My extraordinary father recently passed away at 90. How he freed himself from hate’s grip (he was a holocaust survivor) healed his relationship with his gay son (me) and resolved profound difficulties with his wife has taught me a lifelong lesson about love—and given me great hope.
When my father was a fifteen year old boy, the Nazis took over his small town. Overnight, his once-safe world became terrifying and unpredictable. One evening, a wise family friend visited, and gave them an unexpected prediction for the future. He told them, “This will be a time of great joy.” Seeing their bewildered faces, he continued, “When we have bread to eat and water to drink, there will be great joy. When our children remain safe in our arms, we will have great joy.” My dad never forgot those words.
Dad’s father died before his son’s birth–and young Eric was his mother’s life. The certainty of her fierce love formed the foundation of his world; a foundation that would be savagely shattered– and one day rediscovered.
The last time he saw his mother, she was being beaten by guards in a concentrationcamp. He could not speak, stop, nor intervene, or the guards would have killed them both. He kept walking, completely helpless. And he lived with that memory for the rest of his life.
That was the last time he saw his mother. Before they were separated, they agreed to meet in a nearby town if they survived. When he was liberated by American troops, he went to that town, found an apartment and waited–until he felt certain that she would never arrive. We never discovered what happened to her.
Fifty years after liberation from concentration camp, he attended a workshop in which he was asked to have a conversation with a loved one who had died. Remembering his mother vividly, he spoke to her, perhaps for the first time since that terrible day. And he realized exactly what she would say to him if she saw him in his new life: “Eric, look what you have done. What a beautiful family you have created. I’m so proud of you.”
That moment was life-changing. The experience brought a profound healing to my father; a healing that none of us could have ever imagined possible. We all felt the change in him after that day. It was as though a knot inside him had finally become untied.
From the beginning, my father just didn’t know how to reach me. He had hoped I’d adore him, even with his walls—but that didn’t happen.
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In later years, he and my mother would go to middle schools and talk to students, but he never talked about the atrocities. He only talked about hope—and survival. He would tell the students that one thing saved his life—having friends. He would tell them, “If you want to survive in this world, you must find your true friends.” And how do you find these people? “Become one yourself. That’s how you’ll find them.”
In addition to friends, something else kept my dad alive during his years in camp: his hate. His diamond-hard desire for revenge saved his life—and allowed us ours.
After his liberation from the camps, he came to America and met my mom. He was handsome and strong, and very much a ladies’ man, but when he met her, he knew that he had finally found his home in the world. They would walk together and just speak about life. He proposed to her after just three dates. My mom was 19, a bohemian artist who had fled her white-gloved European upbringing. She truly loved him, but the last thing she wanted was to be tied down. She fled back to her hometown, Chicago.
My dad was devastated. This survivor who never showed vulnerability wrote her a letter that was unlike anything he had ever written. He told her that if she didn’t marry him, he would lose all hope; that he would never trust another soul again. His letter moved her deeply. She knew she’d never find anyone like him again. So they married and had two kids, my sister and me.
From the beginning, my father just didn’t know how to reach me. He had hoped I’d adore him, even with his walls—but that didn’t happen. I knew he loved me, but I never truly felt that he liked me. His accumulated rage, though tempered with fierce control, still bled through. I never felt truly at home with him,and I felt very guilty for that. I felt the holocaust as an unspeakable abyss between us, unspoken and untouchable. I wanted to rescue him, but I didn’t want to get close. Neither of us felt liked by the other, and our hurt morphed into anger and distance. He felt inadequate as a father. I felt inadequate as a son.
I was a gay kid, and my dad was a smoking, drinking, hunting, motorcycle-riding tough guy. Uncomfortable in his presence, I inched through my childhood with him. Time alone together never felt right.
Our great discovery–which didn’t come for years–was that we both needed each other. Bewildered, he would ask my mother why I never kissed him when I came home from school. I felt the barren awkwardness of a child who doesn’t feel comfortable with a loved one.
