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From: Jasper
Date: Thursday, March 22, 2007
Time: 11:40:40 PM
Buster, …My vibes on this are the same as Rovaan’s. ………. The death that hit me the hardest and stayed with me the longest was my father’s. I was 19. My father and I were big baseball fans and we always watched televised Tiger games together. A game was coming on that day – Father’s Day, 1966 and I was ashamed that I couldn’t scrape up enough money to buy my dad a gift. So, I stayed in bed for as long as possible to avoid facing him. When I finally decided to get up my father, who had been awake went back to bed. I didn’t know why at the time, I was just glad he did. ………..I watched the game with my brother until about an hour later when we heard my mother scream. It was the most indescribably ghastly scream I had ever heard. ………My brother and I raced to my parents’ bedroom where the screams came from and found my father laying face down on the bed. We knew instantly that he was gone. We could feel it. We performed CPR while my mother called the Emergency Medical Service and kept at it until they arrived. ……… The full force of my feelings about my father’s death did not hit me until after the funereal. I was an emotional wreck for years, although most people didn’t know it because I found so many ways to keep from going there. At the core of these feelings was guilt for hiding from my father when I believed I could have helped him. It did not help to lean that this “guilt” part of grief was normal and that it gives almost everyone with the same protracted pain whenever they play the “If only I had…” or “If only I hadn’t…” mind game. …………I could therefore see what was going on with Fred and Kim although I didn’t know the specifics in their case. I figured that it had something to do with the fact that Fred and Ron were on bad terms when Fred and Kim got the news of Ron’s death. I figured that Kim, perhaps, saw something dangerous in her brother’s lifestyle and felt that she didn’t do enough to put him on a safer path. …………But after witnessing their act with the money for all these years, it started to look as though they really did care more about money than they did Ron – until I read Rovaan’s analysis of what she thought was going on, especially with Fred. …………I think she’s right. Fred did love his son deeply, which is why the guilt part of is grief is hanging on so tenaciously. If he KNOWS he did something that could have led to Ron’s death there is no way he can go there without feeling the full force of what HE did. The surest way of sustaining emotional denial is to find someone else to blame for your feelings, to tell ourselves, I don’t feel guilty; I feel hurt and angry – and it all that other guy’s fault. I believe that the worst thing that could happen to Fred and the best thing that could happen to O.J. is for Fred to collect every dime of the award. –Jasper