Family/Politics
Dad’s Swollen Feet
Why you should stop disowning the people you love over politics
When my Dad’s cancer progressed to a certain point, his feet were really swollen. None of his shoes fit anymore, which was a shame, since he had just bought himself new leather, steel-toed motorcycle riding boots, and he looked really cool in them.
He ended up having to wear cheap Sketchers knockoffs from Walmart, four sizes too big, with the laces mostly undone, just so he could fit his feet into them and walk a little.
I remember these shoes really well, because my Mom’s, now husband, Karl had to go back to Walmart three times to get the right size. Karl sat on the ground, trying to get my Dad’s swollen feet to fit into pair after pair like some tragic rendition of Cinderella. My Dad kept telling him not to worry about it, that he was okay. Karl was stubborn though, and kept going back out until he got the right size. Dad was so thankful when he did.
My Dad — the same angrily divorced man who, for years, did anything and everything he could to sabotage Karl’s life. From slews of angry, menacing texts and emails to wild internet slander, he was really creative (crazy) about it.
He would even send emails to Karl’s bosses under false names to try to get him fired from jobs. My Dad was bipolar and these episodes of harassment were earmarked by his manic phases.
It was to the point that Karl had to hire a service that monitored and reported all the internet slander so he could keep up. Karl would have to park at a Dunkin Donuts down the street and wait whenever Dad was at the house with me and my brother, sometimes sitting for hours if Dad took his time leaving.
My Dad just couldn’t get over losing my Mom. Despite the intense love he had for her and for our family, he struggled with an alcohol addiction that helped keep traumatic memories of his childhood at bay. This alcoholism, especially mixed with his poor mental health and financial stress, had mounting ramifications over time.
Towards the end of their marriage, Dad had lost his job and lied about it for months, leaving trash bags of unpaid bills in the garage. One night, he blacked out entirely and did some very scary things that only began to make sense to me years later.
He just couldn’t dam up the traumatic memories any longer. After that, he had to go spend some state-mandated time in a mental hospital.
It was one of the hardest times of our life as a family, but we still came out on the other side of it with love.
My Mom remained friends with my Dad and they kept a strong partnership when it came to parenting. Despite all the drama, I had divorced parents who stayed close — we even continued going on some of our vacations together once my Mom pulled us from financial turmoil again.
It wasn’t always easy, there were lots of arguments, but we took on the rough parts together, somehow knowing that getting to spend time as a family unit was still important despite the difficulties. None of my friends at school understood, many of them had divorced parents, but their parents hated each other, or at least had a distant relationship.
Regardless of the difficulties of maintaining this dynamic, now that we’ve lost my Dad, those times are especially treasured in my family.
Years later, after the dust settled from the initial drama, Mom and Karl started dating. Despite the friendship he kept with my Mom, Dad unraveled over this.
He swore that Karl was the reason they broke up, despite the obvious chronology of events that made that impossible. I would try over and over to tell my Dad that Karl was a good guy, and good for our family, but Dad wouldn’t have it.
He had constructed an impenetrable lie to protect himself from taking any accountability for the choices he made that led to his divorce. It was just too painful for him to face.
Now I understand how impossibly wound up he must have been. My Dad came from a sick, abusive home, and had repressed his memories of abuse for a long time. When I was a preteen, my Dad had a heart attack, and he was never quite the same after. The cardiac event seemed to stoke the coals of his deep-buried childhood traumas.
When the ugly truth finally bubbled up through all the denial and alcoholism years later, he snapped — that’s when the blackout happened. The wounded child inside him could be silenced no longer.
When he finally woke up from his manic, alcohol-fueled explosion and his life was in shambles, he just couldn’t account for it. He created new lies to cover for the blown-up ones. He tried to reconstruct his identity based on whatever denial he could salvage and rebuild.
It was all he knew how to do. He survived his childhood on denial and anger. Karl just happened to get caught in his narrative as an enemy.
Another thing that happened when my dad was reinventing himself after the divorce was that he started wholeheartedly supporting Donald Trump — to the surprise of my whole family.
****Disclaimer: This is not a Trump bashing article, this is for everyone. There is ugly polarization on both sides, I’m trying to acknowledge the bigger picture.****
He got totally swept up in the polarizing social media algorithms of the time. He was obsessive about his online arguments. Many of which I took part in from the other end, just as self-righteously, supporting the overall polarity.
We would have never considered my dad a right wing conservative. Growing up, he mostly voted Democratic. He had a waft of disdain for the whole system (a rebellious attitude that I adopted from a young age), along with plenty of unique ideas and inklings that didn’t fall neatly into either category.
Looking back, one of the main catalysts of Dad’s political transformation was when he joined a Facebook group of conservative motorcyclists that would go for local rides together.
