One of my doctors suggested I write about my life experiences.
My father died on July 29, 1979. I was 16 at the time, going into my junior year. His death came as a surprise to everyone. He had battling melanoma for several years though skin grafts and chemotherapy. But most of us assumed he was in remission. He was a dermatologist, and that summer he closed is office for the usual vacation and he came home to die alone.
I found him in the basement where it was cool lying on the couch. He told me to fetch our family friend, who was another doctor. I don't know where my brother and sister were, who were younger than me. When he arrived, we supported my father into the doctor's VW bug and we raced to the hospital. I remember the doctor flashing his headlights on and off on the highway to get people to pull over. My father was placed in intensive care.
My aunt came to watch over us children. I don't think she had been to see us there more than a handful of times, such was the relationship between my dad and his sister. I remember her receiving a phone call a few days later, and she took the receiver away from her mouth to say in a matter of fact way, "He's gone."
Not long after, my aunt asked me if I wanted to come to the hospital to say goodbye to my father. When we were there, I was shown into sterile sparse medical room with an examining table or gurney in the center. My father's dead body lay there. I can't remember of he was naked or only exposed from the waist up. He looked white and his skin tone wasn't normal anymore. I watched him for a while as expected and then we left. I was told this would bring me closure.
I don't have very good memories of my childhood. I'm not sure if that is because of my condition, or whether there were too many things I didn't want to remember. I think my earliest memory of my father is indirect, of him and my mother fighting or there being raised voices. My mother had post-partum depression, bi-polar disorder, and alcoholism. I heard the story once that, when my mother was rushed to the hospital to give birth to one of us siblings, perhaps my sister, my father was on the golf course. I think my mother suffered in part from demanding expectations and a lack of sociable attention.
My father worked hard in those days doing his residency and lecturing. I remember him retreating on a regular basis to his den in the basement, which had a accordion partition to close him off and from which he was not to be disturbed. Although not a violent or mean man, he was demanding of perfection. I remember him becoming very angry if any of us children were to spill our milk at the table, resulting perhaps in corporal punishment.
When my father's mother was alive, we used to visit their house on Cape Cod in the summer. To us kids the grandparent adults came across as very strict and proper but very smart. The talk went right over our heads. But they weren't very affectionate. Entertainment involved competitive croquet. Looking back, what strikes me the most is my father's strategy for dealing with bathroom breaks on the trips from Boston down to the Cape. I am not making this up when I tell you my father had an empty plastic gallon ice-cream tub under the seat. We were supposed to use as a bedpan if we had to go along the way.
My father, having been raised above our grandfather's hardware store, was good with carpentry and locks and electrical work. As children we were very pleased with the homemade bunk beds he made for each of us. A fond recollection that I shudder at now was the construction of a tree platform in a tree the yard. He designed a flat platform that fit in the "Y" of a large tree perhaps twenty feet up. The platform was designed to accommodate the tree limbs expanding, which everyone thought was very clever. What it didn't have was walls. After it was planked, we would climb up to it by putting our feet on a series of bolts, not unlike climbing up a telephone pole. Perhaps on the request of our mother or other prudent souls, he cluttered the elegant simplicity of the platform in sky with a rope railing around the perimeter. Despite the obvious dangers, nothing much happened. The thing that happened, happened to me. The children were engaged in a race to see who could ascend to the platform the quickest. Somewhere near the top on the climbing spikes, I slipped and fell to land on my back. I was stunned, taken to the doctor, and ultimately found to be fine.
Both my father and mother were practical in their way. My father kept a second refrigerators in the basement with a stock of Carling Black Label beer. My mother, being also an alcoholic (or being driven to be one), would be getting into the beer. To prevent this, my father surrounded the fridge with a chain and lock, the chain being enclosed in plastic tubing. One day my father came home to find the chain sawed through: my mother having found the hack saw in the workshop.
My mother was institutionalized around 1971 with severe bi-polar disorder and went to a clinic in Belmont MA. She never fully recovered. My father explained his reasoning for divorce to my mother's family. In a rare ruling for that time, my father was granted full custody of the children.
In 1974 when I was 11 we moved to New Hampshire where my father started his practice. A first, my father hired a day time care-giver to watch us kids. However, evening babysitting soon became an issue as my father was dating a lot with the local divorced singles group. He devised a system of "babysitting ourselves" where we were each paid on a decreasing scale to watch ourselves. It wasn't long before we were letting ourselves in after school and fending for ourselves until dinner. My father, being a doctor, wasn't always home on time. After I while was asked to prepare dinner two nights a week as well as look after my siblings.
Perhaps my father's greatest contribution to child-rearing was 'times'. Times were regularly scheduled appointments, usually one-half hour, to do something with father. Typically we worked backward with the youngest at 7:30, the middle child at 8:00, and my time at 8:30. Of course, in typical doctor fashion, if the prior appointments ran later, the later appointments slid. On a tough day my time might not start until 9:30. During my time I remember playing chess, reading and learning to pay cribbage. To his great credit, my father as the doctor always kept his appointments.
