All I Remember about my Father

             

              It didn’t matter much that he walked out when I was 10 days old, saying he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of a wife and child.  My mother moved back to her parents’ house with me.  But it mattered a lot that he came back when I was 3 going on 4 and courted my mother and me.  3 year-olds are especially susceptible to being courted by Daddy.  I remember wearing my pink corduroy coat and the pink harness, which always meant a special trip.  My mother and I took a train and crossed a field to a hotel in the country, where he lifted me onto the bar and ordered me ginger ale.  Daddy was told I couldn’t be in the bar, but he ignored the bartender, who still gave me the ginger ale.  I remember sitting at night on a bench in Willow Grove Park with my mother, watching my father try to walk through the rolling barrel at the top of the funhouse.  We celebrated my fourth birthday at Mom-mom Burns apartment.  It was the first time I had ever had asparagus with cheese sauce, a dish I still love (I think the sauce was heated Cheez-whiz!).  My father said he had no idea what to get a girl for her fourth birthday, so he asked the pharmacist in the drug store that was in the basement of my grandmother’s apartment building.  He gave me an adult manicure set (I kept pieces of it until I was in my 40’s) and a Toni doll, who had hair that could take a permanent.  Not sure that pharmacist knew any more about four year-olds than my father did!

              Then he didn’t come back.  It felt to me like I waited and waited for him, but I was only four: it could have been two weeks or two years, but it seemed like a long time before I finally asked my mother when he was coming back, and she told me he wasn’t.  After that, there was nothing: no birthday or Christmas cards or presents, nothing.  For one year, his father sent $30 a month for support, but then he tried to take me as a deduction on his taxes, and my mother had to go to tax court and prove she had paid more than half of my support.  After losing the deduction, my grandfather never sent another cent, nor did my father. 

              So life went on.  I had a pretty good childhood, but all childhoods are hard and all children think things could be better sometimes.  So I waited for the father on the white horse to come rescue me when things were unpleasant, but of course, he didn’t come.  When I was 12, my mother’s mother decided that I should visit my father’s mother regularly, so I took the bus and went alone to her apartment every 3 months.  We ate cherries and cashews, as she smoked one cigarette after another (they glowed yellow, not red like my mother’s; never knew why) and talked about all my cousin’s and their doings.  Mom-mom Burns did make arrangements for me to have lunch with two of my cousins, (Laurie was one, but I’m not sure who the other was) at the Cricket Club.  Pop-pop Burns wasn’t there, and I had the impression that he didn’t know about these meetings, but he came home early one day, and there I was.  So he gave me a 20 dollar bill and walked me to the elevator. 

              Pop-pop Burns died when I was 15.  My mother took me to the viewing.  We went to greet my grandmother, who called my father over and said “Bill, this is Robbie, your daughter.”  My father shook hands with me and said “Excuse me, I was talking to someone” and walked away.  He didn’t acknowledge mother at all.  She grabbed me and whisked me out of there and threw a fit about how he treated me.  I was more upset about how he had treated her.  My mother ended by saying that, when my grandmother died, I would have to go to the funeral alone.

              And that’s what happened.  I was 20, a junior in college, when my grandmother died.  My mother went to a dog show in California and I went to the viewing and funeral alone.  My father was presented with a 20 year old college student who was planning to go to medical school.  He was surrounded by a few people who had seen me when I was a babe in arms, and a lot of people who didn’t realize he’d ever had a child.  He was having great fun introducing me to these people.  He was proud of me!  What right did he have to be proud of me?  I got more and more pissed as the evening went on.  I think my Uncle Donald, his brother, (or maybe it was Aunt Anna Jean who noticed how I was feeling) realized some of this, because at the funeral the next day, he had me mixed in with his kids and the same back at his house afterwards.  My father left me, telling me he would call me and take me to dinner.

              When I went back to school the after that weekend, it was Earth Day.  I dragged Tom Duggan, a Jesuit and our college chaplain, away from the Earth Day celebration to talk to him, because I was so very angry.  I learned two of the most important lessons of my life that day: that talking to someone really can help, (I’d never done it before and didn’t really know that it could help) and that there are more possible responses to any situation than one might at first think.  Tom’s first suggestion was murder.  That threw me, of course.  It took two hours for me to calm down and finally realize that it would be OK to do nothing.  My father had never called before, why should he do it now?  And indeed, he didn’t.  He didn’t follow through on the dinner.  I never heard from him.

