The Meaning of the Word
My mother told me this story about a word that my father used to use on frequent occasions. For years, she pretended to know the meaning of the word when he would mumble it to her. He told her it was his favorite word. My mother wasn't the type to have a favorite word.
Growing up as the youngest in a family of four, there was eight years between my brother and me, then ten years between my sister and eleven years between my other sister after that. I became the sole witness to my parents' middle age. But from the start I knew that the two of them were very different. My father was a banker who wrote poetry; he read books like they were food, consuming them in big chunks at a time. My mother was a retired nurse who now stayed at home with me; she had been an operating room nurse who was trained in the 1950's ways of the Nursing - a lot less science, a lot more service.
My mother never believed that my father could read through a five hundred page book in an afternoon sitting, so she would quiz him on it when he finished. He always got everything right, using as few words as possible. She joked that more than his preternatural ability to read, his Hemingway-esque answers to all of her questions drove her stone cold crazy. My father was very non-social, notoriously silent as boyfriends and girlfriends would have to wait in the living room, sitting across from him while he, in his chair, rapidly ingested the words on a page in front of him. We always joked that he didn't like anyone but the family and his best friend, Mr. Collins.
My dad died about nine years ago. My mother at the time was angry at him because of the way he had died. My father had diabetes - a result of long term functional alcoholism - and also had lupus - a autoimmune disease that was discovered to our surprise as no fault of his own. Doctors had told us that our dad had had to have some arterial damage to his leg repaired. And then they told us that the lupus caused the grafts to be rejected. And then they told us his leg was going to have to be amputated. When we learned what would have to happen, we reacted in the best way we knew how - we followed my father's lead - we went ahead and did what had to be done without complaining about it.
But my dad however apparently had a secret plan, he had thought about the operation and come up with his own solution to his problem without burdening his wife or his children with either the necessity of caring for him as an invalid or the information about what he was going to do to himself. My father had decided that he wasn't going to live without a leg.
"Failure to thrive" was the reason behind my father's death, but we knew what had happened. A week or two before his actual passing, I leaned in to him and told him that I knew what he was doing. He had been conscious only for a few moments, but I swore he smiled at me around the tube down his throat.
My dad had, for all intents and purposes, taken his own life, slowly.
My mother, before the funeral services, admitted that she finally looked up the word that my dad had always claimed as his favorite, "and if there were a better word to describe that son-of-a-bitch, I don't know what it is," she scowled. My mom didn't normally swear.
The word was "esoteric," meaning not only private, secret or confidential, but only understood only by a select few. I had learned that word in high school and without too much of an understanding had figured out why it was my father's favorite.
My mother however didn't allow herself to find the meaning until after her husband had died.