On a side note about chess, he taught me a principal that says with me to this day. I was never, and still am not, much of a chess player. My mind just doesn't work like that. But he would let me win, or almost win. I remember having several pieces remaining, and him having only his king. I said that I win. He said that you have to mate the king. So I moved a piece, and he moved his king out of the way. I chased his king all over the board but he would move the king each time. He said the game was a draw unless I could pin the king. He eventually hinted to me how to do it, and the game was over. Being in the computer field today, it is the core principal of an computer algorithm that it must finish.
One of the saddest stories about my father was his re-marriage. If my father is anything like me, his ability to detect people's faces is triggered especially by bright faces. What I mean by that average women was average faces are ok, but women's faces which are larger than life, brighter than life, have an usual attraction and power over us. My father had brought home women he had dated from the divorced singles group before without anything really clicking. But after attending the community theatre, he started dating an impoverished actress who was lovely but very different from him. She had two children.
It seems like the courtship was a short time. Before we children knew it, we were moving to a house with seven bedrooms and six bathrooms. At my step-mother's direction, we were redecorating the house with modern 1970's style with mirrors on the walls, a sunken couch, a water bed and a full wall mural of a garden of Eden with a scantily dressed nymph. Quarters were prepared for a live in maid, and it seems now that my step-mother was set for an easy time of it. After the honeymoon, I imagine reality set in. The maid was let go. Not long after that, my father was seen sleeping in another bedroom.
Perhaps two months after the honeymoon, my siblings and I came home from school to find that my step-mother and her children had moved out. It was a surprise. I called my father at his office and asked him what we were going to do. He said: "go get the silverware out of the basement".
I believe that the problems I have now with attachment and side-effects of neglect come back to this upbringing.
My father was a very intelligent and hardworking man. He lived his life valuing his work and not such much other people. However in the last few years of his life he began to put people over objects, by serving in a church and giving more service. He counseled the terminally ill. The contribution I remember most however is that he volunteered to work at the VD clinic on Thurs night. I can't think of any human condition that is as close to stigma of leprosy as VD. I can only imagine that the people who attend such a clinic are despised by society. The fact that my father would willingly and voluntarily give his time to help these troubled people is a testament to his charitable heart.
My father died on July 29, 1979. I was 16 at the time, going into my junior year. His death came as a surprise to everyone. He had battling melanoma for several years though skin grafts and chemotherapy. But most of us assumed he was in remission. He was a dermatologist, and that summer he closed is office for the usual vacation and he came home to die alone.
I found him in the basement where it was cool lying on the couch. He told me to fetch our family friend, who was another doctor. I don't know where my brother and sister were, who were younger than me. When he arrived, we supported my father into the doctor's VW bug and we raced to the hospital. I remember the doctor flashing his headlights on and off on the highway to get people to pull over. My father was placed in intensive care.
My aunt came to watch over us children. I don't think she had been to see us there more than a handful of times, such was the relationship between my dad and his sister. I remember her receiving a phone call a few days later, and she took the receiver away from her mouth to say in a matter of fact way, "He's gone."
Not long after, my aunt asked me if I wanted to come to the hospital to say goodbye to my father. When we were there, I was shown into sterile sparse medical room with an examining table or gurney in the center. My father's dead body lay there. I can't remember of he was naked or only exposed from the waist up. He looked white and his skin tone wasn't normal anymore. I watched him for a while as expected and then we left. I was told this would bring me closure.
I don't have very good memories of my childhood. I'm not sure if that is because of my condition, or whether there were too many things I didn't want to remember. I think my earliest memory of my father is indirect, of him and my mother fighting or there being raised voices. My mother had post-partum depression, bi-polar disorder, and alcoholism. I heard the story once that, when my mother was rushed to the hospital to give birth to one of us siblings, perhaps my sister, my father was on the golf course. I think my mother suffered in part from demanding expectations and a lack of sociable attention.
My father worked hard in those days doing his residency and lecturing. I remember him retreating on a regular basis to his den in the basement, which had a accordion partition to close him off and from which he was not to be disturbed. Although not a violent or mean man, he was demanding of perfection. I remember him becoming very angry if any of us children were to spill our milk at the table, resulting perhaps in corporal punishment.
When my father's mother was alive, we used to visit their house on Cape Cod in the summer. To us kids the grandparent adults came across as very strict and proper but very smart. The talk went right over our heads. But they weren't very affectionate. Entertainment involved competitive croquet. Looking back, what strikes me the most is my father's strategy for dealing with bathroom breaks on the trips from Boston down to the Cape. I am not making this up when I tell you my father had an empty plastic gallon ice-cream tub under the seat. We were supposed to use as a bedpan if we had to go along the way.
