MTrip
Well-known member
I dug it out of the box a short while ago (recently moved to a new place. I didn't recognize it at first, then I opened it.
I tried to read it a few years ago, not long after my father died. I couldn't get through it...closed the folio after going through eight or nine pages, maybe. It is very bleak. When he wrote it, my father was in a bad marriage & had some health issues. This was on top of his being brilliant with depressive tendencies...not a great combination. To read my old man's journal is to see a portrait of a basically decent guy, trapped in a dysfunctional situation which he got into out of benevolence as much as self-interest, who can see himself slowly coming apart even as it affects his mind.
At this point, one might ask why I still have the journal. What's the point? You don't read it anyway; whenever you open it, it just makes you upset. Just toss it out already! Those comments are sensible & you would be right to say those things. But I can't make myself get rid of it...I don't know why. Maybe it's because of everyone I've known, my father is the only one who truly understood me & because I don't have much else to remind me of who he was.
It makes for sobering realizations: About how he sacrificed for my benefit & I sacrificed too--& maybe traded away the wrong things, about how we are always shocked at first when life doesn't work out as we thought it would, about how one can sometimes secure the future only by compromising it. But most of all, the journal reminds me of how much I've become like the old man...which is a frightening thought.
I tried to read it a few years ago, not long after my father died. I couldn't get through it...closed the folio after going through eight or nine pages, maybe. It is very bleak. When he wrote it, my father was in a bad marriage & had some health issues. This was on top of his being brilliant with depressive tendencies...not a great combination. To read my old man's journal is to see a portrait of a basically decent guy, trapped in a dysfunctional situation which he got into out of benevolence as much as self-interest, who can see himself slowly coming apart even as it affects his mind.
At this point, one might ask why I still have the journal. What's the point? You don't read it anyway; whenever you open it, it just makes you upset. Just toss it out already! Those comments are sensible & you would be right to say those things. But I can't make myself get rid of it...I don't know why. Maybe it's because of everyone I've known, my father is the only one who truly understood me & because I don't have much else to remind me of who he was.
It makes for sobering realizations: About how he sacrificed for my benefit & I sacrificed too--& maybe traded away the wrong things, about how we are always shocked at first when life doesn't work out as we thought it would, about how one can sometimes secure the future only by compromising it. But most of all, the journal reminds me of how much I've become like the old man...which is a frightening thought.
