Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  “What was he punishing you for?”

  “Everything and nothing. He just hated me. Well, I mean, I know he didn’t hate me, but that’s what it felt like.”

  “And what did that feel like?” Dan leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, hands clasped.

  “I just told you, Miracle-Ear. Like he hated me.” I didn’t call Dan “Miracle-Ear,” but I thought about it.

  “But what did that feel like?”

  Dan did this a lot. Asked me a question I had already answered.

  He wanted me to understand that the outward feeling was not the only feeling. He pushed me to identify what was underneath that feeling, which was anger, and then sadness, and then rejection. I felt alone. That I couldn’t rely on anyone but myself. Helpless.

  Now, I know that my stubbornness was patrilineal—that it came directly from the person who had withdrawn his affection. If he still loved me, he wasn’t about to tell me, and I surely wasn’t going to ask him to love me. Two obstinate assholes reeling in pain. Things could have been so much easier if we had just had the ability to reach out to each other.

  “Our signals were always crossed,” I told Dan. “None of us had the tools.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” he told me. “To get the tools.”

  “I definitely remember loving my father before Chet died, and not loving him after, so there’s that,” I added.

  “Well, you probably loved him still, but you were hurt, and it sounds like you turned that hurt into anger, because, as I said, anger is motion, and it allows you to avoid sitting with your feelings. In a sense, you felt that your father had broken up with you too. That must have been really scary for a little girl.”

  Getting broken up with twice by the age of nine. I had never looked at it that way.

  “Yeah, that’s a lot of male rejection before I even got my period.”

  Two guys in the span of one year, and I hadn’t even started dating. I had on no occasion thought about my experiences within this kind of framework, or thought about how my father must have felt losing his firstborn son. Of course he was wrecked. Who wouldn’t be? Why would he have any inkling about how to handle losing a child? No one has any idea what to do with that news.

  “That must have been when I realized I needed to grow myself up. To become a fixer.”

  “Probably,” Dan agreed. “No one helped you with your pain, you were too young to deal with it on your own, and it sounds like when everyone around you disengaged, your pain turned into anger, which turned into motion, and from everything you’re telling me, you haven’t stopped moving since.”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right. I just needed him, and he had this terrible habit of showing up only at times when I didn’t want him to. Like at school, I just didn’t want him representing me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was loud and mostly disheveled. His outfits were the casual equivalent of what I wore to temple on Friday nights. I just believed I was better at advocating for myself. Plus, my mom was sweet and quiet and I wanted more people to see her, to see that I had a mother that was like other mothers—one who showed up.”

  “How did that feel?”

  “Lonely.”

  Most days in elementary school, I could easily walk to school and back by myself, but the winter weather required transportation by car, and since my parents didn’t want to deal with that, they farmed me out to our neighbor. In exchange for a ride to school on winter mornings, my parents offered up my math-tutoring services to their second grader, Samson. Even though I was in the fourth grade at the time, I shouldn’t have been tutoring anyone in any subject—least of all math. After a few weeks, it became apparent that Samson was smarter than I was, and that’s when he and I got philosophical and just started playing Super Mario Bros.

  I remember walking home from Samson’s house one afternoon around five P.M. and being asked by my father, in one of his bouts of selective parenting, where I’d been.

  “The zoo,” I told him, and walked into the kitchen to see if my mom had cooked anything.

  “Did you have a field trip?” my mom asked sweetly, standing with her back to me, over the stove.

  “No, I just went on my own,” I told her. As if a nine-year-old had the wherewithal to take a day trip to the zoo, solo.

  My father went back to reading the newspaper and my mother asked me if I was hungry. I was always hungry, so I took a bowl of whatever she was making and walked upstairs to my room, where I could at least be consistent with the company I was keeping.

  I wanted someone to look after me—someone who would ask where I’d been. I wanted a mother who wanted other kids’ parents’ phone numbers. I wanted parents who didn’t bounce checks. I wanted to be picked up from Hebrew school on time—or at all—in a car with four doors that opened and closed.

  I wanted to escape, to go away to boarding school, anything to get away from my father and all the friends I had lost. My parents couldn’t afford boarding school; otherwise they would have been glad to send me. They were just as tired of me as I was of them. I would make my way through one group of friends and then move on to another, and when I was out of people, my parents would transfer me to a different school. I went from being a sweet and feisty and happy and spoiled little girl who just had to smile to get anything I wanted to being a girl who had the rug ripped out from under her, and everything she considered to be love taken away. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I was so angry. I was losing my grip and flailing around, and I couldn’t calm down long enough for anyone to help me, because I really didn’t believe anyone could. No one seemed reliable.

  “I remember once sitting around for some family dinner. I must have been around thirteen. There weren’t many of us there, just my parents and Shana, and I looked around the table thinking, These are not my people. I thought, I’m going to have to branch out on my own at some point. Obviously, I’ll keep in touch with these people who have had a hand in keeping me alive and feeding me, but this can’t be my real family.”

  “And what did that feel like?”

  “I think I wanted to reject them before they could reject me,” I told Dan.

  Dan asked me if my parents had any grief counseling or if they took any of us to therapy. This was laughable. They didn’t know anything about therapy or what responsible people did when their children died. They thought a parent-teacher conference was a social mixer for adults—simply because it was at night—therefore, it made no difference whether they showed up or not.

  “The subject of therapy never came up except for the time I woke up and pretended I couldn’t move my legs.”

  “What was wrong with your legs?”

  “I believe I was trying to avoid a German test that I had neglected to study for, but now that we’re talking about this, I could have just feigned being sick, if that was the case, because my parents generally didn’t challenge that. I remember saying something to my mom about having polio and her rolling her eyes at me, which made me work even harder at convincing her I had polio. I must have been thirteen or fourteen at the time.”

  At the emergency room that day, the doctor pricked my legs up and down with a needle while I pretended not to feel a thing—and when he was done, he drew the curtain to my examination room shut and suggested to my parents that I have a psychiatric evaluation. They brought me to three different therapists, but I refused to speak to any of them. I just sat there and grimaced and stared each one down until they gave up. Every therapist who gave up was another win. I was as stubborn as I needed to be, and when anyone around me gave up on me, I had won again. They had failed the test. Another faker who pretended they cared but didn’t really.

  Saying all of these incredibly embarrassing things out loud to someone made me feel sick, mostly. I thought about the absurdity of being forty-two years old and op