( this is a work of fiction; any resemblance between these characters and any real persons living or dead is pure coincidence)

My father has rested in this cemetery beneath these long black tree trunks, these ever- watered green lawns, and these flowers tumbling out of urns, for 40 years. My mother joined him here in the ground a year ago. I still miss her terribly; but at 88,  she rests rather peacefully in her grave.

 --  But I'm starting to obsess over my father's death so long ago. It's  like parents are a unit, and she stood in for him. Now that she has died, he is suddenly completely gone .... Leaving me to reflect once again on his untimely death. And it keeps getting worse and worse.  Inexplicably, my father's death when I was 19 is now rushing back at me with the force of a ghost train ....

I am in my dorm room at the university when I get an unexpected call from a not- well-known  uncle. "Ginny, this is your Uncle Ken. Your father has had a heart attack." Gasp. "Well he's ok, isn't he?!" "No  Ginny... he's dead." (He is 58; he has five children under 22.) "Is this some kind of a joke?" is my first response .... I get hysterical .... Though my dad and I have been estranged for the last few years, this is the first time I have ever experienced the death of someone really close to me. Connections on many deep levels that I didn't even know existed are now making themselves known. The love I have for him has completely resurfaced, now with unbearable sorrow. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever conceive of him suddenly dying in the middle of all this! It never entered my mind. Ever!! "Do you want to talk to your mother," my uncle suggests now, not knowing what to do with a female in meltdown.

"Mom, are you all right?" I say into the phone, even though this is the parent with whom I have had a much worse estrangement over the last few years.

"Yes, I'm all right, Ginny, " she says in a voice as cold and condemning as can be. (I imagine her thinking,  it's a little late, you selfish girl. Now that my husband and your father is dead, after all the hell you put us through, -- now you care about me?)

 When I was about 15, for some reason, I really don't know why, I  became a cocky little know-it-all at times with her. I really was a good kid though, that was the full extent of my crimes.  My parents were both under extreme stress at the time, and my dad had long been rather depressed.

Suddenly, when I was about 16, it seemed like my mom decided to change the way we were raised. They were good parents, I had decent relationships with both of them; and as far as discipline went, they were about right. My mother's  father had been a strong German, and in those days, parents had absolute authority. My mother told me that she decided to stay out a little late one time when she was double dating in high school. "Well, my father told me, 'You're not going off the back porch for a week.'" my mother said. " So I stayed in for a week. Well, I was never late getting home again." According to the Catholic teachings we all were raised with,  you did not talk back to your parents. You OBEYED.

Well, my dad was a lot less involved with his children than my mother's father was, even detached from us. Maybe my mother decided that she had to play the heavy. But it was a little late to change the discipline regimen when we were all teenagers --  and she even seemed to go  a little nuts.

Once she told my sister and I to be home at midnight. We arrived promptly at five minutes before the appointed hour. My mother met us at the back door."Ok, for cutting it to the quick,"  she said, "you are going to be grounded for a week. " I responded with some outraged mouthy comment.

"Well your mouth just got you in trouble!" she replied, "now you are grounded for a month." So the war began. After a couple of other incidents, I was  grounded for 4 months, for saying a few sassy things. I mean, I wasn't taking drugs, or cavorting with guys, or doing anything else wrong at all. I seethed with a feeling of injustice, and the horrible fights my mother and I began having were starting to destroy our relationship. I hated her for imprisoning me at home and completely cutting off my normal teenage life for months for making rude remarks.

I  finally started just ignoring her. I snuck out my back window, and shimmied down the porch rail to the ground to meet my friends. When I returned, I would throw a small pebble at the upstairs window, and my brother would let me back into the house.

But one night it was her, and she was on to me. The ultimate blow up ensued. "Well," my mother announced," if you're going to act like a child, you're going to be treated like a child. -- Your father is going to spank you!" I felt sickened humiliation and hate. Not to mention, it was quite inappropriate for a father to spank a 16-year-old daughter. Did her craziness know no bounds in trying to break my spirit? Well she wasn't going to succeed. I locked myself in my bedroom, so my dad just got an axe and started chopping the bedroom door down. He  really wasn't a violent man, so he just chopped one panel out and then  he stopped, realizing how stupid it was.

I always desperately wanted him to intervene with my mother, to try to negotiate for us some way out of this madness, but he never did. He was just the muscle behind every cruel restriction she put on me. And I hated him for that. After this incident, I went to my school counselor to ask for help, and we decided that I should go to a creepy foster home. But I found out there, that legally, I'd have to stay there until I was 18. So I went home, where, I was told, I could legally leave home at 17.

Then later that year, still living at home, I became involved with an older black guy. This was in the days when racism was still acceptable, but I just somehow instinctively knew that racism was wrong. I was also dying for some love and acceptance, and I seemed to be finding it. But it was a major taboo then,  you didn't cross the color line;  whites who did were severely punished by other whites.

