I believe that my dad was in a lot of pain in his life, and I worry a lot about what he’d think of how I’m dealing with mine.
Dad was born in 1911 in a small eastern Pennsylvania coal mining town. His father died of the Spanish flu in 1918, and Dad’s oldest brother went into the mines to support his mother and six siblings. I don’t have any idea what it was like for Dad growing up; he never talked about it, and I was too self-centered to ask.
I do know that he was admitted to Bloomsburg State Teachers’ College, a bit south and west of home. He was given an athletic scholarship, playing baseball, basketball, football, and running track. He played tailback in the old wing-T, shortstop and lead-off batter, and shooting guard. He ran something like a 10-second hundred yard dash. He was a beautiful natural athlete.
At some point, the St. Louis Cardinals offered him a contract, but that older brother, Stanley, told him that he wasn’t good enough to make the majors and to stay in school. (I know that because Dad told me, and, unlike my mother, he didn’t lie or exaggerate about things like that.) Secretly, I always wished that Dad had gone against Stanley’s wishes, but the older brother was probably right.
In college, Dad hurt his knee in a way I never learned; I didn’t see any surgical scars, but he was careful of it his whole life. His back hurt, too. When he was in the hospital after his heart attack, I gave him back massages. I don’t remember where the back pain came from.
He took a master’s at Duke in the 1930’s, where he met my mother. Once walking around Duke, I showed my brother Pete the spot where Mom said they met: he stomped on it, and I can’t gainsay the sentiment, even though we were theoretically negating our own existences.
I don’t know that Dad suffered any other physical injury until he was drafted into the army in the mid-1940’s. He taught chemistry and coached high school basketball in Pennsylvania till then; he won one state championship and lost another when a kid missed a layup. They had married secretly, as Mom wanted to keep teaching. She said in those days they lived high, wide, and handsome, as the saying went. He was a winning coach and, as he was charming anyway, he was popular in the community and greeted heartily everywhere.
I remember seeing my dad dancing once, and I thought he was a Polish Gene Kelly.
Then the war. They went to a fort in Tyler, Texas for officers’ training. Then he was shipped abroad and landed in France after D-Day. Dad never talked much about the war; I could tell he didn’t want to, and there was a piece of me that suspected that it was horrifying, and maybe I didn’t want to know what he’d gone through. He did tell me that sometimes a man simply couldn’t take it anymore and would stand up and let himself be shot. I keep picturing that. He said that you just had to tell yourself, it isn’t going to happen to me.
Mom said that for years he would scream out in his sleep. Look, I have terrible nightmares involving my law career and my teaching, but I don’t think I’ve screamed out, and I can’t imagine what it would take for me to do so.
Dad died in 1983 and took those memories with him. I wish now I’d forced him to talk more about it. I tried to find his military records. They burned in a warehouse fire in St. Louis, so it’s all lost now. I had the impression that he was attached to Patton’s army, but I have no existing evidence of that.
What I do know that he was in a French forest when he was shot in the back of his thigh, and thought, “Damn!” Then a shell exploding nearby knocked him out. When he regained consciousness, German soldiers were walking all around him.
The Germans weren’t taking prisoners by then, which Dad must have known, because he lay as still as he could. Shot in the leg, with an enormous headache, how did he manage it? Not to be flippant, but I would have had to scratch my nose. Eventually the Germans went away, and the G.I.’s came back and rescued him. I’m so grateful for that policy, you bring your own back. In the current atmosphere, notably the Russians aren’t doing anything of the sort.
He never complained about the concussion or the wound in his leg—he did show me a white scar in the back of his thigh—but I believe that the emotional wounds were worse.
A friend of mine in high school whose father worked with mine said that his father reported that, with my dad, everything was black and white: you were either with him or against him.
Oh for god’s sake, given his life, can’t we understand that? Academic politics, Woodrow Wilson said, and as I’ve quoted him earlier in this blog, are so vicious because there’s nothing really important at stake. It’s odd that Dad, having had his entire life at stake in that French forest, couldn’t see the difference in academia. But then everything was a fight for him.
And he was also extremely competitive. I never managed to beat him in tennis. He simply refused to lose. It’s true that maybe, as he got older, I refused to beat him. This dynamic is too complicated and emotionally fraught for me to explore.
One day when Kate was eight or nine, her soccer team lost the first game of the season after having been undefeated the year before. She threw herself on the ground and sobbed, red-faced and inconsolable. Nancy looked at me in confusion; “Where did that come from?”
“Dad,” I said.
Dad retired at 70 and had a major heart attack the next day. Fighter, that he was, he worked his way back and built a concrete block wall under the deck at the lakeside cottage that we rented north of Auburn. Why? I guess just to show that he could.
In another year, his heart just fell apart. When I think what it had been through—a difficult youth, the Depression, college on four sports, then the stress of the war, then his academic life—it was probably amazing that he lasted to 71. When he sat quietly and drew breath in, he let it out in tiny shudders. Stress followed him his whole life.
But he never talked about any of this. His heart trouble was off-limits.
So now, I wonder what he would think of me and how I handle my health issues. In some ways, my physical health is much worse than his. When he was 68, he could still beat me at tennis. Arthritis has prevented me from swinging a tennis racket since I don’t know when.
I’ve had my right knee and right hip replaced, and I have severe lumbar stenosis so I can’t walk any more than a minute or two right now. The arthritis in my fingers and wrists comes from my mother’s side, and now I hope that Kate doesn’t get it. Dad didn’t have any arthritis and played golf and tennis till his heart attack.
But I feel that I complain a lot more than he did. He never said a word about his back or knee, not until he was bedridden and needed back massages. So I wonder what he would say to me. I know that I complain about my pain way too much to Nancy. In fact the pain sometimes catches me by surprise and I find myself gasping. She shouldn’t have to put up with that.
I just don’t think that Dad would have subjected anyone to that kind of complaint. I said as much to Kate, who introduced a new concept: “No, don’t be like the men of the past, you have to complain if you need to, or it’s toxic masculinity.”
I get it. The men in my dad’s generation suffered in silence, and I imagine that their families appreciated that unconsciously. But was it good for them to keep it all in? I know that I would like myself a lot more if I could. Perhaps they got some satisfaction in keeping their families in the dark, at least their kids; at night, their wives could hear their nightmares. I wonder what happened in those nightmares. Body parts? Gushing blood? What did those men suffer?
So shouldn’t I try to keep more quiet about my pain, notwithstanding toxic masculinity? It would have to make for a better atmosphere if I would just shut up about it. When I think about expressing the pain, sometimes I can almost sense Dad sitting nearby. We seldom talked about pain, physical or emotional, though he never talked about not talking about it, either. But regardless of what he would actually think, and he was never reproachful, I don’t feel that I'm measuring up. That’s embarrassing, and I would be unable to meet his eye.
On balance, I think I should just keep it inside.
