The Thaler Family Christmas Tradition : Acrimony
Christmas, for some, can be an exhausting and frustrating time physically, emotionally and spiritually for those dealing with a family member suffering from mental illness, drug addiction or health impediments.
I should know, as it happened to me.
In reality, for many, Christmas was/is a time of loneliness, pain, reliving past injustices, pondering past slights and rehashing personal beefs, many of which have morphed into insurmountable mountains where barriers are erected and fortified making reconciliation impossible and where all to often people it reaches a point that they are written out of our lives permanently, by choice when even reconciliation becomes impossible.
Word came to me on a sultry and humid day in August.
I was sitting in a mall food-court having a bite to eat, still trying to process the NDE that I experienced 4 short months earlier, and thanks to that experience, is about to gift me a fresh perspective into an old and festering wound.
My cell phone rings, unknown caller.
“Is this David Thaler” the voice on the other end queried as soon as I said “hello”.
“Who needs to know”? was my defensive retort after months and months of incessant creditor calls demanding blood from a stone, another by-product of such a profound experience that be best explained at a later time.
“This is the Ontario Provincial Police calling”.
Oh shit, I thought. Life just getting better and better!
“Yes”, I reluctantly admitted, “I am David Thaler”, whom now is sitting on the edge of his seat waiting for the next shoe to drop with a demand from the caller that he needs to immediately turn myself in for some yet to be determined reason.
“Is your father Bruce J Thaler from Victoria B.C?”
Huh? I thought, as my mind shot back into reality, as a wave of relief begins to wash over me.
“Hello, are you still there”, the voice asked.
“Yes, sorry, that is a name I haven’t heard in 24 years”, I blurted out, still trying to collect my thoughts.
“What the hell has he done now” I annoyingly responded in my usual defensive posturing I have mastered from years of similar calls….and there has been many…
“I am sorry to inform you that your father passed away 6 days ago”, he almost whispered, most likely hoping the gut punch he just delivered will somehow be lessened if he served it…quietly.
The caller stopped, awaiting some acknowledgment, and when I failed to respond within the requisite time of his choosing, prodded on….
“Sorry for the delay, but it took us a while to track you down.
I have a number for you to call to get the details and make arrangements to collect his personal effects and instructions on who to contact with instructions on what you would like done with his body.
Do you have a pen and paper?”
After I collected the info, I thanked the officer for his diligence in tracking me down and hung up quickly so I could be left with only my thoughts to keep me company.
As is usually the case, at least with me, old painful memories begin to flood back into my mind.
You know, the proverbial shopping list of the litany of misdeeds and actions I compiled that convinced me to cut all ties with him, each fashioned in such a way to convince myself that the choices I made in the past were the right ones and the actions I took were not just required or needed, but also were convincingly justified as noble and required conclusions to a sad and painful set of circumstances.
Yet, now, in the light of his death it seems all these justifications replaying in my mind now seemed so…..permanent.
In this odd moment in the food court, for the first time in many, many years, I began to question my past decisions and choices in that new light as I wonder whether my grievances were not as insurmountable to conqueror at all, if only I had chosen a different path. Death takes away these what-if’s and makes these decisions permanent.
The early years that I can recall, appeared ok.
During some of the worst periods, that I can recollect, there still was some semblance of “normalcy”.
Times like yearly fishing trips we as a family took to the cottage.
These were the times I remember most.
The good.
It is the bad, the unresolved that I sent down the rabbit hole that now comes flooding back reluctantly into my consciousness.
The time when I was 6, my dad had what everyone called a minor motor vehicle accident where he was rear ended and everything changed.
It turned out to be anything but minor!
Shortly after, and for years to follow, my mother tried to help my father deal with extreme headaches and recurring manic depression episodes, even taking on full time work to support a family he could no longer support.
We soon became a family walking on egg shells. My mom and sister Brenda were trying everything possible not to set him off, which apparently wasn’t hard to accomplish. My sister and mother understood, but this 6 year old brain never got the memo and I usually became the catalyst to his sometime violent outbursts, which he then directed at them.
You never knew which dad was going to show up today, or for how long.
Adding to the growing frustration was not in my dad’s unwillingness to seek treatment, because he did try.
He even went so far as to try to assuage his tendencies with electro-shock therapy, of all horrific options, as a way to cure his tendencies and torment and his increasingly manic then depressive cycles.
We all saw hope when a new drug was developed.
When he took it he seemed ok again, and life returned to some undefined definition of what we would consider normal.
