This is a message to my father. This is a healing of a deep issue of abandonment, and a communication of things that need to be said.

Date:   4/13/2005 3:19:48 PM ( 19 y ago)

There are things that can be forgiven
between Fathers and Sons.

I accept I chose you to be my Father.
I accept that I chose to learn the things
I needed to know about my soul from you.

I accept that I was born into a world of religions
that do harm to children, and that fathers
were once children themselves.

You never intended to hurt me.
You did your best.

You never likely even know that you did not
give me the care and attention that a child needs
because you never got that care from your mother
who died as well when you were very small.

You grew up in the depression.
You grew up in the spectre of hearing
that millons of Jews had died in camps
far away.

I remember you telling me that once
you had a dog and that dog climbed on your pillow
to give birth to babies.

I have loved to watch you smile.
I have loved to see the love you so abundantly
give unselfishly to so many.

You are a hero and respected man in your community.
You sit with the dead before they go in the ground.

You fulfill religious practices that are at the core of
the religion you hold dear.

I too love many things about that Jewish Religion.
I have done my best to get close to an inferno of my own
pain that has not allowed me to take on the practices you
wanted me to have.

I appreciate that will time you have mellowed.
You stopped pushing.

We became friends, and I welcomed you to
be a part of life on stage whenever I could
help others heal with their own parents.

When you were ill years ago.
I came to be with you.
I came to give you enemas.

I came to crawl in bed with you in the hospital.

I told you then that I wanted you to receive my love
while you were alive and in the body, because I did not
imagine I could fulfill the rituals of honoring the dead
that you have so lavishly bestowed on others.

As an Orthodox Jew, you have gotten up each morning
and evening your entire life to go to the Synagogue and pray.

You have been at the center of your community,
saying prayers of departing for families who never had
anyone to fulfill the laws of saying prayers to the departed
every morning and evening for the first year.

What kind of fate is this, that a man who has given to others
this prayers of yisdadol, yiskadoth...
will likely not have this given to him, by his own son?

What kind of irony is this?

You who have sat with thousands of dead,
you who have given solice to too many families
every week at the cemetary,
that you, the giver of such kindness
and honor to the departed,
should not receive this himself?

I do not practice Judaism as you do.
My relationship to God is based on another kind
of prayerbook, grounded in nature.

For years, I have felt this pain
that I could not give you this honoring.

There is only one way that I would consider it.
There is only one way that I even might consider
getting up for a year after you go, to go out to the synagogue
and pray, and even then, I am not sure if I could do that.

We must start where we are.

I want you to give me something that you never gave me.
I want you.

I want your time.

If you want to say even one prayer for you,
you must give yourself to me now.

You must choose me over the calls from the mortuary.
Should they call you at a time to sit with the dead
and you know we have made a date, you must choose your living son
over sitting with the dead.

We have to go away together.
Maybe for days.

We have to have fun together.
We have to spend time together,
for that is the one thing you never gave your own son
to the degree he needed it.

There will always be love between us.
I can forgive all, but I will not allow you to depart
this earth and expect prayers from me
for the dead when you have not given to your own son
what he needed of you, and what he is asking of you now.

When the mortuary calls,
you are going to have to be a man.
You are going to say, it is time for me to be with my son.

###

The link below will lead you to
my Getting Hip site. That link is in the lower right corner

This is where you will find the story of my 30th High School ReUnion
that begins this series about a Radical Healing surrounding my 40th ReUnion:
http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=92&i=120





 

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