Individual Family Lives
My father called the other day to tell me that he had some news for me that wasn’t really bad in the end. I said with an intro like that, he should probably call me back. He didn’t find my attempt at humor terribly successful. As it turned out, he has some prostate cancer. At his age, a few years shy of eighty, this is a less serious issue than if he were his son’s age. As he put it, many men die with it rather than from it. He’s going to keep an eye on things, but not do anything about it.
My father, a retired Freudian psychoanalyst, was a medical doctor. He speaks medicalese, and presumably got the straight scoop from the colleagues who examined him and disclosed to him the situation. My father is also lucky to have a doctor daughter and doctor son-in-law, the one who treats old people and the other who treats cancer patients. So my father has every reason to be fully and accurately informed about his condition.
For some reason, I knew when Linda handed to me the phone, that this was what my father was calling about. It was a medical condition that was likely not fatal. So when he finished talking, I didn’t seem adequately concerned, I fear. The fact was that I wasn’t. Concerned, that is. I didn’t know as much about the disease as did my father or sister or brother-in-law, but I knew enough to know that I didn’t have to worry.
Of course that’s different from expressing enough concern, I guess. I would have had to manufacturer more distress, and judging from the way he presented the information, he believed and wanted me to believe that there wasn’t anything to be concerned about. Talk about ya can’t win for losing. It is a delicate balance between showing concern when you don’t have any and the person for whom you are supposed to not have that concern is so instructing.
I imagine I might have gone a little more overboard, and empathized all of that which he had gone through, but I felt that he would probably be relieved if he didn’t have to go through an obvious dance with me, his only son. We’re men, after all, or something like that. And he could discuss it more emotionally with his other three daughters. Truth be told, I intuited that he truly believed there was nothing for me to worry about.
Perhaps that is because I’m three thousand miles away and have no plans for attending to his final needs. He has always been a controlling sort, and not one for getting close to his children. For decades I tried to accommodate him; for decades I failed. When I became disinterested, he became interested. But the territory of our relationship always felt tenuous to me, and supplication was not my style, so I appreciated the continent between us.
I don’t know how long my father has for this world — he thought for the longest time that like his father, he’d be leaving around age fifty-six — and his plans seem uncertain with his having outlived his projections by more than twenty years. Whatever route he winds up taking, I hope he is able to make his departure without pain, and without fear. As well for those who remain.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.