are both still very hard topics to raise and talk about in our society, despite some obvious and welcome improvements over the last years (FTR I prefer ‘family’ over ‘domestic’ as the latter has historically been used, not least in law, to suggest a ‘lesser’ crime; and having heard experts on family violence speak on this issue it reaffirmed it pretty strongly).
It’s an interesting experience to stick yourself out there and write about stuff like this; because what starts as a largely personal process of course people react to and take particular points from what you write. In this instance the whole biz with forgiveness / moving on / “maintaining the rage” etc seems to have struck the chord, so I’ll add a few comments.
(I could cheat though and just say “everyone read Sarah’s comment” because you just about nail it – I hear a lot of my life experience in yours and so, Avatar like (!), I’m just going to say – I see you; thank you for seeing me; and how lucky your family are to have you.)
I rang the “Life Matters” project at about 26 I think- so two year’s clear of not having dad actively in my life & I therefore had some perspective, but also still left in the situation of his flat refual, adult to adult, to take any responsibility. This sent me off doing lots of reading on mercy vs justice.
I would add from a feminist lens, there is enormous pressure on women, particularly in terms of family violence to “forgive”. I will never forget someone saying to my mother and I – ‘thank goodness she didn’t tell anyone and were able to forgive because it just would have destroyed dad’s public reputation and career’.
To cut a long story short, I came to the conclusion that true justice – what I think you have written about so well Fran, ie resotrative justice – does deliver both the necessary recognition of a crime / wrong done, but is not out to punish but to facilitate rehabilitation and forgiveness. So I consider the whole mercy (which can be seen as forgiveness) vs justice (which too often is seen as retributive) as a false choice; I choose justice in the proper sense of the word. The problem was for our family it was denied, as it is for far too many dealing with family violence.
So what happened in my family was we didn’t have any avenue to that through our peers or society. And in working through it I came to realise how desirable if not essential it is. Because when you ask the victims of crime to manage that themselves as well, including finding a way to forgive the perpetrator – sure that forgiveness might not involve having them in your life etc., but what you are being asked to do is not only heal yourself, but facilitate the rehabilitation of the person that hurt you. If your own hurts include ongoing trauma it really doesn’t come down to a question of “ethics” or “morals” it comes down to a very serious physical and mental price being asked of people who have already suffered, and it’s one most can’t pay.
A pretty crude measure of the cost of family violence can be seen through these two studies:
http://www.fahcsia.gov.au/sa/women/pubs/violence/np_time_for_action/economic_costs/Documents/VAWC_Economic_Report.PDF – so in 2002/3 family violence was costing Australia $8 billion and *half* that cost was borne by the victims.
Fast forward to last year and it’s now costing us $13.6 billion – http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-03-07/domestic-violence-costs-13bn-a-year/57284
So all that was why the Life Matters program made me so angry – it wasn’t about me being angry at dad, it was about them pushing what I found to be a very moralistic, simplistic and ironically, subtlely judgemental view on a very complex issue indeed.
I’ll end by saying not actually angry at dad in a “maintain the rage” kind of way, and I certainly didn’t want to see him suffer. This is I’ve found, an incredibly hard thing to convey or convince people of (you end up if you’re not careful in the “I’M NOT ANGRY!!!!” space).
So here it is in a nutshell – Because dad did not try to reform and without any other recourse, being around him meant that all the triggers planted by his behaviour were alive and well – such as going through all the worst incidences and fear of what might have happened at night, leading to terrible anger. It also obliterated any memory of the “other side” of dad if you like.
It’s perhaps hard to grasp, but for me the only way to rehabilitate the best of dad was not to see him, because we couldn’t find a future togeher without redress – and in many ways that was in effect “forgiveness”, although I’m sure dad didn’t see it that way (although I did try and explain it).
Our society loves resolution and is rigid in its adherence to cartesian dualism (black/white! forgiveness/anger! mercy/judgement!). It’s a lot more complicated than that, and buying into those binaries, as Sarah wrote so well about, can cause a lot more harm.
