82 Vs 22 Daddy
Kistiñe Dziuk
Daddy. He was a Navy Seabee. A carpenter. A guitar player. A fast car collector. A good guy. A man who tried to raise two little girls on his own and did it to the best of his ability. A hippie in his pot-smoking, hard-rock youth and a MAGA in his death.
The actual process of his death was a slow and perverse train that involved a misdiagnosis, drugs that poisoned him, a slew of terribly painful treatments that ultimately led him to a local research hospital that could do nothing more for him.
Thank you for this piece. I fear my parents will have the same ending. The things they now believe are so disconnected from reality and they have started to shape their personalities in baffling, awful ways. I always say Fox News was a gateway drug that destroyed that generation.
Thank you for writing this. I lost my mother suddenly in June of 2019 due to an aneurysm. She had graduated from the University of Missouri law school the same spring I graduated from high school, 1979, and became one of the first female attorneys in Greene County. She and my father divorced my freshmen year in college and she did not remarry until 1990. She succumbed to the brainwashing of Fox News against President Obama despite losing her entire retirement savings under the Bush economic crash; and then supported Trump. We could not discuss anything political because it would mean accepting things she stated as fact which were not true. I will never understand how such an intelligent, liberal woman who was ahead of her time was pulled into the MAGA abyss.
Daddy died in August of 2017\u2026it was a terrible and painful death and he was only 61 years old. His last words to me were absolutely unfathomable and embarrassing: He begged for forgiveness for his behavior and his Facebook posts, since 2015. The MAGA mentality he had displayed since Trump came down that escalator. The point of contention in our formerly close relationship\u2014the reason we had barely spoken in two years.
Years before his death, daddy had sent me several messages through Facebook messenger about \u201Cripping the teeth\u201D out of education departments across the country and I was shocked. I am sick writing those words. I write them because I know I am not alone. I know many of us lost parents and siblings and grandparents and friends to Trumpism. It\u2019s a sad state of affairs and we may as well talk about it, because even though Trump has been out of office for three years, he\u2019s never gone away. We still suffer the loss of our relationships.
It made no sense. He was never hateful, until he was. He was always caring, until he wasn\u2019t. He was proud of me\u2014the first to graduate with a BA, much less an MA in Education, until he decided the Education Department was a part of a conspiracy. He was always the man who I could count on when I called, but he died a man I didn\u2019t recognize.
Well, a lot, and it didn\u2019t start with Trump, but it was cemented and drug to the forefront with his candidacy and election. Daddy was immediately a Trump fan and I thought it odd at first, but I soon grew more upset the more I learned of Trump. I have never watched a ton of TV and only knew of him as being a rich guy in NY with the occasional scandal and bankruptcy.
My dad was the father of two girls\u2026he flinched a little when the \u201Cpu$$y tape\u201D was released but made excuses. Daddy had a disabled brother who died of Muscular Dystrophy and he winced when the clip of Trump mocking a disabled reported was spread widely, but didn\u2019t stop supporting Trump. I never knew my dad to be a hypocrite, so I was genuinely surprised to see him support a disgusting misogynist\u2014an unapologetic and prejudiced ableist.
My dad and I grew apart quickly\u2014like, lightning speed. Every time I talked to him, he ranted about dead people voting or some deep state scheme. My dad was sick with a chronic illness, but I could barely talk to him without getting off the phone feeling sick myself. He became a raging misogynist before my eyes saying awful things about Hillary, but it was never based in reality. I mean, there are reasons to dislike Hillary, or anyone else for that matter, but he was talking Pizza-Gate nonsense and trying to figure out code from her emails.
I started avoiding him and skipped visits even though I knew his health wasn\u2019t the best \u2014 that\u2019s on me and I still regret it. I just couldn\u2019t stand to see his brain rotting in front of me and his new political opinions on everything from abortion to immigration enraged me. We used to talk about his dogs, his travel, and his work. He was now ranting about locking folks up and welfare abuse and pedophiles. I couldn\u2019t deal with it so I didn\u2019t.
In his final days, he asked me what I would do if I were in his position\u2014unbearable pain and doctors who said there was nothing left to treat him with. I said, \u201CI don\u2019t know, but I know you are in pain and there are a lot of reasons to stay, but I understand if you want to go.\u201D He decided to let go.
He apologized between chapters for a lot of things that were out of his control when he was a young father and I was a child. I forgave him everything and apologized for not being there like a should have been\u2026and then came the torrent of tears over what had happened to us during the Trump years.
I was asleep in the hospital lounge when a nurse came to tell me she thought he was going. I watched as they helped him along with morphine\u2014his physical pain was unbearable. He passed away within the hour and I was left shaken, confused, in mourning, incredibly sad, and absolutely pissed.
I don\u2019t know why I wrote this other than as a warning\u2014your legacy will be impacted by the love or the hate you surround yourself with. I have to go way back before the Trump era to remember my dad properly. I know he knew this at the end, and feverishly tried to take it back before he left. I gave him grace then and I do now, but it doesn\u2019t erase what he said and did and how it impacted our relationship.
And that\u2019s the thing\u2026daddy wasn\u2019t a outlier. His story is common. I wish it weren\u2019t but such is the world we live in now. My hope is that the folks reading this can find grace for their loved one or just peace. Politics shouldn\u2019t have destroyed my relationship with my dad before he died, but they did.
My last memories of him leave a metallic taste in my mouth\u2014bitter bile in my throat. I loved him deeply and it was reciprocated, but his skewed world view at the end of his life tragically confused his legacy and his loved ones, and that is the saddest thing I can say.
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