Dad

It's been a little over a year now that he's passed away, right before Christmas in 2008. He'd been in nursing homes for 9 months - from the worst to the not-so-bad. It was my decision to commit him, after he had fallen and fractured his lower lumbar in the apartment he shared with my mom.

He'd always been angry, as far back as I could recall. He was deeply unhappy, convinced the world was out to get him, that everyone else was stupid. And he worked hard, from 4am to 4pm, as a short-order cook at a greasy diner in the Garment District for 25 years. He would come back tired, read the Post, yell at us, have a tense dinner, yell again at us, then go to sleep. I remember always trying to keep quiet so he wouldn't have a reason to yell at us.

My mother, in comparison, was a saint. She had come from a very happy, healthy family in Wajima, Japan, a small fishing village where, for some reason, her family had been famous for their lacquerware. They'd been wealthy, and I remember so many stories of her father who'd never said a bad word about anyone and had been a community stalwart, someone looked up to.

I tried to make sense of why they had to have met. There must've been a reason for it all. But my mother took the spirited verbal abuse, the cold disregard, the sharp temper ready to erupt at a moment's notice. We probably should have recognized it as mental illness a long time ago.

But this just constituted a normal day in our mostly silent household.