by Zoé Mahfouz
I laughed at his funeral. I really did. I burst into laughter, watching him fade away in dust particles. I couldn’t help but remember all these movies where the scattering of ashes went wrong and the characters ended up eating some by mistake. But that’s not why I laughed. I laughed because I was relieved. I thought to myself, finally. A burden taken off my chest.
At the end, he had dementia, but just from time to time. He tried to make my already disabled mom trip on purpose on several occasions, with a big smirk on his face, which he wasn’t doing with the nurses of the establishment. He often experienced bursts of lucidity and took advantage of it to tell my mother that he was still in charge of her life. That he had a say. Followed by a statement of how people in nursing homes shouldn’t be mixed all together, that we weren’t from the same social background after all. He was still the mean bastard he always was, except older.
I never understood that tendency of saying that “old people are cute.” No, they’re not. In fact, lots of them are vicious. Dang it, even the Abbé Pierre was a twisted one. And you want to make me believe that old people are cute? Old people are just a continuity of what they used to be, but without filters, because they think they have nothing to lose since they’re so close to death.
As a matter of fact, I’m glad my father died. Because he dies with a whole generation of people who never accepted the future. A generation who thought that saying the N-word was okay. A generation who thought that groping women’s asses was more than fine. A generation who thought that “Men should be men, and women should be women.”
When I was a little girl, my father expressed remorse in the fact that I wasn’t a boy, because he couldn’t play soccer with me. To which my mother cleverly responded, “But even if she was indeed born a boy, what exactly tells you that she would have played soccer and not dolls?”
When I grew older, I got to witness my father’s behavior completely change in social settings. He was pretending to be a different person. He didn’t really have any friends, just work colleagues he knew from college, which is also how he got his job as a marketing director, just by knowing the right people. He was eternally babbling about the same old college stories, mostly revolving around men putting their penises into food platters. Oh yeah, and my father graduated from medical school, by the way. He repeated a year, but he graduated eventually. And yet he lost 8.000 euros in gambling, so apparently he didn’t know his math that well.
My father never stood up for me. He let me get publicly harassed, insulted, bullied and cyber-bullied without batting an eye. He let a stranger grope my mom’s breast in broad daylight and even openly defended him, telling my mom she shouldn’t have dressed like that anyway. So he wasn’t only a coward, but also a traitor. I stopped counting how many times he stood against us, because it simply became the routine. And when he wasn’t doing all these things, he was sneaking into my bedroom when I was at school, opening my drawers, reading my notebooks, trying to go through my phone to “see what’s going on.” He became partially blind and he didn’t want my mom to drive “his” car, nor accept his condition, so he insisted on driving us, almost causing massive car accidents including under a bridge once, to get a Lady Diana finale.
And if that wasn’t enough, I recently learned that he got arrested dozens of years ago for voyeurism in a Parisian Park where prostitutes operate.
Over and above all that, it was about all the little things in daily life that kept on adding up. Like letting a Karen neighbor say despicable racist things to my mom. Or letting another neighbor drag my mom and me, a pre-teenage kid, into a partner-swapping party, and then asking that same neighbor to do our taxes, by laziness. It was about him taking pleasure in making other people suffer, and thoroughly enjoying receiving a slap afterwards for his actions. It was about a father showing no humanity.
It is so easy to judge someone from the outside when you don’t really know what’s going on inside the household. And how could you? So when people claim that you should “respect your parents,”I say that respect works both ways. We shouldn’t, as a society, be normalizing toxic behaviors then pretend to mourn people who have caused nothing but harm during their time on earth. So in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, f**k you dad.