Dying Dad: The Confession

August 30, 1994

I am sitting here, not liking my father very much. This is perhaps not good timing since
he, my mother and I are sitting around waiting for a one o’clock appointment to hear that he
is dying of liver cancer.
Ten days ago at IMS, I entered into silent space in anticipation of three months of
meditation. The first week of silence was spent in a mix of meditation in the morning and
evening, interrupted by still lingering chores in the afternoon. Over the week, my hours of
meditation grew, and accordingly my world grew, slower, stiller and sweeter.
Every year since 1989 I have made some attempt at three months of quiet in the autumn.
Over the years, my model of meditation has gotten much softer and more informal. Gone are the
days of committing to some great heroic quest for enlightenment, some titanic struggle of good
against evil, some mighty battle to slay the dreaded ego. Now I don’t attempt so much. I just
enter into quiet places and open to whatever happens to arise.
During the first couple of attempts at way mellow meditation retreats, not much happened
on an inner-personal level. Two years ago, my silence was bent and finally demolished by an
unfinished romantic affair that managed to follow me onto retreat only to detonate in painful
fashion for all involved. Last year, disruption came from an altogether different direction: ten
days into the retreat, I got one, then another, kidney stone.
This year, I was sure it was going to be different. I had had a brief romantic revival with
my friend Carol in the spring and summer, but we had already mutually agreed to let that pass
away, so my interpersonal horizons were free of any ominous emotional thunderheads. Also, this
year I was psyched. This year, I had a vision of why I was practicing.
In my first years sitting long retreats, I tried to practice by the book. I obtained my vision
and agenda from the teachers and from the existing formal model. As mentioned above, I had
since cast off the formal model of practice, but I think I spent the subsequent years simply not
doing the program. It wasn’t until this year that I replaced the official program with one of my
own invention. This year, my personal practice has developed a flavor of its own. More than just
a negation of preexisting form, I seem to have developed, not exactly an alternative form or

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program, but still something tangible and personal and interesting to myself.
It was my adventures with Colleen last year that have inspired my practice with positive
possibility. Colleen fascinated me with her leap into the psychotic abyss, and then in our
subsequent exploration, she reawoke in me the mystically dimensions of my practice. In the
formal model at IMS, there was no need for magic or mysticism. It was all very practical and
actual. Just pay attention to exactly what you’re experiencing. The eyes see, the ears hear, the
body feels, the mind thinks—just this much, nothing special, nothing more. There was a lot of
value in the simple clarity of this practice, but now it feels like time to use these simple attentive
skills to investigate the mystery that lays in all directions beyond immediate perceptual reality.
This year, upon entering silence space, I issued an unspoken invitation to any and all
phantoms from beyond the ordinary to visit me as they chose. I was expanding my field of
investigation beyond what was actual and perceivable and real. The IMS model recommends
mindful awareness from the first moment one awakes until the last moment before sleep. In
keeping with this recommendation, retreatants are encouraged to sleep as little as possible, thus
maximizing the time developing mindfulness. But now I was opening my practice to include the
mysterious country, and experience has repeatedly shown the gateway to the mysterious is usually
accessed through dreams.
All year, since Colleen, I had been working on mindful dreaming. I was having frequent
lucid dreams: dreams in which I was aware that I was in fact dreaming. At first I tried to take
advantage of the power of knowing I was the dreamer of my reality by making things happen for
my selfish pleasure and amusement. Alas, I discovered in doing so, I would soon be lost in the
dream again. I came to realized that I was better served just working on stabilizing my
continuous awareness that I was dreaming. Thus, upon entering into lucid dreaming, I would
simply practice moving slowly through dreamscape, while gently reminding myself that it was a
dream.
This style of lucid dreaming, I soon discovered, was virtually identical to normal waking
mindfulness practice. Ordinarily, we try to experience the flow of sensations and perceptions,
while remaining aware that they are only passing phenomena. Likewise, I was learning to
experience my dreams while holding the awareness that they were, in fact, dreams. I soon found
that not only did my meditation practice assist me in developing my dream practice, but also my
dream practice reinforced my waking practice. I would find myself walking through the woods,
pretending it was just a dream. But instead of gently reminding myself I was just dreaming;

