EP4 Nathan Fry

Nathan Fry lost his father two years ago when he was 28 from complications following a heart attack. This was not Nathan's first or only sudden death, but his grief unlocked his understanding of his past and allowed him to create a more accurate narrative of his childhood and the neglect he endured. 

Referenced Text:
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Witman
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson
The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by Bell Hooks

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Transcript

(phone ringing) 

- Hello friend, you've reached Voicemails for the Dead. Please leave your message after the tone.

(tone)

- Nathan: Hi dad. I've come to recently understand that my childhood was one that involved a lot of emotional neglect, occasional emotional abuse, and love being expressed was more or less always conditional on ticking the boxes of what was acceptable and novel. It often seemed like the default view of me in the house switched between indifference and derision. There was the occasional care rate, but for a long time, I felt like there was something wrong with me. 

When I was working with my therapist about four months back to try to figure out what the core belief about myself that I had was that was leading to all of this negative self-evaluation, there were two beliefs that really highlighted most strongly in my mind, that I'm permanently damaged and that I have to be perfect. And for a long time, like way, way too long, I forgot how old those feelings were. I recently read a book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. And I really don't think that I've ever felt more seen. 

In the weeks that followed, I like, I went back and I lined up poetry and journal entries that I wrote in high school and random quotes from the book about how introspective emotionally neglected children come to understand their situation. And it was just so obvious. And for a while, I forgot that I'd realized all of this before, like right before I met Caitlin and immediately forgot everything that I'd ever learned about like not anchoring all of your self-worth on another person. I forgot because, you know, after the breakup, forgetting was easier than forgiving y'all. And I don't think I would have been able to get by with no validation at all. I could get by on scraps, I couldn't get by on nothing. 

And it's hard, I think, for me to figure out exactly how I feel about it now, to figure out what the right thing for me to do with all of this grief for the childhood I wish I had, for the person that I could have been and the life that I could have lived. And it's complicated too by the fact that there were good times and you weren't the worst of it. That was mostly mom. And, you know, mom's still alive and I still see her and I still have to navigate that relationship. But while, you know, you weren't really ever the one doing the yelling, you also never really stopped her, never spoke up. 

You know, I know why, I know what your family was like. I've heard the stories and the anecdotes, you know, sometimes presented as charming of the 1960s Irish Roman Catholic household in that grit-your-teeth, rust belt town with an older brother who tied you to chairs to torment you. I know the grandpa had, you know, a lot of emotional depth, but that he didn't really ever express it, other than in his poetry, which I'm pretty sure he never showed anyone. And I know the grandma was, you know, very kind and loving, but that, you know, your household was nothing if not patriarchal. I know what grief and despair you did feel in your life, you overcame with discipline. And I know that there was a lot of grief and despair in your life. And I know that it kind of frustrated and baffled you that that discipline didn't really come as easily to me. For what it's worth, I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, though the symptoms of that disorder and complex PTSD and childhood neglect mimic each other so closely that like, it's hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. 

You know, all through grad school, I was so focused on work that I didn't really have time to work on myself. And in the three or four years before your death, I've lost, you know, three grandparents and my thesis advisor. And it felt like every year more and more of the people who had supported me were going away. But in the days before your heart attack, I felt like I was starting to get back on my feet a little bit.

Your heart attack was in November and your heart stopped beating in early December, despite being in the hospital for a month after, I still can't really tell if you were brain-dead that whole time. There were moments staring at your eyes where I thought, maybe, you know, maybe you weren't on the floor that long before mom found you, maybe the CPR and started fast enough, maybe there had been enough oxygen to last a while. Maybe you'd come back from the brink and we could still foster the relationship that I kind of always hoped that we'd have. There were also moments where I thought, maybe it would be better if you were brain dead.

