Loss

My father is dying of lung cancer. A non-smoker, they never found the source. It's touch and go. No sympathy comments please. I don't know if I care. I don't want to care. I want to hold onto my resentment towards him for disowning me when my children were little for marrying a non-Jew. I resented he stole grandparents from my children, that he doted on his other grandchildren and treated mine like they were as dead as I was. I still hate him for that. My sister-in-law doesn't understand because when her son died at nine, she believes she reunited our family. Yes, my parents, having REALLY lost a grandchild, started speaking to me again, but it was superficial, stiff and distant. My sister-in-law figures we were talking and so she was a family hero. She gets irritated with me when I say I still hate my father and things were never the same.

The disowning was my father's imitation of his beloved asshole rabbi who also disowned an eldest daughter for the same reason.  It was this big family secret. My father was very ashamed of me. Ironically, when my mother's sister, who is Haredi and very religious in Israel came to visit, she chastised my father for cutting me off.  "How can you not talk to your daughter after all the family we lost in the Shoah." She was a camp survivor. She told me she was sure my husband was very special for me to marry him. I adored my aunt, able to hold onto her own personal principals despite religious edicts.

When my father's older brother found out, he, too being a religious Haredi in Brooklyn, he had the same reaction as my aunt. "How could you cut her off after all we lost in the Holocaust?" He had already lost  a daughter to cancer.

I had the world's most loving grandfather, also a concentration camp survivor, who lost most of his children in the war. He was the greatest gift in my life, my whole childhood. My children never had that. My husband's parents had their own serious limitations. We avoided them because of his father's alcoholism.

So my children were stuck with me and my husband. Cousins were distant, my sister judgmental.  It was just us four. I was an undiagnosed bipolar. I wish I could do it all over again. And I don't want to go to the funeral. I don't want to feel anything. No sympathy! I'll get really angry. I don't want to care.