People You Never Get To Love

Sometimes they're the same people who made you.

I’m traveling to southern California this week to see—among friends, fellow musicians, and business associates—my 85YO mother, who seems to be entering the final days (weeks? months?) of her life. Those of you who’ve followed me a while know what a fraught enterprise it is to be the primary responsible party for the person who was your primary abuser.

So I am a bit too overwhelmed to comment on current events. Here instead is a personal story from some time ago.

My father was excited because the clerk who checked him into his Inner Harbor hotel the night before had recognized his last name. Are you Sandy’s father? I love her column. This was in the spring of 2001 during one of his rare visits to see us in Baltimore. My then-husband K. and my father and I were sitting at an outdoor table having brunch somewhere in Federal Hill, and Dad had grabbed a copy of CityPaper from the sidewalk box.

That week my “Underwhelmed” piece was about the singer Susannah McCorkle, who had thrown herself out the window of her 16th-floor apartment in Manhattan. I’d been devastated because I’d only just discovered her music. She was a great recording and performing artist who often wrote her own material. I loved her version of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “The Waters of March” and I marveled at the astuteness of her original piece called “The People That You Never Get To Love,” a song that beautifully captured the wistful feeling of an adult infatuation that passes without being acted upon.

McCorkle was also an accomplished prose writer who’d published short fiction and was rumored to be working on a novel or memoir of some sort. As a wannabe/blocked novelist-turned-fledgling jazz musician, I had only just found this wonderful role model. Now, along with her loved ones and the world, I had suddenly lost her. I didn’t know her and yet the loss was palpable.

Her voice was lilting, sensual, small but distinctive. I once heard her on NPR’s Fresh Air telling Terry Gross this story: as a young hopeful she’d gone to see a great Italian vocal master. He’d listened to her sing and immediately began discouraging her from taking it up professionally. That’s when she explained she was interested in jazz rather than opera. Oh, okay, that will be fine. 

My father at that point was known to say, occasionally, Well, it’s alright, not everybody has to go into medicine, and then offer some anodyne compliment about my writing career. He did this even though I made a point of never showing him anything I’d published or discussing my ongoing projects. So what a thrill it must have been for him that September weekend in Baltimore, to learn that his daughter, married but still bearing his last name, was “famous” in her adopted hometown. 

It’s never fun watching someone read your writing, but it was particularly unnerving having my father sitting there across from me at breakfast as I watched his eyes slide steadily down the column of newsprint.

I had used the incident of McCorkle’s terrible, self-punishing suicide to talk about depression, from which she had suffered for years without any public acknowledgment. She feared that being labeled a mental health case would harm her career. After a series of professional setbacks, when she was beginning to feel washed up, she’d fallen into one final trough of bad feelings out of which she could not climb.

I was just months away from my own deep crisis, from which I was lucky enough to escape after we ended infertility treatments and turned our focus toward infant adoption. Depression was, I'd come to believe, a family inheritance. Many years earlier as a struggling high school student (who didn’t yet understand how to identify my parents’ treatment of me as two different but complementary styles of emotional abuse), I’d begged my father to let me see a psychiatrist. Appalled, he looked away from me and shook his head no. I was crushed, of course, and not for the first or last time by him and his denials, his emotional and physical absence while my mother rained hell on my head, or the jabs he made all on his own. It’s no wonder he couldn’t tolerate my request. It might have forced him to be honest about his own dark interior and failures as a parent. 

I had concluded my column with this thought, meant earnestly if not literally: 

“If a Susannah McCorkle can be who she is and do what she loves in life and bring such joy to others and still not be happy enough, what hope is there for the rest of us?”

I could see my father’s face become increasingly dour. He got the bottom of the column, put the paper down, averted his eyes, and went back to eating in silence.

Sometimes it was hard to fathom where we went wrong. Was it because my mother had poisoned me with her ancient complaints after their divorce in the late 80s? Was it the mere fact that he could never speak honestly about the past, or even just tell a few interesting stories about his life in India? Was it just that one terrible insult to my pride and identity in an Italian restaurant so many years earlier, where he—who wouldn’t know a university academic if one punched in the face—told me I was too opinionated to become a professor? Today I’d call him emotionally avoidant and connect his inability to communicate to his own childhood trauma with a terrible father. I was only beginning to achieve that multigenerational perspective then.