              My senior year, at age 21, I left home and rented a room near the college.  I decided to look up my father and get to know him.  My mother said “If you look him up, you’ll bury him” and that turned out to be quite literally true.    I had no idea where he lived or his phone number, but I knew where my Uncle Donald lived.  I drove over there and was parked out front, trying to work up the nerve to ring the doorbell when Uncle Donald came out to pick up the paper.  He saw me sitting there, came over and asked me why I was just sitting there and told me to come in.  So I came in, had dinner with his family and left with my father’s phone number. 

              Well, I did call him and we arranged to meet at a bar in Chestnut Hill and go somewhere for dinner.  He blamed the failure of their marriage on my grandmother (my mother’s mother), who felt that she could just drop in at any time and stay as long as she wanted.  Having lived with my grandmother, I certainly knew how annoying she could be, but couldn’t see this as the sole reason he would walk away from his child.  He said, when he came back when I was three, that he and my mother were looking at houses and going to get back together, but then my grandfather had a fight with him, following him down the street trying to hit him, and he just walked away again.  I asked my grandfather about that.  He said my father was drunk and threatening to hit my mother, so he got between them.  My grandfather was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known, so I knew the provocation had to be great. 

              Anyway, I met my father about once a month that year.  I just wanted to know this man who was responsible for half my gene pool.  When I first met him, he could down 16 boilermakers (Canadian and a Bud) and still walk a straight line.  There were evenings when I matched him drink for drink (I was only drinking the beer, not the whiskey) and realized that I had his tolerance (without the tolerance for alcohol, it’s hard to become an alcoholic!).  He had lost his driver’s license permanently for his 3^rd drunken driving offense when my mother was pregnant with me.  I would make his rounds with him: we would get on a bus in Frankford, get a transfer, get off on a corner where there were four bars (There used to be lots of those corners in Philly), hit those, get another bus in a different direction, get the second transfer (making a big triangle), get off on another corner with four bars, hit those, use the second transfer to head home, and hit some of the bars in Frankford!  My father was a master at SEPTA, the Philly bus system.  He could get from almost any point A to any point B after 2 am when the bars closed.  It wasn’t easy to do either. 

              There was one strange night, a very cold one, and I was shivering when I got to the first bar.  I was too cold to drink beer and asked my father what would warm me up.  He suggested Crème de Menthe.  I ordered one, and a man at the bar who was talking to my father ordered me another.  By the time I was drinking that, he had ordered me two more.  My father insisted that it was a point of honor to finish a drink that someone at the bar bought for you.  The man ended up buying me 8 glasses of Crème de Menthe and my father insisted that we couldn’t leave the bar until I finished them!  What kind of father does that?

              My father was not always a pleasant drunk.  Usually, yes, but I had seen him pick two fights in bars, both with men much older than himself.  A lot of bluster on his part and no punches landed.  The other men left.  Still, not nice to know this was how my father behaved.

              Bill (William Henry Burns, Jr) always had a book in the bar.  He read voraciously, lots of spy novels, thrillers, some science fiction.  He had an arrangement with the library.  He would take out 25 paperbacks and return them 30 days.  He worked at Mrs. Schlorer’s, his brother’s company.  Originally it had been his father’s company: Atlantic Syrup Refining, but his brother expanded it.  He bought out Mrs. Schlorer’s, a company known for its mayonnaise.  When I was growing up  they also made all kinds of pickles, a well-advertised sandwich spread, maraschino cherries and a wonderful ham glaze.  They had another label, Venice Maid, for institutional size products.  He worked in the business office and did distribution/logistics, planning where the trucks would go and sending them off.  He took me to the plant once when cherries were being processed.  All kinds of vats of pickles but all you could smell were these maraschino cherries, with a sugar syrup being sprayed over them in two washtubs. 

              To complicate my feelings in all this, I had gone on a retreat Junior year and developed a crush on the retreat master.  His monastery was not far from my grandmother’s house, and I ran into him one evening.  He invited me out for a drink.  He was only 4 years younger than my father.  I was always looking for fathers but most men old enough to be fathers of 20 year-olds, are not looking for 20 year old daughters.  So I ended up in a relationship with a man almost my father’s age, while trying to get to know my father for the first time. 

