How Daddy Died: the Real Truth

My father’s death certificate is a fraud. The family doctor, family friend, long-dead, initiated the cover up. Dr. Blackmer, dressed as always in a dark suit with the sprinkling of dandruff on his bear-like shoulders, stood in that hospital corridor that last night mumbling about pernicious anemia. So this is what he chooses to call the cause of death, “pernicious anemia”. I can only guess at his motives, his competency in not labeling my father an “alcoholic.” Maybe, their friendship got in the way. Often, his friends would cover for him.

But I knew the secret, the secret I did not talk about with my aunts and uncles, the secret I sometimes shared with my brothers who did not want to talk about it -- daddy’s drinking, daddy's death, a union from hell.

Two weeks after my father’s death, Sister Patricia Joseph, my English teacher asked me to step out into the hall in the middle of class. This was an unprecedented action. A tidal wave of embarrassment swept over me as I walked up the aisle and out the door. My classmates’ eyes were riveted on me as I passed. In that deserted corridor, surrounded by metal lockers, she gave me the chance to talk, to let the secret out. I remember her ageless, lined face, her penetrating brown eyes. Amid her hemming and hawing, she had the courage to ask me how was everything at home and was there anything she could do. And I lied. I did what daddy would have wanted me to do -- I kept the secret. I said everything was fine.

To me, my father was Prince Charming and I selectively remembered what I wanted to remember, what I needed to remember -- his black Irish looks, his camel cashmere jacket, his humor, his many friends, a word game we played where I would try to find a word he didn’t know. I caught him on physiognomy. Words came easily to him; behaviors and actions did not.

In the winter of my sophomore year, my writing began appearing magically in the school newspaper, submitted by my English teacher. There were humor pieces, short essays and a short story in a literary supplement. My father, now lost in a hazy alcohol fog, never read any of this work. I excused him, convinced myself he was too sophisticated to spend time reading a high school newspaper. I had a few mind games of my own.

My father’s sins, like mine, were sins of omission. It was not what he did do; it was what he didn’t do. Benign neglect reflected his parenting style, at best. He had seven sons yet never attended any team sport to watch his sons play. He never went to a school parents’ night or attended a school play. He was at home less and less so I think from necessity we just started signing our own report cards. I was often the parent, the forger.

After the birth of my first child, my bushy-browed pediatrician asked routinely for a detailed family medical history and I lied again. He probed, he pushed, he seemed unsatisfied with my lame answers concerning the cause of my father’s death. I answered as I then believed that my father had died of a “broken heart.” The pediatrician responded sternly that no one died of a broken heart. To this intimidating professional, I could not say my father died from alcoholism. I ran from the shame. A child of television, I carried mental pictures of the Bowery in my head and not the sterile offices of the insurance company where my father worked.

Sometime in the fall of 1983, at the suggestion of a therapist, I began attending Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings. This was not a process I entered willingly. After all, my father had been dead for nearly twenty years. What good could it possibly do me? What was the point? But I went. I went weekly and I went religiously for two years.

Even there in those non-threatening church basements, I still protected him. At the beginning, I left those Wednesday night meetings filled with a religious fervor to change my parenting skills. Our home became a Skinner box. I cracked down on judging, labeling, name-calling, nicknames, sarcasm. I became a pariah of goodness. My children and husband rolled their eyes a lot. I was examining my parenting skills instead of the ones I grew up with.

Gradually, I faced the more painful process of putting my father in the spotlight. It took me a long time to say, “My father was an alcoholic,” and an even longer time to say, “My father was an alcoholic and died from the disease of alcoholism.” There was more shame in that.

There were other sins of omission as well. I felt rumblings of anger towards my father’s siblings, his friends, his business associates for overlooking, discounting or dismissing his alcoholism. What could they do or say? I rationalized. Would it have made a difference? I don’t know. What I wanted them to say to him was a simple “I’m worried about your drinking.” Maybe, “I see your drinking is affecting you.”

How many meetings did I have to go to before I could say “I’m angry with my father?” 50, 60, 100? The Richard Gere character in the movie, Pretty Woman, says, “It cost me $10,000 to say ‘I’m angry with my father.’” Frankly, I thought he got off easy.

Still miracles are out there. A friend’s ex-husband, a lawyer in his 40’s, addicted to alcohol and cocaine, did get sober, but not before he had lost his family, his law practice. He had not seen his daughters for three years. So what finally happened to him? Was it that he had learned that the Massachusetts Bar Association was considering an action against him? If so, I applaud that bar association for doing it the hard way, for confronting one of its own. It may have made the difference.