A Song For My Father; Two articles about my dad Joe Jackson Senior

In the Sunday Independent today April 16th there is an article titled ‘It’s Like Watching Your Dad Slip into Senility.’It’s sub-headline claims I believe patients like my dad, having ECT, should be listened to.’ But more than that my point was that ECT should not be forced on patients without their permission, as it currently can be, in Ireland. Also the headline sadly omitted the words ‘at only 44.’ The article is also heavily edited. Here is the article as I wrote it. And that will be followed by a more extensive article on the same subject.

A Family Torn Apart By ECT. Joe Jackson

‘I hate the bastard doctors who proscribed ECT for my father. It’s tearing him, me, and my whole family to shreds. May those doctors rot in hell.’
That’s what I wrote in my diary on October 10th 1972. Not exactly the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi, is it? Nevertheless, nearly forty years later, even though I now am disinclined to damn nameless doctors and know that Electro-convulsive therapy can help some people, it still is something I despise.
These days I hate it more than ever. Why? Because my mother, who is 85, hospitalised, and recovering from a stroke, sometimes looks back over her life and says, sadly, not knowing that I wrote in that diary entry, “the day your daddy had his first session of ECT is the day our family began to fall apart.”
So, I welcome the news that the government, under the watchful eye of Health Minister Kathleen Lynch, intends to overhaul the Mental Health Act 2001. Better still, among planned reforms is the lifting of restrictions that prevent patients from taking legal action against psychiatrists, plus the enactment of a new law prohibiting ECT without the permission of a patient.
The government also wants the views of “interested parties.” Ok, so maybe the powers-that-be can learn something from my dad’s story. That said it would be a travesty of his life were I to focus only on the monster he often became as a result of ECT. First, let me give you an insight into how precise, lyrical, and poetic his mind was before it was ravaged by those electrodes. .
One night in May 1972, I read in the Radio Times that a TV show to be broadcast that evening, which was called, That Monday Morning Feeing, was about, ‘men who work on an assembly line’ and ‘perform a vital job’ which nonetheless can be ‘dull, mindless, and soul destroying.’ The latter was precisely how I saw my job at the time, as an apprentice sheet metalworker, which I’d become, in part, to please my father, even though I’d always wanted to be a journalist. I hoped we’d talk about this after the show ended. We did.
“I’m looking at the height of your forehead and if one can judge anything from that, you have greater potential than I had at your age,” he said, initiating the conversation. “But you can see, from that TV show, that whatever you go on to do in life, your task is set out for you. It’s going to take unceasing effort. It’s going to take fighting on when you are sick and tired of the whole lot. It’s going to take what Kipling there, (dad points to a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If on his bookshelf) says is the strength to, ‘Force your heart and nerve and sinew/To serve their turn long after they are gone/And so hold on when there is nothing in you/Except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on’.”
“So, what happened in terms of you and your dreams?”
“I didn’t make it because I didn’t put enough effort into it. But having read all of Behan’s plays, Joyce, Shaw, Shakespeare, I have always cherished the secret dream, which I know now will never be realised, of being a – I won’t say ‘author’ because that implies your primary goal is getting published – literary creator. But I would like to see you taking up journalism, if that is your thing.”
He was a remarkable man, right? And my life was re-routed by even that one conversation, which went on for hours – I’d been making an audiocassette of that TV show so I secretly recorded part of our chat – and was representative of hundreds we’d already had. That night I wrote in my diary, ‘it breaks my heart to hear dad say he is giving up on his dreams. But I shall become a journalist and a literary creator, for both of us or die in the attempt, so help me God.’
Tragically, my father and I never had another conversation quite like that. Four months alter he had his first session of ECT. Not that I was informed what was happening. All I knew was that tea time one day he suddenly seem unable to complete a sentence, and kept asking over and over again the same kind of fragmented question, such as “Joseph, that shirt, hanging, is that, on the door, yours?” even though mom kept reminding he’d bought it that day. Then, my father flicked open my 8 mm movie camera, as if he’d forgotten that exposure to light would damage the film. Worse still, when I asked, “dad, what are you doing?” he looked at me as if he couldn’t understand what I was saying, regarded me as stupid to ask that question, and didn’t seem to know who I was.
