Stoicism is a useful path right up until the moment when it crosses a line and turns into dissociation. I want to make sure that doesn't happen. I try to be stoic (in a Zen-flavored way) because I don't see how it helps me or others to create narratives and dramas and generally make a bad situation worse. As I've said in the past, life with my father is hard enough without my adding layers of "he used to be this way and now he's this way, oh the horror..." and so on like that. Better just to concentrate on the present and deal with things as they are, not as I'd like them to be.
But that doesn't mean that the emotions aren't there. They are. Oh, yes, they are. Some days are worse than others. Yesterday was bad. I just want to note for the record - in case anyone is tempted to misunderstand - that when I walk down 93rd Street to my father's apartment, I'm very much aware that I'm walking along a street that I used to take to elementary school. And when I get to the apartment - the one I'll have to pull apart shortly - it's the one I grew up in and it's full of ghosts. There's 50 years of history in every angle of view and I can see all the scenes. And when I have to give away his cats, I'll be giving up the last living connection with my parents when they were whole - in addition to which, I'm genuinely attached to one and the other was my first Buddhist teacher (he's difficult and I made a conscious effort to overcome my aversion to him and that changed him, and me too). And that I wish my mother was around to help, though I'm glad she isn't. And that when I see the wrecked, stooped, raving old man in the Depends, I know exactly who he was and I've got our whole intense, close, complex, contradictory relationship laid out in front of me. One layer over another. The sensation is very much like sticking a knife in your heart and twisting it slowly. Meditation, which I do every morning, teaches you to pay strict attention to the sensation of the knife in your heart and experience all its details and flavors. It makes you aware of all the threads and stories and concepts that drive the knife in. It teaches you not to act all at once on the sensation of the knife - not to try to remove it too fast, not to try to drive it deeper. What meditation doesn't do is make the knife in the heart feel like anything other than a knife in the heart. That's a good thing. You've got to be where you are, even in bad places and bad times.
Possibly I'm dealing with too much change all at once, or with too many months of tension all built up. The other thing meditation teaches you is that if you wait it out, the sensation of the knife in the heart will unpack itself into its component parts, then go away and turn into something else eventually.
I can wait.
Last night's visit wasn't objectively all that bad. At the outset he was surprisingly coherent and very cheerful. He told me I was three years old, but a moment later he asked how old I was and I told him I was 49.
"That's almost 50," he said.
"That's right," I told him. I was a bit surprised.
"Me, I'm dead!" he said - energetically and cheerfully. A joke - a self-aware joke - like in the old days. Right there on the edge. A kind of full awareness. Not bad.
A while later he told me at length that he was considering marrying E, except that he was concerned he didn't have a job.
You take what you can get.
I suppose his new interest in E (it came up by phone the other day, too) suggests that he's happy and comfortable at home - which, if so, has a bearing on the question of whether to move him or to find a way to keep schlepping to New York.
It'll work itself out.
He had a slight cold and when he fell asleep after dinner, he really fell asleep - all broken and twisted over to one side and he didn't show any signs of waking up. So I left, in a downpour - and since I was preoccupied with trying to stay dry on the way to the subway I didn't have a chance to think about my personal history of 93rd Street or anything along those lines. It's better like that.
Be here now, as they say.
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