My father, having been raised above our grandfather's hardware store, was good with carpentry and locks and electrical work. As children we were very pleased with the homemade bunk beds he made for each of us. A fond recollection that I shudder at now was the construction of a tree platform in a tree the yard. He designed a flat platform that fit in the "Y" of a large tree perhaps twenty feet up. The platform was designed to accommodate the tree limbs expanding, which everyone thought was very clever. What it didn't have was walls. After it was planked, we would climb up to it by putting our feet on a series of bolts, not unlike climbing up a telephone pole. Perhaps on the request of our mother or other prudent souls, he cluttered the elegant simplicity of the platform in sky with a rope railing around the perimeter. Despite the obvious dangers, nothing much happened. The thing that happened, happened to me. The children were engaged in a race to see who could ascend to the platform the quickest. Somewhere near the top on the climbing spikes, I slipped and fell to land on my back. I was stunned, taken to the doctor, and ultimately found to be fine.
Both my father and mother were practical in their way. My father kept a second refrigerators in the basement with a stock of Carling Black Label beer. My mother, being also an alcoholic (or being driven to be one), would be getting into the beer. To prevent this, my father surrounded the fridge with a chain and lock, the chain being enclosed in plastic tubing. One day my father came home to find the chain sawed through: my mother having found the hack saw in the workshop.
My mother was institutionalized around 1971 with severe bi-polar disorder and went to a clinic in Belmont MA. She never fully recovered. My father explained his reasoning for divorce to my mother's family. In a rare ruling for that time, my father was granted full custody of the children.
In 1974 when I was 11 we moved to New Hampshire where my father started his practice. A first, my father hired a day time care-giver to watch us kids. However, evening babysitting soon became an issue as my father was dating a lot with the local divorced singles group. He devised a system of "babysitting ourselves" where we were each paid on a decreasing scale to watch ourselves. It wasn't long before we were letting ourselves in after school and fending for ourselves until dinner. My father, being a doctor, wasn't always home on time. After I while was asked to prepare dinner two nights a week as well as look after my siblings.
Perhaps my father's greatest contribution to child-rearing was 'times'. Times were regularly scheduled appointments, usually one-half hour, to do something with father. Typically we worked backward with the youngest at 7:30, the middle child at 8:00, and my time at 8:30. Of course, in typical doctor fashion, if the prior appointments ran later, the later appointments slid. On a tough day my time might not start until 9:30. During my time I remember playing chess, reading and learning to pay cribbage. To his great credit, my father as the doctor always kept his appointments.
On a side note about chess, he taught me a principal that says with me to this day. I was never, and still am not, much of a chess player. My mind just doesn't work like that. But he would let me win, or almost win. I remember having several pieces remaining, and him having only his king. I said that I win. He said that you have to mate the king. So I moved a piece, and he moved his king out of the way. I chased his king all over the board but he would move the king each time. He said the game was a draw unless I could pin the king. He eventually hinted to me how to do it, and the game was over. Being in the computer field today, it is the core principal of an computer algorithm that it must finish.
One of the saddest stories about my father was his re-marriage. If my father is anything like me, his ability to detect people's faces is triggered especially by bright faces. What I mean by that average women was average faces are ok, but women's faces which are larger than life, brighter than life, have an usual attraction and power over us. My father had brought home women he had dated from the divorced singles group before without anything really clicking. But after attending the community theatre, he started dating an impoverished actress who was lovely but very different from him. She had two children.
It seems like the courtship was a short time. Before we children knew it, we were moving to a house with seven bedrooms and six bathrooms. At my step-mother's direction, we were redecorating the house with modern 1970's style with mirrors on the walls, a sunken couch, a water bed and a full wall mural of a garden of Eden with a scantily dressed nymph. Quarters were prepared for a live in maid, and it seems now that my step-mother was set for an easy time of it. After the honeymoon, I imagine reality set in. The maid was let go. Not long after that, my father was seen sleeping in another bedroom.
Perhaps two months after the honeymoon, my siblings and I came home from school to find that my step-mother and her children had moved out. It was a surprise. I called my father at his office and asked him what we were going to do. He said: "go get the silverware out of the basement".
I believe that the problems I have now with attachment and side-effects of neglect come back to this upbringing.
My father was a very intelligent and hardworking man. He lived his life valuing his work and not such much other people. However in the last few years of his life he began to put people over objects, by serving in a church and giving more service. He counseled the terminally ill. The contribution I remember most however is that he volunteered to work at the VD clinic on Thurs night. I can't think of any human condition that is as close to stigma of leprosy as VD. I can only imagine that the people who attend such a clinic are despised by society. The fact that my father would willingly and voluntarily give his time to help these troubled people is a testament to his charitable heart.
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