His endless dishonesty rankled. At his 70th birthday dinner (which also happened to be the night before his wedding to wife #2—that’s a whole story in itself), I’d said something about my activities as a fledgling professional jazz pianist and singer. My father had suddenly spoken up, pointing the end of his butter knife at me for emphasis:

You know, I was prepared to send you to Juilliard!

I glared at him. 

It’s true! He raised his eyebrows and smiled with a kind of gleeful arrogance.

No, it was not true. It simply made no sense. I had never wanted to go to Juilliard, had never prepared to go to Juilliard, had never been Juilliard material. I was not that good of a pianist in my teens. If some fantasy of having a daughter in conservatory ever actually passed through my father’s dreamscape, he had certainly never shared that vision with me. But now he wanted to take credit for the results of decisions I had made entirely on my own, sometimes in defiance of him. It was infuriating.

Maybe I should have been braver and bolder as a daughter. If I could have found a voice, maybe I should have asked him his side of all those old stories my mother had repeated. About his childhood, about his father’s mistreatment of him, about his mother’s untimely death. His first-hand perspective might have helped—but then again, what would he have said? I had no reason to trust that there would be some kind of honest reckoning. And I would find myself doubly bereft.

In early 2016 I was in a meeting at a Panera with my video business partner and our cameraman when I got a phone call from Regina’s daughter, my stepsister Denise. I got up from our table and stood by the coffee pots for some privacy. Dad was in the hospital again with some kind of acute cardiac problem. Denise is a physician herself and she began spouting off a series of medical terms and protocols about which I knew nothing. The upshot seemed to be that everyone thought my father was about to die. She put me on the phone with him and conferenced in my sister. We listened to my father saying goodbye to us. He loved us girls. He was proud of us. He had lived a good life and now he was ready to go. I started to cry but I wasn’t even sure why. It’s possible it was merely the appropriate, expected response to the absurdity of the scene: in a public place, talking by cellphone to your father on his deathbed.

I allowed myself to believe he meant the things he was saying, and I accepted his words. The anger of my earlier years had cooled, but beneath it there wasn’t a heart bursting with love. The feeling was more like this: I never had him and now I never will.

We went down to see him at UNC Hospital and again he said his goodbyes. At one point he thought he was coding and I watched him fighting off the nurses, saying Don’t resuscitate! Don’t resuscitate! He was clearly ready to go. I came home and wept desperately for days, not because I was going to miss my father, but because this really meant the end of the story. He would go and there would be no big heart-to-heart talk, no big dramatic reconciliation. As my sister liked to put it, no Hollywood ending.

That moment in the hospital was not, it turned out, the end. Some fancy medical tech saved his life that day. He lived for another 18 months and then died at home in a hospital bed set up in their living room, just under a wall-mounted big flat-screen TV. The last time my sister and I saw him, he was frail and clearly never getting up from his bed again. His dementia was full-blown and he barely seemed to recognize us, yet he grabbed us both by the arm and choked out a quiet prayer on our behalf. I went through the motions, kissed him on the cheek, and held his hand. I wish I could say I was moved.

His funeral in late 2017 took place in North Carolina, among his stepfamily and the new community of mostly Filipino and Chinese churchgoers who counted him as a friend. We walked up to the open casket together—my husband, our teen son, my sister, her husband, and I. I looked down and there he was: the empty shell of a man who had always been an empty shell as a father and now would never be more than that.

My uncle Bertie approached me with tremendous sadness. I had not seen him in decades and disliked him immensely, for reasons I will tell you in another story at some point. Such a loving man, Bertie said, smiling through his tears. I responded with a close-lipped smile. Was my father really such a loving man? How do you figure, exactly? Because he smiled a lot? Because he was passive and unthreatening, and the people outside his immediate family never had to deal with his passive aggression?

The service was in a Baptist church. During the hour and a half, there were many invitations to be saved, be born again—the standard marketing pitch.

Everyone seemed very sad, but how well did they know him? It was clear upon our arrival that most of these people barely knew their buddy “Dr. Joe” (born Jawahar) had two daughters, two sons-in-law, and a grandson. Regina had asked my sister or me to present a eulogy, and after much fraught discussion between us, we decided we’d each write a short thing and stand up together to deliver them one after the other. I tried to be honest if not complete. I said he was a man his daughters barely knew. He never told us stories about his childhood or talked about his life as a surgeon or shared in any open way.

And yet—he was the one who’d brought music and art and books into our home, who’d introduced us to Broadway and to Manhattan restaurants, who’d shared his passions and tastes. He was an avid reader and so his two daughters became the same. My sister adopted a similarly measured tone, speaking of our father’s love of travel and a few international trips she’d taken with him. 