              I graduated Chestnut Hill and moved to Baltimore to work for two years.  I came back every month or two, to see my mother and grandparents, and generally went to see my father too.  Toward the end of those two years, I got involved with a doctor in Baltimore, born the same year as my father.  Again, I would have been happy to be one of his kids, but that wasn’t what he was looking for.  I was “head over heels in love” with him, in a relationship that would last 17 years.   With Jim’s help and encouragement, I got accepted into medical school!

              The Medical College of Pennsylvania was right up the road from the Mrs. Schlorer’s plant, so my father went up, looked on the bulletin boards, and helped me find a place to live.  So back to Philly I went.  I tried to maintain the relationship with my father but didn’t want to always just see him in bars and drink.  So occasionally we did other things.  He turned out to be a good roller-skater; apparently he had worked at roller rinks.  He also liked the track.  Turned out so did I, not for the gambling, but I liked watching the horses run and it was a place we could both hang out, he could drink and I didn’t feel obliged to keep up with him because there were other things going on.

              My father had been an alcoholic since age 14.  My mother used to tell me how high his IQ was, but he got expelled from one or two high schools and only had a year of college.  He caught the tail end of the European theater in World War II.  My mother always said he got in some kind of trouble in the army that his father had to get him out of.  In his father’s will, there was part of the Atlantic Syrup Refining company left to him, but it was in a trust that could only be dissolved with the approval of both his brother, Donald, and his sister, Marie.  My sophomore year in medical school, my Uncle Donald decided to sell the company to Connelly Containers.  The trust had to be dissolved to sell the company, but Marie refused to dissolve it if my father got any of the money.  She had me investigated, verified that I really was in med school, and agreed to dissolve the trust in my favor.  My father agreed to it too, as long as I agreed to give him $2,600 of the $9,600 involved under the table without telling anyone.  So I got $7,000 for med school and living expenses, the only support my father ever gave me! 

              John Connelly walked in, the Monday after the sale, and fired the family, my Uncle Donald, his brother-in-law, and my father.    My father was out of work for a year.  On unemployment, given a choice between food and drink, he chose to take all his calories in liquid form.  He lost 100 lbs that year.  He looked everywhere for a job in the industry he knew, food distribution, but everyone in Philly in the industry knew that Bill Burns was a drunk, who had only held a job this long because he worked for his brother.  No one would hire him.  At the end of the year, he said if he couldn’t work in the industry he knew, then he’d work with what he loved, and he took a job with the Pennsylvania State Liquor Control Board as a liquor store clerk.

              During this involuntary time off, my father decided to take me fishing.  He had gone on a boat with these friends of his before, gotten drunk, put his arm through the window in the head, and caused them to cut the trip short so he could get 40 stitches in his arm.  They weren’t eager to have him on this next trip.  His drinking buddies made him promise not to drink and not to bring any alcohol, and he so promised.  The group chartered a bus to Atlantic City and a fishing boat from there.  As soon as the boat left the dock, my father brought out his flask.  If he hadn’t, he would have been about the only one not drinking (except me).  I got seasick, and the thought of drinking anything that would slosh in my stomach gave me the dry heaves.  I ate dry ham and cheese sandwiches and didn’t drink anything.

              Being the only sober person (well, other than the captain, I hoped) on a boat is incredibly boring.  My father tended to perseverate: “Isn’t this a great fishing rod?  Robin lent me this rod.  Isn’t this a great fishing rod?” over and over.  He only caught one sea robin, and I didn’t catch anything.

              When we got back to the shore, most of our fellow fishermen wanted to hit a local bar and continue the party.  The bus driver said OK.  He was getting paid for the time and wasn’t in a hurry, so he went back to sleeping in the bus.  I was still nauseated and there were a few other people just going to the bus to wait, so I went with them.  My father came in about 20 minutes later, sat down next to me, smelling of sweat, cigarettes and whiskey as usual, and said “You look like a nice girl.  What’s your name?”  I told him I was his daughter, but he said “Daughter?  I don’t have a daughter,” and proceeded to try to kiss and paw at me.  I worked at fending him off.  Fortunately, he needed to leave to use the bathroom.  A man from several seats back, who had seen the whole thing, came up and asked if I wanted him to sit next to me.  I accepted gratefully, but when my father returned, he said “Hey, buddy, you’re in my seat”.  When the man tried to stay put, my father threatened to hit him.  The man apologized to me, but my father was much bigger than he was, so he had to get up.  My father started try to kiss and paw me again, but fortunately he passed out drunk.  He stayed unconscious till we got to Philly, and I couldn’t wake him then, so I just left him there on the bus.

