Requiem

 I got the following message today from someone online.

“Didn’t know if you were aware, your father passed away.  There was no funeral, no one in the family knew.”  

He apparently died in April.

As I sat with a wave of adrenalin washing over me, just staring at the message, I didn’t even know how to react.  He was 81 years old at the time of his passing.  I knew one day I would get a call, or an e-mail informing me of his death.  I never knew how I was going to respond on that day.

I always worried I would be expected to go to a funeral.  I didn’t know if I could do it.  There was relief that I had been spared that discomfort.  I always wondered if toward the end of his life he would reach out.  We know the answer now.

No.

 

 There were at least four wives.  FOUR.  My mom was the first.  They were married seven years when I was born and after one more year she left him.  She told me I was what ultimately gave her the strength to finally leave.  She had tried to leave many times before.  Their relationship was the definition of gaslighting.  He would abuse her, buy her gifts when she left and beg her to come back, sell the gifts as soon as she returned, act like she was the one who was crazy.  He would regularly get into trouble with the law, he was wrapped up with organized crime, always in court, couldn’t hold a job.

The abuse didn’t stop when she finally left.  He kept her in court for years.  Challenging custody, visitation schedules, anything he could.  Mind you he didn’t want custody, but he wanted to make life as hard as he could.  I spent my young life in and out of court mediation rooms, being questioned in courthouses by strangers. 

The little time I did spend with him was usually unpleasant.  A lot of times he would take me to his mother’s house immediately and drop me off for her to watch me and then he would pick me up and take me home.  He wouldn’t allow me to communicate with my mom at all when I was with him but I would sneak out of my room at night and call her on the phone just to have someone to talk to.  He would send me home with complete strangers both to me and to her, just to scare her.  He tried to bait people into physical violence so he could sue them.  He tried it several times with members of my mom’s family.  They knew better at that point than to take the bait.

He married the woman he cheated on my mom with.  I would sit in my room at his house and listen to them scream at each other for hours.  Things the ears of a child should not ever hear.  Things two adults shouldn’t say to one another if they hate each other let alone if they are married.  It went on for years.  When she finally left him there was another, and then another.  Same story.  The third woman left with a police escort, he told me she was doing drugs, I doubted it.  I don’t even know what happened to the fourth.  She wasn’t around long.  There may have been others, I don’t know.

I could fill a novel with the stories I remember and some that I was told.  There was the time he let me play with his gun.  I think I was about five.  The time he took me to a doctor who wrote curse words ALL over my body in mercurochrome.  Sometimes he would force feed me food he knew I didn’t like, not healthy food mind you, this was like hamburgers and then mocked me when I cried.  I was never allowed to cry.  I was not allowed to have an opinion on anything, unless it was his. 

I watched him alienate every single person who came into his life, from his brother, to his mother and father, every women he ever claimed to love, even waitresses at restaurants.  It didn’t matter, he had contempt for them all.  He wasn’t there when I graduated high school, he wasn’t there was I graduated college.  He wasn’t there period.

My mom never got over the abuse she suffered at his hands.  Sadly, she lived in the horror of that time in her life for her whole life, and at 79 years old she still gets visibly shaken whenever his name comes up in conversation.  She never sought help for the trauma she lived through.  It permanently scarred her and stunted her ability to trust others.  She never remarried.

By the time I was a young adult I visited him occasionally out of obligation.  Oddly it was my mother who would push me to do this.  She would say “he’s an ass but he’s your father”.  What a thing to say…  My visits with him were cold and obligatory.  I had years of pent-up anger, I never talked about it, I never asked him why, he never offered any explanation.

Then one day everything changed.  I met Diane and fell in love.  The details of my childhood came out slowly over time.  I used to tell people I had a normal childhood.  Looking back on it, my childhood was the farthest thing from normal but it was my normal, nd to be honest, it was normal when I was not with him.  We continued to visit occasionally but over time we grew further and further apart.  See, it was not OK with him that as an adult I didn’t think like him, that I was a republican, that I was a Christian.  He hated all of it.  He regularly berated me about it. 

When Lydia was born, at around 2 months, we took her to see him.  She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  I walked into the room with her in the car seat.  The first words out of his mouth were “Take that stupid bonnet off her head she looks ridiculous”.  In that moment, something shattered in my head.  I had flashbacks of walking the path from our front door to his car as a little child, him yelling out the car window to go back inside and tell my mother to dress me properly.  A hundred thousand other stories like it….

But this was not going to be my story any longer, it was never going to be Diane’s story and it certainly was NOT going to be Lydia’s story.  I wrote him a long e-mail finally releasing my frustrations.  I must have read it a thousand times before I hit send.  I had already decided that our relationship was going to need to be over unless he could bring himself to some kind of change.  The response I got back was seemingly heartfelt.  Begging to meet with me to put all this behind us.  I knew it was a mistake, I went anyway.

I sat down in the booth at that Panera across from him.  I had no idea what to expect, I was terrified.  It was in that moment that he let loose with a barrage of accusations.  He told me I was unreliable, that I was selfish, that my wife treated him terrible and lied to me about it.  It went on and on, and I hadn’t spoken a word.  I vowed not to do so unless I had to.  I wanted nothing on my conscience, but the moment he implicated Diane in his deceitful divisive tirade I had all the evidence I needed that my relationship with him would never be what I hoped it would be.  He was never going to be allowed to come between my wife and I.  In that moment, I got up and simply walked away. 

It’s been over 18 years. 

 

He never called again, never reached out, not a card, not a comment sent through a relative.  Nothing.  I didn’t ever reach out either.  It took years to unravel the damage that had been done in my mind.  I found myself having conversations with him, out loud when I was alone.  My mind and spirit needed to have the conversation he never allowed me to have.  Eventually God allowed me to forgive him.  I never told my kids about him.  When they would ask about him, I would just tell them that he had a lot of problems and it was hard for him to be nice to people. 

The bible says to honor your father and mother.  But how do you honor a man who is not honorable?  I ultimately decided that I could honor him more by not seeing him because when I did see him it was impossible.

He never had a funeral.

Not one person in his family was there.

There is no grave, they poured his ashes in a river, apparently at his request.

I cannot think of a more sad way for a human to end their life than the way Tim Tirakis chose to end his.  I shed a few tears today, but not in sadness for the death of a person who I used to call dad.  It would be normal to do that, but there’s nothing there.  It was shed because today the last hope that I would have a normal relationship with a father died.  

If I have any regret its that when I walked away from him, I also left his family behind as well.  They were all good people who treated me well and they didn't deserve it, but I simply didn't know how to have a relationship with them and not him.  In addition, I never knew what he was telling people about what happened, so I thought there was a possibility they didn't WANT to talk to me.  The damage was pervasive.

I always wondered if God would restore what was broken in me so long ago, and looking from the outside one would be hard pressed to say anything other than that it is impossible.

But it isn’t impossible.  In fact, it occurs to me in this moment that God did indeed restore what was broken. You see,

  I try every day to be the father to my kids that I didn’t have

I try to be the husband to my wife that she deserves and our relationship is intact and strong after 26 years

I am the son to my mother that my dad never was to his own

You see, God HAS mended what was broken.  He kept His promise to me, and by His grace I will keep the promises I made to Him and to my family.

I do not have an earthly father, but I am not alone.  I am surrounded with love, and by God’s grace I will be the man for my family that I always wished I had in my life.