The trouble with manic depression is that when he was OK, as is usually the result of the drug therapy, he came to the point that he felt great and unilaterally pronounced he no longer need the drug and he was “cured”.
A decision which caused him to slowly sink back down the manic rabbit hole once again to where we all had to start the whole process over again.
The insidious and predictable rinse and repeat cycle from hope to despair back to hope again that follows a manic-depressive around in life like a shadow on a sidewalk.
Then came the approaching Christmas of 1976. I remember it clearly.
I joined him in the weekly trip to his doctors for some reason.
I sat in the waiting room while he had his appointment.
After he came out of the session with his doctor, he seemed the happiest I have seen him in a long time which, for me, was a a promising sign of hopefully a Merry Christmas this year.
I finally allowed myself to believe that for the first time in as long as this 13 year old could remember, that this Christmas was going to be the best one in a long time.
We got home and dad immediately called a family meeting and that he had a big wonderful announcement to make to us all. My mom, my sister Brenda and myself settled in for what looked like good news, and in all fairness, to him he probably thought it was wonderful news. To us, it was devastating.
He started with a synopsis of his life, his unhappiness, and what was causing all his mental issues. He informed us that he has decided that he needs to leave us and our mother after Christmas and that the root of his unhappiness is in his struggle to come to terms with his own sexuality.
He was leaving our mother, and us, because he could no longer hide the person he truly was and continue to live the lie he was living. He was a homosexual.
To say it caught everyone by surprise would be an understatement, none more than my mother who was devastated at the admission.
True to his word, the day following Santa’s arrival, he left to take up residence on a cot in the sign painting shop he has just re-started for the third time. Apparently, he couldn’t get out of dodge to start his new life fast enough.
My mother, ever the trooper, and quite relieved after years of dealing with his mental illness , picked up the pieces and carried on supporting us. We had to move, sell the house, try to start again.
It didn’t take long for the news to get even worse.
My sister Brenda, all of 20 years old, got news that she had cancer. This news devastated the whole family including my father who seemed to take the news the hardest.
A summer of radiation and chemo garnered the wonderful prognosis and relief that there was no trace of cancer and she was officially considered in remission medically.
The great news of her remission was sadly short lived.
Less than a year later she developed a hell of a cough and soon the prognosis was poor in that the cancer had returned, has spread thru her lymph nodes and now she had numerous aggressive cancer tumors in the back of her eye, on her lung and on her breast. The Metastatic cancer had invaded pretty much every organ of her body.
Brenda lost her valiant battle August 5, 1979.
For my father, the news of her death was the straw that broke the proverbial camels back.
He never left her side in the months leading up to her death. Not once.
As Brenda’s funeral was about to start, I found myself alone in the viewing room awaiting my mother and the people to get seated for the funeral and in walked my dad.
I approached him to give him a hug, but he brushed past my open arms to take up residence at her casket, said his goodbye. Once he was finished, he then turned to look at me, and with anger and hatred that filled his eyes, pointed at me and said “I wish that was you lying there and not my precious daughter.”
With that pronouncement, he walked out of the room never to be seen by me again.
It seems almost fitting that after the funeral, I found out that my dad’s two brothers felt the same about me that my dad did. Both chose, for whatever reason, to have nothing to do with me following my sisters death either.
While I never, ever, heard from his oldest brother Glen, or any of his family following the funeral, my dad’s middle brother Gary would infrequently haunt me, usually to only inquire about my father to see if I had received any contact from dad or to see if I knew what he what he was up to. On occasion, Gary, or my grandmother Olivia would receive one of dad’s crazy letters demanding money or in the case of Olivia his inheritance, and call me to demand I get my father to cease and desist in his torment….as if I could..
As is always the case in the past, when Dad had a meltdown and decided to take one of his famous “walkabouts”, I was usually the one left behind to clean up his messes.
After a few predictable months following the funeral the phone calls started again. Leaving everything behind included all his responsibilities, his messes including a mountain of bills, friends who he owed money to, paying off work he had requested but never actually paid for was part of his catharsis I guess.
Leaving it all behind was his good riddance and fuck you too present to me.
For me it was a nightmare. There was also a unforgiving landlord that needed his stuff removed and his back rent paid in full. Once everything gets settled, eventually he returns and the whole process starts over again so, secretly, I’m praying this is his last foray into the wild blue yonder hoping that he finally finds the peace and happiness that has escaped him up till now.
To where he goes, who knows.
I didn’t care.
