Whatever...Love Is Love Read Online Free PDF

nothing.” He had to sit on my grandfather’s right side at dinner so he could backhand him if a pea fell out of his mouth. In one night on the football field, all that rage just flew out toward the Irish kid. My mom saw then that he had a lot to be angry for. She had so much compassion for my dad. She saw the truth of his heart from the start and no matter how he acted, she would always love him.
    But after the accident, things changed. My dad, coming from old-fashioned Italian immigrants who had all worked construction, was especially ashamed of his inability to provide. Now my mom had to take care of him, pay off the house, pay all of our bills, and take care of the kids. He could do nothing, and he was furious about it. There were years of operations that only left him more scarred and in more pain. There were also the psychological effects. Back then he wasn’t “disabled,” as we say now, but a “cripple.”
    He was given painkillers to dull the pain. He drank to dull the pain. He sat in his orange-and-red Barcalounger for years cursing the guys who had taken his life from him. He also cursed and abused my mother, us kids, and even our dogs. He would scream and yell, throw things, and chase us through the backyard with a gun when we ran away.
    He hit bottom when we discovered my mother had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 30 years ago. She was given five months to live. My dad went out of his mind. That summer, my family was running a pizzeria down at the Jersey Shore while my mother was in Philly getting chemo. Dad spent every day raging back and forth from the pizzeria to our one-bedroom apartment next door. After nights spent drinking, he would come to the restaurant and scream. The raging stopped when he knocked me down in anger for closing up five minutes too early. My older brother threw him out of the window. We all had had enough. That was the last time my father ever laid a hand on any of us.
    My father and I have healed a lot over the years. It is an ongoing process. I could always see his light, though it was painful at times. I saw how much he hated himself and how his father had passed that self-hatred down to him. I saw the possibility that I could be that way, too, if I didn’t face my own demons.
    After having gone through years of my own therapy and developing a deeper understanding of myself and my dad, I’m not terrified of him anymore. Now I am compassionate, painfully curious, and heartbroken for him. How must he have felt every time he had to ask one of us little kids to tie his shoe? He was in too much pain to perform even simple acts himself. Even my child self knew I was crossing some sort of dangerous territory as I dropped to my knees day after day to tie the “protector’s” shoe. A man who could once lift an entire building now could not tie his shoe. I can only imagine the shame.
    Now, as an adult, I can focus on the beautiful things my dad did and the sacrifices he made for us. He got up every Saturday and Sunday at 5 A.M. to drive my sister and me to our jobs at the local bakery, and my brothers to their jobs picking up nails on construction sites. He drove even though he could barely sit up straight. He taught us the value of hard work and how to become self-reliant. He made sure every one of his kids went to college and saw Disney World before we left home for good.
    And now, three decades later, I am sitting in the garage with him and my sister just talking, remembering those painful and joyous moments of our childhood. I am humbled by his courage. He quit the drugs and heavy drinking. When I was in my 20s he was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He started medication and has been much saner since. In my 30s, he was wrongly diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s and was given more medication that made him shake so hard he couldn’t bring a spoon to his mouth. He was eventually rediagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He loses more mobility