              I never wanted to see him or talk to him again, but I talked to Jim, (the doctor I was in love with) who said he was the only father I had, and instead of cutting him off, I should just put limits on the relationship: always meet him in public, always leave him in public, never be alone with him, never have him in my apartment, never have more than two drinks in my time with him.  So that’s what I did.  I never discussed that day with him until years later.  We still met for dinner or the races but less frequently.  I never called him any more, but he continued to call me to arrange to meet.   

              I was a senior in med school when my father had his first stroke.  He was only 51 years old.   He had the sudden onset of “amaurosis fugax”, a temporary loss of vision in both eyes.  It lasted about 10 minutes.  When he was unable to reach me, he decided, since it was a eye problem (except that it wasn’t really; it was a circulation problem) to take himself down to Shea Eye Hospital, where his eye doctor was.  His own doctor was out of town, but the admitting physician at Shea, recognizing this as a stroke symptom, admitted him to the hospital.

              Problem is, Shea is an eye hospital, so people get up every day and wear street clothes, not hospital gowns, and came and went as they pleased.  He had told them he was an alcoholic and might have DTs.  He was proud of always being honest about his alcoholism, but what’s the point of honesty if it’s not followed by change?  So they put him on a regimen of Librium to prevent the DTs.  So the next day, he got up and got dressed and sent out to buy a paper.  The first newsstand wasn’t open, and between the first newsstand and the second there was a bar.  So he went back to the hospital to find out what time his Librium would be given.  He stayed at the bar, drinking, till med time, went and collected his Librium, then went back to the bar.  Since the next day was Sunday, and no alcohol could be sold in Pennsylvania on Sunday back then, he wandered the neighborhood a bit till he found a private club where he could bribe the doorman to drink on Sunday.  He knew all the tricks.

              He told me all about this on Sunday night, and I thought this was ridiculous.  They weren’t working him up for the stroke because his doctor wasn’t back in town yet.  So on Monday, I explained all this to my resident and asked if we could admit him to MCP.  I went down to Shea.  I asked the nurses if they hadn’t realized all this was going on.  They said they didn’t know when he first left, but they certainly knew when he came back.  So I signed him out and took him up to MCP, where he had his workup.  He still had a visual deficit, a left homonymous quadrantanopsia – a loss of vision in both eyes in the right upper section of his visual field.  It was a stroke.  He was treated for hypertension and placed on aspirin, about all there was to do back then.

              At MCP, my father (I’m getting tired of typing that, so it will be Dad or Bill) woke up in the middle of the night and decided he wanted a cup of coffee.  He knew there was a coffee machine downstairs, but was afraid if the nurses saw him pass the nurses’ station, they wouldn’t let him go downstairs.  So he went out the fire escape, not realizing that it doesn’t open on any floors, only goes down (he was on the 5^th floor) to the outside.  There he was, in the back parking lot which was chained shut at night, since it was a daytime employees’ lot, in pajamas and bare feet, in November!  Fortunately the chain was slack enough that he could squeeze over it and between the gates.  He then had to walk three long blocks around the fenced hospital campus and in the front door.  By the time he walked in, they had realized he was missing and were on the lookout for him. 

              Bill came to my med school graduation, along with about 30 relatives on the other side of the family.  He wasn’t invited to the party at my grandmother’s.  I stayed in Philly and did my residency at Temple University Hospital.  My father had his first seizure during my internship.  He had been pulled to substitute at a liquor store in town, so when they called the ambulance, he was taken to Graduate Hospital.  I got the call from the ER and went down.  He was still post-ictal, unresponsive, lying on a gurney.  It was Yom Kippur, which meant most of the usual staff at Graduate were off for the Jewish Holy Day.  The doctor working the ER looked like he had been pulled out of retirement.  This wasn’t his usual gig. 

              The ER doc was planning just to wait until Bill woke up, and discharge him to the street.  I made the argument: yes, he was an alcoholic, but this was his first seizure, and a first seizure in anyone deserves an admission and workup.  The ER doc looked at me and said “OK, but you remember this.  I’m going to call the second year resident and he’s going to come down, look at him and say “Oh no!  Not another drunk with seizures."  When you get to be a second year resident, remember, even drunks with seizures have families”. 