The anger in is eyes that day over Brenda’s casket was enough convincing for this 17 year old that I defensively needed to take action for my own mental well being.
I had reached the limit of my own emotional and financial largess.
My father’s raging disappointment in me to the point that he wished me dead , was for me the last straw….mental illness or not.
So, now, here I find myself sitting in a food court, once again getting the call to clean up his final mess.
Since I had the NDE, and no longer fear dying, I did not cry from the news of his death.
If anything, I felt happy relief that his years of pain and torment have finally ended and his soul is free, and while I mourned his passing, I celebrated his destiny.
I must admit I was totally unprepared for what was to come next.
Since I was only working part time at the time of his death, I didn’t have the financial resources to take time off work, let alone pay for a flight across the country to clean up another mess. I was hoping I could arrange to settle all his affairs by phone.
I called the coroner and made arrangements to have his cremated remains shipped to my local funeral home.
I wrote out the obituary and had it placed in the my local paper for 3 days as well as the local paper in Victoria and set up a donation requisite with my local funeral home thankfully taking care of all the details.
I made arrangements to have his ashes buried on his parents resting place to which I am sure I am going to burn in hell for.
I chose a marker stone to be placed at the gravesite, simple in design with his full name and dates of birth and death cut out of the granite adorned with one three leaf cluster in the top right.
With his wishes, there was to be no funeral, which more than agreed with my current budget arrangement so none was scheduled. I thought of perhaps having a visiting day at the funeral home, but since he has been gone now for well over 20 years in my area, I doubted the cost involved in such an undertaking would garner any support or interest to make the resultant financial or emotional toll worthwhile.
With all that done with relative ease, I reached out to the number I was given where he was residing with the idea that I could just give them permission to just throw out all the resilient junk and donate everything else for use as they saw fit thus saving me the time, money required to go out and do it myself.
Unfortunately, the guy on the other end of the phone was having none of it.
“You HAVE TO come and see his apartment…“I’ve never seen anything remotely like it in my life. It’s fucking incredible”!
I tried to re-assure the congenial chap on the phone that actually, I have seen and done this many times over, and nothing he could offer would surprise me. I let him know I really don’t have the financial resources or the time commitment necessary to undertake such a trip at this time and even if I could it wouldn’t be for at least 4 to 6 weeks before i could save up that type of money. While I appreciated his offer, I could not in all conscience force them a to wait that long, as I knew knew that would mean they could not rent out his apartment until I could attend.
He told me not to worry about that and you need to come and see this, it is that important!
He said they will not touch anything and not to worry about the time.
They will leave his apartment secured and intact and await my arrival.
Although I was somewhat annoyed at the prospect of cleaning up his apartment, I must admit he peaked my curiosity as to why he was so adamant that I attend.
Thank God he did, because it changed my whole perspective of my father.
A month later thanks to a timely loan from my mother, I arrived at his apartment.
The guy I talked to on the phone earlier was very happy to see me and happy that I decided to make the journey.
He took me up to his apartment, slowly opened the door… very slowly, seemingly for dramatic effect to what was about to greet my eye…and eagerly awaited my response.
At first glance, I was underwhelmed.
All I saw was junk.
In fact, I think I just horrified my host as I walked in, glanced around the apartment, then promptly asked where the garbage bags were.
My host was visibly mortified at my aloofness.
“Look around Dave, this is friggin incredible” he pleaded, more than a little annoyed at my attitude.
“Do you not see what all this signifies?” he asked incredulously.
“Nothing I haven’t seen before” I retorted, trying hard not to notice the death stare he’s projecting my way.
“Ok’ he sneered, “Pity those that refuse to see. Take as much time as you need” He turned to walk away, shaking his head for the length of time it took him to make his hasty exit, stopping momentarily at the door to let me know he will get me some garbage bags as he slammed the door shut behind him.
I collapsed into the only seat available, thinking this is what I came all this way for as I was scanning my surroundings.
As I began to truly take in my surroundings, I began to appreciate why my host was less than impressed with my attitude.
Slowly, instead of seeing everything as just junk as I did in the beginning , I noticed that there was some sort of order in all this chaos. The chair across me began to reveal the symbolic nature of was surrounds me. I began to notice that it wasn’t just junk thrown on the floor, but carefully placed and individually selected by my dad to attach some sort of symbolic meaning to him. He is trying to tell a story here…
My host was right, pity those who refuse to see.
For the rest of the day I tried to make sense of what lay before be and stretching out in multiple directions.