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instead, I would remind myself I was just walking in the woods. This game made persistent
mindfulness much easier and much more magical.
But what has this got to do with not liking my dying father? Some dream I had on retreat,
maybe? Unfortunately not. I spent a week settling into quiet space; a week softly setting the
table as invitation to magical visitors from dreamland and beyond. Just settling into quiet space,
open to whatever might therein arise.
What arose, alas, was an urgent call from my parents. A routine urological exam had
discovered blood in my father’s urine, and the medical investigation had reached the point where
cancer was strongly suspected. Over the ensuing three days, my father had a bone scan, a liver
scan and finally a biopsy of a suspected tumor. All test results were pointing to advanced cancer.
My initial reaction of shock quickly dissolved into dismay at my suddenly imperiled retreat. I was
already in retreat rhythm and my momentum told me, No, I can’t get involved in this; I have to go
sit and walk.
It didn’t take long for the anguish of rupturing the precious envelope of my retreat to be
overcome by the obvious inevitability of necessity. There was no choice but to go home to
support my family in this ultimate of life crises. I tried to lament the poor timing of this crisis but
I couldn’t take that complaint seriously for long. I knew obviously that death pays no heed to any
earthly schedule. Life is always in process; death always interrupts it in the middle. Death is on
everyone’s schedule but it always arrives unscheduled. I guess it’s like the fire alarm at IMS: The
alarm goes off now and then, and the retreatants are trained to stop what they’re doing and
proceed immediately to the front lawn to await further instructions. Of course, at IMS it always
turns out to be a false alarm. In my case, the alarm was signaling an authentic emergency, and I
had no choice but to leave the safe envelope of quiet practice and report to the front lawn in
anticipation of further instructions.
I arrived home to find the building of our family ablaze with impending disaster, yet my
parents seemed to be trying hard not to hear the alarm that was blaring so obviously and ear
shatteringly. My mother kept pointing out that my father looked and felt so healthy; how could it
possibly be so that he was dying? In fact, except for a sharp pain in his ribs near his liver, my
father did seem about the same as always. Still, I knew that cancer cooks like a microwave oven:
from the inside out. It starts invisibly amid the normal commerce of the body as a single
demented cell. Only after a long time does that single mutant grow into a colony obstructive and
destructive enough to set off any alarm. By then, as we would soon discover, it is way to late to

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save the building.
I had hurried home in time to be there when the results of the liver biopsy were reported.
The biopsy was taken on Friday so we were forced to wait in limbo until Monday to hear the
results. My mother, father, and I sat on death row, breath held, fingers crossed, awaiting word
from the hospital. Who would call? The governor with a reprieve, or the hooded executioner?
My mother called the hospital several times trying to force the issue but to no avail. When the
doctor finally called, late in the day, he had little to say. After hungering all weekend, we were fed
only the smallest, but nastiest of h’ors doeurves. The biopsy had shown cancer cells; we should
come in tomorrow for the details. Just like the gatekeeper who guarded the Wizard of Oz had
said, Come back tomorrow, and the gate was again shut tight.
Not having any Ruby Slippers at our command, we were forced to swallow the first bite
of the inevitable and wait impatiently yet another day. There was still room for hope, and my
parents clung to it desperately. OK, so it’s cancer. But maybe it’s nice cancer. Maybe just a jail
term; not the death penalty.
My sister Susan, who was participating from the sidelines due to competing demands of
job, baby and husband, held no hope at all. To her, our father’s doom was clearly inevitable and
she acted mostly impatient to get the ordeal over with. I stood in between these extremes of false
hope and conceding the worst. During the tense waiting, wild speculation was an irresistible
temptation. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s everything, and every shade in between. When my
sister finally asked me if I thought my mother would remarry, I first uttered what became my
mantra: Let’s just deal with what’s actually happening. That will be enough in itself. All the
facts were pointing in the worst direction but we hadn’t arrived there yet. Limbo tends to be a
nerve-wracking spot to vacation but that’s where we were. The next moment, let alone the
next day, was unknowable and profoundly uncertain. Whatever happened next, we would deal
with as best we could.
I settled in with my parents as we waited for the next day’s appointment to arrive. My
mother was agush with strained optimism and small speeches full of hopeful adages. My father
was subdued and tense and distracted. Although it’s hard to know what to expect at such
extreme times, distracted and distant is about what I expected from him. He’s spent his whole life
distancing himself from painful emotions, hiding in the sterile abstract haven of his formidable
intellect. He has been so full of anger that he was never able to hide it completely, except maybe
from himself. I remember him many times biting his lip, seething with anger, only to ask him what