Finally, I followed mom to the scullery and asked what was going on. She told me that doctors wanted dad to “go away for a while, to St. John of Gods” – this thought chilled me as I knew that was an institution for the mentally disturbed – but he didn’t want this “social stigma” imposed on his family so he choose, instead, to have “some kind of treatment to cure depression.” But it was what mom told me next that remains a savage indictment of how families were kept in the dark, and had their darkness deepened vis-à-vis ECT, in 1972.
“But your daddy couldn’t tell me exactly what the treatment was because they don’t seem to have told him,” she said, starting to cry. “They couldn’t have. Because this morning I said, “Joe, do you want me to go up to John of God’s with you?’ and he said, “No, Phyllis, it’s ok. But will you leave out my togs and a few sandwiches; I’ll probably go for a dip when I get back.” Then, a few hours later, I got a phone call from some nurse who gave out hell to me. She said, “your husband should not have come up here on his own for this treatment, someone better take him home.” So, I went up, and Joseph, Jesus help me, I will never forget, until the day I die, the state your daddy was in.”
A few weeks mom learned dad was having ECT, which was not explained to my family, and we were not allowed to discuss. So, I wrote about it in my diary.
‘Dad’s ‘cure’ for depression has left him more depressed than ever. Once he told me that a son should never see his father cry, now he’s crying all the time, especially on his own late at night, listening to Sinatra LPs like No One Cares. And he accuses mom and me of talking about him, even when we aren’t. He can’t even spell simple words anymore. It’s horrible, like seeing your father slip into senility even though he is only 44. And I can’t help him in any way because he’s not talking to me. It’s even getting dangerous for us to be in the same room. His mood changes so quickly into a sudden rage, usually directed at me. He’s taking it all out on me, says mom, and even that fact alone is breaking her heart. It’s all so sad.’
Then on October 10th, the date I wrote the diary entry with which I opened this article, dad and I had a conversation that ruptured my psyche. It started with me walking into our living room, near midnight and him saying, “sit down, or I’ll knock you down, no, stay standing until I tell you to go to bed.” It ended three hours later, with dad decrying my “imbecilic efforts to communicate” and then musing, aloud, “ If I had to look back over my life and see you as its end product, I’d have to say, frankly, that my life had been a waste of time.”
The moment those words sliced into my skull, I heard a child scream deep inside me. Before I knew what I was doing, I punched my fist through a glass frame on dad’s shelf. When he saw the blood on my knuckles he smiled, and said, “Now you can go to bed.”
You get the picture. It’s not a pretty one. But this is what happened to my family in l972, thanks to that “cure “ for depression, Electro-convulsive therapy. Therapy. Two years later, I finally decided I had to leave home. Three years after that, my mother made the same decision. We loved the man but couldn’t take his behaviour anymore.
That’s why there was no one in the family home to save my father’s life when he fell down the stairs one night in 1978. It was only afterwards, while reading his diaries; I discovered that apart from being introduced to the delights of ECT in 1972 he also was proscribed, as part of his “cure” for depression, the uppers and downers that, to a great degree, led to his death. So, now you know why I still despise ECT.
See Joe Jackson’s articles about his father on his website joejacksonjournalist.com.

This article is the sole copyright of Joe Jackson and may not be used in whole, or in part, without his written consent.

The Joe Jackson Files. The Strength to Dream. Joe Jackson Senior.

“So, what’s your book about?” is a question I hate being asked these days in relation to a memoir I am writing. In fact, I usually joke, in response, “Well, actually, I hope it will be about six by four inches in size and about 14.99!”
Why is that question such a pain in the ass to me? Simply because I find it so hard to stand outside something I am writing and label it coldly, truthfully, analytically. That’s why, knowing I would soon have to do just this in order to make a “sales pitch” for my literary agent I was delighted when a friend of mine, a fellow journalist, read sections and said, so succinctly, “This is the story of a father with a secret and son with a dream.” Stand up Beibhinn Byrne and take a bow!