              Unfortunately, they admitted him to neuro intensive care, which meant that he spent the night on a gurney, with EEG leads on his scalp.  My father always sweated like he’d been digging ditches.  He wore a towel around his neck most of his life.  I seem to have inherited this.  So the EEG leads kept coming off, and having to be reattached, so he couldn’t sleep.  Early in the morning, he started having alcohol withdrawal symptoms.  They called me at 8 am because he was standing in the ICU swinging at people.  They said they couldn’t control him and were going to have to release him to the street.  I told them I’d be right down.  My med student, a wonderful guy named Doug, offered to go with me.

              I’m not sure what I would have done without Doug.  He planned it out on the way down, and made me stop to pick up cigarettes.  He said we would go into the NICU, get my father between us, get him in the car, give him cigarettes, talk food distribution or whatever else he wanted, walk him into Temple and get him admitted, just like he’d agreed all along, without ever asking him or telling him.  And he was right!  It worked like a charm!  Then my father was on the medical service at Temple and it was my best friend, Sheila, that he was trying to punch with the DTs.  The seizure was alcohol related (with the change in where he was working, my father hadn’t had his usual breakfast drinks) so there was no really effective medication for it.  The treatment was either never to drink or always to drink.  My father made the second choice.

              Can’t remember when in all this my father set his apartment on fire for the second time.  I got the phone call from Frankford hospital’s ER.  He had fallen asleep drunk with a cigarette in his hand.  He had done it several years before, without too much damage, but this time his apartment was pretty much a total loss and he had some smoke inhalation, so they kept him overnight.  The landlord wouldn’t have him back either, so I had to help him find a new place to live.  Falling asleep with a cigarette and starting a fire would happen six more times in his life.  In one, the man in the next apartment had a heart attack and died.  I thought my father might be charged, but he wasn’t.  Best place he had to live was over a bar, where he sat in the bar till it closed and had to turn his cigarettes and lighter over to the bartender before he went upstairs.  But this was Bill Burns; he soon started keeping a pack of cigarettes and a lighter hidden in his room for late night smokes.  Far be it from him to obey anybody else's rules.  

              I think I was still in Philly when the State of Pennsylvania told my father he had to go through their alcohol rehab program.  This was after the seizure.  He went to the library and got the bag with 25 books, but when he reported to the 30 day inpatient program, they took the bag away from him, telling him he could only read alcohol rehab literature from their library.  He put in his 30 days, becoming an expert on alcohol rehab literature. 

              After this first rehab program, he really did try.  Problem was, his entire social life was going to the bars every night.  So he kept doing it.  The bartenders were very supportive, keeping him plied with ginger ale or tomato juice.  But his so-called friends were a different matter.  They continued to try to buy him drinks.  Not sure how long he held out before he went off the wagon, a couple of weeks at least, which for him would have been the longest period in his life except for the year before my parents married. 

              When I first met my father, he could down 16 boilermakers and walk a straight line.  At this point, he had a benign essential tremor in his hands, making it difficult to light a cigarette or hold a cup of hot coffee.  Alcohol temporarily improved the tremor.  Now he couldn’t walk a straight line stone-cold sober.

              His false teeth never fit.  He used to click them, or suck on them, an annoying habit.  He took them out to eat and finally gave up wearing them altogether.  He was strictly a steak and potatoes man and had no trouble at all eating a steak without teeth.  He put butter on French fries.  The only vegetable he ate was radishes, and he always said those were the only thing he couldn’t eat without teeth.

              After residency, I opened a private internal medicine practice in Bridgeville, Delaware.  In private practice, seeing patients in the office, taking care of my own patients in the hospital, taking ICU call and medical call, covering for other doctors, I didn’t get back to Philadelphia all that regularly.  My mother had been working for the US army in Germany, and when she returned two years later, she moved down near me in Delaware.  Sometime around this time, my father made his fatal mistake as far as the State of Pennsylvania was concerned.   He worked at one of the old style liquor stores, where there was just a counter and a catalog and people had to tell the clerk what they wanted and he got it from the back.  A number of customers had found that my father tended to make mistakes in math.  They would line up and refuse to be waited on by anyone else.  They would wait for the mistake.  If it was in the store’s favor, they would point it out.  If it was in their favor, they would pay and leave.             

