Cognitive Dissonance

For most of my life I have had a complex relationship with my father...to put it mildly.

When I was around 10 or 11 he succumbed to the same disease his mother had and slowly became a bi-polar lunatic. It wasn't overnight, but sometimes it felt that way. He had never been what you would call a model dad, but we had had our good moments till that point.
Once the disease hit, however, he was a changed man.

Despite the fact that he is a doctor educated at Einstein or the fact that he knew that his mother and other relatives suffered from this malady, when he started to evidence symptoms of manic depression, he did nothing and eventually the few good moments I now vaguely recall were no more.

I have not had any sort of relationship with him in eons. Once he, for lack of a better term, got crazy he was never anything but antagonistic towards me. It's the old story of the father never thinking his kids were good enough and nothing they did ever merited a positive word or hint of encouragement. So when he and my mother separated, it was for the best. He had been just as awful to my mother as he was to his children. The first few months after he left the house he still stopped by to do his best to remind us why we wanted him out in the first place. Eventually he stopped trying to get back into the house and our hearts and for the first time in years it was a pleasure to be in our house.

Six or seven years have gone by since he left and I've had possibly 1 "conversation" with him during this time. I say "conversation" since it was mostly him yelling at me and using a variety of curse words to get his point across. For the most part he has been out of sight and out of mind, and I have preferred it that way.

Today I found out that he had a stroke last night. He's alive, but slurs when he speaks and has no control over one side of his body. Since he has no medical insurance, he refused treatment since he doesn't want this minor blip in the road to "impoverish" him.

He has lived a life of gluttony, sloth, and the whole slew of deadly sins. He does indeed deserve everything he gets. And it's not really much of a surprise that he had a stroke; his main source of nutrition was a stick of butter and sweetened condensed milk. Not particularly the recipe for a long life of health. In fact I was waiting for him to have heart attack, or considering his penchant for walking around with a loaded handgun in his back pocket and pick fights with street denizens, I was waiting to hear he was shot by some random person after an altercation he himself provoked.

And yet, despite all this, despite the hell he put our family through, despite the joy I felt when he was no longer a part of our family unit, despite the dreams and wishes I had that he would just disappear forever and leave me and my family alone my emotions are mixed. For worse or for the minute better, he was the only father I knew. For the first time in years, early memories of county fairs and camping trips (all occurring during my single digit years), have hit me like a mack truck. Unlike the rest of my siblings, I do remember being happy to see him. Unlike the rest of my siblings, I do remember walking the streets of Greenwich Village with him, getting the ice cream cones that we never told my mom about. All the crap and all the pain that he caused me has still not erased these vestigial fond feelings.

And yet... I have no desire to contact him. I don't want him to contact me either. I don't want my siblings to have to deal with feeling sorry for a man who abused and then abandoned them. I don't want them to feel guilty for not helping him through this crisis or anything else. Tenuous happy memories aside, I want him to just disappear over the horizon and never dampen our doorway again, literally or figuratively.

Of course that will never happen and eventually I'll have to come to terms with this whole mess.
Till then, however, I'll just have to manage this chaos in my head best I can and hope that he slumps out of our lives without much more ado.