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was wrong and to have him innocently, yet tensely, say “Nothing.”
I have spent a lot of my life distancing myself from my father. In my adolescence, he
seemed contemptibly weak and pathetic. His favorite game seemed to be wallowing in the
endless victimization of his childhood. Over and over we heard the stories of his shames and
defeats and betrayals. As I grew up, I unconsciously molded myself as his opposite. Where he
was weak, I was strong. Where he was helpless, I was hyper-competent. Where he was endlessly
infantily dependent, I was totally self-sufficient. The most stinging accusation, at that point in my
development, was to be told that I was acting like my father. How could anyone think such a
thing when I was clearly his exact opposite?
When I started sitting long meditation retreats, the folly of that reactionary posture was
one of my earliest and most chagrining insights. I would sit and walk and struggle with my mind,
then let go and realize something about myself. I had believed I was completely without anger,
not like my dad, who only thought he was. Of course, he was in denial, I really had none. But on
retreat, I was endlessly furious. Eventually, I peeled down beneath the anger and discovered a
very sad, shamed, helpless, dependent, little boy. As I discovered aspects of this persona, I would
ask myself what must have happened to me for me to end up feeling this way? I would search my
childhood memories for an insult or injury that could have produced the wound in question, but
invariably and inevitably I would come up with something that happened not to me in my
childhood but to my dad in his. After a while I could only laugh at the truth of this. Not only did
I need to work through and heal my undealt with shit, but apparently I also had to work through
his as well. Later on, in Iron John, Robert Bly suggests one of the ways a boy can become
shamed is to ingest a shamed parent. So it seemed that I had not so much earned my wounded
inner child, as much as I had inherited him from my father.
These realizations of the legacy of woundedness that I received from my father allowed
me over the subsequent years to become much more tolerant and caring towards him. When I
had been pushing away my own pain and vulnerability, so was I obliged to push him away. Once I
began opening to my own shadow, he became much less of an offensive reminder of it. I came to
see my dad as a badly wounded little boy, who had compensated for and coped with his torturous
past as best he could. He had retreated from the overwhelming assault of his childhood by closing
down emotionally, by numbing himself to the ordeal, and once semi-safely hidden, he had never
since dared to come out.
When I had left the shattered refuge of my meditation retreat, I was glad to notice that I