As hard as it is to do, I think that bearing witness to the family violence you describe, particularly in such a compassionate way, is important. As you say, people will take the bits that particularly resonate for them and tease them out to compare how they relate to their own experience. I think part of the reason this piece resonated so much for me was the emotional truth that I recognised – to borrow from Dickens, every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way, however I think that despite the specifics being different, the overall residual feelings you have identified are remarkably familiar to me. Perhaps I have also found comfort in the means of expression – this may be because I sense that certain other characteristics of our situation are also aligned – age, nationality, gender, tendency towards shocking verbosity…
. In other words, you are speaking my language.
These kinds of discussions can be excruciating to have in real life with even the most well-meaning of friends (or even therapists) who often don’t seem to be able to fathom the nuance in what you are saying, or perhaps employ a different dialect when attempting to do so, such that the communication of understanding can resemble pity or judgement more than empathy. There is also the natural instinct that many of us have to solve, fix, and mend, rather than simply listen and share. Many people in my life either remark in wonder at how I have ‘turned out so well-adjusted’ as though I have won some ‘get out of jail free’ card, which to me is to deny the deep well of ambivalence and maladjustment that I feel inside on any given day and work so hard to overcome (which I am clearly adept at convincing others is neither here nor there, to put them at their ease) – or they may distance themselves ever so slightly, as though perhaps concerned that this new information they have about me may some how infect them in some yet-to-be-determined way – or (the third option) they may in turn bring forth their own tale of sad humanity, the disappointments and the horror, which yes I am prepared to hear, and see, and empathise with, (after all I started it) but which somehow for me have often ended somewhat unsatisfactorily with me taking on the therapist role while they revert to being the needy child in the relationship. I can’t blame people for taking any of these approaches, but it is nice to be able to have an intellectual AND emotional discussion which favours neither disappearing down a black hole of self-pity or righteousness, nor ‘just get over it, life’s hard for every one’ denial. In short, I am happy to have had this conversation.
In terms of my ‘maintaining the rage’ in order to be true to myself, I don’t mean to say that I am still angry at the way my childhood was mishandled by those in charge. I can’t see how maintaining that kind of rage would do any one any good. But there are times where, in order to cut myself some slack, I need to be able to vent, to acknowledge that I got a raw deal, and yes, to be angry about what happened. Also, when attempting to maintain relationships with people who have behaved badly towards you in the past, there is every chance that they are continuing to do so, and to offer ‘forgiveness’ in this scenario, for me, is dangerously close to enabling the continuation of that behaviour in some form or another, particularly when the behaviour has neither been acknowledged nor amended. I have to believe, although it pains me to admit that the Catholics may have been right about something, that we are all capable (albeit to varying extents due to life circumstances) of some form of free will. That where we have done wrong, regardless of provocation, illness, out-of-mindedness, we are in some way capable of staring that wrongdoing in the face and saying ‘I will do better. I will try to manage my pain in some other way. I am sorry.’ In the absence of this I am not really sure what ‘forgiveness’ even means – except in the sense that you have used it, Imogen, which is to say that it means you are no longer angry, you have compassion, you wish things could have been different, and you are able to see the good that lived alongside the anguish.
Thanks Sarah; I think one of the best things about putting this out there has been seeing it resonate with you. I kind of find it hard to comment because mainly I just nod along with what you’ve written!
I’m so glad that you wrote this, not only for your own healing but for others as well.
When you reached out to me a while back I was deeply touched and at the same time saddened because someone that I hold with such respect has had such turmoil that ‘could’ (I say that very loosely as the diagnosis and treatment of any mental health illness is dependent on many factors) have been avoided. People often read many books and papers on the different research that is out there surrounding any issue that they may be dealing with and while that can be extremely helpful the key factor to their healing is being completely ignored. Now, this acting of ignoring said key factor is obviously not done consciously but has immense consequences.