This was a new group of people to reinvent himself in front of, and they had a big audience on Facebook. This was when he really started to compromise his deeper reasoning in exchange for a feeling of belonging.
The guys in this motorcycle crew were nice — I really liked most of the ones I got to meet, but there were lots of guys like my dad who liked to post inflammatory comments and content, and they loved to argue. My dad was definitely one of the most, we’ll say “passionate” online debaters — possibly of all time, so he fit right in.
The collective rage was easy to latch onto for someone like my Dad, who struggled with deep anger for most of his life, an anger with a source too painful to touch.
My family witnessed this online persona as another side effect of Dad’s tumultuous mental state. He would spend long hours staring at his phone, arguing with both close friends and distant acquaintances about whatever was dominating his news feed at the time. The arguments usually went personal, and my Dad would get mean, especially if he thought he was “losing,” casting a pall over previously warm relations.
He preferred alienation from one “side” to the discomfort of recognizing any ideological snags, not budging on any iota of loyalty to his chosen team. For a while, he forgot one of the most important philosophies that has played out over and over again throughout my family’s history — that the strongest relationships transcend disagreement, rather than yielding to it.
His mistakes were mistakes we’re all becoming more prone to: the assumption that the ideological homogeneity of a group is strengthening, when, in reality, relationships based only on agreements are the weakest across the board.
“Us” can become “Them” as quickly as the circumstances change — an impermanence which you can always count on.
Social media algorithms hijack our brain chemistry to drive engagement (and profits). It is easy to keep angry people engaged, and discontented people spend more money and time online.
So, no matter who you vote for, if you’re angry and scrolling, the internet overlords win.
Adding to the volatility, volleying through an argument is becoming more uncomfortable than ever as we continue to metaphorically associate debate with a battle instead of a dance (For more on this, read the book, “Metaphors We Live By”).
Instead of debating to uncover new truths, to learn and humble ourselves, we debate to protect our old dogmas, breeding a mutual disavowal that just digs us deeper into our own trenches, never gaining more than a few feet of ground.
It is in this way that denial backs you into a corner, to the point that it ends up limiting the space that can be lived in.
Whether it be denial of the skeletons in your own closet, or denial of the fact that your preferred system of ideals and beliefs might not be as encompassing as you want it to be, shirking accountability to the truth will cost you more than the initial shrug.
As complicated and terrifying as reality can be, denial will corrode you from the inside, like cancer, if you let it.
Justifying righteous condemnation and disavowal between regular people for the sake of electing a “lesser” evil IS a form of denial. When we do this, we deny our deepest humanity, which lies in our ability to communicate and cooperate. We deny our humanity for the false security of an institution that finds us much easier to control when we’re furious and afraid of each other.
This denial leaks into other parts of life even when you try to categorically reserve your inflexibility to just one area — like politics.
When the prompting of some concept immediately triggers you beyond rational, calm, discussion, or beyond any future rational discussion, you start right there, inherently lacking the ability to sense the humanity of the person or group you were prompted by. This inevitably has negative ramifications for the way you view people around you.
My Dad had a habit, especially later in life, of making the world, and the people in it, his enemy. It was another way for him not to look at parts of himself that might not have been compatible with his life.
This helped fuel his irrational hatred of Karl for years.
The way we think, the way we process information, forms real physical grooves in our brain. These thought channels take lots of effort to change, and they influence the way we process everything, especially the really triggering, reactive stuff.
So there is no “sectioning off” inflexible thinking — thoughts flow, like water, through the grooves that are reinforced.
Engaging in the scheme of heavy judgement and condemnation that makes up our current political culture will seep into other parts of your thinking, whether you want it to or not.
It doesn’t matter if you claim that you’re only fighting for “damage control,” or for more time at the status quo, or for something as seemingly innocuous as the health of the environment. Inner peace, the only aspect of your life that you can really control to any extent, is still threatened when you make enemies out of your neighbors, family, or friends.
And when we give up our inner peace and remain conflicted in ourselves, peace in the world becomes impossible.
In our current political and social discourse, and especially online, we do not encourage nuanced, middle ground perspectives. It’s to the point where many of us feel like we’re not allowed to agree with some things about a given worldview and disagree with others, for fear of losing some sense of social identity or moral superiority.
We are no longer allowed to disagree amicably, because we view every disagreement as an attack on our meticulously sculpted identities.
In a world that’s largely painted as a dichotomous struggle between two warring sides, straying to no man’s land often means you end up getting fingers pointing at you from both teams. It is socially safer to just fall into one side or the other and rally. Never thinking or speaking provocatively, for fear of being trampled by the mobs.