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felt pretty good about my dad. His life was in many ways tragic and stunted, having rarely in his
psychic life ventured beyond the imaginary haven of his happy family. That was his core fantasy:
That he had had the most wretched parents, but he had gone on to reverse that by being the best
dad. He would tell stories of how his parents had abused him and humiliated him, then alternate
with endless proofs that he had been good to us in every possible way. He forced us to live with
him in his imaginary happy family, like some early-sixties suburban sitcom. This was of course
unnatural and unrealistic and I’m afraid has left me personally very poorly equipped to deal with
conflict as an inevitable and healthy part of relationships. Still, I realized, on account of this
demented deluded conspiracy, my poor old dad has always been super nice to me. It might have
been pretend, neurotic nice, but at least it was nice. He never made me do any thing I didn’t want
to; he never sided against me; he never scolded me. He gave me indiscriminate love, which is a
pale impostor of unconditional love, but on many levels a pale impostor is better than nothing. I
had inherited a mythic hurting little boy from him, and that little boy, I realized, was quite fond of
the imaginary good parent my dad had so long pretended to be.
Now, having let go of many of my reactionary adolescent postures, I felt able to go home
and care for my dad, who had at least worked hard to do his best imitation of loving me. I would
return his neurotic care with real care. After all, at least he never yelled at me. Until now.
That afternoon, as we waited for the next day’s dreaded death sentence, my father yelled
at me. He was telling me some idle story about a short story he had read fifty years ago while I
half listened and made myself a sandwich. All of a sudden he started yelling that I should stop
what I was doing and listen to him. I couldn’t believe it. Many’s the time over the years that he
has told me stories of similar insignificance, even as I was reading the paper at the same time.
During that day, when my dad wanted to share anything heartfelt or significant, I would stop and
give him my fullest attention. But if I stopped everything to listen to every bit of fluff he had to
share, I’d have died of hunger and boredom long ago.
Now, in response to his angry demand for attention, I paused and considered how to
respond. Here he was, sick and probably dying, perhaps I should allow him any excess, no matter
how inappropriate. On the other hand, I have been carefully retraining myself not to participate in
abusive dynamics in any of my relations in the world. Should I continue that essential practice
now, or drop it? I felt my own anger boiling inside of me in response to his, but perhaps I should
ignore it or override it. But that’s what my dad has always done: just stuff his anger inside,
swallow it, what harm could it do? It could give you cancer, for one thing. Good point.

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 So I held my anger on it’s leash, and coolly announced to my father that I would not
respond to a request so angrily delivered. Then, I assured him that whatever he wanted from me,
he need only ask and I would surely give him. I sat down at the table with him and ask him if he
wanted to apologize to me. No, he didn’t. Instead he launched into the rest of the plot line he
had been telling me. I sat across from him, in silent attention, not hearing a word he was saying.
I was simmering and percolating with low-grade anger. I couldn’t believe I was being forced to
listen to the adventures of a long extinct detective, that hearing this story was more important
than my being treated with care and respect. I sat and seethed until the story was over. I politely
thanked my father for sharing the story with me. He gave no sign of minding my unhideable tone
of insincerity. After I calmed down, I told him that he had many reasons to feel angry in his
current situation but that I was pretty sure that my treatment of him wasn’t one of them. I wanted
to support him in possibly getting in touch with his anger, but at the same time, I wanted him to
also learn to aim. Nice idea anyway.
Later that evening Dick blew his top again. (A few years ago, I started playing with
calling my parents Dick and Sylvia. I wanted to equalize the relationship with them, and train
them not to treat me like a child. Now, I alternate between their names and titles as the context
dictates.) This time, it was my mother who was the target of his anger. Her offense was that she
had let the gas level in her car get below half full. This too was quite a ridiculous thing to get
furious about but he wouldn’t get off it and finally Sylvia and I had to get in the car at 10:00 PM
in search of a full tank. This dying business is not always a bed of roses, I’m afraid.
The next day finally arrived, and eventually found Sylvia, Dick and me listening to the
diagnosis offered by the Oncologist. My father had pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver
and rib. If untreated, he would die in three months. If they went for chemotherapy he might last
longer. In any case, it was incurable. My mother cried dearly; my father went behind a thick
mental screen and stayed there for the rest of the day. I didn’t feel too much either, to tell the
truth. I was moved by my mother’s tears, but mostly I just felt grim. By the time we got home, I
noticed that I was feeling a distant, non-specific anger. I turned my mind to it, but it just sat there.
It had nothing to say; it just was there. OK, be that way. I’d just keep an eye on it and maybe it
would tell me secrets later.
On arriving back home, my mother went immediately to the pharmacy to fetch narcotics,
leaving me with my dad. He sat with me in the kitchen, still behind his opaque shield. Finally, he
announced in a perfectly calm, unemotional voice that he had a confession that he wanted to make