                A man asked my father for a particular kind of brandy, if they had any and how much it was.  My father went in the back and came back with a bottle, telling the man it was $5.25.  The man asked my father to check how many bottles they had and to recheck the price.  If that was really the price, he would take all that they had.  My father, of course, never rechecked the price, but sold the man five  bottles, at $5.25.  The actual price was $52.50 and the mistake was caught at the end of the day.  My father was told he had to repay the error, and that he had to put in his application for disability.

              It’s not easy to get disability for alcohol related seizures, but his disability got approved, much to my surprise.  However, after they let him go, they told him the disability would be only 10%, $300/month from the state.  He still had to apply for Social Security Disability.  So he started asking me for money.

              This was in the 1980s.  My office visits were $15.  I made much more on the hospital patients, but still, my best net was $45,000 for 1 year.  My father’s requests for money increased and increased until I was giving him more than $600/month.  I gave him what he asked for until he let it slip in a phone conversation that he was repaying a loan shark $30 for $20 at the end of each week so he could play cards!  His gambling addiction hadn’t been an issue for me before, but it was now when I was working 16 hour days and every other weekend for money that he was gambling with!  I decided just to put him on a fixed $300 a month allowance, matching what the state gave him, until Social Security came through. 

              And of course, it still wasn’t enough for him to live on, but Social Security did come through.  By then, he had had another apartment fire, though not a bad one.  He was still living in the apartment, whose walls were coated in soot.  He wanted to move, but, while he had enough money for rent, he did not have enough money for an escrow deposit on a new apartment.  So he thought, if he could refrain from cashing one month’s check, he would have rent and escrow and could move.  So he went down to the alcohol clearing house on skid row, drunk, and asked to be put in an alcohol rehab program.  He was put in a 28 day program, but he cashed his check at a bar after he got off the bus, so it didn’t work.  So he tried again.  Over a year, he went through about 6 month long programs.  My favorite was the 3^rd one.  The woman who ran that called me and asked what my father was doing there.  I didn’t want to betray him so I gave what I hoped was a non-committal answer, and she replied “Three square meals and a cot; that’s all he’s here for.”  She threw him out of the program.  He called me, absolutely irate, that her program violated all the principles of AA and he didn’t understand why she was allowed to continue to run a program! 

              The final one of these programs was at the Coatesville VA.  Coatesville had 4 different, in-patient rehab programs, from a very aggressive one for younger men who could actually be rehabilitated, to one for older alcoholics for whom there wasn’t much hope of long term abstinence.  My father was put in the level 1, and had himself transferred to the level 4 for the older men, telling them that he really had no intention of not drinking when on the street.  There was hope, however.  They started an application for a VA domicile, long term care.  I thought this might solve my problem (I had actually hoped, after the fire in which someone died, that he might get his end of life care in prison, since I wasn’t sure how in the world I would manage it, but that wasn’t to be).  Unfortunately, stone cold sober, he fell asleep in the lounge at the VA hospital with a cigarette in his hand and set the carpet on fire.  That led the VA to decide that he would not be welcome in a VA domicile, and deny his application.

              Not sure of how the timing went on all this.  In 1987, I put in my first application to adopt and in 1989, welcomed Diane home.  In 1990, I realized that the child I loved and the medical practice I loved were not compatible, accepted an ER job and in 6 months, closed the practice.  In 1993 I brought Nerissa home.  Somewhere in all of that, after Diane and before Nerissa, my father fell off a bar stool in Philadelphia, broke his shoulder, had surgery, and while he was in the hospital, was evicted from his apartment.  The hospital discharged him to Eagleville, a city home for the homeless, but they rejected him because he was on Dilantin for his seizures.  Eagleville was a boarding home at that time.  There was no one to give medications and residents were not allowed to take their own.  So Eagleville sent Bill back to the hospital and they called me.  They were talking about just discharging him to the street with an address for a shelter, but I talked them into letting him stay the night and I would pick him up the next day.  They literally just let him stay the night.  They didn’t readmit him and they didn’t even put sheets on his bed or feed him.  So I brought him down to Bridgeville, having arranged for him to stay at Katherine Reynolds house.  Katherine took in elderly patients and I had cared for some patients there.  I warned her about his propensity for falling asleep with cigarettes.  She confiscated them at night, though he did manage to burn a few holes in the recliner he usually used and the carpet around it and in his shirts. 