That said, I later realised, this also is the story of a mother driven to near suicide by that father yet saved, in part, by her love for, and by love from, that son. And that drawn into this psychological maelstrom are, the son’s girlfriend, best friend, and sister, meaning, fundamentally, it is the story of a family that falls from grace.
And out of all that came this article in which I will focus, largely, on the single factor that my mother and I still agree contributed, above all else, to our family’s fall from grace. Namely, the eight sessions of Electro Convulsive Therapy my dad had in 1972. However it would be unfair to my father – who, incidentally, I never stopped loving, a fact Nuala O’ Faolain once told me she found hard to believe – if I focused only on his/our fall. So, first let’s flash back to the greatest high, in every sense; even literally, he and I shared during my childhood. In fact, pretend I am Rod Taylor in The Time Machine, and I’ll set our time switch to a night in 1964.
“Go on, Joseph” my dad says, as he pushes me past a watchman’s hut on the Christiani and Nielsen building site at the West Pier in Dun Laoghaire. “But be quiet! I don’t want your man to hear us, though he’s probably pissed and asleep!”
Then dad punches me in the side as if he’s forgotten this tickles me and makes me laugh. So, I bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud as we dash towards what he tells me is “the biggest tower crane in Ireland”. Then he pauses, takes a breath laughs, says, “And, just imagine, that makes your ol’ man, who as you know is the biggest bastard in Ireland, the driver of this country’s biggest tower crane, right!”
“Right!” I say. And I love it when dad jokes about being a “bastard”. Especially this summer, a time we’ve spent so many afternoons driving around Dublin trying to find this real mother and father. Just like I hated it, when dad told me he was only eleven, playing a match in the “Pres Grounds” in Glasthule, when some fella said, after he scored a goal, “I wouldn’t be getting so uppity about meself if I was you, sure you’re only a dirt bird’s droppings”. Imagine, that was the terrible way dad learned he learned he was “illegitimate”. Don’t want to think about that now.
“Not bad for someone who started out as a child labourer, after I got out of that hellhole in Glencree, is it son?
“No, dad. It’s great” I reply. But I don’t want to think about his time in Remand School, either, where he was sent “for stealing a few measly rashers” and Oblate Christian Brothers, he says, “seemed to get great delight from beating the shite out of kids” like him. So, instead I think of something funny, like how, today at the dinner table mom said she had a “little Ulster” on her toe and we all laughed, including her, when dad explained, “The word is ‘ulcer’, Phyllis, not ‘Ulster’! ” Then dad told us what mom said was called a “Malapropism”, and this was named after a Mrs Malaprop, from a play, who “mixes up words.” Must remember that.
But now all that meters is that we are standing beside the half built base of the new Kish lighthouse. Or, to be more precise, as dad always tells me I must be, especially if I want to become a journalist, what he says is called its “caisson”. That word reminds him of some fella from another play, by Shakespeare, and me of ‘Cassius’, as in Clay. Though I know ‘The Greatest’, would deck me for using his old name now that he’s known as ‘Mohammad Ali’. But, as I listen to the waves swoosh against that caisson what really, nearly knocks me on my back is the fact that I’ve gotten this close to its three concentric – there’s another of those big words dad uses and loves me to use – walls with their diameter of 104 feet! People tell me I’m tall for my age but right now, I fell like David gazing up at Goliath.
Then, as I lean back even more to look up the full length of that tower my gob obviously drops open, and dad jokes, “So, Joseph, are you trying to catch flies in your mouth?” I want to reply, “No, but I was thinking that crane must be as tall as the Daily Planet Building I thought was real, until the day I told you, “That’s where I want to get a job with Clark Kent” and you said, “The Daily Planet is just a makey-up office for comics, son!” But before I can say anything dad locks my mouth open, maybe forever, by telling me he wants me to climb that tower so I can see its cabin! Is he mad? What if I fall? Does dad think I am Superboy, and can fly?
“And don’t worry, if you fall, I’ll be behind, to catch you!” he assures me, as if reading my mind as we seem able to do. So, as always, trusting whatever my father tells me, I climb. Then he follows and starts yapping non-stop but I know he’s only trying to keep me from being afraid I will fall. If so, he’s chosen the wrong story.