I started at the chair, which seemed to be the center point from which everything seemed to “flow” from.
The chair represents and must symbolize my father, the adornments that occupied the chair were actually symbolic representations of everything he loved.
Layers and layers of symbolic meaning call to me to figure out the story he was trying to tell.
Flowing out from and close proximity to the chair immediately to the right was symbolic representations of my sister from his symbolic perspective, which was quite impressive in size. In the center of this assigned area was her picture, and I must say was some great symbolic representations of what she loved in her life, and while I could understand some, others escaped my understanding and that understanding unfortunately died with my father.
Immediately to the left of the chair was my picture and a smaller grouping of symbols that, in his mind, represented me.
These representations are those that appear central and closest to his “heart”.
I can only assume, based on the layout, that behind the chair back into the kitchen represented his past, the centerpiece being that hardened cake which representative meaning escapes me.
Flowing outward from the chair represented his life story since arriving in Victoria.. ending at what appears to be “The Tree of Life”,….fertilizer for his tree I suppose…
My new friend was right.
Incredible in the detail and placement that apologetically the pictures actually do little justice.
It’s going to take days, if not weeks in order for me to go thru everything and try to denote understanding to his “life story” as there are hundreds, if not more than a thousand representations to work thru, let alone discern the placement, the reason for the placement a certain way in a certain placement from the center and it’s relationship within the whole. It became overwhelming in it’s scope as I can now see this must have took him hundreds, if not thousands of hours to assemble, place and create.
The daunting task before me feels like someone just handed me a rubix cube and told me I have 15 minutes to solve it.
It took me two days to figure out the general layout and digest it’s general meaning, some of which was easy to discern, I think, others escaped my ability.
And I shudder to think I almost threw it all away in my own ignorance.
Closer inspection came as I began disassembling the symbolic scene piece by piece, layers upon layers. Everywhere I looked , everything was filled with personal quotes, rice, coins, stamps, newspaper clippings, personal thoughts scribbled on post-it notes, record albums, books, thousands of heart stickers, flags. It was overwhelming in it’s breadth, scope and nature.
For everything I could deduce a meaning of or from, there were 20 that escaped my understanding.
On Day 5 of 7, I found an small area that blew my mind and forever altered my understanding of my dad. It was located under his chair and I didn’t notice it until I moved the chair as I was cleaning.
There were 2 cars, based on the careful placement, one appears to be hitting the one in front.
Beside the car, 2 toy figures, identical in features, standing on the car.
One looks normal, the other has what appears to be angel wings glued to his back. Having just months earlier had my own NDE, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Is he trying to tell me that when he had his accident so many years ago, that he had some sort of spontaneous out of body experience?
My thoughts flood back to the time my dad had just moved out of the house after Christmas. I rode my bike out to his shop to see him carrying a Harvey’s hamburger and fries in case he was hungry. He looks at me and blurts out… “David, Time you know that I am Jesus Christ, and that makes you the son of God.”
Wtf? I thought.
He’s nuts.
Perhaps he is just kidding.
He wasn’t.
Looking at that exchange now, along with the week I spent finalizing his affairs and cleaning out his apartment in Victoria has left me with more questions than answers.
With my own fresh death experience as a guide, it seems plausible that my father may have had a similar type of experience that day when he was hit from behind.
Sad truth is that I will never truly know.
Perhaps that day at his shop so long ago he was reaching out to me to tell me of his own experience and I shut the door for that opportunity calling him nuts and being so judgmental, just as so many have done to me since my own experience?
I felt sick to my stomach.
Sadly, I will never come to know these things with his passing, that opportunity is now lost and replaced with regret and sadness.
I now feel that perhaps I could have made a difference in his life if I chose to try harder to see things from his perspective, put myself in his shoes in trying to understand instead of being so judgmental and blinded by my own self importance.
How many Christmas’s with my dad did I deny myself because I got lost in that song.
I share this story not to seek pity, but to seek understanding.
I do realize some personal experiences will be just to hard or hurtful to re-evaluate, but as with my case, perhaps the exercise in the end would and should have been worth the effort.
We are entering a period of unprecedented times where co-operation, empathy and love are needed more than ever.
Many people are suffering thru Covid and too many now have lost loved ones.
Economic pressures are mounting for millions as evictions and loss of employment are very real probabilities.
Try not to let minor differences turn into permanent disenfranchisement.
Surely we live in a world where differing opinions can be celebrated.
United we stand, divided we fall.
Anything can be overcome if we choose love.
Thanks you for reading.
Blessings