In the evenings when you'd wake up, or I don't even know what it was, I think it was waking up, your eyes would snap open and I don't know whether it was a moment of lucidity or some kind of weird side effect of withdrawal from the benzos they gave you and stopped, or I don't know, but you'd hyperventilate and your eyes would just be wide open. Pupils look like deer in headlights. Then you just do these whole-body convulsions and rock back and forth and chew on the ventilator tube. And for a man who didn't show a lot of strong emotions, that made that even harder. That almost broke me. I used academic stuff to distract me from the enormity of what was happening. My job, giving me time off, of course, but in the face of all of that stress, I created a personal project to distract me because that's what I've always done when shit hits the fan emotionally. I retreated into abstract thought, arbitrary bullshit deadlines because that was the one area that I was consistently able to get praise from you guys, growing up.

A month or two back after I realized all of this neglect stuff, I had a realization after Mom kind of unexpectedly told me that my PhD and my other accomplishments were more impressive in the light of my ADHD diagnosis. And that realization is that, even if everything external got better today, it still really wouldn't be enough. If you came back and you and mom suddenly became the people that I needed you to be 20 years ago, that scratching nullity at my core, it's still there. And I still need to address it on my own terms and with my own work. But I think I'm finally clear-eyed enough to be working on the right thing. And I think the thing that I've come to is that absent other people's judgment of me, I pretty much like the person that I am. I'm living my values. I like me and the person that I'm striving to be. 

I think the thing that I'm realizing is that once I reached adulthood and left the house and the fights got less frequent, the last thing I needed to do for your approval was be happy. And I couldn't do that while also towing all of the other conditions for your approval. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm gonna be okay. I think that's what I've been trying to tell you and mom for years, even before you passed. I think that's why, you know, on your deathbed, I've read you when I heard The Learned Astronomer by Walt Whitman. Because on the off chance you were capable of hearing me, I needed you to know that at least at some level, I figured out that my work was really only as important as the joy and beauty I could find in it. I needed you to know that I wasn't gonna be killing myself to find arbitrary markers of success anymore in the hopes of praise from you and Mom. While I can't say that every aspect of my childhood was what I needed, and I can't say that I've fully healed from that, I do know that you and Mom were doing more or less the best you could. And I love you both. I just, I think it's a more clear-eyed love than it once was. And I shouldn't go in expecting reciprocity in the way that I would have liked it. 

Bye, Dad. 

I love you.

(gentle music)

- Hailey: Welcome to another episode of Voicemails for the Dead. You just heard Nathan's voicemail to his father who passed away two years ago when Nathan was 28. Nathan, how does it feel to hear that again after recording it?

- Nathan: I recorded that probably about a month ago and listening to the full 10 minutes of it again, it's a lot. Just kind of seeing it all laid out. It's been kind of an emotionally volatile time in my life with all these realizations recently. And I think it's been a while since I've like traced the full narrative. 

- Hailey: So in your voicemail, you reference that your father's death happened after a series of other deaths that had happened in your life. It sounds like, in fairly quick succession, you refer to three grandparents and your thesis advisor. How was your father's death different from those deaths?

- Nathan: My dad's heart attack was in the mid-November. So he was in the hospital for weeks. There was more of a kind of a pre-grieving process there than some of the other deaths. My thesis advisor was completely unexpected that he was 40 and passed away by heart attack. And like, we had no expectation of that. It was just one day I saw him at a lab meeting and the next day he was dead. And so there's kind of the pre-grieving process with my dad. There's also just kind of the relationship, obviously. Like I think I loved my grandparents, both of my grandfathers that died, my grandmother, I loved them dearly and my other grandmother as well, but she's gracefully still living. But I think there was less in the air there. There was less unresolved because I think there was, for whatever reason, like my grandparents over time, I guess like became more able to kind of say the things that they were unable to say to their kids. I don't fully know. And I think there was less kind of ambiguity there of like whether I felt like I was living up to what they wanted for me, things like that. 

- Hailey: What was it like to have your father die the same way that your thesis advisor did? Did you start getting terrified that you were gonna have heart attacks?

