The Day I Killed My Father

My father, technical sergeant Philip Weingarten, his mother, Dora, and my mother, Ruth, circa 1943.

It was September 18, 2006. I had arrived at my father’s apartment in a senior living facility in Bethesda, Maryland, on day 200 or so of his descent into vascular dementia. Vascular dementia progresses more quickly and viciously than Alzheimers, and is less susceptible to treatment. It is irreversible. My father was 92.

He was lying in bed, writhing and screaming. He did not know I was there. I believe he did not know he was there. It was just screaming. I don’t think he was in pain — he was in some sort of ghastly, disconnected fugue state. But you cannot know for sure. Was he in pain? It was by far the worst I had seen him and the prognosis was not going to improve. He was, physically, still reasonably robust. This could go on for some time.

I was 55. I was there in his apartment to meet a woman who worked for hospice, who was overseeing his palliative care. “Palliative care” is a common medical euphemism for end-of-life treatment where no cure is possible. It’s about making your final days or weeks or months, or even years, as comfortable as possible.

As my father lay howling in the bedroom next door, the hospice lady and I were in the living room, trying to talk over the noise, doing our best to be genteel and professional, to pretend something godawful wasn’t going on 20 feet away. She was dispassionately reading from a checklist of his regimen of meds, and giving the increasingly dismal reports on his condition, but I interrupted her, suddenly and a little too loudly.

“I’d like to tell you about Philip Weingarten,” I said. She stopped, looked up, stilled her pen, and fell silent. I am going to reconstruct what I said next. It took a while. This won’t be verbatim — it’s been almost 20 years — but I will reproduce everything I said with as much accuracy as I can. My phrasing was a bit stilted. I had thought this through on the drive over, and composed it as in writing.

“My father is a man who greatly treasures his dignity. He always has. He also has certain precepts he lives by, and one of them involves a sort of dignity that he holds most dearly: the dignity of obedience to what is expected of decent people. He is a rule follower, and it may be his only religion, other than love of family. When he applied for a job as IRS agent in the 1950s, the federal government, as was their custom, audited him for the previous five years. And, in fact, they discovered discrepancies: He was owed something like $300 in refunds on taxes for which he had overpaid.

“One day in the early 1960s, he came home from work in midday — a highly unusual occurrence, because this was a man of stultifyingly regular habits — and turned on the radio and shushed me quiet. Within a few minutes a news story came up, reporting that three New York IRS agents had been arrested for taking bribes. They were part of a team of agents called “Office Audit,” who audited taxpayers — mostly individuals but sometimes small business owners — in the IRS main office. The taxpayers and/or their accountants came in and showed their paperwork, and defended their returns. These three IRS men were charged with having taken cash bribes from accountants to overlook certain things. The bribes seemed paltry and cheesy — $20 or $40 at a time — but there were a lot of them, and they had added up.

“The IRS guys had been caught in a trap. A month before, a fifth IRS man had been planted there as a new employee, but it turns out he was an undercover agent working for the FBI. He was a convivial fellow who had gone for lunch and drinks with his coworkers, and chatted them up, and learned their secrets. Then one day he didn’t come in for work, and a few days later the indictments arrived.

“I knew all three names on the radio. They were names my father had mentioned around the dinner table, in casual workday chatter. They were his three colleagues. They were three of the four agents from Office Audit. The fourth agent was Philip Weingarten. He was the only one not charged.

“Several years later when I was older and understood these things better, I asked him whether he had ever been solicited for bribes, as the others had.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “But I was the stupid one. I never understood what they were offering. They made it as plain as they could, but I never understood it. It must have seemed to them like trying to explain differential equations to a rabbit. Eventually they gave up trying. I was the stupidest guy in the room.”

“That was my father. He wasn’t a prideful man, but he prided himself on his integrity. It was part of a general attitude that was based on the idea that our humanity is anchored by our dignity, and our dignity is based on our obedience to civilized norms.

“He and I didn’t entirely agree on that: I believed in things like passive resistance and strategic obstinacy and controlled mayhem; at 17, I found myself ideologically aligned with the scruffy protesters at the Chicago convention in 1968 — he was, reluctantly, aligned with the overbearing authorities because the law was on their side. His view was so maddeningly consistent and unyielding and fuddy-duddy, it made me doubt myself a little. I respected his process.

“I was a wild, drug-abusing anarchic mess by then. My lifestyle was the opposite of everything he valued, but in some way he had confidence in me — he trusted my ambition. When I dropped out of college with three credits to go, in order to join a teenage Puerto Rican street gang in the Bronx with the vague idea of writing about it for New York Magazine, he talked my mother down from the precipice. “Gene knows what he’s doing,” he told her. I don’t know if he actually believed that, but he said it, and it calmed her. Sometimes, articulating something helps make it true.

“In 1972, I had just gotten my first newspaper job in Albany, N.Y. but had not had time to re-register to vote from my home in New York City. I was determined to vote for George McGovern, and was preparing to take a 4 a.m. bus from Albany to New York, and then return in time to cover the election for my newspaper.

“He didn’t want me to do that, so he made me an offer. He told me that he hadn’t planned to vote in that election (he was a lifelong Democrat but didn’t like either candidate) but that if I stayed in Albany, he would vote for McGovern for me so I didn’t have to make the trip. I made the trip anyway, but I had no doubt he would have kept his word. He had an overwhelming sense of honor and duty and, most important, fairness.

“Just after his 90th birthday, plagued by a weird, terrifying form of late-life blindness in which he saw cartoon-like, menacing phantasms instead of real images, he asked me to take him to the polling place on election day — dodging the demons in the street — so he could cast a mathematically meaningless vote for John Kerry in solid-Democrat Maryland over George W. Bush, whom he disdained. He knew it was the right thing to do.

“My father had a full head of hair, but he always wore a fedora when going to or from work, because it seemed to him to be a uniform showing respect for civility. A guardian of personal dignity. Even when he could not see at all, he dressed himself impeccably when he took meals with the ladies and gentlemen in the senior citizens center.

“This is the guy in pajamas screaming at the top of his lungs in the next room, ma’am.”

I was done. The hospice lady remained silent for what I remember to be five minutes but was probably 15 seconds. An eternity. There was so much at stake.

She met my eyes, fully, for the first time.

“I think we need to increase his medication.”

“I absolutely agree,” I said. “You have my approval.”

I do not remember the hospice woman’s name, but if I did, I wouldn’t tell it to you now. I have no idea, nor do I want to find out, if what transpired in those few seconds between us was by the book. If there even is a book. But my father was dead six hours later.

I’m writing this finally because two decades have passed, and because of what day it is, and because we are in a cold, ideologically vicious and vacuous time when, for example, a brain-dead woman in Georgia has been cruelly kept alive because she is carrying a fetus that will surely be born in a dreadfully diminished state — all because doctors are afraid of prosecution on anti-abortion statutes, all because government has gone fascistly insane.

I called my father “Pop,” an old-country throwback. Happy Father’s Day, Pop. And yes, I know absolutely that once again, you knew that I knew what I was doing, and approved. You were always on your son’s side, and I was always on yours.

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See you tomorrow or the next day.

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