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to me. I had to promise not to tell any of my other family members, then he explained to me that
during the mid-seventies, he had had a series of adulterous affairs. How many is a series? Seven
or eight, he estimated. Women ranging from 27 years-old to 64. He met them all at meetings of
the Mensa society. I, myself, had declined invitation to join Mensa; what for did I want to hang
around with my fellow intellectual hi-IQ peers? I’d rather chase girls. Who knew?
My father went on to explain to me that the motivation for these affairs was resentment on
his part for my mother’s successful involvement at our local temple. He felt she had been
flaunting her successful involvement on various committees without acknowledging his role in
getting her involved. He said he never had felt any remorse or guilt for having these affairs, but
now felt the desire to tell someone. I was stunned. I told him that I had mixed feelings about
hearing his confession. Part of me was angry on my mother’s behalf, but part of me was proud
that he had it in him. I said I couldn’t offer him absolution since it wasn’t my place to give it and
since there was no indication he was asking for any. And that was that.
My mother returned, and our attention turned to forging a plan to cope with my father’s
diagnosis. The local Oncologist had said that radiation therapy could destroy the tumor in my
father’s rib that was causing him so much pain. Beyond that, chemotherapy was the only viable
option but we would have to further explore whether it would be of any benefit in this case. My
parents had no intention of continuing with the local doctors, in any case. When disaster strikes,
they head for the big shots. My mother got on the phone, and started pulling strings. She ended
up with an appointment at Dana Faber Cancer institute in Boston, where the elite go to get
treated.
At the same time, they launched into a furious campaign of denial and grasping at straws.
Someone knew someone whose nephew had the same cancer, and was treated at Mass General,
and was now doing wonderfully. It turned out he had operable pancreatic cancer. Well, what
about Cousin George in Florida? He was a doctor and had saved Uncle Sam when everyone else
had given up. But he told us that Uncle Sam had had operable colon cancer, and that my dad
should do just what he already had scheduled. OK, but so and so has had bone cancer for seven
years and she’s still alive. Maybe Dick has seven years left. Finally, I had to take my mother aside
and point out that they could hope for all they could but that everyone we had spoken to who had
any familiarity with this type and stage of cancer said there was no hope at all of long term
survival. They could pray for miracles but she at least should let in the fact that my father’s life
was probably soon over.

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 I had planned to stay with my family at least through that night. My brother, Matthew,
had routinely called home from travels in Alaska with his wife, and hearing the news, was flying in
late that evening to join the crew. Suddenly, though, my energy fell through the floor. I realized
that I was physically and emotionally exhausted, and that I had to retreat to my life at IMS and my
safe haven in the woods. I had escorted my parents through the terror of the initial diagnosis and
now we were entering a new phase. My brother would soon arrive with fresh energy, and I was
allowed to go. I promised I’d be back soon.
Once I had some space to be with my feelings more deeply, I realized I was deeply upset
at my father’s confession. Accepting his death was upsetting by itself but there was a level were I
so clearly saw the inevitability of death that I could not argue or help but surrender to the fact of
it’s impending arrival in the family. But while death was upsetting yet acceptable, my father’s
adultery was a complete shock. As I said above, I believed his whole psychic game has been to
take refuge in his loving family. In recent years, particularly, he had taken to making long,
embarrassing soliloquies about how beautiful my mother still was and how attracted to her he still
was and how much, much, much he loved her. We all put up with these frequent announcements
as another of my father’s endless mind games, and once again, at least he was pretending to love
his wife. The only thing that bothered me about this was that my father would too often lose his
temper and angrily bully my mother into capitulating on whatever issue they were at odds about.
When I was present for these childish outburst, it would greatly upset me that he could pay lip
service to the greatest love and devotion for my mother, then betray those sentiments through his
poor treatment of her.
But now this love/hate pattern has been elevated to a much more extreme level. We had
all been playing the game of reminding my father that at least he had his family around him and
that was what he cared the most about. His imaginary happy family was his refuge and we were
all willing to act it out as much as we could so his last days might be as positive as possible.
When my father snapped angrily at me to pay attention, I felt the burden of not wanting to shatter
the happy family game. I didn’t want to be viewed as the bad boy who selfishly dropped the baby
when he most needed to be held. But now I saw how thoroughly corrupt my father’s fantasy
really was. That he was the ultimate traitor to his own fairy-tale union of domestic tranquillity.
How could I play nice daddy games in the face of his adulteries? And not just one, but seven or
eight. He wasn’t even sure how many! And his claimed motive was not even lust, but to punish
my mother! And then he kept it carefully to himself without remorse for twenty years, filled with