Through the years, we fought and argued. A lot. I would hold him accountable for the sting of his criticism, his lack of praise. And he learned to listen, and to try. Over the years, we became friends. We felt the warmth of shared love, though my protective reflexes remained cocked, waiting for the next criticism. Over the next years, we worked through our fears, our problems and our anger. It was a healing that I never thought possible. But that awkwardness never fully left. I thought that he would die without it being lifted.
Six months ago, my dad announced to all of us that it was his time to go. He called the people he loved on the phone to tell them goodbye
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Six months ago, my dad announced to all of us that it was his time to go. He called the people he loved on the phone to tell them goodbye. Yet something extraordinary happened. Our outpouring of love and care, and our acceptance of his decision, made him decide to stick around. What happened in those six months was something I never expected.
A friend of my taught me the trick to truly perfect caramelized onions: Cook them over a very low flame for hours. In those hours, every drop of their acidity disappears. Their bite goes away and they become the sweet essence of onion. My dad lost his bite, lost his anger during those six months. We laughed and said that he had become caramelized Eric.
I saw the person he would have become in a safe world. Those months bared the goodness that lay within him his whole life. His kindness and love were overwhelming. And the one thing that I thought would never change, my awkwardness with him, left forever. In the mornings, before work, I went to his house, lay in bed with him and held his hand. We would look outside the window at the squirrels and the birds, and I would feel as though I was in an oasis of safety. People would come to see him and leave the bedroom with balled-up wads of tissues in their hands, moved to tears by the wisdom and guidance he gave them.
My mom and my dad had one of the most wonderful relationships I had ever known, but in the last five years after his open heart surgery, that began to change. She became bitter and angry because he wasn’t fighting to survive. She had married a fighter, but now there was no fight in him. Her anger grew worse and worse-yet they loved each other so much. It was a helpless situation, and we didn’t see hope for a good ending. But they had been the greatest of companions for almost 70 years, and they wouldn’t give up. My mother would wake my father up at three in the morning and say, “Eric, what’s happening to us? We can’t let our relationship turn into this.” And he would look at her and say, “I love you, you’re right.” The next day they would fight again.
Somehow, when my dad decided that it was time to go, my mom stopped fighting him. Their relationship went back to it’s earlier state of goodness. My mother cared for him as if he was at once her child—and her beloved.
Dad once said that after concentration camp he felt as though he were in a cage. He said that he had to reach inside himself over and over again to pull out the hate inside him. And he told us that it came out little by little, piece by piece. I lived through his huge struggle–and I was able to witness his profound success.
My father passed away last Thursday. One of his great wishes was to see me and my partner Greg marry. He loved Greg, who is loving, kind, and silent in the ways that he was silent. He said that we fit together like an ass on a pail. Greg and I often joked about who was which. We told him that he wouldn’t miss our marriage, and so we got married next to his bed during his last hours, with loved ones all around us. People often came up to me to acknowledge my grief, but I didn’t just feel sadness. I felt a child’s joy. I had finally found a beloved friend in my father. And it took sixty years.
We never thought that my dad’s anger and bitterness could be healed. We couldn’t imagine that his grief and guilt at the loss of his mother would ever go away.
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We never thought that my dad’s anger and bitterness could be healed. We couldn’t imagine that his grief and guilt at the loss of his mother would ever go away. And I never thought I could feel fully and joyfully comfortable with him.
All these things changed, but they didn’t change in years. They changed in decades. When my dad left, he knew his work was done.
My dad’s story gives me tremendous hope. Not just because of his success, but because of how slowly it happened, how painful the process was, and how full the healing. That healing didn’t happen because of a course, a workshop, or a conversation. It came from decades of these things. At nearly sixty years old and married for the first time, this gives me great hope: for me, for my family, for my clients and for the world. Healing took so much longer than I ever thought it would. And it was more complete than I ever thought possible.
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This article originally appeared on Psychology Today
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Beautifully done. Thank you for sharing all of this.