RAGE
Mel Waldman
My father shoved the knife in my hand and screamed: “Kill me!”
I dropped the knife and ran out of the kitchen. Since then, I’ve been running for almost 50 years, even after his death, afraid of the terror, rage, hatred, helplessness, and despair in him and me.
He died 17 years ago. And in the last decade of his life, he suffered two deaths. Clutched by Alzheimer’s, he lost his mind before he passed away.
His third wife forced him out of his Beverly Hills, Florida home, claiming he had threatened to kill her. And although we seemed connected only by rage and mutual hatred, I took him in.
He stayed with me for three months. At first, we raged against each other. Yet buried beneath our rage, I believe, was a crazy, wild, sad love we could not express directly to each other. I think Dad was terrified of such intimacy. I know I was.
He left when we were starting to know each other. It was our beginning. Yet he never let it develop. A beautiful potentiality was not fulfilled. It was our end. He had a dark rendezvous to keep.
When he returned to Florida, his wife made him sign some legal forms and quickly placed him in a nursing home. Protected by a slick lawyer, she seized and got all his possessions.
Inside the nursing home, he deteriorated rapidly. The first death swept across his shrinking mind and vanishing identity. And before the second death came, he had lost his rage too. I’m told he used to sit quietly in the dayroom. Yet from time to time, he grew a big fat grin, revealing a gold tooth and an instinct for survival. Once a raging bull, he had become a “sweet, old man.”
In the end, he possessed only two words-“yes” and “no” and nothing more. The memories of his son, daughter, and brother were deleted from his mind, lost in a microscopic chasm between synapses, falling far into the abyss of oblivion. And his mind, almost nonexistent, was severed from his body.
Unaware of his raging past and oblivious of his current surroundings, one day the little man slumped over in his chair after lunch and died of a heart attack.
His last exit was a silent secret unnoticed by staff hypnotized by the long-lasting soap opera AS THE WORLD TURNS.
His body was shipped back to Brooklyn for the funeral. Then he was buried in a Long Island cemetery next to my mother who died many years ago. Finally, he was home, beside the woman he truly loved, bereft of the rage that had fueled his violent existence.
But he left me behind, not knowing how to feel about him. Before he returned to Florida, I forgave him. I mean, I thought I did. I had this grand catharsis and let go of my rage, and struggled to love this powerful little man, five-four with a thin moustache and large cataract glasses, whom I had dreamed of killing all my life.
My rage was a snowstorm that had buried my love in a deep snow. Yet still, my hidden love emerged after the windswept rain ripped through the icy walls of hatred and destroyed the antediluvian fortress that separated us.
Letting go of my rage was the most frightening event of my adult life. (And ironically, in the end, without your rage, Dad, you became a victim of the woman who betrayed you. She sent you away to die. And you went quietly, mindlessly.) And it seems I’ve had to rage again, from time to time, to feel alive in the old primitive way, before I forgive again.
I could have killed you many times throughout the years. But I chose to love you secretly instead. It was the buried secret I kept from you and me.
POSTSCRIPT 1
I have this recurrent nightmare. I wake up in the middle of the night and go into the bathroom. I look in the mirror. You stare back at me, smiling sardonically, knowing you have swallowed my soul. I scream a long soulless scream and die.
POSTSCRIPT 2
Awake, I ask the dark silent questions: Is it contagious? Is it inherited? Will I look in the mirror one day and not know I am there? Will I die before I die?
