Fathers, Monsters and Sons

By Paul Hamilton

Paul Hamilton's narrative on family dysfunction is in the tradition of Jeanette Wall's 'The Glass Castle'. Hamilton uncovers secrets about his family's past after he places his father in a dementia care facility. Hamilton sorts through his father's belongings and discovers documents revealing his father's immorality. FATHERS, MONSTERS AND SONS explores the perplexities of the fatherson relationship. Hamilton reviews the relationship by looking at this theme in movies like Star Wars and classic novels such as Frankenstein. Hamilton shares his journey towards recovery with straightforward poetry about his father and family. Hamilton concludes his narrative by issuing a call to reclaim the power of storytelling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640030459

Book preview

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Fathers, Monsters

and Sons

Paul Hamilton

ISBN 978-1-64003-044-2 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64003-045-9 (Digital)

Copyright © 2017 Paul Hamilton

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

To my father Robert Hamilton and to all the other Hamilton ancestors who have made my life and life story possible. They too are my fathers.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Dementia Strikes My Father

Silence Grabs the Throat

Silence Rules the Roost!

Giving Up the Farm

Living on Radio

Who Are My Fathers?

My Father’s Proudest Moment

Frankenstein Had a Father Too!

A Father Dressed in Black

Filial Devotion

Lessons Learned

Poems about My Father and Family

Notes

Bibliography

Introduction

In simple terms, this book is a story about life’s passages, passages that have formed my journey through life. This book is also a family record of sorts, a tool for personal therapy, a way of collecting the most significant memories from my childhood and early adult years. I have taken advantage of my ability to remember the past, a dangerous occupation if shared with too many people. My personal advantage is that I have no progeny and very little extended family. I can tell my stories without repercussions or critique from relatives. I am the youngest of my father’s offspring. All I have to leave behind is this family narrative.

Reflection is a wonderful human attribute, yet few people take advantage. I have always had an interest to wonder about the events of my life and that of my parents. This book puts that wonder and curiosity into written form. I have always had many questions about my family’s past. Unfortunately, my questions have come along too late in life. There is no one in my family tree that can help me with the answers or unravel the mysteries.

My family story is by no means some overly dramatic twisted tale. It is my wish just to tell these scattered episodes, put the details into the open air. The details have to do with several unexpected, sudden family deaths. These deaths have had a significant impact on my parents’ lives and as a consequence on my relationship with them.

For people who are familiar with the traps of family dysfunctions, the reader will come across familiar themes. Alcoholism, the absentee father, and the processes of grief all have their place in these pages.

The second portion of this book examines the father/son relationship through a number of literary windows. These chapters serve as introduction to the conflict between father and son that are central to the story. The biblical stories of Abraham and Isaac, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and Elie Wiesel’s Night are some of the stories I have reviewed with this purpose in mind. I hope the reader might be motivated to acquaint themselves with these classics.

An appendix is provided. In the appendix, the reader will find a collection of poems. These poems have helped me to reflect on my relationship with my father. Other poems are impressions about my childhood. These poems have been invaluable in that they have provided me with starting points for writing and organizing ideas for this book. The reader may feel free to start here before reading through my family story. These poems continue to be a source for reflection. Poetry is a timeless source for reflection.

Poetry can also stir the soul, work as a prelude to something larger, a jump-off point for discussion with family or friends. Family letters can be useful in this way too. Our culture will, no doubt, be further impoverished with the apparent loss of letter writing. Letter writing was an important form of communication employed by both of my parents. This one form of communication probably kept our family connected especially when direct and honest conversation could not. After my mother’s death, my father told me that she had saved every letter I wrote to her during my years at college.

If this book should prompt the reader to ask questions or discuss the family’s past, then those family conversations will have met my purpose for writing this book. Having been in pastoral ministry for many years there were many times when I heard a son or daughter respond to the parent with, You’ve never told me that story before. In those moments, I am glad for honesty, revelation, for another secret exposed to the light of day. Family conversations about grandparents, relatives, or about significant or unusual events from the past are crucial for family stability and well-being.