 My now truly hysterical mother went so far as to taunt me, "Little Miss Round Heels! You are starting to look colored. Your nose and lips are getting wide. "  I hate to even dredge up this ancient filth, because I don't even know anyone who thinks racism is acceptable anymore. But that is my story.

 Everyone I knew then was incredibly shocked and condemning. My dad even went to the police, but was told that there was nothing they could do if I was seeing  him willingly. At this point, I think that my parents decided that I was so beyond the pale and deviant, that they were almost glad to get rid of me. And that cemented my feelings of rejection and abandonment. I waited untill my 17th birthday, and then moved out while still in high school. My dad came over to my new apartment and handed me a check for $25.00. I ripped it into shreds and threw it down the stairs after him.

 I was grievously, unimaginably hurt, and I wanted to hurt them back. I thought that if I ignored them long enough, maybe they would come to their senses and love me again, now that I was out of the grip of my mother's  demeaning reign of terror.

But I was also thrilled with my new freedom. It  was 1969, and the full blossoming of the hippie era fit perfectly with my idealistic, progressive nature. I was ecstatic to begin staking my claim to the tradition of  the bohemians and the beatniks of yore. After all,  I considered myself to be the final word in sophistication, and I thought that my parents and most adults were hopeless throwbacks.

But sometimes the dark psychological side still  broke through. My sister and my roommate and I hitchhiked down to Florida for Christmas to attend a big rock concert where I had a bad trip and ended up in the bummer tent. The next morning we saw the ocean for the first time--an unforgetable awesome miracle. But I was still shaken and depressed from my experience the night before. When I saw a mother with her little girl holding hands walking down the seashore,  I put my face against my beach blanket, against Mother Earth, and wept.

My girlfriend Beth and I began that summer by hitchhiking to California. There was still a thrilling,  highly secret brotherhood among hippies then, and hippies often picked up hitchhikers. When I met these colorful,  truly loving and inspiring people, I knew that this movement would change the world and me forever. I thought that it would change everything.

Beth and I would wake up on the road in our sleeping bags, full of the  new dawn and our new lives, not knowing what adventure the day would bring. We once went to sleep in a park at the Four Corners Area of Arizona; it was dusk, and I could hear sharp little deer feet leaping around on the hard desert sand between many exotic colored flowers.  The next day we were picked up by a hit man for a motorcycle gang, and discovered in conversation that he was just a "regular guy." A noble cowboy told us the story of his life while driving us through two states, and treated us like his sisters. We met the best people and the worst people in the world.

After we had been in California for a while, my temperamental girlfriend   took off in a snit, leaving me alone with my tiny dog. I slept in a park in the foothills overlooking  Berkeley at night, unfortunately realizing I had gotten to California  just a tad too late for the original hippie scene. If this all sounds nuts, it shocks me now too.  I was a wholesome, middle class girl from a religious family, and actually, I had led a somewhat sheltered life. The perils of all this were obscured by the romance of experiencing a free life as a hip writer,  and by that false feeling of youthful  invulnerability. I even hitchhiked from California back to Vermont all by myself.

I only heard from  my dad a couple of times during that heady year. Once he sent me a  newspaper clipping of Art Linkletter explaining how his own daughter  had  jumped to her death after taking LSD. I should have recognized it for the sign of love that it was. But I only saw the warning he also put in the letter "if you get arrested, don't expect me to bail you out."  I took that as another confirmation of rejection, even though he put xxx ooo at the end of the note. I wrote back, "Don't worry about having to bail me out. I've been on my own for a long, long, time."

 At Thanksgiving,  I wanted to visit my three brothers, so I took the Greyhound home, and snuck in our house, avoiding my parents and hiding upstairs. My brother must have told my dad that I was there. Because he popped in his old greying head and ample shoulders.  "Hi, Ginny," he said. "... Do you want some turkey?" He seemed somewhat amused, as if I had snuck home to eat.

 That was the last time I saw my father alive.

My mother and I, both shaken by the horrible tragedy of my father's early death, decided to reconcile. In fact, we became a beautiful exception to the rule that people don't  change. Because we did. I realized that Mom and I were exactly alike in some ways, and irreconcilable opposites in other ways. Mom was extremely conventional. I was foolish enough to invent myself and to try to reinvent the world. Living separately, my mother and I tolerated our differences, and at the end of her life, we adored each other. We had both just wanted to be loved -- our past cycle of hurt, hate and rejection had become a repressed memory that we both wanted to stay buried.

But strangely, that old family horror is starting to come back. My dad's face haunts me, his black hair and glasses, his  tendency to chubbiness. -- My earliest memories of him, snuggling to feel the warmth of his shoulder the way that young children do. -- Him telling me that he was a radio repairman in WWII in Europe. Studying his formal service portrait in uniform hanging in our living room -- he looked young, deeply depressed and scared.

When my brothers complained about what my mother had made for dinner he always said, "Wait till you get in the Army!" He had a silly side, and used to wear goofy hats to cover up his bald spot. Sometimes in the morning he would yell upstairs to wake us up, "Rise and shine! Let me hear the pitter patter of your callouses on the mahogany!" He was the Republican to my mom's Democrat. Rarely, he unleashed an explosive temper that could be scary, and he liked to string swear words together in a long stream when frustrated.