“So, did I ever tell you that some of the lads throw themselves in the harbour there, then tell the foreman they fell in, so he’ll send them home for the day?”
“No, dad.”
“Well, they do. And he does. And the fella, lovely man, doesn’t notice, or if he does, he never says, that this always happens on Thursday, after we get our pay and the lads are gutting to go up to Smith’s pub for a pint! But what they do is wrong, they’re telling lies, which you know I hate. What do I tell you about honesty?”
“Without honesty we have sweet –“
“ Sweet fuck all, right! But don’t ever let me hear you use language like that, ok!”
“Ok”.
But I’m only half listening, trying not to look down. Then I almost miss my step because I swear to God I see Konga rising out of the water, just like I always seem to, since I saw that King Kong type picture, where he surfaces outside the harbour in Dalkey. I close my eyes. Open them. He’s gone. Lucky for him, I reckon because me, and dad, together, could easy beat the bollix out of Konga, or any monster.
“Joseph, re you ok? You’re very quiet.”
“Fine, just trying to get to the top.”
“Aren’t we all? That should be your motto!”
At last, we’re standing in the cabin.
“That part of the crane, there, is the slewing unit” dad tells me. “It makes the jib and machinery arm rotate so don’t touch that lever or we’re all in trouble!”
All? There’s no one else in this cabin except you and me dad, so was that a malapropism I want to ask but don’t. But I sure do want to pull that lever.
“Joseph, ever hear of a book called Ulysses?”
“I saw the picture.”
“How could you? They never made a picture of Ulysses!”
“They did. It starred Kirk Douglas.”
“Not that fucking Ulysses!” dad says, laughing. “I’m talking about a book that is, ok, based, in part, on the Greek myth of Ulysses, and that’s what that picture you saw was about. But the book I’m talking about is set in Dublin at the start of this century and it comes to my mind, now, son, simply because it starts there.”
I turn around. Dad is pointing towards Sandycove.
“In that Tower” he continues.
“Joyce’s tower?”
“Exactly! And that’s who wrote the book, James Joyce, the man with the same initials as you and me, and who happens to be the world’s best writer. Maybe even, in a sense, the world’s best journalist. He writes part of Ulysses as a newspaper! ”
“But I bet he’s not better than Clark Kent and can’t fly!”
“ Of course he’s better than Clark fucking Kent! But, Joseph, Joyce would find it very fucking hard to fly right now because he’s dead! Yet, when he was alive, the man could fly; believe me, on the wings of his words. Better still, he could take us with him. But Ulysses really is the world’s best book – the tower crane of literature! And I want you to read it when you get older. By then, one hopes it won’t still be banned in this God-forsaken piss pot of a country. Know where I had to read it?”
“Here, when no one was looking?”
“No, though I do read Joyce here during my breaks! Today I was reading his play Exiles, which he wrote before Ulysses, but after another book I want you to read, Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, which is written in the voice of that young man as he grows older, a marvellous literary device. But, no, I read Ulysses in the library of Trinity College, every Saturday, for weeks. And it wasn’t easy for me, as a “common labourer” to even walk through the gates of Trinity, a place for rich people. But know what I said to myself walking through those gates?”
“Just try stop me?”
“Pretty much! Though, actually, what I thought was, “fuck this shit!” And I want you to promise me now, Joseph, you will always kick out against that kind of shit.”
“I promise.”
“Good. But another reason I thought of Ulysses after we climbed up that tower is because, James Joyce also based that book on the Greek myth of a father, Daedalus, and his son, Icarus. Now I could tell you their story, but I won’t. Why? Because when we go home I want you to go to our new, New Elizabethan Reference Dictionary, look up the section on Classical mythology and learn about that myth.”
And so, I did. I also, incidentally, when dad wasn’t watching, pulled that lever, which sent the jib and machinery arm circling, made him laugh and say, “I should have known you’d do that!” and ruffle my hair, a feeling I loved. But here we must leave our modern day Daedalus and Icarus – the father who made wings for himself and his son and sealed them with wax which melted when Icarus flew too close to the sun thus sending him plummeting into the sea – and focus on our bloody fall.
To do so, I’ll set our Time Machine at September 1972, when I’m in a high again. This time, Killiney Hill but even more so romantically, because I am discovering the joys of making love, with my girlfriend. Then, we head back to Eden Villas.
