Mixed Feelings?

Before this afternoon I hadn’t spoken to my father in a few months. I suspect it’s because I’ve stopped bothering to hide my sexual orientation from anyone on twitter and facebook.  I mean yes it’s my fault I’ve hidden it from him for this long, but in my defence he’s a very religious Jewish man.  He would tell me it’s a phase or quote scripture at me.  The one time I did try to tell him, he started yelling about Rachel Maddow and G-d expelling sodomites (all this in the middle of a kosher Chinese food restaurant) ….it just didn’t seem to be the right time

So yes I chickened out, I admit it.  However he has made an extraordinary effort to avoid speaking to me on the phone, except he calls me when he knows I can’t answer, and I of course do the same thing, so we’ve been playing phone tag for months. 

Whatever, I would allow him time, and to be honest I’m OK with not talking to him, seeing as how he just got remarried and I seem to regress to a child with anger problems at the mention of his new wife.  However yesterday he TEXTED me to tell me my grandmother was dead.

Now before you afford me more sympathy than I deserve I have to admit I didn’t know the woman well, in fact I have only seen her once since I was 6.  She was not a pleasant woman, in fact I despised her. However I feel I should have been told this over the phone not in a frackin text!

But this is not really the point of this post.  The point is that now I don’t know how to feel about, Elka’s (my dead grandmother) death.  I obviously don’t miss her, but when I read the text I cried a little. Maybe the loss of possibility, maybe I felt sad for my father?  I am not really sure how to sift through the jumble going on right now.

I once heard a story about a man who loved his mother and hated his father.  His father was an abusive alcoholic and his mother was his protector.  When his mother died he coudn’t cry, not one tear, but when his father died he balled like a baby.  Not because he loved him, but because there was a loss of the person he hated most, and he didn’t know how to replace that feeling.  Maybe my feelings about Elka are similar.  I did blame her for many things, I held a lot of anger for her, maybe what I’m really upset about is that I will never get the chance to tell her that I thought she was to blame for so many things in my life?

In the end it doesn’t really matter though.  The fact is that she’s dead eliminates all possibility of telling her I hated her and blamed her for things that happened, or the possibility of altering our relationship.  Now all I am left with is the memory of the mean scary woman I remember from when I was 6, and the old frail woman I met 21 years later who’s last words to me were “I am only here because your father wanted me to see you.”