My Father Never Escaped His Rage and Anxiety. Can I?
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?
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