Chapter 1

Dementia Strikes My Father

What we remember from childhood, we remember forever . . .

—Cynthia Ozick

Sometimes stories are easier to understand when they begin at some place towards the end of a person’s life rather than at the beginning. For me, this family narrative is very much a retrospective; it is a story that in the later years of my life I have felt compelled to write. The story begins towards the last years of my father’s life. This story starts on a cold winter morning in January 2013.

Ten years had passed since my father had relocated himself back to Mason City, Iowa. My father had celebrated his 90th birthday just two months earlier in November. Over the Christmas holiday my father complained about sharp shooting severe back pain. The pain kept him up at night; he was very restless and slept little. His neighbor across the hallway, Ellen, had taken him to the Emergency Room several times. His doctor thought back surgery was a real possibility.

I left Oklahoma on a Monday morning for the all-day car trip. Most of my trips back to Mason City had taken place during the summer months; a couple of the trips occurred in the fall. It had been a long time since I had returned to my hometown in January. Despite my father’s unknown health status, I was looking forward to spending a few days reacquainting myself with the frigid in-your-face attitude of Iowa’s winter cold.

I arrived at the hospital early on Tuesday morning anticipating that my father would undergo some kind of surgical procedure. Mercy Hospital had been a permanent fixture along the main highway running east-west through Mason City. I never had had any reason to enter the facility until now. This was my first time to acquaint myself with the corridors of the hospital.

I found my way to the fourth floor and introduced myself to a nurse at the nurse’s station. Immediately, the nurse told me that my father’s doctor, Dr. Adams, wanted to check in with me. The nurse put in a call to Dr. Adams, and in very short order, he conveyed to me his opinion on my father’s health. He said that after a couple of days in the hospital, my father was much improved; he indicated that surgery wasn’t needed after all. My father’s back pain was a mystery never understood. Toward the end of our conversation, Dr. Adams did tell me that my father should not go back to his apartment. His assessment was that my father was no longer capable of taking care of himself; he should not live by himself. He said it would be best for my father that I find a long-term health facility. Iowa’s cold winter had found a way to get my attention; this felt like a slap in the face. My father’s descent into invalid status came about quickly. He had managed to live the last ten years of his life without much difficulty. Other than dealing with the tortures of loneliness, my father cooked for himself, took care of his finances, and continued to socialize with friends at church.

After I finished my conversation with Dr. Adams, the nurse began to fill me in on my father’s difficulty in remembering things. I soon learned that assessing a patient’s level of awareness was a common inventory tool used by nurses; I had no idea that confusion was a measure used for diagnostic purposes. I was told that my father’s degree of confusion was highly elevated. I was still trying to understand why they used the term. So what illness equates itself with confusion?

My father moved back to Mason City, Iowa, in the summer of 2004, after having lived in Southern California for more than twenty-five years. I’m positive my father never had any intention of returning to Mason City. He never speculated with me how he believed the last years of life might play out for him and my mother. Like most men, he most likely assumed that he would precede his wife in death, and therefore, he never gave the possibility of living alone much thought. My parents were the same age with my mother, being older by eleven months. Both of my parents had been in good health until my mother passed on rather suddenly due to an Alzheimer’s-related illness. Until then neither one of them had any major medical issues that were cause for alarm or worry. My mother did once express to me her fear that she might die of some cancer because of her many years of smoking, but for her, cancer never manifested itself. However, my father did have an episode of testicular cancer. Doctors considered him a good candidate for a seed implant procedure. The procedure was effective; he never had a recurrence.

