My Father

Dad at the Salem Oak Diner, Salem, NJ

Visiting my Father in South Jersey. Another drinking binge for me. Sitting in the dusty living room with nothing to say to each other. Drinking though the long, uncomfortable silences. He's watching the History Channel. War after war, pictures of carnage and slaughter, and bleak human suffering. An armchair historian captivated by the glory, the calculated orchestration of mass killing. The Abrams tank, the atomic bomb, which "we had to use" on Japan to end the war.
Geri, my stepmother, sits on the couch which is permanently bowed from her weight . Her breathing is labored and she gasps between burps and gurgling sounds. She is dying from emphysema, and the woman next door that may dad is paying to look after her is giving her Newport cigarettes. Geri sneaks hits off them when my Dad goes into the bedroom to nap and hides the half smoked butt in her shoe.
She is committing slow smoking suicide, likely devastated by the murder of her son, Louie , who was shot in the chest lying in bed next to his girlfriend. It was over a thirty dollar drug debt. She heard the testimony at the trail: the blood spurted out of his chest "like a fountain". She had psychotic episodes after that, speaking to her dead son. The paneled wall in their old apartment was covered with photos of him, reproduced on an inexpensive computer printer. They all burned up in the fire from an overloaded electrical socket.
One morning I watched her sitting on the couch, looking pasty, her lips almost blue, her body wrenched by convulsive coughing. She looks into her diaper, and mumbles something like, "floor all wet", apparently having wet herself.

A year later I was back in South Jersey, with my Dad, standing over her hospital bed at the Salem County Hospital. She was barely able to lift herself from her soiled sheets. Her wrinkled skin, covered with bruises from blood draws and IV needles, hung loosely over over her fat body and small atrophied legs. She was shaking, babbling to herself, "uh huh, yeah", as if answering questions from someone only she could see. Her son Louie, perhaps.
She looked close to death. I could barely contain my tears. My father was faintly crying as I walked beside him though the overly lit, well waxed corridors of the rural hospital.
The next day when we returned she wasn't in her room. I made an enquiry at the nurse's station and was told she'd been moved to the ICU. When we found her there she had blood on her lips from biting her tongue during a seizure from drug withdraw after being taken off her anti-psychotic medication. That would be the last I would see her. The next time I came out was for her memorial service.

Five years later and, I believe, he is still grieving. They were together more than twenty years. After thirty five years working at Dupont Chambers Works in Deepwater, New Jersey, he has nothing. A fixed income, living in a rundown apartment complex in an apartment with cob-webbed corners and grease-splattered kitchen walls. A person can create so much value to be expropriated by others, and end up with nothing themselves but memories; faded photographs in a photo album, smoke stained from the fire at the old apartment in Deepwater. He lost so much over a short time. His brother, his mother, and his father passed away. His wife died leaving an impression on the old stained couch, a bleak reminder of both the good and bad times they shared, but more a reminder of her absence.

35 years busting your ass and breathing fumes,
sitting with dusty memorabilia, in this lonely living room.

The children in the photos are so far away,
you remember sitting on the beach watching them play.


Is this the sort of life that most working class people can look forward to, a life unfulfilled, only to be followed by sorrow heaped upon sorrow?