The big sleep.

I was often told when I was in high school that I seemed to have an overly morbid worldview, or at the very least that I pondered my own mortality more than seemed normal for a kid in his late teens. Let it be known that I was at my angstiest not the sort of guy who'd romanticize suicide, not least of all because all of my angsts were about things I wanted to do that would be decidedly difficult were I dead. Whenever I'm at a party that goes into the early morning, and people start playing ten fingers or truth or dare or any of those personal revelation games, I'm always surprised at how many people admit the thought of suicide brushed their minds in their teen years; not a judgemental surprise, just surprised because it's such a foreign idea to me.

In actuality, my morbid reputation was the result of me trying to protect what I perceived as a fragile body and a fickle life. I admit some of my instincts seemed strange. For instance, I'd often curl my hands into fists when riding in a car, the idea being that if we got in an accident, I didn't want an errant bit of glass of metal to shear off a finger (one of my greatest phobias of that time, and still a decent one today). Never mind that if the car accident was sending blades of metal slicing around I likely had bigger problems than losing my pinky, but the worry always stuck.

My mother's side of the family also has a bad history of heart disease for males. Having been pretty overweight in high school, as well as pretty sedentary (I had, unbeknownst to me, an iron deficiency which made physical fitness feel like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer), this also worried me, knowing full well that my grandfather (again, mother's side), who died before I was born, was only in his early fifties when his heart exploded as he was driving to work. Certainly those worries ignored my father's genetics, as well as the fact that my grandfather was living a hyperstressful lifestyle managing a business while supplementing enormous amounts of cigarettes and coffee for food, but I was still a bit spooked. I remember vividly being unable to sleep one night because I'd become gripped with fear over the idea that someday I'd know how it felt to die. I stayed up a whole night trying to fathom what that would feel like, and when I felt like I had best approximated the feeling, slumber overtook me.

I've since lightened up a little (a lot, really), mainly because nothing ever seems as important in the adult world as it does in high school (although I still really wanna keep my digits from getting sliced off) , and because I think I've managed to replace a mild propensity for gloom and doom with a mild propensity for aw shucks optimism. It's a more calming lifestyle, and with rare exception it keeps me from getting too up or too down.

I think the reason this has been on my mind is my father. I have, for those who don't know (and why would you?), a pretty old father, for my age. I believe he's sixty-five now, or getting close. He grew up in Brooklyn through the fifties, and eventually moved out to San Francisco where he became a successful (critically, not at all financially) poet. I've never read as much of his poetry as I should. He recently sent me a small volume for my birthday, and while I can read it and tell how good it is, it's not something I feel I can relate to. I've written a bit of poetry over the years, and in some respects reading his poetry feels like seeing a writing style that fights or clashes against my own. It at times seems to make no sense, and doesn't seem to care if it does, which is a very alluring quality to me, but one that I can never achieve. While I recognize it as being great poetry, I don't feel like I can use it as a touchstone the way the son of a blacksmith might use his dad's technique with metal. It embarasses me in a strange, personal way, so I shy away from reading his stuff.

In any case, he moved to Philadelphia some time ago (my inability to recall exactly when betrays a certain detachment from it all), as he and my mom had a falling out when I was in high school and he had little enough money that housing in Marin was a complete uncertainty. We probably talk about once a week, mostly about my acting, both of our writings, and whatever's happening in basketball at the time. The last couple times we talked, though, he mentioned in a very casual way that he was trying to get a doctor's appointment because he was having a great deal of pain in his esophagus. While I think my concern barely registered over the phone, I remember very clearly thinking, "holy shit, is my dad dying?"

When he'd been living out here but not in my mother's and my home, he had lapsed back into a smoking habit. I had once asked him to stop, a conversation in which I fell apart crying halfway through because it felt so damn awkward. He was a heavy, debilitating alcoholic before I was born (although I guess the way alcoholism is defined, he still is), and met my mom at the treatment center where he finally sobered up. Knowing this, I couldn't understand how he couldn't recognize the nature of addiction, or even short of that, addictive habits. He told me he'd cut out the smoking, but he didn't. He'd have to be pretty damn foolish to think I couldn't tell. I don't hold it against him for not keeping the promise, because I know that most addiciton mantra states that you have to want to quit something for yourself, and that saying you're doing it for your family can be a foil that won't work. But I also know that I opened up a pretty big wound in talking to him about it, and I can't not feel bad that it continued to go on.

Anyways, my dad never takes proper care of himself, something my older brother (half brother, actually) has seen more of firsthand than I have. He takes a dim view of doctors. He wrote off his high blood pressure to momentary stress, which might be reasonable if not for the fact that he has naturally low blood pressure in his youth (I seem to have inherited this... better than high, I reckon). So the fact that he called me, mentioned this mysterious throat ailment, and admitted he was actively trying to see a doctor because it hurt so bad he was having trouble eating... I have an instinct that it's something very bad, maybe lethally bad. And I feel somehow corrupt to have that instinct.

I think what worries me most about the possibility is that I have trouble communicating myself emotionally to my father. I feel like when I'm in the position to, I'm already starting on the verge of tears. And in addition to being unable to articulate the kinds of things I'd want to, I'm not even sure what I'd want to say. There's some frayed wire somewhere that makes something not feel right, and I don't know anybody in the electrician's union.