But my father the weeping tyrant never exercised any restraint. He was president of a midsized pipe manufacturing company in north Minneapolis. I’m sure he was good at what he did; he exuded competence and authority outside the house, and seemed to have been able to control his moods while at work.
I prefer to remember my father as a reader. That was why my mother the librarian had fallen in love with him. He would rhapsodize about Proust or James or Wharton. He was always quoting poetry, and indeed I learned early on that reading to him from the poems of Emily Dickinson could calm him down, could delay or even prevent the fits of rage and melancholy. Studies have shown that a good dose of poetry, spoken at the right time, can impact the same parts of the brain as the pills we use to medicate bipolar patients today.
My father often slipped into quotations so easily and so naturally that you wouldn’t realize he was quoting at first. Not that he was trying to fool you. No. His thoughts just moved so quickly that he sometimes had trouble footnoting them. Most of what he would recite was melancholy. I frequently had to fight back the tears. But I did fight because I knew it was important not to give in to the sadness—or the frustration for that matter. I would not, I was resolved, end up as my father.
So why did I choose pediatric oncology, what one professor in medical school said was the “saddest of all the professions”? Not out of any altruistic ideal to save children, although that is what I passionately try to achieve each and every day. No. It’s about stopping the cancer. Winning the battle. A place to focus my anger. For it’s always there, the rage, underscoring everything I do. You don’t choose pediatric oncology without that rage. You’d die of sadness, otherwise.
About my poor mother, my father was fond of quoting Henry James:
Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
Yes, she was kind. Her kindness defined her, yet it didn’t always come easily. She had her demons, too. You could see her struggling sometimes, not during my father’s temper tantrums, as she called them, but at other times, when she fought against the tedium that was women’s lot in those days. The librarian’s role, although it kept her near her beloved books, was too limiting for her. She had a larger mind than that. Still, her familial challenges consumed most of her mental and emotional strength even though she dealt with those challenges with kindness and more kindness. The only sign that she was struggling was sometimes a slight hesitation before fulfilling the demands of my father, and, I’m now ashamed to say, me. I was a selfish child.
Still, kindness, for my mother, was a discipline. That didn’t make it any less authentic. She was not faking it, she was not manufacturing it, she was calling it up from some place deep inside her that otherwise never saw the light of day. My mother was a complex woman.
I say this because it all played into my decision to go into medicine. So my own deeply ambitious soul wouldn’t feel thwarted. I also knew I needed a way to channel my anger against a more formidable foe than a bipolar husband. And to practice my own brand of kindness in the midst of my own rage.
My father once shared with me a quote about anger by Aristotle.
Anybody can become angry—that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
That could stand for my life’s work: to channel anger to its rightful spot. In the battle between anger and joy, to give joy the better odds. But all I can think of right now, as I lie here trying to sleep, trying to empty my mind, is a quote from Medea:
The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable,
Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.
39
MJ
JOHN ENCOURAGED ME TO GO visit my father—my mother was long dead by the time we married. But he always refused to come with me, said he couldn’t get away. Didn’t even let me send any photos of our wedding that included him. My father was puzzled by the beach ceremony. A marriage without a proper priest? Without a wedding dress? Without a dinner and dance afterward at the veterans’ hall? To him, it didn’t seem like John and I were married properly at all.