My father died last year, at 81, shortly after his first round of chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer. We’d never been close, even in the years before his depression made closeness impossible. Still, his passing left a hole I’ve been trying to patch up ever since.
Nikolay Nazaryan was a difficult man who never got to live the life he thought he deserved. His deteriorating mental health warped our family life. I know I’ve inherited some of his anxious tendencies, and I wonder every day whether I can overcome them so that my three children remember me as the shelter, not the storm.
My father was raised in the conservative Soviet republic of Armenia, then still reeling from the genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire and, more recently, the terrors of Stalinism. He studied physics in Leningrad and eventually became an instructor. My mother was one of his undergraduate students. They married and moved to a communal apartment in the city’s northern suburbs, where my brother and I were raised.
My earliest memories of him are the ones I cherish. Like the frigid night he rescued two kids abandoned in the decrepit courtyard beneath our windows and got them home safe. He never drank, never cheated or stole.
But he once hit my mother across the face: a loud argument, followed by the quick flash of his hand. Even then, I suspect that a darkness was welling up within him. I’ve never forgotten that moment; it plays behind my eyes during every argument with my wife. Will this be the one where I turn into him?
***
We arrived in the United States with the last wave of Soviet Jews in 1989 when I was ten, settling in the suburbs of Connecticut. My mother adjusted more quickly than my father did, learning to wear high heels and drive a car. Her brother, who had come a decade earlier, had a successful tech company and an office in Trump Tower.
Meanwhile, my dad struggled to learn English. He couldn’t find a job in his field — X-ray spectrometry — and had to deliver pizza. He once spent several months trying to predict Powerball winners, even building his own fiberglass chamber to simulate the bouncing balls. Of course it didn’t work. Nothing seemed to.
So he seethed. There were more outbursts, as well as constant concerns about neighbors calling the cops.
I became the vehicle for his American dreams. While other kids were playing soccer or football after school, my father gave me advanced math lessons using a Russian textbook. He shouted, threatened and catastrophized: How could I get into M.I.T. if I couldn’t remember my trigonometric derivatives? I’d shout right back. The real takeaway from those afternoons was how to use emotions as weapons.
Around that time, a deep anxiety settled over my dad. He spent my high school years certain he was suffering from a mysterious gastric ailment. He briefly became convinced that cancer was contagious, once breaking out into tears when I accepted a glass of water from a friend’s dying father.
He also worried about microplastics, PFAS chemicals and radiation, which, to be fair, was prescient. He said American culture was idiotic and that American drivers were reckless. Through his eyes, we came to see the world as a minefield.
How my father’s pathologies coalesced into depression, I’m not sure. I just remember coming home from college and going to a psychiatric ward, where he was preparing for his first treatment of electroconvulsive therapy. It helped until it didn’t. He spent his last 20 years in a fog of anguish, largely beyond our grasp.
***
Now, I’m trying to make sense of his life while continuing to define my own. There’s a gutting line in “Reunion,” John Cheever’s classic short story about fatherhood, that haunts me. Watching his father amble across Grand Central Station, the story’s young protagonist sees: “my future and my doom. I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations.”
Like my father, I am prone to hypochondria and anxiety — and have wasted hours on the internet looking at pictures of cancerous moles. My 9-year-old son seems to have similar tendencies. How will I support him while waging my own campaigns?
Somehow I have to. As the buffer between my father and my kids, I want them to keep his memory without repeating his mistakes. Every interaction they observe me engage in feels like a chance to teach them about communication, self-control and emotional calibration.
As a scientist’s son, I also look to research for guidance. Psychology was once hyper-focused on mothers, often blaming them for a child’s mental health issues. But we now know that fathers play an equal role, for good or ill, in determining their children’s well-being. For instance, this month, a new study found that having a father with depression was associated with a dramatically higher levels of combativeness and hyperactivity, as well as lagging social skills.
At the same time, most dads who are surveyed say they need more mental health treatment options, even if it’s as simple as having friends and family check in on them more often. Some might see these findings as tragic, and perhaps they are. But they also present a challenge, an invitation to show my children we need not be doomed by a mental health condition we inherit.
But I also wanted to know what an expert thought, so I called up Daniel B. Singley, a psychologist and director of the Center for Men’s Excellence in San Diego. “It’s the heritability of a vulnerability, not a condition,” he said. Nurture has as much to say as nature.
Interviewing Dr. Singley was a little like a therapy session in itself. After hearing my story, he suggested being open about mental health with my children as a powerful way to establish trust and model good communication.
There are also other tools. I’ve become a passionate runner and recently took up kayaking. Gardening has been surprisingly relaxing. And yes, I’ve sought professional help when needed. Meds have quieted my anxiety and cognitive behavioral therapy tricks — breathing techniques, mnemonic devices — have done wonders.
My father never got to become a famous physicist or see his son go to M.I.T. Worse, he couldn’t ask for help until it was too late. As I held my father’s hand for the last time almost one year ago, tears streaked his emaciated face. There were still campaigns he wanted to fight. I suppose I will have to wage them on his behalf.
Read by Alexander Nazaryan
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
The post My Father Never Escaped His Rage and Anxiety. Can I? appeared first on New York Times.
