I never much liked my father. He was remote, mean, inarticulate and an alcoholic. He partied hard, played around on my mother, terrorized my younger sisters and flew into unexplained rages. He was also a celebrated heart surgeon, once head of his state’s Heart Association, lauded by senators and corporate heads after ‘he cut 'em open, fixed ‘em and sewed 'em back up.’ When my family was eating out or shopping in town, we were frequently stopped on the street and told what a great man my father was, how he saved ‘my mother's/father's/brother's life’ and how my sisters and I should be proud to be his children. Fat chance.

These mixed messages continued all my life, til he died in 2000. The whole sordid past was reeling through my mind as the pastor delivered the eulogy, "...great man... leader in the community...family that loves him..." Of course, his actual family was sitting there in that cathartic moment, feeling every emotion in the world except love for him. That's when it hit me, during the pastor's litany of the heroic deeds of my dead father.

A night during high school, a doorbell interrupting homework that I answered and there on the doorstep were 2 cops with my father, slumped and mumbling, slung between them. A cloud of words "...get him home... save someone's life tomorrow...accident...woman...fatal..." This memory shot to the forefront while the pastor droned on, a memory of my father killing a woman while driving drunk, a memory of no court date, no records, no public mention. A memory of a year's lost driver’s license, when he moved to an apartment next to the hospital.

The hideousness of this memory and it’s implications rippled outward and crashed in my ears during the rest of the eulogy. I stumbled outside at the end with my youngest sister. She had just been born that fateful year and had no memory of ever hearing about this event. It struck me that the whole family had willed itself to forget this incident, a mass hypnosis. It was literally never spoken of again, even during the later divorce proceedings. Somehow, we needed to blur our vision around the Mr Hyde of my father.

I remember that my mother said that night that my father was so important in the community that the police would look out for him. I remember feeling comforted. Somehow my deeply flawed father would not embarrass us or throw us into turmoil, as this event would in some other man’s family. I never looked into the details, the name of the victim, if she had a family, what was done to hush it all up. The whole affair just vanished out of our reality. Until that parade of lies said in front of my father’s casket pulled them back.

During the past 8 years since his death, I have pondered the use of this memory and what it says about me. Sometimes I think I imagined it - it has now been 40 years, and my memories are suspect. But lately I am thinking more about what it says about our country and the current scandal-ridden occupants of the White House. How the DOJ has covered for their every transgression and the country has willed itself not to see the horror of it all, to avoid the shame and turmoil. More than anything, it tells me that the big public lies are told, bald-faced and smug, by our president and his associates in the full confidence that nothing will happen as a consequence. A hand-slap. A caution. A license taken away for a year. If a local doctor can commit vehicular homicide and get away with it, the President truly is beyond the law.