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flowery speeches of limitless love and devotion! When he told me, I said I felt partly proud of
him. I don’t feel that way any more.
At first, the level of disjunction and dissociation necessary to act in such self-
contradictory ways seemed beyond my imagination. I worried what other grotesqueries he
might have yet to tell about. Alas, as I hung out and explored the situation, I realized it was not
so inconceivable as I might have liked to imagine it. Looking into my own past, I realized all it
takes is unexamined anger.
As I mentioned, before my first long retreat, I believed I was without anger. If someone
expressed anger to me, I would go blank until it was over. I told myself this was because I had no
anger inside me and therefore I could not at all relate to it when I was exposed to it. Ya, right!
At the same time as having no anger, it also happened that I had no conscience. I never had a
conscience, as far as I can remember. I would do whatever I could get away with, and I never
had a clue what people were referring to when they talked of conscience. This heartlessness even
continued throughout the first phase of my spiritual career. I would meditate and fast and do
yoga, and contemplate the void, and believe in magic, and read wise texts, and spout ancient
wisdom, and I believed every bit of it. I thought of myself as genuine and holy and pure. The two
traits I most admired in myself were my honesty and my sincerity. Still, I could act in blatantly
dishonest and insincere manners, and not only have no remorse, but not even feel any
contradiction with my lofty self-image.
What I have eventually come to realize about this amoral, conscience-less, not so distant
part of my life, is that I felt deeply wounded by the world but didn’t dare know it, and I felt very
angry at the world for conspiring in my hurt, but I didn’t dare know it, and consequently, I felt
that whatever harm I did the world in caring for myself was completely justified in light of how
the world had betrayed me. But of course I didn’t know I felt that way. The net result of all this
unseen pain and anger and self righteousness was that I could do whatever hateful, hurtful thing I
needed to and feel totally blameless in the process.
This moral numbness started to erode when I left both my acupuncture practice and my
lover Carol, to go live in the woods of Kentucky. While there, my heart spontaneously split open,
and among the numerous beneficial results was that I suddenly felt able to love Carol much more
deeply than I had been previously able. I set to work reviving our relationship, but quickly
realized I had been holding a secret that with my new openness I could no longer carry.
In the last year of my living together with Carol, I had an affair of my own. By then,

