HOW I KILLED MY PARENTS, PART ONE: MY DAD
Okay, I realize this title is startling (got your attention, didn't it?), but I've seriously believed I was responsible for my father's death since 1992.
See, my father had been a smoker since 1945, two to three packs a day when he was younger, and two packs a day from the time I could remember. When I was in first grade, I remember waking up and playing "airplane," flying through the clouds of smoke hanging in the living room.
My father went to college on the GI bill after Korea. He was the first person in our entire family to get a college degree, and he never let anyone forget it. Even as he would ask me how a word was spelled when I was 10, he would end an argument by saying "Who has the college degree?"
I graduated from the same college as my dad in December 1991. With higher grades. And magna cum laude. And after winning the highest academic distinction they give to one student out of the entire graduating class in a school with an enrollment of close to 25,000.
Suddenly, my father's favorite tag line did not work anymore -- because not only did I also have a college degree, mine was better than his.
My father was diagnosed with emphysema a couple years before I finished school. Six weeks after I graduated, he was hospitalized with it for the first time. Now, with emphysema, the course usually is several hospitalizations, oxygen dependence, and only after years of that, death.
My father was dead two weeks later.
Before you feel too sorry for me, trust me when I tell you that this might be sad, but this is not a tragedy. As an untreated bipolar schizophrenic, he made my family's life a living hell. To paraphrase Christopher Titus, we never knew who was coming to dinner or what mood they'd be in when they got there.
My father called me my senior year of college to tell me he didn't know why I was still there, I was wasting my time, and I should just stop wasting their money and come home (side note here: my parents didn't pay for college at all -- so the "wasting their money" part was a red flag even if nothing else was). After I explained to him that I was on the dean's list again, just won sorority woman of the year, and just won the aforementioned award, he responded by saying "And for $50, you can get your name in 'Who's Who of American College Students'."
I said, "Really, Dad? Were you in that?" challenging him for the first time I could remember. I ended that conversation by telling my father to f*ck off and hanging up....and lived in terror for the rest of the day, fully expecting him to drive up to the school and drag me home. Instead, he just refused to talk to me for six months.
So, my father dying was sad, but not tragic, you see.
Nevertheless, I still felt responsible. After all, I took away his trump card.
Tags: Schizophrenia Parents Death
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