“Joseph, Frieda, you must have been able to smell the fry from Killiney, you’re just in time for tea!” says my mom as we walk into the living room. But something is wrong. She looks distracted, sad. I become anxious, follow here to the scullery.
“You ok?”
“I’m fine, son, just sit down, and I’ll get your tea.”
Even so, I sense mom isn’t hiding something from me. Yet, I do as I’m told, stroll into the living room, can’t believe what I see, then race to the dinner table.
“Where’s the fire, Joseph?” dad asks, making me feel even more confused.
“No fire, dad” I reply; as I almost slap his right hand away from my cine camera, and slam its side panel closed. “But, surely you know if you let light in there it could ruin the film, that Frieda and I we were making today up on Killiney Hill.”
What the fuck is happening? My father is looking at me as if he isn’t aware of that fact, and doesn’t know me.
“Don’t get your fucking knickers in a twist, I was only checking to see how it works” dad says, before smiling across at my sister, who is sitting beside Frieda. I sit down beside her as he continues. “Killiney? I know – Audrey, that’s – It’s -”
“It’s what dad?” asks Audrey.
“Killiney, love, where your brother and his girlfriend go a lot for – Seems to be – So, Joseph, did you just say you were using this thing here to make a film today?”
“Yes dad” I reply, staggered by the fact that he seems unable to form a sentence.
Then, thank God, mom walks in, before dad can ask exactly what Frieda and I were filming, places Audrey’s fry, then his, on the table, pours his tea. He seems fixated on the tea strainer, as if he’s never seen one before. Am I going mad?
“Joseph will you help me with the next two plates, they’re roasting hot from the oven?” mom says. But it’s a request I don’t understand because I can see that between her fingers and those hot plates she, as usual, has placed a dishcloth.
“Mom, what’s happening?” I ask as she absentmindedly cleans the frying pan.
“Dad opened my camera, as if it he didn’t know what he was doing, and he’s acting strange. Did something happen today that I don’t know about?”
“Yes, love. Though what, exactly, I can’t tell you because I don’t know. But your daddy has been acting funny since he came back from -”
“Where?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you.”
“Says who?”
“Your daddy.”
“Mom, I need to know.”
“And I need to tell you. So, ok, last night your daddy sat me down on the sofa and told me that doctors wanted him to go away, for a while, to John Of Gods.”
Those last three words seem to echo like a death knell.
“But, mom that’s a place for people who are mentally disturbed.”
“I know it is, son. And I got the shock of my life when your daddy told me. But the doctors said that’s what would beat his depressions. Yet, he told them and he said to me, last night, God love him, “Phyllis, I don’t want to be locked away because I don’t want anyone saying to the children, ‘wasn’t your daddy in the nuthouse?’ It’s bad enough people that know their father was born a bastard’.”
Mom can’t finish saying that sentence, and I can’t absorb what she is saying, without us both starting to cry. But we fight the tears with a shared intake of breath.
“So instead, your daddy said he’d let them give him some kind of treatment. But he couldn’t tell me what it was because they don’t seem to have told him, exactly. They couldn’t have. Because this morning I said to him, “ Joe, do you want me to go up there with you?” and he said, “No, Phyllis, it’s ok, but will you leave out my togs, a towel and a few sandwiches, I’ll probably go for a dip when I get back.”
Mom pauses, again fighting tears. I hug her.
“Then a few hours later, I got a phone call and some nurse starts giving out hell to me. She says, ‘Mrs Jackson, your husband shouldn’t have been allowed to come up here on his own, for this treatment, someone better come and take him home’. So, I got the bus up to John of Gods, and Joseph, Jesus help me, I will never forget till the day I die, the state your daddy was in. He was like a baby, babbling, saying the same things over and over but nothing made sense. Then – and this really broke my heart, son – when we got off the bus in Dun Laoghaire, he held my hand. Your daddy hasn’t done that for, oh I don’t know how long, since, you were a baby.”