- Nathan: Yes, especially because I, in the weeks that followed, was getting like a lot of arm pain and also chest pain at times. And it turns out that I just lean on my elbow too much. And then also I eat too much spicy food. So yeah, there was a paranoia in the months that followed for sure. For my dad's death, I think I was so much less able to process that. My thesis advisor was awful. Sorry, no, he was good. The death was awful. But like I was kind of a senior member of the lab at that point. And so I was one of the people that was like calling people like right away. I was the first to know of our lab and I started the phone tree. And so there was kind of a degree of like responsibility thrust on me there that almost made it easier, right? Because there was like something that I could work on in like the particular ways that my brain works. That's helpful. My dad, he was functionally unable to communicate with us for the weeks that he, after he had his heart attack. And I was not kind of in a position of authority in my family really ever. My brother did a lot of the taking control of the situation side of things. And then my mom and my aunt are both nurses and so handled the kind of medical advocacy part of it. This is the other thing that I think a lot of people don't tell you is like, if your loved one is in the hospital and you don't have people that like know medicine and know what they should be doing, there's so much that like you don't know that you don't know. 

- Hailey: Is your brother older than you?

- Nathan: He is, yes. So I'm the middle child. My brother was three years older. My sister is three years younger. 

- Hailey: Do you think that's part of the reason why he took on some more of that decision making? 

- Nathan: I think that's part of it. I think it's also, I talked about that adult children of Emotionally Immature Parents book. And one of the things that that book kind of gets at is that in those households, the parents will often kind of create kind of roles for the children, right? And my brother's role was like the golden child. And I don't think he particularly identifies with that role, but that was kind of his.

When we're as a family and we're all acting on our little parts, that's who he's meant to be in the eyes of like the people around him. And I don't think that's fair to him. And mine was kind of always fuck up, like emotional wreck. And so I think part of the reason that I was able to kind of take a back seat was because that was kind of what was expected of me. 

- Hailey: Walk me through the timeline. You mentioned that he was in the hospital for about a month. Ultimately, was there a decision made to pull the plug, so to speak? 

- Nathan: So my mom had actually had a work event that evening that like my sister was in town for. My sister and her fiance at the time, now husband, were home and my mom and dad were there. And my dad had like had chest pain, but he also had some like GI issues that evening, I think. And so didn't realize, or like maybe didn't want to admit that like it could have been hard stuff. Just thought it was some other illness. He was aware that like his heart was in trouble. So my mom was like asking him to take a nitro. It widens the blood vessels and like can hold off them temporarily if that's the problem. And he didn't want to take it and ended up that stubbornness probably part of the reason that he ended up passing away. So he was the last one up. And at some point in the night, you know, she had already gone to bed, but she woke her up or something, I don't know. Came downstairs and shouted loud enough that my sister and her fiance heard. They called 911 and they got him to the hospital, but there was a, there was, we don't know how long he was on the floor. And so there was that. There was kind of in the first few weeks, a big open question as to how much oxygen loss had happened, whether he had brain damage or not. And we never really got a definitive answer on that front because by the time, by the time we would have been able to get a definitive answer there, there were a bunch of other issues. He ended up getting an infection in his lungs and that's ultimately what probably killed him. He was on the ventilator, as I alluded to, part of the way they wanted to get him off it was doing a trach. So that's where like when they cut the hole in the neck, every time I tried to give him anesthesia, his blood pressure would drop so low that they had to stop it. And they could never get him on the table. And eventually the defibrillator that they had slipped and he coded a few times. And then at that point, it was just like he was on the machines so we could say our goodbyes. And eventually we had to make that decision of disconnecting the ventilator and it only took a few minutes after that. 

- Hailey: Was that a family decision or was that really more your mother's or your brother's? 

- Nathan: I think it was a family decision. It was, it's hard to say. We were all there. Ultimately it was gonna be mom's decision. And I think we all kind of agreed to it. It was a difficult meeting. But my brother's girlfriend at the time, my wife is a doctor, was on a speaker phone with us and heard the description of the uncalled doctor and basically said, "I'm so sorry." 

