I never saw a more fitting symbol of my parents’ marriage than that of my mother batting away my father’s hand on the last night of her life. She was in the ER, suffering her first and final stroke, and was mostly unresponsive. Her eyes were closed; she formed no words. The doctors and nurses had left the room (it was a busy night), and my dad and I stood on opposite sides of the gurney—me holding her left hand and he trying to hold her right.
Their interaction would have been comical in any other context: Dad would pat her arm and she’d jerk it away. He’d enclose her hand in his for an instant, but she’d wrench free and whap at the air.
All the while, she let me hold her left hand.
I felt bad for him. I knew he’d have to live with the memory of that rejection the rest of his life. And he did, silently, for we never discussed it in the three years he had left to live.
But really, aside from the stroke, this back-and-forth was like just another day for them.
***
At fifty-seven years old, I am four years into my third marriage. Twelve years separated the end of my first and the beginning of my second. I moved out of the second situation in 2003, and I married my third wife in 2016.
During much of those intervening unwed times, I remained single. I wouldn’t have so much as a date for years at a stretch, and there were several stretches like that.
***
My mom’s sister once claimed that my parents fought all the way to the church on the day of their wedding in January 1948 — “a cold day in hell” Mom would quip at some point on just about every anniversary.
I missed the first fifteen years of their marriage, coming along as their only child in the spring of 1963, but what I witnessed during my time was something like a long, slow-motion train wreck. They fought frequently and viciously. They raised the needling of one another to the level of a cruel sport. Any personal shortcoming, whether perceived or actual, was fair game.
Yet somehow — whether it was stubbornness, spite, or some weird take on love—they managed to stay together until the end.
***
My first marriage, beginning in 1984, was to a young woman five months pregnant with our child. We’d met in a post-treatment halfway house the previous year, where I worked as a houseparent and she’d lived was a resident.
We were both sober when we met, but that didn’t last long.
My dad bought us a mobile home and we set up in a nice trailer court, playing the part of a young family. We gave it our best at first, and for a while it was happy.
We were kids with a kid.
***
One morning when I was five, I woke to the sound of my parents fighting in the hallway outside my bedroom. Dad had been out drinking the night before, and Mom was demanding to know where he’d been and who he’d been with.
“Who was she?” Mom screamed over and over.
I rolled out of bed and stood in the doorway just in time to see Dad slap her hard across the face. He slapped her again.
I don’t remember them noticing me. I don’t recall either of them stopping their fight for my sake or offering me comfort. And I don’t know whether it would’ve made any difference, because there was no unseeing what I’d seen.
The next thing I recall is sitting in an informal circle in the kindergarten room with three other kids, and I’m telling them that my dad hit my mom before school.
I’m not crying. I don’t recall feeling much of anything one way or another. I’m not sure if the kids said anything back to me.
***
I used to needle my first wife. It was a sick kind of game. It triggered hellacious fights, but then we’d make up and all would be fine until the next time. I always counted on the making up part. That part was fun. A Don Henley song of the time captured our situation well:
I’m not easy to live with, / I know that it’s true. / You’re no picnic either, baby, / That’s one of the things I loved about you.
My drinking spiraled out of control. I don’t remember much of 1986.
Two days into 1987, we drank at a bar with some friends. After closing time, while driving home, I tried to pick a fight.
“Do you ever get the feeling our marriage isn’t going anywhere,” I asked. Salvo fired.
She didn’t miss a beat. “I’ve been checking out apartments for the last month.”
She wasn’t bluffing. Within a week, she’d moved out.
I quit drinking the next day. I haven’t had a drop since.
***
As a young boy I lived with two principal fears regarding my parents: those of death and of divorce. They terrorized my nights and occupied my days. My obsession with divorce was worse, because it always seemed so imminent. Every argument triggered me.
One night, as they fought across the dinner table, I grabbed a serrated-edged steak knife and held it to my chest, screaming that I’d stab myself if they didn’t stop.
They both stood up. Dad put his hand on my shoulder. They promised to stop, promised me they loved each other and would remain together always.
Neither of them grabbed the knife away.
We settled back down and continued eating.
***
I was thirty-six when I asked my second wife to marry me three weeks into our new relationship. She was suffering from a recent broken engagement. I had not been with anyone in seven years.
I’d known her slightly when we were teenagers. We went to different schools; I first met her at a house party of a mutual friend. I actually had a date with her once. At least I thought it was a date. She didn’t remember it when we met again as adults.
We fought viciously the day before our wedding. That night, at my house, I knelt beside my bed and prayed, asking God if I’d made the right decision.
There was no immediate reply. Instead, the answer came back in numerous sharp bursts over the next three years.
***
It’s not like there were no tender moments between my parents. But they were few, so few that I remember some of them specifically:
Mom told me that Dad called her “Sapphire” when he was feeling romantic.
I have a black-and-white photo from before I was born. They are dancing cheek to cheek at a party in someone’s pinewood-paneled basement. She’s wearing a white sweater with flower prints. He’s in a checkered flannel shirt. Both are radiant, grinning at the picture-taker.
Dad sometimes boasted that Mom was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
He always insisted that, even though they fought a lot, they loved one another, and they would “never go to bed angry.”
(Nota bene: I don’t know how that last claim is possible, since they slept in separate rooms and their fights often stretched over days and even weeks.)
