Zen: In memorium

I found out yesterday that my stepfather died. My sister, Zizzy, with whom I have a tenuous relationship at best, sent me her annual Christmas card. I usually get it in March, but she was later than usual.

In the card she wrote "The big event of 2008 for me was the death of my father. He died of complications of a stroke and Parkinsons. Fortunately he had done some traveling in 2007/2008 and we saw him in Vermont, Ohio and NY." And with that, Zen is dead.

I'm not surprised I wasn't told more. It's not as though Zen liked me and would have wanted me to know (or comment) about what happened to him. But he was my stepfather since I was 10, having met my mom when I was 8. This behavior is normal for that side of my family, in which people stand ready to cut you off for life for so much as a missed thank you note.

I've spent many an hour with various therapists to be told that, basically, my mother and stepfather didn't like me at all. Every time I saw Zen he was furious with me for one reason or another. I would say "So what are you up to these days?" and he'd say "as little as possible" with as much hostility as he could muster, as though somehow it was MY expectations of him that were too high.

The last time I saw Zen was at my brother Lawrence's lavish New York City wedding (reception-at-The-Pierre lavish). My youngest Lindsay had somehow gotten into the tractor beam of some weird guy who kept grabbing her saying "I need to dance with her." Lindsay was about 7 at the time, and I ended up having to physically grab Lindsay and take her to the bathroom to escape this guy. I mentioned it to someone else there, that I was really creeped out by the inappropriate attention being paid to a 7-year-old. Zen found out and went ballistic. He wanted the guy arrested on the spot. For what? I thought, dancing too much with a 7-year-old? The guy hadn't done anything and I was making sure he wouldn't.

Mr. Delcol (sp?) -- the father of the bride -- reassured me that the creepy guy in question "was gay" (as though that would make it OK, which it didn't). I just wanted him away from my kid and wanted no more further embarrassing scenes and told DelCol that. Zen was apoplectic. He wanted the guy taken out in handcuffs and he was furious with me that I didn't share his fury.

That's the last time I saw Zen, but it pretty much defined our relationship. He tended to be furious with me. One year when I went to Colorado to spend Christmas with my dad and asked him to pick me up from the Newark airport, he was so angry at my "thoughtlessness" he drove the entire way from Newark to Princeton at about 95 mph, missing the mailboxes on the side of the road by inches. I've never been so terrified in my life.

So, I suppose that I would find out that he died sometime in 2008 in a belated Christmas card is fitting.

My brothers and I called him Zen after we met him. The first conversation, which became part of family legend, went roughly like this. "This is Mr. Zenowich," mom said.
"You look like Clark Kent," one of us (probably me) said.
"No. I'm more like Mighty Mouse," he said. Hilarity ensued.
We struggled with the name and he said to just call him "Zen." So we did.

Zen had a huge effect on my life and the way I think. He was one of the most intelligent people I ever knew and he shaped me intellectually. He once -- during a moment of honesty -- mentioned that he only liked me intellectually and he would nurture that. I guess what I got from Zen was the gift of original thinking. Zen was an iconoclast, always ready to shatter conventional wisdom.

When I lived at home, he was still struggling to make a career in the publishing world. But he hated it. And he would have fits of temper and quit his jobs, even though he was a really good editor, at least according to those authors he worked with. He had always bragged that he could live "perfectly happily" renting a room, with a bathroom down the hall, in New York, with no job or responsibility. My mom and Zen would have huge, ugly fights, made even uglier the greater the wine intake.

The fights used to freak my little sister Zizzy out. It was just her and me at home because my brothers ran away to my dad's because of the generally abusive nature of the household. (Zen actually broke his had once slamming it on the wooden table because he was angry at my brother.) I assured Zizzy that the marriage was OK. But it wasn't and Zen and my mom lived a kind of twilight marriage, where he would live with her for a while and then sometimes not.

I have no idea how Zen spent his final years. I have been estranged from my mom for a long time, after it became apparent that she planned to take the abusiveness that was her childrearing with me and apply it to my girls. The last time she saw my daughters, she spent most of her time drunkenly yelling at my youngest daughter for being "lazy, just like your mother." The girls made plans to to run away and escape her in the middle of the night. I could only think that I never wanted my daughters to experience what I had had to live with for the first 18 years of my life, so I decided enough was enough.

Zen pretty much was complicit with my mother and all I have left of my childhood are memories of desperately wanting to get away to where I wasn't despised. One time, I was trying to have Zizzy come visit me at college, but Mom and Zen wouldn't allow it until they talked with the psychologist I was seeing. After he spoke with both of them, in separate conversations, the shrink declared them to be the the most "awful" people he'd ever dealt with and his advice to me was to have as little to do with them as I could. Zizzy was never allowed to visit.

So I'm struggling with how, exactly, I deal with such a death. I never really hated Zen that much. But he always made it clear he didn't like me, despite mom's efforts to make us call him "dad." (Um, I already HAVE a dad, I blasphemed.) I can see his contemptuous smirk as I write this "what does this matter to YOU?" he'd say.

I wonder if my sister will let me know that my mom has died via a belated Christmas card.