My father died forty nine years ago this coming November.   He died suddenly of a stroke when I was fifteen years old.  I have vivid memories of that time in my life that immediately triggers feelings of rage.  Some of you may feel that I need to let go of this intense anger because it is either harmful to me, unnecessary or that I need to forgive those that have committed abusive acts.   I reject all these suggestions. I will share my story with you and tell you why I made this choice.

I was home from Highland Park  High School one fall day and my father walked through the door.  He wasn’t due to come home for several hours when his work day was over.  He worked in a factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey placing small engines in boxes.  It was a difficult, tedious job.  I went with him to work one day a few months earlier and I was exhausted from helping him label the boxes for shipping.

He never complained about his work although I often saw him holding his head in obvious pain.  He didn’t announce why he was home early, but my mother later told me that my father was fired from his job because he neglected to tell them he was going on vacation.

Now I either didn’t have enough life experience to be inquisitive or I was in denial about the precarious state of my father’s health.  His behavior was odd and at the time, my mother and sister and I didn’t discuss our observations.  My black jeans had white bleach stains and my dad found some black paint to fix them.  The paint didn’t match and didn’t really work with the cotton fabric.

Earlier that summer, he was driving with me on the New Jersey Turnpike.  It was about ninety five degrees with one hundred percent humidity and our 1964 Comet definitely didn’t have air conditioning.  My father was driving the car into the wrong lane.  He was dangerously close to the cars on our left.  There was a lot of honking, but my father was oblivious.

He was out of work during the entire fall of 1966.  I was at basketball practice and noticed that my mother and sister were standing in the gym hallway. My mother motioned for me to come. I didn’t understand because she never picked me up from school. I always walked home.

I walked closer to her and I will never forget the look on her face. It said tragic, hopeless, what in the world am I going to do?  Her mouth was turned down expressing a sadness I had never seen before. She said, “Your father has been in an accident.  We must go to the hospital.”

My father was driving erratically and was pulled over by the police who had him transported to St. Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick.

He was in the intensive care unit where my sister and I were not allowed to see him because children should not be exposed to grave illness or impending death. This was a terrible policy that adversely effected my grief process for years to come.

If you don’t see your loved one dying or dead, you have no real memory of his death to return to. Therefore it is easy to stay in a state of denial endlessly.  Which I did for a couple of decades.

My sister and I waited hours in the hospital visiting room which could have doubled as a mausoleum.  No one really talked to us and they wouldn’t even let my mother in the intensive care unit.  She had to sneak in to see him.

I crept into a state of numbness and didn’t climb out until years later. My sister and I went to school the next two days because there was nothing better to do.  My teacher told me I had to go to the principal’s office who told us that we needed to go home.  There was no warmth or sign of concern in his directive.  We walked home all the time knowing the news we were about to hear.  As soon as we arrived, my grandfather told us that my father had died.

My sense of innocence was demolished and I found comfort in the cigarette habit I was developing.  My father was fifty-six years old and now he was gone.  I had no idea how to process this loss.  I had no idea what I had lost; only that there was emptiness in the space where my dad once stood.

The funeral and service were catastrophes.  No, they were worse than that.  They were degrading, humiliating and had no connection to my father.  My family is Jewish and we were not religious and didn’t belong to a synagogue.  We had to meet with the local rabbi who was somehow hooked in with the cemetery where my dad was to be buried.  We had never met the rabbi before and I wished I never set eyes on him.  He spent more time agonizing over the fact that my dad didn’t have a Jewish name than attempting to console a mother and her two grieving kids.  “He didn’t have a Jewish name?”  He repeated this phrase over and over again until I turned off his voice in my head.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did.  When we entered the cemetery, I noticed that the grave yard was divided into two sections.  One part included large, garish headstones.  The other part had small grave markers that mostly were level with the ground.

My father’s resting spot was in the small grave marker site and we witnessed the workers digging a hole for my father’s coffin.  I found this to be totally disrespectful as I kept mulling over the rabbi’s words during the service, “Although he didn’t have a Jewish name, I understand that he was a good man.”  He didn’t understand a damn thing.  I felt like I was watching a movie that I wasn’t in.  It was surrealistic to the point of having a dreamlike quality except it wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare.

The institutions of work, medicine, organized religion, and the funeral industry not only let my family down, they were emotionally distressing experiences.  They were every bit as traumatizing as my father’s death.

When I think about these painful memories, I get angry.  The anger gives me power and a sense of righteousness.  It paves the way for me to connect with millions of others who have been hurt by the institutions that are supposed to insure our well-being and protect us.

Some will say that I need to let go of this rage so I can live a pastoral and serene life. But, I don’t want to live a calm life.  I want to hear the streets alive with the sounds of outrage. Like the MC5 says, “It’s time to Kick out the Jams!”

Dear Honored Readers, I would appreciate your thoughts and feelings about this blog which you can include below or on https://www.facebook.com/HealingEmotionalPain  Thank you so much.

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