For a significant portion of my childhood and adolescence, my father was an active alcoholic whose erratic behavior wreaked havoc and chaos on our family and left him a virtual stranger to his children. But when he was away from home my father was a much-loved old-time family doctor. It was not until my father’s funeral, attended by dozens of former patients, that I ever knew anything about my father’s kind, warm, caring bedside manner. That is a source of great sadness to me, a loss and an emptiness I still feel to this day.
|