- Hailey: In theory, you had some time to say your goodbyes, not necessarily with him conscious, but with him breathing. Let's put it that way. How did the conversations that you chose to have then feel different than recording a voicemail now, two years later? 

- Nathan: I think the main difference, there's a couple. I think the big one is the recognition around that unfulfilled need for acceptance from my parents. That was kind of something that I wasn't able to admit to myself for a long time. I had not done that work at the time of the heart attack. And so there was a lot of like unsaid things that I probably would have said otherwise. 

- Hailey: What did you choose to say to him?

- Nathan: I mentioned that I read that poem. There wasn't a lot of dumping of emotions in really any other capacity. There was, in the moments before they turned off the ventilator, we kind of all got our collective grieving process. It wasn't like a one at a time thing. There was less of like a one on one, "I've said everything I need to say "to close this emotionally." I mean, I don't think I could ever close it emotionally, even if I had said everything that I wanted to say, but. 

- Hailey: Did you have any instances of like relief upon his death either immediately or shortly thereafter? I'm curious mostly because you describe there being some moments of unrest and what seems like was probably pain for him in some of those last days. And I'm curious if there was any sense of at least this is gonna be over for him. 

- Nathan: Yeah, not in the like, not in the day of and not at the days after, but I think once I kind of got a little bit more distance from it, there was a little bit, if that was gonna be the rest of his life, which is very much an open question, but if that was what it was going to be, I don't think he would have wanted that. He would not have wanted that. 

- Hailey: I assume you didn't have those conversations with him? 

- Nathan: You know, not directly with him. So my grandmother had dementia in the years that before she passed and he was, I think often very distraught over that and like very guarded with that distress. And I think between that and my grandfather on my mother's side had gone through an extended hospice stay, became clear to them that like they needed to have a living will. And I think he had discussed it with my mom, but I think there was a lot of things that they thought they had covered that there's a lot of weird corner cases in those things that I don't think were fully explored. No one really prepares for what if you can't talk and you're having what look like panic attacks, almost like a seizure. No one really thinks about that in their living will because it's not a particularly common thing that happens to people, but that is what was happening.

- Hailey: Is there any part of you that wished that he had his heart attack and it was all over and you didn't have that extra time? 

- Nathan: Yeah, no, there is. It's easy for me to be like, I would like to have just like not had that month of my life in hell or whatever. But I also think if it had happened suddenly, like it had had with my PhD advisor, there would also still be that kind of open question of could I have said something? Yeah, there was definitely a part of me that was like, I wish that that had just been done. 

- Hailey: So I do have to ask why Walt Whitman? Why that specific piece?

- Nathan: I have a weird history with Whitman. Basically, I think I learned about Whitman for the first time in AP US history in high school. One of the ways that my dad actually did kind of reach out to us as kids in a way that like, I think was really the only way that he was able to was every Christmas, my mom got most of the gifts, but he would get the Barnes and Noble books, like the leather bound ones and like write little notes in the front of them and give them to us for Christmas. And that year of AP US history, I'd come from this family where my grandpa was a poet and I had been writing poetry for years. And so I heard about this like famous American poet in AP US history and I was like, I want that book. And so he ended up getting me a copy of Leaves of Grass for that year for Christmas. Honestly, I still haven't read a cover to cover. It's a dense book, but there's a few that I really liked and that's one of them. The gist of it is basically it's Walt talking about being tired of all of the memorization and math and rigorous logic around astronomy. It's basically him getting tired in a lecture hall as all this math is happening until he goes off, I think the last lines of the poem are, and from time to time, look up in perfect silence at the stars. One of my dad's things was in the summer, he would kind of sit in the chair in the backyard and just kind of stare at the stars. I think he liked that silence, that solitude at times. I had been immersed in all of this tech and science, but felt like it was not spiritually enriching in really any way, or at least not in the ways that I was deficient in. And I think I wanted him to know I'd realized that at some level. I don't think I had even realized it at the conscious level yet, but I think that that was en route to that.