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Carol and I had become fairly estranged yet, as I mentioned, I had no ability to open to conflict in
the relationship. Instead, I jumped in bed with another woman, who was very pretty and very
shallow, a lot like a pin-up photo but without the staple. Actually, I recall I didn’t feel very good
about the whole thing, but I couldn’t stop myself. Then, I just pushed it under the covers and
went on with my faltering relationship with Carol.
But once my heart opened in Kentucky, I realized I could not profess a new capacity to
love Carol, yet leave my secret affair between us. My first instinct was to wait to tell Carol until
she had moved to Kentucky so that it would be difficult for her to turn around and leave me. It
was at this point that my till then non-existent conscience first spoke. Someone in my inner
committee suggested that it would be more fair if I told Carol about the affair before she moved
to Kentucky. That way it would be easier for her to leave me if she needed to. What! I couldn’t
believe what I had heard. A voice inside my head had made a suggestion that wasn’t in my own
selfish best interest! It was heretofore unheard of but once I heard it I realized it was right. So I
told Carol immediately and she blew her top and we never got back together.
Since then, my conscience has grown, bit by bit, in direct proportion to the extent I have
gotten in touch with my hurt and my anger. Now, when someone acts in ways that I find hurtful,
I notice and do whatever is necessary to care for myself, be it get angry and fight back, or run
away, or talk it out, or let go of it. And if I initiate an action that I realize might be hurtful to an
other person, I am much more likely to stick up for them and restrain myself, since learning to
care for my own hurt has made me sensitive to the hurt I can inflict on others.
I also have learned on retreat, that for every stratagem in the mind, there exists an equal,
opposite and contradictory stratagem. A self-defensive mind can never be too careful. If
there are two opposite ways to defend oneself, the mind will usually pick both of them. We will
try to beat ‘em and join ‘em, in order to cover all our bases.
In myself, for example, I discovered that when faced with the difficulty of getting the real
love and emotional nourishment that I needed from my parents when I was little, I split off into
two strategies, both of which still operate in me today. On one level, I adopted a strategy of
doing anything possible to win love. Anything, anything, just name it, I’ll do it, if you’ll love me
for it. This manipulation for love has been a strong motivator in my style of service in general,
and in particular in my relationship with women. I offer everything and I ask for nothing, just
love me.
The opposite strategy is to just say no: I don’t want anything; I don’t need anything; I

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don’t feel anything. It’s my outlaw posture: I’m not a member of any group, and I know that
anyone I trust will eventually betray me. It’s my hateful side, and I’m trying to watch out for it in
this dying father process, because that side of me is always glad when I lose something; always
glad when anybody loses something, and death is best of all. Bad boy.
In light, of my father’s great contradiction, I suddenly suspect that he has been working at
equal and opposite strategies in his psychic defense. I’ve already detailed his obsessive refuge in
his imaginary loving family with him at the head as the best dad ever with his adored wife at his
side. Now, with dismay, I see the opposite strategy functioning too. As a child, he hated his
domineering mother, even as he was desperate for her approval. Until my grandmother’s death at
the age of 96, six years ago, my father related to her with a combination of slavish devotion and
obvious hatred. My father chose my mother because she was a strong and controlling woman like
his mother, and I suspect that on one level he adored her for reminding him of his mother, while
on another darker level, hated her for the same reason. This sounds extremely simplistic to my
own ear but as I think about it, it’s easy to recall endless visions of bitterness and jealousy and
rage by my father directed at his dear beloved wife. It’s apparent to everyone, sometimes even to
him, that he gets most angry at my mother when he confuses her with the domineering aspect of
his mother.
Once I went to see the movie Rain Man with both my parents. It was the second time I
had seen it, but it still made me cry. One the car ride home, my mother started inquiring into what
it was in the story that so moved me. I started to discuss dysfunctional family themes, and soon
my father started getting very agitated. Anything that suggests that we were not the happiest,
most functional family of any familial species in the universe is very upsetting to his worldview.
Soon, he was yelling at my mother, which freaked me out further, and I started yelling at him. It
was just a lovely outing for the world’s most happy family. After we let my mother off at her
work, I continued to take my father to task for his rough treatment of my mother. Finally, he
declared in emphatic defensiveness that she had beaten him down all his life. I told him he
sounded rather mixed up. Who had beaten him down all his life? My mother? He hadn’t known
her but half his life, and besides she didn’t seem nearly strong enough to beat him down so
consistently. It seemed pretty obvious he was mixing her up with someone else.
So where does that leave me now? How does this help me understand my dad, and better
deal with the distress the current situation causes in me? I understand how it’s possible to be an
unbelievable hypocrite and without remorse or conscience act in ways that harm that which you