My parents married in 1950, then moved to Mason City from St. Paul. They raised three children there. I still refer to this North Iowa town as my hometown even though I left when I was eighteen when I went off to college. After my mother died in 2003, my father spent the next two years going through my mother’s drawers, her cupboards, and closets, cleaning out everything. Then he packed the remainder of the family belongings; he gave some things away to friends. He found a buyer for his business, then a buyer for the house. He undersold his business but walked away with a small fortune for the house and property. He bought property cheaply just before the California housing boom took off.

Through the years of my childhood, my father’s health had always been good. He quit smoking when I was young. He did so cold turkey it seems. One day he was a smoker; the next day he wasn’t. I don’t recall that he went through any kind of cessation program or that he struggled with the on/off, back-and-forth cycle of quitting smoking, then starting again. But like so many things that took place in my childhood, neither my mother nor father made an announcement or explained to me what they were doing or experiencing. All I can remember was that one-day my father was a smoker; then some time later, he no longer smoked. My father ate what he liked; he played golf for exercise.

When he moved back to Iowa, he exchanged his afternoon Old Fashions for a glass of red wine with dinner. Heart disease was not part of my father’s family medical history, although his mother died at eighty-eight due to a heart attack. My father’s father died many years earlier of lung cancer. He was a grandfather I never had the chance to meet; my father kept his life in his past and rarely offered any clues about their relationship. This grandfather remained like a ghostly figure in the past, not haunting, just not real. He was a silent presence in my father’s life, and that silence kept him far away. My father would tell me stories about growing up with his brothers and sisters but never a story about his father.

Even now my father commanded a handsome profile. His hair had turned quickly from gray to white; it formed a wavy crown on his head. His blue eyes still sparkled. He never had cataract surgery. His step was somewhat labored now, but his stride was still confident and purposeful. The only mark of any physical decline occurred when he cut off the end of his third finger on a table saw. But that accident happened a long time ago. He had used the table saw for more than fifty years without incident. He admitted that he was angry with himself for not paying attention to what he was doing. He arrived at the emergency room quickly that day, but the separated appendage could not be reattached. My father had worked with all kinds of power tools, knives, hammers, nails guns, and other kinds of construction equipment during his life and except for a cut every now, and then he had managed to avoid any serious injury.

My father was eating breakfast when I walked into the hospital room. He had almost finished his oatmeal, wheat toast, and coffee. It was one of his favorite breakfast meals. He was glad to see me, but at the same time, he wasn’t surprised that all of a sudden I was in the hospital room with him. He didn’t ask me, What are you doing here? or Where did you come from? He didn’t ask me about the drive from Oklahoma the day before. It seemed like these questions just never came to the forefront of his mind.

After exchanging some small talk, my father asked, How is your mother doing? This was the first time my father had ever asked a question about my mother since her death. I quickly realized that my father’s memory had lost all sense of perspective. My first instinct would have been to correct him and say that mother died several years ago. In the past, when my father could not remember something or when he would repeat the same question several times, I easily became angry with him. This time I tried a different tactic. I said, I don’t know. I haven’t seen her yet. The answer seemed to satisfy him.

It was then that I realized that my father’s struggle with a faltering memory had taken a sharp turn on a curved road and had overturned. He had been taking medication for several years in the hope that this would somehow delay his memory deterioration. The pills seemed like an experiment in hope against hope. His memory worked like waves moving back and forth against the shore. Sometimes his memory was fully present like big waves slashing against the shore, but more often than not, it seemed that his memory had moved far away from shore never to return. There was no guarantee that his mind would ride the crest of the incoming waves. Increasingly, his memory had become disconnected with reality. His mind was moving backward and forward on its own uneven rhythm from past to present without any regard to real time.

I told my father that the doctor was going to release him in a few hours. My dad seemed happy about that. He replied with a simple, Good. Then I told him that he was going to spend a few days at Good Shepherd Health Care Center. Good Shepherd Health Care Center is a long-term nursing care facility in Mason City. Good Shepherd like Mercy Hospital have been in Mason City since the days of the Great Depression.

Okay,