- Hailey: And was this a public reading? 

- Nathan: My mom was there and she doesn't get poetry. I think literally after I was done reading it, sad, like I still don't get poetry. She didn't really need to, it's not for her. 

- Hailey: Do you wish that that had been a one-on-one moment? 

- Nathan: Yeah, honestly, I'm not sure I got any one-on-one time because there was like a two visitor in the room policy. It was like mid COVID and we always had two because there were enough people there that like we were just cycling through. 

- Hailey: So it sounds like a lot of people in your family had someone else. You mentioned that your mom had her sister, your brother had his now wife, your sister had her now husband. Who was your support structure during this time?

 - Nathan: I don't really know that I had one, if I'm being honest. To the extent that I did, it was, I have a Discord channel with a bunch of my high school friends. And I think day two, I messaged in general and was like, "Hey, can we create like a Doom channel because I'm gonna be doing a lot of Doom posting?" It's still a very active channel. So I was mostly just kind of screaming into the void of all of my like friends in the area. And we were at the hospital every day. And so I did see some people occasionally. For the most part, I was just kind of trying to deal with it on my own terms. That was basically it, which to be honest, has been most of my life. I've not been in a lot of relationships and most of the kind of emotional close relationships that I do have are with people that are living very far away.

- Hailey: I think it's very normal to do two things that you refer to when someone is dealing with death or grief or even stress. And one is to find what society considers to be a healthy coping mechanism, which I would argue is not healthy, in the form of workaholism and just forcing yourself into mundane tasks because they help quell that emotional feeling. And then the other thing is we can hyper focus and fixate on certain interpersonal dynamics. You reference Caitlin in your voicemail and you reference the idea of leveraging all of your self-worth on a single person. Can you talk about why you chose to bring up that dynamic in this voicemail?

- Nathan: Yeah, I mean the big reason is it is like that breakup is the reason that this has gone unresolved for so long in my mind. Because towards the end of high school, I was actually mid senior year had kind of put the pieces together and was like, no, like my parents are not the determinant of my self-worth. I have value in and of my own right. And as it turns out, once I was able to recognize that, I was able to find an emotionally meaningful relationships pretty quickly and then immediately kind of abandoned all of that, you know, I'm my own person, I don't need other people's approval thing. And then when she broke up with me in I think sophomore year of college, I was crushed. And so in that state, I was looking for some form of emotional support. And that's when I started calling my parents more frequently. That's when I started kind of retconning my experience of childhood into something a little bit more socially palatable of like, yeah, my parents love me, my childhood was normal, like I was just high expectations. And then it was years before I really was able to grapple with that again. My focus on kind of like a free time perspective was completely academics. And like, that's basically all I did in college. I had friends, but like outside of seeing those friends, that's what I was working on. All of the emotional support I had pushed off onto my parents in that point. And like, that was not effective and was probably bad in the long run. But I think a lot of the reason that I was like so fixated on work throughout my life was the moments where I was able to get praise for my parents growing up was when I made Honor Society.

 - Hailey: Was it ever anything that wasn't academic? - It was mostly academic. So well, I did other things. I wrestled in high school and lost 30-something pounds freshman year to try to hit weight class and got praise for that briefly, which has definitely fucked me up in some other ways. Yeah, I mean, that was the big one. I was never particularly athletic. And I think part of the reason that I wasn't athletic is because I didn't really pursue athleticism because it felt like praise was a bit of a competition. And with a brother that was like three years older than me, there was no mechanism for being more athletic than him. And so I think that's kind of where I got that often like pathological perfectionism. I'd get like a 97 on a test and be, I think in third grade, literally hitting myself with books as like a, I should have gotten that answer right kind of thing.