After we both said what we’d come to say, there were two more eulogies. I realized Regina had hedged her bets. My cousin Prisha, Bertie Uncle’s eldest daughter, spoke first. She was several years older than me and seems to have known my father better than either of his two daughters ever did. She had followed in the family tradition and left Harrisburg to attend medical school in India, at the Christian missionary-run medical college Vellore where my parents had met. It would seem my father had been something of an inspiration to her, but the articulate and strong role model she described was unrecognizable to me. 

Prisha was one of at least a dozen people that day who mentioned my father’s amazing baritone voice. He had apparently sung at CARNEGIE HALL, she said. This too was something that we heard from several others. Joe Asirvatham, an amazing baritone, who SANG AT CARNEGIE HALL. Prisha’s eyes went wide as she said it.

I didn’t understand it, and then when I did, I stifled a laugh. She was referring to Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh, where my parents had lived as newlyweds and where I’d been born, not the famous destination in New York City. While I had never heard about this performance from my father or mother—not even once—I assumed it was something like a community choir event. Maybe he had a solo in one of the songs. I have no idea but I’m sure he was never a headlining act. Between his singing and his frequently remarked-upon good looks, I began to imagine my father as a cross between the handsome, clueless, bubblehead character Jon Hamm played in 30 Rock, as well as Being There’s Chance the Gardener, an infinite vessel for the projected warm feelings of people around him. 

The last eulogy arrived as an unhinged, weepy monologue from Regina’s son, a troubled former drug user and hard partier who’d been born again and now intended to found his own church. He said Joe never treated me like the B team. My sister and I were side by side in a pew but we didn’t need to look at each other to know the same thought had passed through both our heads simultaneously.

Of course, you’re not the B team, dude. WE are. 

At the sandwich dinner after the service, there was a video looping on a large overhead screen. Prisha’s husband had captured it on his cellphone just a few days before Dad died, but several days after my last visit to him with my sister. On the day we saw him, he had seemed very much out-of-it. Apparently, he rallied for a few minutes with his cousin-protege and her husband, both of them devout Christians, as everybody all around us seemed to be.

In the video, my father, alert and articulate for one last time, raised his head from the pillow and sang the religious standard “I Believe” in a loud, strong voice, while Prisha’s husband filmed him and intermittently interjected Praise be…..praise be. This cellphone video played a second time, a third, probably five or six times before someone finally stopped the loop.

I had trouble not finding it ghoulish. Everyone else in the room seemed to be inspired.

This was allegedly my father’s favorite song, again a brand new piece of information to me. Maybe that’s for the best. It’s an atrocious thing, with a monotonous melodic line, sentimental and stentorian. In 1953 it was commissioned by a TV personality, and composed to order by a team of Tin Pan Alley writers, as a message of uplift and patriotic hope in the days of the Korean War. Since then it has become a  religious standard, and it’s really quite a wonder, plodding and insistent and literal, like so much of what we were hearing from the pulpit that day.

After the eulogies, the preacher had stood up and told this somewhat horrifying story about dear Dr. Joe. My father had recently expressed concern that his Muslim and Hindu friends would not qualify to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Rest assured, the preacher said, he was finally convinced of the truth that only by accepting the Lord Jesus as Savior could one be saved.

This enraged me. Here was finally something I could admire about my father—his ecumenical nature, his refusal to buy into the idea of an exclusionary, tribalist after-life—and the preacher had robbed him of it in his last days.

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall

“I Believe” is essentially a single repeated melodic phrase, climbing up and up in pitch, with endlessly ratcheting tension before overblown release. Before the nightmarish looping video, we had already heard it performed by the church choir, with a featured soloist soprano who screeched the climactic top notes with a nasal fervency. 

It is rare for me to outright hate a piece of music. In almost any composition, from the most traditional to the most experimental, I can usually find something to listen for, a quality of sweetness or harshness, cleverness or novelty, or even just an atmospheric perturbation worth noting. But this song makes me want to throw hammers at windows. It is garbage music created by small minds for small purposes. As such, it’s been covered by dozens and dozens of pandering artists. Some people have more money than taste—and some musicians have more need for cultural approbation than artistic integrity.