My Dad started to become very staunch and insolent. His Facebook arguments with other boomer parents elicited texts from my friends, “Wow Em, your dad is really going off on Facebook today,” or “Did you see what your dad said?!” I argued up and down with him about it, but he was caught up with his end of the propaganda spectrum.
And, especially then, I was caught up with mine.
We got nowhere.
Despite our usual closeness, we stopped talking very much for almost six months. Six months I bitterly regret, now that he’s dead. I had not yet learned how to maintain my peace in this triggering, polarizing world.
I sheltered into my left leaning “team” with the same sense of superiority, continually failing to bridge the gaps between us with righteousness. Maybe, if I took a few more steps back, or a few more deep breaths, I would have had six more months worth of nice, loving conversations with my dad, something I would give up a great deal for now.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t mature enough for this perspective at the time, and my line of questioning with the universe led me to places that my Dad wasn’t willing to explore with me after a certain juncture.
He had to depart from reality in many ways in order to fit into the mold where he could most express his deep anger. I was angry at him for it, because I still had to live in the world as it was and try to make sense of it. Part of this departure from reality was what led him to leave warning signs of his cancer unchecked for years, despite me constantly begging him to go to the doctor.
From age thirteen on, I asked my Dad to go to the doctor every year on my birthday. I had a premonition that his cancer was coming. I remember telling my Dad that it was unfair of him to not take care of himself, because we were the ones who were going to have to live with it if he died. I had no idea how bitterly true that was when I said it.
The 2016 election was a big deal for me, because it was the beginning of me backing up to see the bigger picture behind the mechanics of our society.
The curtain had been pulled off it’s rail, and I didn’t like what I saw.
It was also the beginning of me looking at the wake of interactions I had related to politics, over arguing about the “best way to live,” and not liking what I saw from myself and others.
It was the beginning of my awareness roller coaster through the never-ending disillusionment rabbit hole of things we’re duped into believing for the benefit of the powerful.
I started thinking that I didn’t want to be playing this perpetually outraged role anymore. I was done being angry.
I just wanted to look at people as humans again.
So, slowly, over years, I started to look at all the overstimulating and surmounting woes, snags, and snarls of the humans of the Earth as fascinating, emotional stories instead of platforms to assert my ego, identity, or politics upon.
I started asking more questions instead of forming opinions right away, and when opinions did start to form, I found myself stepping on some toes as I crept out of my ideological camp into no man’s land.
Around this time, my Nana was battling cancer for the second time (my Dad probably had early-stage colon cancer at this point, but we wouldn’t detect it till much later). My Nana was like a second mom in our household. Growing up she always lived with us and held an irreplaceable role of wisdom in our family.
It was all hands on deck when she got sick again. Although my Nana was my Mom’s Mom, my Dad always thought of her as his true mother, and she thought of him as a son. They were best friends. Karl loved Nana a great deal too, and they had their own special bond. She was a woman who it was impossible to feel uncomfortable around. She was authentic, hilarious, endlessly generous, and easy to love.
Nana’s illness forced Dad to deal with Karl a lot more than he ever probably would have. He gained a reluctant respect for Karl seeing how dutiful he was to our family’s matriarch at her most vulnerable. This respect eventually grew into real love and friendship over the year and a half or so he lived after Nana passed, and to the utter shock of the rest of my family.
I remember the night Nana died, we were all in the house after the undertakers had come and my Dad and Karl were in the same room, which was still an irregular occurrence at that point — despite our coordinated care-taking in the past few nightmarish months. We were all emotionally exhausted, standing in the hallway of the dining room looking at each other in the semi circle of family that was left. I remember meeting eyes with my mom, a little worried at the Dad — Karl dynamic, and then Dad said something ghoulishly funny I can’t quite remember and we all laughed at each other for a moment. We laughed the bewildered, heavy laughter that sometimes follows trauma.
Later, we were all amazed by the interaction, we saw it as a gift from Nana — she was so wonderful at loving that it was her legacy that we all were able to forgive and move on, loving each other and laughing like she had always wanted us to.
It was also a gift from Karl, who offered forgiveness gracefully, and fully. He alluded to all the past harassment from my dad as water under the bridge — a deep testament to his overall wisdom in challenging emotional dynamics.
Later, in an impressive display of accountability, my Dad told us that he was so wrong about Karl, and he apologized for all the bullshit he had caused, with real remorse.
When he got really sick, he said that he regretted all the time he didn’t spend getting to know Karl, and all the extra time we could have spent as a family if he had gotten over his anger.
After Nana passed, we started having dinners and game nights with everyone, not having to exclude Dad or Karl anymore.