***
Living alone and single between marriages had been a cinch for me. If only children share a superpower, it is their ability to self-sustain, to self-entertain.
For years, I’d entertained myself with safe, dead-end crushes on waitresses, store clerks, drive-thru bank tellers. At the same time, while talking with friends, I’d rationalize my lot by telling them I had no business being with anyone. That I had no idea how to do it.
The truth is I wasn’t willing to try. Living single was my easy way out. I’d become terrified of everything that went with coupledom: the heightened level of commitment; the crisis periods all relationships endure; the silences; the arguing; shared decision-making; the prospect of impermanence or, just as scary, of permanence.
So I entered my second marriage having not learned anything.
***
On many nights, after Mom had stumbled upstairs to pass out in her separate bedroom, Dad would stay awake at his perch—a stool at the breakfast bar next to the kitchen. There, with his tumbler of whiskey-and-Seven-Up nearby and a Pall-Mall burning down in an ashtray, he would brood over that evening’s course, jotting down things Mom had done that had pissed him off. They tended to be long lists, and he’d leave them at the breakfast bar so he could refer to them the next morning.
What he never knew was that Mom would wake up extra early just to go downstairs and read the lists, memorize them point by point. That way, she could anticipate his broadsides and better deliver her defense.
She was shrewd that way, experience being a generous teacher.
***
My second wife and I embodied the flip sides of codependency. She was controlling, outwardly focused, intolerant. I was passive-aggressive, self-obsessed, lacking boundaries.
It’s no surprise that patches of common ground were few and far between. Domineering and submissive people do not play well together.
We devolved into a mire of mutual contempt, where “I love you” disappeared and “go fuck yourself” became commonplace.
***
One summer, Dad took a fishing trip into Canada with some buddies. He and Mom had fought just before he left, and he’d threatened to commit suicide while he was up there, stating that one of his friends owned a gun, and that the friend was bringing it with him. Those were his parting words.
Mom stewed all that week, with no word from my dad.
Needless to say, when he returned from Canada, hale, hearty, and happy, Mom was relieved. No mention was made of the suicide threat or the fight before leaving. Instead, they sat over drinks on the back patio. Dad talked non-stop, regaling Mom with amusing tales of the fishing trip.
They talked for hours. It left my mom hopeful, exhilarated, buoyant.
But the next day, and for days afterward, he barely said a word.
***
Suicidal brinkmanship is a cruel and desperate ploy, and I’m ashamed to admit that I played the kill-myself card frequently with my second wife.
But inwardly, I wanted my life to end, too. I obsessed about my death in those years: gunshot to the head, veering into oncoming traffic, carbon monoxide poisoning. Hanging was the most frequent fantasy. I imagined securing a rope to a piece of heavy furniture and jumping out the bedroom window at night — leaving a ghastly display of hopelessness that would greet our backyard neighbors the next morning. I thought of hanging myself in the steel-beamed storeroom at work. I considered the weight-bearing capabilities of random tree limbs.
Alone in the basement of our house, I would wrap belts around my neck and tighten them, gauging the feel of asphyxiation, testing the waters.
One thing that could always stop me was the thought of leaving my kids — my teenage son and our baby daughter. But when even that ceased to be a deterrent, I finally sought help.
In 2002, I checked into a treatment center in Arizona, where I spent a month meditating, doing Yoga, learning about codependency, practicing new communication skills, and sitting through intense therapy.
I returned home feeling stronger. I no longer thought of suicide.
But the most important takeaway was that my second marriage was likely doomed, and that it was not a bad thing.
***
On the night of Mom’s fatal stroke, after they’d wheeled her away to get a CAT scan, Dad remarked to a nurse that my mom had been the love of his life.
I actually did a double take.
Thus began the mythologizing of my parents’ marriage. Over the next three years, until he died, Dad visited her niche in the mausoleum almost daily and rhapsodized to all within earshot that their relationship was a romance for the ages.
I never heard him say a critical thing about her in those last years.
***
My third wife never met my parents. I married her ten years after my dad passed. She’s sixteen years younger than me, divorced once, but is far more evolved in the ways of relationships, and, I would add, maturity. I missed some important developmental opportunities in life. That is no excuse; but it is the situation. My wife knows this, and she’s patient. For now.
So I’m playing catch-up. I make mistakes daily. I act like an only child sometimes. I still have a mean streak in weak moments. But at the end of the day, love rules. At the end of the day, I’m getting there.
Last week, my wife took a trip with her two kids — just a couple of days’ getaway to a cabin, a break from the numbing routine of quarantine and virtual schooling in our own home. I stayed behind with the dogs and cats.
My first day alone, a Monday, was paradise. I binge-watched my favorite movies. I ate what I wanted, when I wanted. I skipped doing the dishes. It was like the old days.
On Tuesday I began to feel a tug. In the afternoon, with the pets napping and the television turned off, the quiet made a striking impression. Gone were the familiar sounds: the kids debating over what to eat for dinner, the human footfalls on the hardwood floor, my wife singing in the crazy chipmunk voice she summons up for my entertainment. The only sign of life was outside: the white noise of traffic on the busy street where we live. But that seemed a world away.
I thought of my dad living out his last years. The sound of solitude.
No.
I couldn’t wait for Wednesday.
