My Narcissist Dad Doesn’t Need My Pity
It turns out he’s doing just fine
Walking away from a parent isn’t easy. It’s been nearly 30 years since the fallout with my father that ultimately ended our relationship, and I still remember how it tore me apart.
Back then, few were talking about narcissists, but I understood it’s what I was dealing with. I knew because the definition, “an extremely self-centered person who has an exaggerated sense of self-importance,” was the very description of my father.
I suppose we’ve all met some version of the man — the sneering “alpha male” with the chip on his shoulder, the judgmental blowhard with all the answers, the MAGA member before MAGA was a thing, the man who can walk into a party angry at his wife, and feel utterly justified in ruining everyone else’s time.
But I loved that often-cold father of mine. From my birth he’d been presented to me as an example of ideal manhood. I saw him as brave, special, better than most. I made light of his idiosyncrasies — the way he tuned me out when I spoke, seemed uncomfortable spending time with me, and often referred to me in the third-person, even when I was right there in the room.
Other qualities were harder to joke about. My father could be infuriatingly unkind to my mother, and when they argued, he would stop speaking to all of us, sometimes for days. After my mother’s death, he quickly remarried, then spent weeks at a time refusing to speak to his new wife.
My father was stingy with money and easily offended. He’d fallen out with his parents, his siblings and all of his old friends. After his three children reached adulthood, he played us against each other, buying expensive gifts for one, while refusing to talk to the others. A tiny misstep on our part could result in a year-long silence. The moment my father sensed that someone might expect something genuine from him, he was gone.
I step off the rollercoaster
The end of our relationship took place after I moved to another state, and it had all the ups and downs of a terminal disease. The original rift — over his treatment of another family member — was followed by a shaky recovery, more time in the doghouse, another reconciliation, more punishment, then a face-to-face meeting that ended with my father walking out.
Though we never again met, I didn’t stop trying. I remember sobbing while driving to the post office with yet another conciliatory letter — because he was my father, my only surviving parent, and because I knew he’d use what I had written to knock me down again.
This crippling dance went on for several years before I sent my father one last letter telling him that, though I wished him well, we were not good for one another. I wouldn’t be writing again. I was told that, after reading my letter, my father said it only proved that I’d gone off the deep end.
But I was (sort of) OK with that. After a decade of trying to mend the unmendable, I’d let my father go. I stopped asking after him. I mentally said goodbye to anything I might’ve expected to receive from his estate. I told myself that if I ever learned that my father was in need, I would make sure he was provided for. But I would never agree to live with him, and I would never invite his influence into my life.
So it was a surprise when, several years later, I received a Christmas card from my father. The entire message read:
“Sheila has chronic mono and sleeps 20 hours a day. I do all the housework. -Dad.”
I didn’t have to read between the lines to hear the complaint in my father’s words. His wife — the woman who was supposed to take care of him — had let him down. Was I not outraged?
Yet clear as his message was, I found myself astonished. After all this time, what did he think his note would accomplish? Was he running short of sycophants? Did he think such a self-absorbed whine would bring me running to his side?
An update on an elderly man
I ignored the card, and since then have received news of my father only through an erratic grapevine.
Now in his eighties, he lives in a memory-care facility. His longsuffering wife passed away, after which his stepchildren attempted to steal his remaining money. My father’s legal guardian recouped what he could of what was, in actuality, a very modest nest egg. I was told that my father receives very few visitors, which is understandable. Most of those who knew him gave up on him long ago.
I was saddened by what I heard. It’s not what I want for myself.
Then, a few weeks ago, I screwed up my courage to ask a sibling how our father was doing. Did he need anything?
He’s doing well, I was told. In fact, he believes that he owns the memory care facility in which he lives.
“He thinks it’s worth millions,” my sibling went on. “It’s all he talks about — that he owns the place, that he’s leaving it to his three children, and they’re all going to be rich.”
His three children? And suddenly it struck me. My father, even in his lucid days, hadn’t believed that our relationship was over. He’d thought, in his narcissism, that we were just taking a break — that it was all part of the game. It’s why he sent that Christmas card, and why he’d continued to give my brother religious articles to pass on to me — why he’d told my siblings that I’d “always been his favorite” while also contemptuously nicknaming me “rainbow.”
Another piece of the narcissist puzzle
I find this fits with accounts I’ve heard of other narcissists, as well: the friend’s father who, after refusing to speak to his son for years, sent his granddaughter flowers for her birthday, then demanded a photo of them; the son who didn’t tell his parents his wife was pregnant, only to send them a birth announcement a month after they became grandparents.
Narcissists will be narcissists. Those of us trying to deal with them — we’re frayed, troubled, sleepless, in tatters. But they’re not. In my father’s head, he didn’t lose a daughter. In my head, I lost everything.
Understanding this, I feel more peace than I did. My father is OK. I didn’t break his heart. I held onto my mental health, raised my children without his abusive presence, and mended my own wounds. I made the right decision.
And my father? He’ll die feeling like a good man. After all, he’s leaving me millions.
