| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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We're all with you. |
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wisper said it. |
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telling us in a beautiful way, a awful thing be well |
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I feel for you and I am sorry for your loss. |
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goddammit. it sucks when our dads do things like that. mine did it too. be as well as well can be. |
goddammit. it sucks when our dads do things like that. mine did it too. be as well as well can be. |
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this whole sorry matter last night, having successfully put most of it out of my mind for i don't know how many years. i never stayed overnight at the house but i was there one night sorting through some stuff when suddenly all the lights turned on. he had the living room lights on a timer. freaked me the fuck out. there were relatives who came to back me up on some of what had to be done, and for the funeral. the one who stuck around the longest expected money but the terms of the trust were so strict that even if i wanted to at least compensate her for travel expenses i would not have had much flexibility. having only barely heard of her before she arrived on the scene i do not expect to ever talk to her again. in the 9½ years since this happened there is something i never told anyone but my sister and a few friends. i never even told my mother, and i regret that because i think she had her suspicions and would have been relieved and even amused to know the truth. my father was gay. i found a VHS tape hidden away deep in a dresser drawer, buried under several pair of women's underpants. unlabeled. i put it in the VCR and it was cued up to start right at the money shot, with 2 dudes sucking each other off. he hid that VHS tape like a teenager would stick a Playboy under the mattress thinking his mother would never think to look there. did he want it to be found? was this his way of letting us know? or did he just forget? i don't think he was ever sexually active with other men, but that his awareness simply came out late in life and he explored it through porns and such. i asked the estate attorney if he knew. he said something like "no but i kind of figured as much." then he delivered a clumsy but sincere eulogy on the secrets of the human soul and what goes on inside the brain that is never expressed aloud or in any communicable way. i thought of that when i had a brain MRI done a few years ago, how they scanned and photographed every single slice of my brain and still couldn't tell what the hell was going on in there. at the time i was walking into buildings and blacking out for no apparent reason. the neurologist decided it was major depression, which hardly came as a surprise, i guess i just never expected such drastic physical symptoms. i would say that my dad was depressed but that word was just not admissible to him or his generation. my sister reacted to the news that he was gay the way i should have: she laughed, saying that being married to our mother would drive any man to the other side. i truly wish our mother knew, but i think that the window of time during which she was sentient enough to understand was limited anyway. a gay friend of mine was the most unsettled, or rather sympathetic about this, even though he never knew my dad. he said that in another generation i might never have been born, a comment which seemed heavy at the time he said it but seems needlessly existential now. i put most of dad's stuff on the curb and donated the clothes to Goodwill, but i dumped the porns into a trash can in the parking lot of a restaurant. |
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flamboyances that i think tipped off the attorney. they were actually pretty good friends who spent a lot of time together in addition to the lawyer/client thing. i think my mother could have handled knowing. whatever her reaction might have been i think it could simply have been fair. after my mother was gone i had a conversation with a friend whose first wife came out after they got divorced. i was impressed by how he so articulately and sincerely said that he had no intellectual or mental problem with it. he might feel different if he'd spent his whole life with her but that's just hypothetical. that conversation got me thinking about how i should have let my mother know, but i guess there's no point in looking back. |
without a computer. very sorry. when my grandfather died (at 85, of cancer) we had to go through his belongings, which included a garage packed to the rafters with junk he'd collected over the years. just before he died, he told me mother "there might be some things in there i wouldn't want you to see." as a teenager, i had found his extensive collection of girlie magazines packed away in boxes. so it came as a surprise when i found a set of pictures from the 1930's: they were of him in what i would describe as tastefully homoerotic nudes and semi-nudes. they were taken by an man called george enz. i found letters from him that had sort of an unexpressed passion. we all have our secret souls. |