My dad's father had been a civil engineer, but apparently his wife, my dad's mother, spent most of his money -- she was a vicious piece of work. Among the many nasty stories that my mother told me about her, my dad's mother once told my mom when she was eight months pregnant with me. "You know your huband doesn't love you. He loves your sister Susan." The bizarre quality of this savage remark makes me wonder if she was mentally ill. She also played the horses. When my dad sent her his pay from the service to keep for him so that he could go to college, she spent all of his money before he got back. To spite her for this, he refused to ever go to college. Still, he always remained her favorite son, and he somehow remained under her sick sway. If his mother and my mom had words, my dad would side with his bizarre mother. Later, long after my dad's mother died, his eyes would tear up when he visited her at her mausoleum on Memorial Day.

My dad used to like to fish, but he graduallly seemed to lose interest in everything. Our garage was full of dusty, forgotten, scattered items he never used. Mostly, he just slept, laying in his bedroom listening to the radio with the echo of the announcer saying "Ball one. Ball two."

I sensed some distance in my parents' marriage. On rare occasions we would overhear an ugly fight downstairs, and we would come down crying in our pajamas and beg them to stop. But mostly they supported each other as spouses and parents. My dad was miserable at work. He was a clerk in a hardware store and he used to fight with customers and his boss. His boss called my mom  a couple of times to complain to her about it. "You know, I don't have to take that, " he said. My dad got really depressed one winter and made my mom call in sick for him for a week. Shortly after that, after another problem with his boss, he got fired. He was 50 years old. Our next-door neighbor managed to get him into the huge tank factory where he worked, warning him humiliatingly, "Fred, you're going to have to work!"  The factory started him out as a supervisor, but that didn't work out, so they gave him a job as a janitor. At 50, he had to clean toilets.

Well now I am the same age as my dad was then, and a funny thing has happened to me over the years. When I was young, I was very different from my dad. But so much is heredity, and some inherited traits don't come out until later in life. I have always resembled him slightly, except being a female. But as the years have gone by, I have found myself inheriting more and more of his genes.

Until, at 58, I AM HIM!

I long ago developed the crushing depression that he was never treated for. I lived having no energy, no confidence in yourself, no enjoyment in anything in life, no hope. Only I was very successfully treated for it. Our lives followed many similar paths and I had a lot of the same problems that he did. So now I fully understand what I did to him. My parents did get over-the-top when I was a teenager, but I realize now that they sincerely cared about my welfare. Couldn't I have been more patient? Couldn't I have just put up with them for a couple of more years out of respect? Yes. Yes I could have.

I know now how I would feel if I had to leave this world with a killing pain in my chest, terrified on some hospital cart,  everything unfinished, totally unprepared, with two estranged young adult daughters and sons 17,15 and 10 at home. Did I cause my dad's heart attack by the stress I put him through? What did he think about me when he died? I felt the fathomless grief of a teenager when he died, but I had no clue what it was like to be an adult then, what it was to be him. Now I do. I know exactly what it is like. And I feel an absolutely crushing new sense of guilt. A guilt that is massive, and unendurable into eternity ....  It has shaken my view of myself as a good person.  I have always valued family above all else -- But who is closer family than my own father?

 For him to just keep going, to keep getting up and going to work every day, to stand by his large family through decades of destroying, debilitating depression was supreme heroism. I am unbelievably grateful now, knowing too well the price that he paid. But I can't thank him. He is here in this grave.

And the whole issue of my relationship with my parents isn't even a clean, totally black and white thing. It is a very complicated mess. Because I could easily have been the one who died.  I could so easily have disappeared hitchiking alone on the interstate from California to Vermont. And I know that if that had happened my parents would have felt the same way that I feel now. That they had failed me in a major way, that they would have had to live with tremendous guilt. I am haunted by the fact that they gave up on me so easily. Was I not worth fighting for? I would fight a lot harder for my daughter. My husband would pursue our daughter to the gates of hell before he would let her break their bond. The truth is: my parents and I all failed each other.

My father neglected me. It was not his fault but the effect on me was the same, regardless of his innocence. It was like he was already a ghost back then. When he died, it was like he had never been there. 

My adolescence became a family catastrophe. What I have is survivor guilt. I eventually met a wonderful man and I got a second chance at life. I am so happy and grateful that my life turned out so well. But my joy will always be tempered by the knowledge that my father didn't survive. I got the happy ending. He got the ultimate nighmare.

And as I am standing here, looking down at his grave, I do not think this out, but suddenly I have this instinctive urge to dig him up from his grave so that I can see him again. Like I am instinctively reaching out to embrace  a beloved family member. --  Only I instantly realize that he isn't here -- just his skeleton, his burial suit, and his glasses are.

And I realize that this is way bigger than I am.

And that only God can sort this out.