The key factor that I am talking about is listening to ones own heart. Our heart knows what it needs in order to move forward, it’s our cognition that screws us up! The consequences are living a life solely through anger, resentment and retribution. This is living as though the one that harmed you still holds the strings of abuse or hurt over you (picture Pinocchio with his strings but the strings are chains of pain). It’s more harmful to you then it is to your abuser even though you silently do it in hopes to ‘get back’ at them.
Yes forgiveness is viewed as an action but that’s because we have to actively remind our sneaky thought processes that we have worked on that part of our healing. The emotional component is the decision about how active the perpetrator can be in our life, if at all. To me forgiveness is not about allowing the person and/or situation to control and dictate how we react and navigate in the world. Hurts, trauma, tragedy and loss cannot be undone or forgotten. They are very much a part of our lives, it’s how we carry them with us that shows if we have healed or not. Healing, forgiveness and moving on is just another way of saying “I know how to live my life having gone through this. My pain is not a controlling element in my life and I see value in others as well as myself.”
It is ultimately up to each individual person if they see forgiveness as a helpful element and even what it means to them. At the end of the day listening to your heart, being open to trying some things out in order to connect to your heart and following what you need is the only way to heal.
I admire what you’ve written here and can see your process clearly. My experience and memory of you (it has been many years since we’ve seen each other!!) has me very connected to what you’ve shared here however I’m sure that anyone that reads this will find healing as well.
When I read this a few days ago i had so much I wanted to say but sadly at this moment my brain is exhausted. I hope that I have articulated some of my thoughts well enough. The short version is : Imogen, you were a great friend to me, I know I could call on you if needed and I’m thankful you feel the same way. I love you and am happy to see that your heart is healing. xo
Ok now I’m all verklempt; and wishing you lived in Australia. I’m sure we need awesome counsellors like you.
But mainly I’m thinking, look at you all grown up. Love, the granny nanny. xx
Yup, I’m all growed up
A while back I looked into some jobs in Australia but it just didn’t appear to be feasible. So I stay in Canada and hope that one day I’ll be able to afford a lengthy trip out your way!
Alright Granny Nanny, go do some ‘old’ lady things and enjoy your summer weather while I drown in yucky winter rain.
xoxo
thanks for being brave enough to post this v. personal account of your experience growing up with a parent with bi-polar. having finally undergone diagnosis myself, i have lived both sides of the coin. you’re take on forgiveness is poignant and i am torn as to whether to cease contact with the ill ( and as yet untreated) parent or take my medication and draw a line in the sand. whatever i decide, my choice is informed with yours in mind. thankyou.
thanks for being brave enough to post this v. personal account of your experience growing up with a parent with bi-polar. having finally undergone diagnosis myself, i have lived both sides of the coin. you’re take on forgiveness is poignant and i am torn as to whether to cease contact with the ill ( and as yet untreated) parent or take my medication and draw a line in the sand. whatever i decide, my choice is informed with yours in mind.
your*
Hi Marcia
Thanks very much for commenting, and all the very best with your own situation. I really don’t feel like I’m even remotely experienced in dealing with someone with bipolar, because the lack of a diagnosis for the vast majority of his life (and I only found out after he died) didn’t let me come to grips with the available knowledge & treatments etc. available.
I think if there’s anything to be drawn from our family experience, it’s the usual stuff we all know about mental illness – that it’s poorly recognised and treated in our society (expecially remembering my childhood spanned the mid 70s-90s), that it’s very hard to talk about and get treated for because of the taboos etc.
There are of course many “what-ifs” for me, and a big one is what if dad had been diagnosed and gotten treatment earlier. Such a scenario would not have guaranteed a rosy ending, because for eg the medications used were a lot cruders 20 years ago (think of how far anti-depressants have come as just one eg), but of course the path we travelled would still have had other choices.
I guess this is my way of saying that I really don’t think there’s anything definitive in my choices or experience, because beyond the cliches (violence bad, untreated mental illness can tear families apart), everyone’s experiences are many variations.