              The older people in good health at Katherine’s got on the shuttle bus in the morning and went to the Senior Center in Bridgeville, a small town of about 1400 people.  To my father’s delight, the senior center was next door to Jeff’s Bar.  So Bill would check in at the Senior Center, have breakfast, take his book and go to Jeff’s, returning to the Senior Center for lunch and the bus back to Katherine’s in the evening.  So now it was my small town’s main street, on which I had my office, where he fell down drunk and the police chief, a patient of mine, who had to deal with him.

              Starting with a totally unrelated issue (well, not totally – it had to do with the end of the relationship with Jim, who was the same age as my father, after 17 years.  He ended the relationship, in part, over a disagreement we had about fathering.), I was seeing a therapist, Peggy Swan.  Of course, this whole thing with my father quickly became a focus of the therapy.  When I brought him down to Delaware, Peggy suggested that, if I wanted, I could bring him to a therapy session and confront him about his behavior during my childhood, at his father’s funeral and on the bus after the fishing trip.  So I did.  He said he knew my mother would take good care of me and he didn’t think he could add anything to that, he didn’t think he had anything to offer a child, so he just stayed away.  He didn’t remember his father’s funeral at all, having been blind drunk through the whole thing, and the same with the bus.  He hadn’t noticed any change in my behavior or the way I treated him before or after the fishing trip.  When he kept saying that he thought he had nothing to offer a child, Peggy asked to talk to him alone, concerned that he might be suicidal.  She came out a few minutes later and said he would never be suicidal, he didn’t care enough about anything other than himself to end his own life.  That was my dad.    

              Katherine’s house was also around the corner and just down the road from my mother’s.  My mother knew where my father was but didn’t want him to know where she was.  But she got some mail delivered to the wrong address.  She was driving past Katherine’s and saw him sitting on a chair outside, so she stopped and gave him the mail and told him it had been delivered to her house by mistake (they still had the same last name – Burns).  Bill went in and said to Katherine: “Your sister just handed me this mail and said it was delivered to her house by mistake!”  Katherine said “Bill, that wasn’t my sister!  That was your ex-wife!”  The last time he had seen my mother I was 15, so at least 30 years earlier.  He didn’t recognize her at all.   (Actually, he had seen her once earlier.  When my mother read of his sister, Marie Burns McCullough’s death, she saw him outside at the senior center, stopped, and told him how kind Marie had always been to her and how sorry she was to hear of her death.  Apparently he didn’t realize who she was then either).

              My father had a condition called psychogenic polydipsia.  If he couldn’t get alcohol, or even if he could, he drank water compulsively.  That became an issue with his seizures.  The first time he was taken out of Katherine’s with a seizure, his serum sodium (which should be 135 to 145) was 118, from drinking large quantities of water.  Another time he was taken out of Katherine’s looking like he had a major stroke.  His Dilantin level (normal therapeutic level 4 to 12) was 50!  He was getting admitted to the hospital in Philly with seizure with low Dilantin levels, swearing that he was taking the prescribed dose, so the doctor’s kept increasing the dose (absorption of Dilantin is variable and the dose needed can differ quite a bit).  Finally, at Katherine’s he was actually getting it every day and he became Dilantin toxic!

              At one point he fell off the bar stool at Jeff’s and broke his hip.  So he was in Nanticoke Hospital, which I had admitted to and worked in the ER of, where he was waiting for his surgery.  The water in his bathroom had been turned off (he had been there before and they knew he would drink water out of the toilet if he couldn’t get it anywhere else, and his fluid intake always had to be monitored).  Now he was NPO (nothing by mouth) awaiting surgery, and just giving the nurses (who were friends of mine) a ton of crap about wanting a drink of water.  Finally the nursing supervisor went in to talk to him.  She explained that in the next hour he would be going down to surgery and they would be putting a tube down his throat and if his stomach was full of water he could vomit and aspirate and die.  So which was more important, giving him the water he wanted or the fact that that could kill him later?  He responded with what I came to believe was his basic philosophy of life: “There’s only one important thing in the world, that I have what I want when I want it.”  That was my dad!

              He did his rehab for his hip at Lofland Park Nursing Home, which belonged to the hospital.  It was there that we had our big confrontation.  Can’t remember how it started, but he told me he drank because he wanted to drink, and nothing was going to come between him and his booze.  I said “So you would rather drink than have a relationship with me and my children?”  And he said “Yes!”

