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Saturday, March 25, 2017

Dear Dad- Written March 25, 2017

Dear Dad
The Yiskor candles are burning in my kitchen.  It has been 45 years since your death.  I was 19 years old when I shoveled dirt onto your coffin.  I’m 64 years now and I’ve lived 15 years longer than your cancer truncated life. 
It has been a difficult number of months for me.  I took over a significantly troubled non-profit organization two and a half years and, while many things have improved dramatically, our financial situation is dire.  Revenue has not kept up with expenses and we ran a significant deficit last year.  We are faced with dramatic cash flow challenges. There were and continue to be extenuating circumstances which made this task virtually impossible.  Part of the fault lies also with me.  There are things I could have and should have done better.
The organization’s financial challenges have caused me enormous anxiety, to the point that I faced severe panic attacks this past summer.  At this point, I am only able to maintain functioning with the help of a cocktail of anti-anxiety medications.  Even full dosed, my mood remains edgy and nervous.
There is so much to unwrap as I attempt to understand the profoundly painful emotional impact this current situation is having on my psyche.  But I cannot help recall vivid childhood images where, perhaps fueled by a Depression Era Weltanschauung, you raged at me for being fiscally careless.  In retrospect, the memories seem, to be honest, ridiculous.  Perhaps I was 6 or 7 when you screamed at me for not squeezing the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube.  I still can remember feeling so utterly confused by the ferocity of your anger. Perhaps you remember the day at the Renaissance Swim Club when a dime dropped from my hand and rolled under the soda machine.  You screamed at me demanding that I get the custodian to move the machine so the dime could be retrieved.  I believe I was 11.  Even back then I remember thinking how unreasonable that demand was.  But you were my father.
And so 50 or more years later, the thought that I am being judged for financial carelessness, the organizational equivalent of squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube or failing to reclaim the dime from the bottom of the soda machine, has elevated my anxiety to frightful levels.  I am once again, the small child, in pajamas, in the bathroom with improperly squeezed toothpaste tube clutched in my hand. 
Intriguingly, even understanding the underlying emotional dynamic doesn’t seem to, in any way alleviate my anxiety.  It is the little orange pill that seems to do the trick and, while not transitioned in to “Mr. Happy” I am able to proceed with the tasks and responsibilities of the day.  At least until the medically induced calm begins to subside. 
I think about your life and I remember with such clarity your humor and your charm.  But, in retrospect, also realize that lurking underneath your warmth and your smile were deeply troubling emotionally painful demons. That you were claustrophobic was well known by all family members.  Thus, you never flew and rarely took highways as the exits were spaced too far apart. And it is why you chose to be treated on an outpatient basis when your Hodgkin’s Disease was first diagnosed.  We would drive you to the hospital, wait while you underwent chemotherapy and then rushed you back home before the nauseating effects began. 
A relapse of the disease a year later necessitated your admission to Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital in New York where, after 3 weeks, you passed away.
Later in life as I studied at the Columbia University School of Social Work, I began to think about your claustrophobia in metaphorical terms.  At age 18 you entered Pace University in New York to study to become a history teacher.  After your freshman year you were recruited and served in the Army Air Corps during World War II.  The war concluded and you returned home, planning to continue your college studies.  But your father would have none of it.  It was time to go to work in the family business – J Raphael and Son’s Importers and Grinders of Spices – where you remained until cancer found you. As I learned later in life, it was work that you never enjoyed and never gave you a real sense of satisfaction. I vividly remember screaming arguments between you and your brother Sidney.   Your joy came after work with friends and they were a balm to your restless and pained soul.  At age 27 you met my mother and by age 31 you had a wife and three children.  Any semblance of freedom was gone.  At work and at home you were trapped, you were on a life highway with no exits.
I think of you now in my period of anxiety.  Deep within my psyche, here is the scathing voice of my father berating me being careless with money. But I also think that there is a tinge of your claustrophobia – that I am trapped, that I cannot succeed in this job and that I will be jobless when I return to Atlanta.  I am not a psychiatrist, but it occurs to me that claustrophobia is broad, full impact anxiety – overwhelmed by the painful constrictions that life has presented you and fearful of living them out on a day-to-day basis. 

As I make my way through my own emotional challenges, I have come to better understand the nature of your anxiety and profoundly debilitating impact of the stresses you must have felt.  But for you, there was no orange pill and perhaps at home and at work there was no relief.  That anxiety, that fear, that sense of life closing in on you from all sides must have been unbearable. It is hard for me to truly comprehend your emotional pain or understand how you managed the unrelenting psychic distress. Squeezing the toothpaste is more than depression era parsimony, it is the unforgivable wasting of the limited resources that provide an opportunity to live a happy life.  We are all feeling squeezed. I look back at your life and now understand that the ongoing pressure on your psyche must have been relentless and unbearable.   You weren’t yelling at me but raging at life’s unrelenting pressure. By the way, since that day I have never squeezed the toothpaste from the middle of the tube.

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