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most hold dear. I see the possibility that while on one level he loves his wife and family, on
another level he might feel quite otherwise. So what to do?
I returned to my parent’s home after a couple of days of recuperation, and stepped right
back into the same movie. My father was being chronically angry with my mother and she was
getting tired of it. At one point, I spoke to him about it alone. I emphasized again that he had
much to be angry at in his current situation but that it didn’t seem appropriate to take it out on my
mother. I pointed out how it must feel from her point of view: she’s trying her best to care for
him, and she gets angered at in return. He claimed he gets angry because she doesn’t finish her
sentences. I observed that we were all doing the best we could in a difficult situation and that we
all had to work to appreciate each other’s strengths and tolerate and compensate for each other’s
shortcomings. As I presented this to him as caringly and as carefully as I could, he
absentmindedly rolled his eyeballs up into his head until only whites were ghoulishly showing. I
considered reminding him that he recently had yelled at me for not paying adequate attention
while he told me a meaningless story, yet was now tuning me out while I was trying to
communicate something I obviously felt was important. Instead, I gently observed that the
shortcomings we all had included his habit of rolling his eyes into his head while I was talking to
him.
Meanwhile, my brother overheard my conversation with my father about working more
skillfully with his anger and suggested I cut it out. He said it was inarguably and obviously futile
to address my father at this level; that he was incapable of modifying his obnoxious behavior and
that we should all humor him in every way until he was gone. Unfortunately, there’s a lot to
suggest he’s right about my father’s intractability. Still, I don’t know. After all, why did my father
choose to share his confession with me? He claimed no remorse yet he felt the need to tell me as
soon as he learned he we was dying. Apparently, on some level he wanted to stir things up.
Perhaps if he had told my brother, he would have stuffed it with everything else and gone on being
only a good boy. Of course, in my opinion, my brother still lives in schizoid denial of his own bad
boy shadow. Anyway, stuffing it can be very bad for one’s health, I’m led to believe.
In any event, my father chose me to receive his dark secret, and it’s up to me decide how
to relate to him in the last days of his life. I see him in pain and also terrified and furious without
his hardly being conscious of it. No amount of narcotics seem to make him feel secure in the pain
and I suspect it is deep fear, not the pain itself, that he’s trying to find relief from. I want to
encourage him to get in touch with his anger and fear, but without having him take it out on those

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who are trying to care for him, particularly my mother. The trouble is the real target of his anger
is intangible—it is fate, or life, or all his life even. Meanwhile, my mother is much more tangible
and a much more familiar target to be angry at. It’s a mess. They say that we die only as well as
we lived. If that’s true, we have a hard road ahead on this one.
Another reason to challenge my dad, rather than to just conspire to stuff it all, is that it
might be what I need to do to take care of myself. My father is the owner of his own destiny and
it’s quite possible that his fate is already sealed on every level. But it’s my obligation also to care
for myself. To open to as much of reality as I’m able, to as many levels of myself as I dare, and to
trust myself to respond in the moment wholeheartedly and authentically. It’s just that the stakes
are so high in this game. The good boy in me is afraid if I screw up, I’ll be judged forever as the
member of the team who did it wrong, who was bad when it was most important to be good.
That would indeed look very bad on my resume, and would take forever to live down. My
mother said that the time for learning is over. I think she meant that it’s too late for my father to
learn anything at this point because he’ll have no time to enjoy the fruits of knowing it, and
besides he’s too busy dying to do anything difficult like learning.
Of course, I don’t see it that way. This is the end of the fourth quarter and the clock is
ticking down. Any learning to be done between me and my dad for either of us had better happen
soon or not at all. And I have no way of knowing but I suspect that the truth might be one of the
only things that you can take with you. I hope so.
Finally, I just have to trust myself. I don’t want to say that I’m committed to offering my
most wholehearted expression of truth in each moment, except when the stakes are high, except
when it’s most important. Ram Dass told me that now’s the time for my real practice to begin.
That meditation on the Zafu is like martial arts in the dojo. Well, clearly I’m in a bad
neighborhood now, and it’s time to see if this stuff really works. That’s all I have to say for now
but I’m sure they’ll be more chapters to this story to come. I just have to go out and live them
first. Wish me luck.

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