              The commandment says “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the earth”.  It doesn’t say they have to earn that honor.  It’s actually about the child, not the parent.  I thought long and hard about this when I tried to find ways to deal with Bill, and always ended up thinking, well, if my days weren’t long on the earth, they were going to seem long before I was done with my dad. 

              He got out of Lofland and back to Katherine’s for a short time, but then had another stroke that left him unable to walk.  He asked me why they couldn’t just amputate his legs and give him prostheses to walk with, and really couldn’t seem to understand the answers.  Lofland wouldn’t take him back.  It turned out that he was making no effort to pay any of his medical bills.  Lofland belonged to Nanticoke hospital, so I paid them off, but they still wouldn’t take him back.  None of the local nursing homes had an opening, so he ended up about 20 miles away.  The kids and I went to see him on Sundays and take him cigarettes.  Finally there was an opening at Genesis in Seaford and he transferred there.

              By then, he’d been wheelchair bound and in nursing homes for several years.  He had some more therapy though, and was able to stand and transfer, so he asked if we could go out to dinner.  I took Nerissa (I don’t remember where Diane was that night, but I don’t remember her being there), got him into the front seat, put his wheelchair in the back and we were off!  I asked him where he wanted to go and he said “Applebees”.  This was before we had an Applebees in Seaford, so it meant going to Salisbury.  But I got him out and into the wheelchair and Nerissa, who must have been about 4 or 5, said she had to go to the bathroom.  So I took her, and when we came out, my father had a cocktail in front of him and a bottle of wine on the table.  I told him, he had to be able to stand and lock his knees or I wouldn’t be able to get him back in the van.  It had been 5 years since he’d had any alcohol.  I don’t think I realized till that moment that the craving was still there, despite the 5 year involuntary abstinence.  He drank the cocktail and one glass of wine and was shocked to discover that his tolerance was gone.  He used to be able to drink a bottle of wine on his own, but no longer.  I was furious.  I did manage to get him in the van and back to the nursing home.  The next Sunday, I told him I would never take him out again if he was only doing it to drink.  He said, “How ‘bout if we go out for pizza next week?”  (That was his usual response to being told “No” in advance.  Whenever I told him he couldn’t have any more money, he would say OK, then two sentences later ask if he could have $20.)  I was walking down the hall with the kids behind me when Nerissa (age 4) said to Diane (age 8) “Does Grandpa even like pizza?”  Diane replied “Grandpop just thinks that anyplace that has pizza has beer!”  Out of the mouths of babes!  I brought a take out pizza next week, and it was his turn to be pissed.  I never took him out again!

              In June of 1998, my mother was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer.  She tried chemotherapy, which they told her would only give her 3 to 6 months at best, and decided it was worse than death.  She lived 5 months from the day of diagnosis.  She didn’t want my father to know about her illness; she was afraid he would call and be all sloppy about it.  The girls and I had been visiting him every Sunday for years.  Now we moved in with my mother to care for her and my visits to my father became more sporadic.  I got a call from the nursing home August 6; I was actually signing papers to buy a new minivan when the call came in.  They said my father had been found unresponsive and they were sending him to the hospital.  So I took my new van and went to the hospital.  I was met by the gastroenterologist, who said my father was GI bleeding again (he’d had episodes before, and leukopenia and other medical problems other than those detailed about.  Not cirrhosis though!).  They would transfuse him overnight and colonoscope him in the morning and cauterize the bleeding sites.  I went to see him but he was still unresponsive.  I went home to my mother’s and told her I thought he was doing it for attention, since I was seeing him less and couldn’t explain why to him.  He died just before midnight, the ultimate attention getter. 

              This 11 pages of writing is all that I can remember about my father.  I didn’t like him.  I tried to love him, love being defined as the willingness to extend oneself for another’s growth or well-being.  I thought forgiving him would be easier after he died and I didn’t have to keep dealing with him.  Not sure it has been, but I’ve come to believe that forgiveness is in the intention, the will or desire to forgive.  None of the above makes me angry.  I feel sorry for him, for his missing the joy that comes with raising a child and caring for grandchildren, joy that my mother and grandmother knew well and I have come to share with them.  I think alcohol is a poor substitute for that.