Compassion Through Understanding

This is my father. On the back of this photo he wrote, in his squiggly, septuagenarian handwriting,

Bob Scott

1943

Age 19

Silver Star

Midway and Sub Crew

I chose this picture because it reminds me that at one time my dad was a kid and the person I saw growing up wasn't the same person. Just knowing that helps me come to terms with all the shit my brothers and sisters went through as children. 

My father was in the Navy during WW2. He told me multiple times that his small stature ensured he would serve on subs. And he did...on the USS Pickerel. For what ever reason (because my dad always had a different story as to why) he stayed back at Midway while the Pickerel went on it's last mission. It was sunk off the coast of Japan. The first sub lost in that area. He was on that sub when it was hit roughly a year earlier. 

After WW2 my dad enlisted in the Army. He served as a warrant officer as a CID investigator during the Korean War. It was in Korea where he was shot in the leg by some low level black market vendor, an American...his words, not mine. Other accounts vary, sometimes it was a Korean. A lot of the variations depended on how much Seagram's he drank that night. He had the DD214 and Purple Heart to prove something happened. The details were always bullshit. These days I tend to think those stories were a way for him to forget what really happened.

My father was an interesting person in a character development sort of way. I could never create a character with such complexity well enough. My father did it though. 

My whole conscious life I have looked at my father as full of shit.

It's all justified. 

From the time he left our family to start a new family when I was four, me sitting in front of our apartment at ten, waiting three hours for my dad to pick me up for a Dodgers game, being left stranded at multiple locations in the US and Mexico, and everything in between, I have abandonment issues. 

I'm working on it.

I hated my dad for a long time. All my life I saw the conman, the grifter. I bought into what I saw as his humanitarian side, then rejected it. Now, years later I find myself seeing it for what it was...a broken person wanting to help other broken people.

This is where a potential mindfuck comes into play. 

My father was an alcoholic and junky on and off all of my life. He had some clean moments typical of a lifelong addiction. Most of my memories are a mix of both clean and using. My father was also a master's level psychologist, and later got an honorary doctorate. He worked in the field of addiction as a counselor, and later executive director of treatment centers in Southern California, Arizona and Indiana. 

Years earlier, after getting out of prison in Florida he was clean. He moved back to my grandparents, and enrolled in college. While there, in the throes of newfound sobriety, he helped start a lot of AA groups in Southern Indiana as well as getting involved in the General Baptist Church, eventually being ordained. It was also during college that my dad met my mom. 

I recently found out that my parent's marriage was one of convenience for my pops. Religious beliefs of others had a part. That's a whole story in and of itself. It's one I'm still processing, but I will write about it I'm sure. 

This year has been one of healing. In the process of figuring out why I am the way I am I have been able to see the why in those closest to me. It's like I have grown in empathy for those who have hurt me. At least those with a blood attachment.

My relationship with both of my dead parents has been a rollercoaster of love and hate. But now the cars have stopped and the bar is lifting and it's time to exit the ride on the love side. 

I'm not saying what they did is cool. I will never justify it. But I understand the why now. 

My whole life has been spent alone, yelling, "WHY!" into the wilderness. I am starting to get an understanding. 

And with understanding there is compassion. 

And with compassion there is love.