Now mom and I can’t help but cry. But when she starts to dry her tears in that dishcloth I reach across, take it from her hands – God almighty no sight hurts me more than seeing tears in those pale blue eyes – and say “that’s dirty, use this”. Then I lift the rim of my shirt and as mom stoops down, she suddenly seems to become my child and I wish to God I could protect her from all pain for all time.
Minutes later, I sit back down at the dinner table, dad looks at me, says, “Joseph, am I seeing things or have you been -”
“No dad, splashes from the pan got into my eyes, I splashed them with water.”
But Frieda, for one, doesn’t believe me.
“Ok, but there was something I wanted to, to, to -” he continues. “Ask you. Oh yeah, that jazzy shirt there, see, hanging on the coal room door, yours, is it?”
“No, dad.”
“It’s yours Joe”, mom responds tentatively, as she enters the room. “We bought it today, in McCullough’s, after getting off the bus from – Well, anyway, you saw it in the shop window, said you thought it was nice, so we bought it, remember?”
“If I fucking remembered I wouldn’t be asking Joseph if the shirt was his, would I?” dad suddenly roars so angrily it startles us all. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that fucking thing. Now why don’t we all shut up, watch TV, and have our tea?”
And so descended The Silence – to cull a concept from the Ingmar Bergman movie of that name -which came to settle, like a shroud, on our home over the following two months while my father had what I’d later learn were his eight weekly sessions of ECT. How I learned, I’ll tell you, later.
But before that happened, even my mom noted, much to her distress, that dad – for some reason neither of us could fathom – seemed to be “taking it all out on” me. His depressions, far from being cured, also seemed to deepen and were, truly most painfully apparent, to me, on those nights, after I went to bed, and I could hear him downstairs listening to LP’s like Sinatra’s No One Cares, and sobbing to himself.
And so, I’d cry, too, for my father. Especially – at least whenever I’d remember John Lennon once said that people only cause pain when they are in pain – if I’d asked, en route to bed, “dad, are you ok?” only to be told, “Why don’t you fuck off, you stupid cunt?” Or else, other nights, I’d write tearful diary entries such as this.
‘Can anyone but me know how sad this is? My father, the man who once told me he has devoured dictionaries and who nurtured dreams of being what he called “a literary creator” – that golden gauntlet I picked up the night he threw it down –
now needs me to help him write letters. He can’t even remember how to spell simple words. It’s like dad has suddenly become senile at the age of forty-five.’
Then came my first long dark night of the soul, if not the night that ruptured my soul. It certainly made me cling even more desperately to my anthem, Elvis Presley’s recording, If I Can Dream and, even more specifically, to its lines,
‘As long as a man has the strength to dream/He can redeem his soul, and fly.’
In fact, my continuing faith in the promise of those lines – which, having come close to death three times, I’ve already decided I want on my tombstone – is why I really have no choice other than to call this memoir The Strength To Dream. But, in this article, I must skim, relatively speaking, over the details of that night, simply because its facts have only recently become known to my mom and cause her grief.
Ok, what happened, on October 10th 1972, my girlfriend’s 17th birthday, was that I gave her, on the wishing steps on Killiney Hill, a Claddagh ring, with two hearts entwined and on which I had engraved ‘Freejoe’ – an abbreviated form of Frieda and Joe – thus making her “happier than ever before” and then I came home to this.
“Sit down before I knock you fucking down” dad says as I enter the living room. He is sitting on a sofa. “No, on second thoughts, stay standing until I tell you to move. I hear you bought your girlfriend a ring for her birthday and that – this – that thought makes me want to puke. I have been out of work for a month and you never bought me (snaps his fingers) that, not even a pack of cigarettes.”
“I didn’t know you were so broke that you -”
“There’s a lot you don’t know and think you do but what I really want to say is – What was it? Yeah, every day of your life, you prove your so-called love for Elvis fucking Presley and for your girlfriend and you say you love me, so prove you do.”
“How can I do that dad?”
“Action speaks louder than words and you could have proved your ‘love’ for your father over this last month by buying him a pack of cigarettes, couldn’t you?”
“I just didn’t think of it.”
“But you thought of it to buy your girlfriend a copy of that Rod McKuen LP and not me, didn’t you?”
“That was early in the summer. You weren’t out of work then.”
