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My Dad and the not-so Virtue of Selfishness [1]

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Date: 2023-11-30

My dad was my dad and I love him ‘cause he’s my dad, y’know? I’d fight anybody who said anything bad about him and I have a lot of good memories of him. He always took us kids everywhere (babysitter? Why? The kids like to go out and have fun too) and he seemed to truly enjoy having us around. Looking back at some of the things he let us get away with, I’m kind of amazed at his patience and tolerance.

But...

My dad was absolutely the most selfish person I have ever met. He knew nothing about Ayn Rand or libertarianism but he had it down pat. He would do absolutely nothing for anybody. And I mean nothing. It was like a code for him. He said that any time he ever helped anyone it always came back on him somehow and he just would not do it.

I have seen him drive past people he knew, fellow church members back when that sort of thing counted, stuck in the road in a sudden snowstorm, coatless and trying to get their car filled with their family out of the ditch and he drove right past. The man later came down sick from the cold and his health was permanently impaired.

I’ve seen him drive right past car accidents. I’ve seen… but you get the point.

His attitude was, if you want a friend get a dog.

Honestly I think, looking back on it, that some of this was a reaction to some of the things that had happened to him as a Marine in the Pacific during World War Two. Nobody talked about PTSD back then but he certainly seemed to show signs of it. After the war he simply withdrew from the world and tried to have as little to do with it as possible. But what use is a diagnosis if it doesn’t make any difference? Whatever made him so selfish doesn’t matter as much as the fact that that was just the way he was.

My mom passed away when dad was 76 and a couple of years later he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, no enormous surprise since he had smoked Camel cigarettes from the time he was a teenager. My sister and I took care of him till the moment he died. Literally the moment. I was wiping out his mouth with a wet sponge on a stick when his tongue suddenly went limp against the sponge at the moment he passed away.

It was a hard death.

My dad was the skeptic’s skeptic. He never believed anybody about anything. When the doctors told him he was dying he simply refused to accept it. I honestly believe he only allowed himself to know he was dying in the last few days before he passed. He began moaning ‘Oh, I’m gonna die!” and “I want to go home!” (we were staying at my sister’s home at the time) and almost crying, which Dad was not the kind ever to do.

I don’t believe there was any real pain involved, he just got weaker and weaker until he just stopped living. But mentally he was in torment.

I am not trying to turn this into a morality play or say he should have been nicer to people or anything like that. And no, I don’t think Dad went to hell because he was selfish.

But it didn’t make him happy and it did make his last moments his own hell. Or it certainly didn’t help, which is the same thing, now, isn’t it?

All of his life he had only thought of himself, never of anyone else. When he knew he was dying there was no counterbalance, no ‘one child born to carry on, to carry on’. To him it was the death of the Universe, of absolutely everything because there was nothing outside of himself. And he couldn’t deal with it.

If I am impatient with those who are selfish and inconsiderate of others this is part of the reason why, I lived with someone with that attitude for years. It is not a healthy way to be.

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