That night I couldn’t stay asleep. I stumbled around in our unlit hotel room to get dressed and went downstairs to the lounge. In a wingback chair tucked away in a corner, I wrote in my journal and cried. As sharp as the momentary pain was, I knew it would be one of the last times I’d ever cry for my father. Something occurred to me about this mystery of a man who had wowed everyone else in his life with his handsome visage and rarely heard but much discussed singing voice. By the age of 15, commanding the high school stage in the role of Sally Bowles in CABARET, I had already far surpassed the musical accomplishments of my still-young father. Carnegie Hall notwithstanding. Maybe he’d never been able to tolerate this fact. Jealousy as a motivation for parents to quash their children’s dreams is a topic not widely enough discussed.

A few weeks after the funeral we learned that my father had not bothered to write a will. It’s not that we were expecting big money—Regina had cared for him and she fully deserved to be comfortable for the next twenty or thirty years of her life, and besides, some of their money together had come from her own profitable sale of a suburban New Jersey home. But my father hadn’t even mustered the wherewithal to put a few thousand bucks in a college savings account for his only direct grandson. This I found a bit weird and even suspect, for at some point in the previous five years Dad had called me and asked for the boy’s social security number. So there must have been some kind of intention, at some point. 

In the end, my mother had called it twelve years earlier when my father and Regina got married. NOW HE IS GOING TO MARRY THAT WOMAN AND NOW SHE WILL INHERIT EVERYTHING BECAUSE HE IS SELFISH AND HE WILL NOT LEAVE ANYTHING FOR YOU. 

I hated that she’d been right in her typical money-obsessed paranoia. For me, it wasn’t really about the money. It was about his perennial, and now finally proven, inability to do anything. To follow through. To behave in a genuinely loving manner toward his daughters who were the only thing that mattered.

He could not put his ass in a chair with pen and paper to make some decisions.

People without two dimes to their name will find a way to think about their loved ones and parcel out a few inexpensive baubles. So much for our supposed heirlooms—that’s what he called all the inane tchotchkes he’d buy compulsively, an obvious habit of retail therapy that never made him happier for more than a few days.

But then again, I’d been a shitty daughter, right? Unforgiving, angry. Meeting his detachment with my own.

Regina went on to live in a house filled with my father’s books, which she’ll never read, and with family pictures of my paternal ancestors about whom my sister and I will never hear stories. She even has pictures of us in her possession, my sister and my now ex-husband and our son and me….and why would she want those? There is almost no chance we’ll ever see each other again.

People are easy to lose, easier than we think. Especially those we never really had in the first place.

My mother was too frail to travel from California to the funeral. But she was so distraught she ended up in the ER three or four times in the space of six weeks, on the verge of diabetic shock because she wasn’t eating enough. Oh, I miss him so much, he was such a nice and good man. In emails she reminisced about lovely times I’m sure never actually existed, and got mad when I indulged in my usual (foolish) candor. I’d told her I wasn’t really grieving. I’d lost my father a long time ago—in some ways I’d never had him at all.

(I didn’t mention his lack of a will and how angry/sad that had made me. I was grateful she didn’t ask.)

She blasted me with three or four outraged emails in a row, operatic run-on sentences in which she claimed he was a wonderful father, he had worked so hard, he loved us so much that even when he had rheumatoid arthritis in his 30s he would moonlight at East Orange General’s ER just to make money to pay for our private school tuition, and so forth.…

I did not bother pointing out all the ways in which these statements were a complete revision of everything she’d ever said in the past. (Private school tuition? Wasn’t that his choice, not ours? Didn’t you hate him for insisting?) She had spent decades pouring poison into my ear about him, about his affairs, about mean shit he’d said to her. Until I estranged myself from her in my mid-40s for a nice long 8 years, I had allowed her to do so, thinking it was my duty to be her confidante while also knowing she had no right to use me in such a way.

Now I let her ramble on in her revisionism without responding.

Eventually, she stopped her grief-tirade and began eating enough to stay alive. She’d been saying that maybe it was time for her to die, too. It was an insane thought but I also churlishly wondered,

Why not? Prioritize him again, if you must. Your daughters are used to it.

Honestly, though, after deciding to reach out to her again after 8 years, she and I had a moderately pleasant relationship. At the very least, my rage toward her had subsided and been replaced by something not quite forgiveness but maybe calm acceptance. I didn’t want to see her perish of grief over our father, to whom she had not been married in 30 years. It would just be a stupid way to go, like falling ass-ward into the Grand Canyon trying to take a selfie.

I thought, Mom, he really wasn’t worth it, but tactfully I kept that half-joke to myself.

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