“It’s the thought that fucking counts. In fact, I have a list here, of all the – I mean, I made, of all the – Where the fuck did I put that list?”
As dad rummages through his pockets, mumbling, “fuck it, fuck it, fuck it” like some demented version of the blessed trinity, I want to cry out ‘Christ help us.’
“Forget it, I can’t find that list” he says, finally. “But I will, do you hear me?”
“Yes, dad.”
“But I do remember is you calling me, last time we talked, an insensitive animal.”
“ I didn’t.”
“Don’t fucking make me get up off this chair, Joseph, or you will live to regret it, if you live. Did you, or didn’t you, fucking tell me you thought I was insensitive?”
“I never said you were an animal. All I said was that you seem to have become insensitive to the feelings of others and hypersensitive when it comes to your own feeling. Like when you think me and mom are talking about you and we’re not.”
“That’s the same as calling me an insensitive animal. So, I suppose now you’ll tell me you didn’t say you think I am sick.”
“I will. Because just like I’d never use the world ‘animal’ to describe my father and kill anyone who did, I’d never say you are ‘sick’. I merely suggested that your hypersensitivity, in this sense, might go back to normal when your treatment ends.”
“So, are you saying I am abnormal?”
“No, dad, I’m saying current circumstances are abnormal.”
“And what the fuck do you know about my ‘treatment’?”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, dad.”
“Then you better watch every word, every fucking syllable that comes out of your mouth or you will find out exactly what a ‘sick’, ‘abnormal’, ‘animal’, can do.”
So it continued for an hour, maybe three, with me standing there, pleading my case for the love this son feels for his father, until finally, I realised he couldn’t hear a word I was saying – at least if it contradicted what he was feeling. Then he said:
“You know what I was thinking tonight, if I had to look back over my life and see you as its end product, I’d have to say, frankly, my life had been a waste of time.”
Hearing those words, ‘I swear I heard a child scream’ – as I said in a poem I wrote later that night, which I called, taking my cue from a song by Richard Harris, Cries For Broken Children – then I turned and punched, on my father’s bookshelf, the glass frame that surrounded my Confirmation photograph. Some shards of glass remained caked in my knuckles, which began to bleed, some fell onto out carpet.
“Pick up every fucking piece of that glass” my father hissed, in response, as he rose to his feet, formed a fist, with his right hand, and looked like he was about to beat to a pulp the first person who ever called him a “bastard.” Then he stopped.
Why? Because he saw tears in my eyes, I hoped. But that hope was ripped right out of my heart when I saw dad smile, then heard him say, as if delighting in the fact that he had finally broken the son he sometimes called “Cool Hand Luke”. Then, compounding my pain a thousandfold, he said, “You can go to bed now, I’m finished with you” as if he was disowning me, like he’d been disowned at birth.
But it wasn’t until five minutes later, when I woke my mom, saying, “I need to talk to you”, told her the least hurtful details of what had happened and she said,
“Joseph, I blame that bloody ECT treatment your daddy is on” I first heard any mention of this particular ‘treatment’. And so, later again, I wrote in my diary, ‘Fuck the bastard doctors who prescribed ECT for dad, because, whatever it is, it’s tearing him, our family, and me to shreds. May they, and their families, rot in hell”.
Histrionic little fucker, wasn’t I? So, now that I older, seemingly more sensible, rational, and mature, have my views on ECT tempered, even slightly? No. That’s why I would say to anyone considering so called Electro Convulsive ‘Therapy’, think about it ten thousand times, and then think about it again. Then, when you do, remember that it has been outlawed in certain States of the USA and that, here in our own country, there is a group called Mind Freedom Ireland who are trying to get involuntary ECT banned. I’m with them. So, too, I guess my father would be.
But I’ll never know for sure, will I? Why? Because – and here’s my real punch line in relation to ECT – after my dad had that savage ‘treatment’ he became addicted to the pills he was prescribed, and, when he didn’t have those pills, to alcohol, both of which killed him at the age of only fifty. And I found his body.
So, if you meet me at a party, don’t, whatever you do, mention fucking ECT.
© Joe Jackson. See chapter of The Strength To Dream at joejacksonjournalist.com.