approaching anniversary

there's definitely a slight tinge of fall in the air today. the temperature is still in the 90's, but there's some subtle and indefinable difference. tomorrow will be the eighth anniversary of my father's suicide.

unfortunately, eight years dead and i still haven't really come to terms with his memory. the suicide, of course, fucked everything up. maybe it would have been easier to come to terms with our shared past if he hadn't bailed out. since he checked out, any anger i experience towards him ends up just bringing me back to the image in my head of him pulling the trigger. it reminds me of his fear of death. it reminds me that maybe i could have done more to keep him alive, even though i am abundantly aware that, when someone really wants to die, there's no force on earth that can prevent it. it's one of the legacies of my childhood, the feeling that, if i could have been a stronger, smarter, more loving, ad infinitum, i could have repaired the damage that was done to him by both nature and nurture. my intellect knows the truth, but my heart can't embrace that truth.

my dad always wanted someone else to be responsible for him. when i was a little kid, he would talk to me in a pathetic way about how he was going to get old and die. it made me cry every single time. when i was about ten, i finally got it. i realized that he was just yanking my chain; i'm not sure why it was so gratifying for him to make me cry, but that's how it was. that was one of the junctures in my life when i made a decision to harden my heart towards him a little more.

there were many years when my anger towards him was so intense that we weren't really having a relationship at all, even though i would visit my parents and stay at their house pretty regularly. i had finally managed to find a way to have a relationship with him and i always thought i could control his behavior to some extent. by keeping in touch and open to his pain, maybe i could manage to limit the damage he could do to other people. of course that was a ridiculous thought. that delusion was shattered the day he died.

i guess that's the positive side of his suicide. i became crystal clear about my inability to control anything. it's been quite liberating, really. nowadays i just float through my life, profoundly aware that i'm not even in much control of what's going to happen to me in the next five minutes. for some reason, i don't even find that particularly frightening. i just try to come to terms with the things that occur in my life by acceptance.

my dad spent so much of his life making everyone he came into contact with miserable. my therapist says that she thinks he was a sadist. i agree. i don't particularly like that diagnosis, but he was a cruel person who actually did seem to enjoy making other people suffer. i can't write about this anymore. too painful.

quote of the day:
"The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)