Open Heart by Jay Neugeboren Page A

and with my mother (his “Shugie” who, afflicted with Alzheimer’s since 1992, has been living in a nursing home). Giving him basic family news, though, is merely prelude.
    Although my father was a failure in worldly matters—he never earned a living from his own businesses, went bankrupt before he was fifty, and spent the rest of his life as a clerk in a stationery store—and ineffectual and submissive at home, his judgment always seemed to me sound, and he seemed never to complicate things more than was necessary. Given the grim and unhappy nature of so much of his life, it was a mystery and wonder that this was so.
    â€œShit or get off the pot,” was his routine response if I expressed indecision. If I invited his opinion about a specific situation—should I do A, or should I do B?—he never turned the question back to me (as in: “Well, what do you think you should do?”), but instead would give a direct Yes or No answer—Do A, don’t do B—and if I asked for reasons, he gave them without elaboration: C, D, E, F, G.
    Though for most of his married life he was consumed by frustration and rage (he had a violent temper, and would often slap me and knock me around)—ashamed because he could not support our family and give our mother the life he wanted to provide for her, and humiliated regularly by my mother for his failure to do so—and though he and I, until the last few years of his life, were seldom able to have an easy, extended conversation, I had come to count on his direct, no-nonsense opinions and responses. More often, though, fearful of coming to him with a problem since doing so could make him attack and humiliate me, I relied on what I imagined he might have said to me had he been capable of being the man he wished he could be, and the man I wished he would be.
    And so, when times are especially good, or particularly difficult, I conjure up his spirit, and we talk. At these times, though imagined,he is totally present; though kind and loving, he is brutally honest; though idealized, he is the most realistic and practical of men.
    We talk most of the way down to Guilford to Jerry and Gail’s new home and on the way back from New Haven the following day, and words, feelings, and tears flow easily and in abundance. As often happens during these conversations, his good judgment and his kindness—both having increased enormously with the passage of time—help me through.
    After giving him news about his grandchildren, his wife, my forthcoming book, and Robert, I tell him that all is not well: that I am becoming more and more certain my heart is fatally diseased—broken, flawed, failing—and that I am frightened I am going to die soon.
    I immediately apologize for complaining—of course I realize how blessed I am: in my work, my job, my home, my friends, my children—and I start talking about people I know who have real troubles and who don’t have the wherewithal in life I have, and when I do, my father interrupts me. “Listen, sonny boy,” he says, “it doesn’t matter what troubles—what tsuris —others have. Your tsuris is still your tsuris and you shouldn’t bury it.”
    Do I remember a radio play I was in, he asks, called “No Shoes”—about a man who complained because he had no shoes until he met a man who had no feet?
    â€œWell, it’s certainly not so hot to have no feet,” my father says. “But if you have no shoes—like now, in the middle of winter—that’s not so hotsy-totsy either.”
    â€œNot a lot of time to dwell on the sweetness of being with Jerry for two days, [or] my talk to Yale doctors,” I write on my return, and then: “my ride there and back, alone. Weeping when i talk with my dad and tell him just how scared i am—that I might have heart problems and nobody to take care of me…this is what hurts more than the