The ultimate importance of family was renewed to us through intense grief. My Dad and Karl became nerdy friends who talked Star Trek together. Dad taught Karl how to work on the house and put up the Christmas lights properly — they even rebuilt a staircase together. We all couldn’t believe it.
And to this day I’m deeply grateful for all the time and love that accountability and forgiveness afforded us as a family, even though less than a year went by before my dad was diagnosed with late stage colon cancer.
When the cancer was painfully official, Dad told me he didn’t feel like fighting on Facebook anymore. He told me that all of that stuff had started to seem pointless, not worth the energy.
He refrained from posting about his illness very much — not wanting the attention or the pity. When he was forced to use the same semi-socialized healthcare he had endlessly denounced, he grew silent and pensive. When he still had trouble getting the medical equipment he needed due to his low-income status, he was distraught, put into the same foot-swollen shoes of masses of poor people he had never thought to empathize with while championing his politics on the matter.
My Dad had to admit that his worldview was maybe not as complete as he thought. He was wrong about his cancer. He had tried so hard to believe that it was anything else, a food allergy or an especially bad bout of IBS. But he was wrong, wrong in the most important way, in the way that was going to keep him alive.
Strongly held opinions seemed to matter a lot less than they once did, because the lid had been entirely blown off of his life.
Here was a possibility he hadn’t considered — dying — since he had spent his entire life focused on surviving. Surviving the abuse and the pain, and building addictions to protect himself. He started redirecting his energy back to the Real Stuff — love, the force that extends so far beyond the algorithms and pundits trying to corral us into categories.
For the last birthday my Mom had while Dad was alive, he made her a model sailboat, based on an old schooner sailboat that bore his last name. It took hundreds of hours, it was the most tedious thing I’ve maybe ever seen while he was making it, but it came out amazing.
He even sculpted his own tiny cannons, since the cannons the kit had come with were just not cool enough. My Dad was a true craftsman, he could make or fix just about anything you could imagine, and he would do it with a creativity that is lost on most people, even some of the most skilled fixers and handymen.
After he died, his boss had to hire a whole team of engineers to troubleshoot the huge machinery my Dad used to fix single-handedly, despite a lack of formal education.
My Dad wasn’t used to idle hands, so making his perfect little boat consumed him. He was able to make it from his lounge chair and his bedside table, allowing him some agency when other beloved activities like riding his motorcycle were no longer accessible in his illness.
It was a defiant act of love, one of the last choices he got to make, to spend his time creating instead of wallowing in pain or scrolling through Facebook and arguing. This rebelliousness my dad was famous for — was so beautifully applied in this final act of defiance against his sickness. A choice we can all learn from.
Dad was an artist in the way he chose to live his life, and in all the thoughtful, beautiful things he created, and it is so sad that any toxicity or denial ever tainted or clogged that creativity.
But what a triumph he had over that in the end — and with a classic style of authenticity that only he could muster.
My dad had to be a survivor when he was young, and for most of his life. It’s at the root of all of the lies, confusion, and anger that followed him. He was one of the strongest willed people I’ve ever known, other than my Nana.
Seeing that strong will triumph over this final adversity with such wisdom and grace was truly one of the spectacles of my life, and I treasure it every day. I remind myself of that miracle when I wake up in the morning, sometimes paralyzed with grief. It keeps me going, this one, sublime, thought: “People Can Change.”
So, this is a story of a triumph over polarity, about favoring love above all as the only encompassing truth.
It’s about letting yourself be wrong, and living so much more right for it.
This is a story about being honest with ourselves, even when it is incredibly painful. Because when we die, we have to let go of everything, even our political penchants, even our dearly kept lies.
From personal experience and from watching my Dad, I know, when you really realize you will die, as intimately as you need to realize it, the lies are the first thing to go.
Dad overcame his denial in the 11th hour. He decided to take accountability, accept his wrongdoings, and see the bigger picture.
And, for a little while, he got to live a life with even more love and truth than he thought possible. He got out of his corner, he had more space, more freedom, and less anger, before it all came to an end too soon.
We don’t all have to wait as long as he did. We don’t have to let it get that far.
We can accept ourselves as flawed and confused in the face of it all. We can forgive, others and ourselves. We don’t need to break up our friendships or families over politics. Enemies can become friends — I’ve witnessed it. But we have to stop lying to ourselves, and stop lying about the lies. We have to stop asserting that they make anything easier.
Because they don’t.
We have to stop screaming and pointing into an echo chamber with vitriol in our hearts — scrolling away our precious hours and pretending it’s going to change anything.
That’s because the only change that matters is the transformation of our hearts — the courage to allow ourselves to hold more love and transcend disagreements. That transcendence can start today, with the simple humility to admit when we’re wrong — more than once in a while.