- Hailey: Now that your dad has died, his validation isn't an option anymore. How did that change the landscape for you? 

- Nathan: For a while it kind of did it is the thing, right? Like there was a while where it was like, I don't know what to do, right? Like the grief was kind of consuming for a long time. It was this grieving both my father and the inability to ever really get what I needed. I think there were two big things that really, that really shifted that perspective. One is that like I left the job that I had been at, which was also pretty demanding.

The other part of it, a little funny. An acquaintance of mine grows some psychedelics and I did kind of a self-administered psychedelic assisted therapy. I think a lot of that kind of helped me recontextualize things a little bit. Both in terms of like the grieving process and in terms of like what I wanted out of life. I want to be able to validate myself independent of anyone else. And if other people want to do that too, that's great. But like that's not what I want to get it from anymore. 

- Hailey: You mentioned grieving, not just your father's death, but also the childhood that you wish that you had had in the person that you wish you could have been. Who is that person? How are they different from the person that you are right now? 

- Nathan: You know, it's hard to say. And it's honestly, it's hard to even fully grieve them because I also don't know if that person is someone that I want to be either, right? Like there's a lot of question marks there. What I would have wanted them to be is like a lot of the same values that I have now, but more willing to put themselves out there and like be vulnerable with people. And I guess at some level I'm doing that now, but it's taken a lot of effort. There's other like smaller things. Most of the rest of my family is pretty tall. I don't know if I would be this height if I had not starved myself for several months in freshman year of high school. I don't know. Like little things like that, that like I will never know the answer, but there's question marks around it. And like to be clear, if you're short, that's fine. Don't beat yourself up about it. Yeah, I mean, it's just like all these like, I would have probably been a really different person if I wasn't always like trying to get that validation elsewhere.

- Hailey: You say very clearly that your mother was more the source of your direct trauma and she's still alive. How did him dying change how you wanted to interact with her?

- Nathan: So how I manage it is kind of still an active point of contention in my own mind and in my own life. It's been complicated in part because I actually had some conversations with her around all of this when I was home for Christmas.

And that was tough, but she actually responded a lot better than I was kind of expecting her to. I think she's been, for the first time in her life, like actually going to therapy and taking it seriously recently. I think partly because my dad passed and like she has been going to this grief counselor and also her father passed in the months before as well. So she's been through a lot. I didn't mention in the voicemail, but my mom and dad lost their first child and I don't think ever really fully grappled with that. So after he passed, I was never gonna be able to tell both of them what had happened or like what I felt had happened. And I think that almost kind of created a need of like, well, I need to tell one of them. I can't have this lack of resolution from both. 

- Hailey: In recording this, do you have an idea of what you wish he would say in response if he could?

- Nathan: Somewhat oddly, I think losing my dad and kind of re-engaging with him in this framework, I think I've kind of figured out that a lot of what I felt like was unexpressed was there but not able to be expressed in a way. I think he felt a lot of stuff that he'd never really allowed himself to feel fully and like express at all. You know, what I would want him to say is what I think was true, which is that he was always proud of me and that he did always love me. I think my dad's ability to express emotionally is in part a product of his upbringing. Also in part a product of just kind of the expectation of men of his generation. And I think he really swallowed that quite a bit. Like I kind of view patriarchal masculinity as like, I think Bell Hooks talks about this a little bit, right? It's this exchange of like, yeah, patriarchy is gonna benefit you, but it's gonna come at the expense of lobotomizing yourself emotionally. And you don't need to do that. I don't think my dad needed to do that. And I think it did a lot of damage in the long run. There are ways of being a man that are not being unable to express things.

(soft music) 

- Thank you for listening to Voicemails for the Dead. You can find links to all the reference texts in our episode description. Our music is provided by Suboctave out of North Carolina. "Voice Mails for the Dead" is entirely listener-funded. If you'd like to support this work, please consider donating on our website, voicemailsforthedead.com. I'm Hailey Taymore Brown, and thank you for listening to another episode.