Articles written by

Kate Wenner

I took care of my father in the last months of his life as he battled stomach cancer. I slept in the bedroom next to his, monitoring every hour of his day and night, and I treasured our closeness -- in large part because it came so late in his life. Before his illness, he always kept us all at arm's length. He was quick to anger if we challenged him, intolerant of scrutiny of any kind. And then, only weeks before I lost him forever, I learned why.

He had gone in eight short months from being a skiing, bike-racing, dating man of 70 to a shrunken, exhausted soul with paper-thin skin, and in this condition he revealed to my brother, sister and me the shameful secret he had kept buried since childhood: when he was 14, his mother and sister had deliberately set fire to their dry goods shop to collect insurance money. It was late at night, and the couple who lived in the apartment above the store came running out from the flames, screaming and carrying their children in their arms. They could have easily been killed.

My father had no part in planning the arson, but he saw what happened, and it changed his life forever.

''I came from people who were despicable,'' he told us through a flood of tears. ''They set this fire out of their own greed. I tried to excuse it by telling myself that survival forced us to do these things.'' He looked anguished. ''Survival? We had enough to eat. We had a place to sleep. We had our own store. Some of our neighbors considered us rich. To risk killing children so you can make a fancier store? That's evil. I was part of evil. Now you see why I'm ready to die?''

My brother asked, ''Are you saying you deserve to die?''

''No, no,'' he insisted. ''It's not that. It's that I'm tired of living with shame. I've held on to it all these years. I'm exhausted from trying to cover up, driving and driving myself. Dying is the way I can let go of it at last.'' But even after he confessed, he did not forgive himself. Shame had been his companion in life, and it went with him into death.

In search of some way to deal with the pain of losing him, I turned to religious traditions, though my family had ignored them for two generations. I began attending synagogue to say Kaddish. I was a neophyte, but by Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, I had learned the Hebrew word ''teshuvah.'' Literally, it means to return; on Yom Kippur it is used to describe the work of remembering who you once knew yourself to be. I recited the Vidui, a list of transgressions from A to Z: we abuse, we betray, we are cruel, we destroy, we embitter, we falsify, we gossip, we hate, we insult . . . we yield to evil. And I learned that the hardest work of atonement is not naming your transgressions, but finding the courage to forgive yourself for pain inflicted on others -- an exercise that brings you face to face with shame.

During Yiskor, the prayers in memory of the dead, the rabbi asked the congregation: ''If this day is about forgiveness, why do we remember people whose lives are over? Hasn't their chance for forgiveness passed?'' We waited for his answer: ''They have a new chance for forgiveness through you. You bring them into this day through your prayers, your memories.'' I was sobbing before I knew it, in agony at the memory of how my father's life had been constricted by shame. Every day, every action, every relationship had been defined by his efforts to cover and hide his secret -- and the sin wasn't even his, though he felt complicit in it. My father revered honesty; how awful he must have felt concealing this horrible vision for nearly 60 years. He treasured family and friendship; how wretched it must have been for him to hold himself apart from people for fear of being found out. It all seemed unbearably sad.

I followed my rabbi's direction: I brought my father into the day through my memories of him. I felt his presence as surely as if his hands were on my shoulders. And then I understood the miracle of my father's confession. In confronting yourself truthfully, you start to forgive yourself, and with forgiveness comes the possibility of a new beginning. My father had created a new beginning, not for himself -- it was too late for that -- but for us, his children. He showed us his courage, his determination to face his shame. Facing the truth restored my father to himself, but it also restored him to us. In his final days, he at last allowed himself to feel loved and to give love in return. I live every day in that love he found.

My father's diagnosis of cancer at the age of 70 came as a terrible shock to me. It did not, however, come as a shock to him. Right after the operation, in which a surgeon removed half his stomach, he told me: "The truth is, I expected the cancer. I never said it out loud to anyone, but privately, to myself, I acknowledged the truth-in a certain way, I was ready to die."

I know his exact words, because I had a video camera running as he spoke them. I had brought my camera along when I went to visit him because I was a producer of ABC's "20/20" at the time and knew the extraordinary transformations people could experience when asked to speak honestly about their lives. I wanted to ask my father questions before it was too late. Why, for example, had he kept his diagnosis a secret from my brother, sister and me for weeks? Why didn't he ask for our help?

"I wasn't willing to take a chance that I would ask for love and be rejected," he explained. His disturbing but honest answer launched us on seven months of intimate and revealing conversations, culminating-in the last few weeks of his life-in the confession of a shameful secret that had haunted him since childhood.

We didn't talk every day, or even every week, but periodically he would suggest that I bring my video camera when I came to visit. The videotaping provided a framework for him to look back on our family history. He repeated stories he'd heard as a child-about his mother's escape from czarist Russia when she was 12, the family's trip to America in steerage, her marriage at 14 to a man twice her age. He told me about his father's death and the family's moves from Boston to Philadelphia, then to New York City's Lower East Side and to Brooklyn-always fighting its way out of poverty. His own escape was through reading, and the Horatio Alger stories helped him fashion an identity. His ambition as a child was to become a rich man and drive through the neighborhood handing out pennies to poor children. He wanted to become a chemical engineer but had to abandon his dream when his mother forced him to quit school in his teens and work in her small lingerie shop. She paid him no wages, and when she caught him taking a dollar from the cash register a terrible fight erupted. He left home and never returned.

As the radiation treatments progressed and he grew frail, my father's customary gruff defensiveness softened, and he started using our videotaping sessions as a way to talk about his deepest feelings. One day he touched his finger to his chest and asked: "Who am I if I'm not this personality I constructed to impress people? Who am I if I'm not this 'Manufactured Man'?"

When he posed these questions, I felt free to ask about the sadness I'd always sensed in him-his moodiness, how quick he was to push away anyone who tried to get too close. I told him that my memories of childhood were of him being angry much of the time and frightening me with that anger.

"I was incredibly angry," he agreed, "because you guys were playing and I was working all the time. I had to compensate for being poor. I had to have sports cars, bigger and bigger houses, vacations. Maybe my anger was really my fear of losing all those things."

He told me that his illness was giving him a new perspective on everything. "I feel like I'm starting a new life. I don't have to be on the make for every opportunity, every dollar. I just have to experience my life. It's what everybody would like to have happen, don't you think?"

It's enviable, except for the little detail of the cancer," I suggested.

"But if it wasn't for the cancer, I wouldn't be here. There's no way I would have gotten to this point without the cancer."

We had logged at least a dozen hours of videotape and covered every subject from his business accomplishments to his two divorces, from his relationships with his children to what illness was teaching him. I could ask him anything; he could tell me anything. We had built a reservoir of trust.

Then, one evening when he was showing us photos of himself from his early 20s, he put the album aside to tell a story. I had heard the outline before-that one of his mother's schemes was to set her own store on fire to collect insurance money; that, when he was 14, there had been a fire on Christmas Eve when the store was full of merchandise. That night, after his mother set the fire, they rushed home and were in nightclothes when a policeman came to tell them their store was burning. My father recalled the details-the snow that had just begun, the yellow color of the lamplight, his mother's fake show of hysterics. But now he added something he had never revealed before: There had been an Italian family living above the store. He broke into sobs as he described the father running from the flames with his baby in his arms.

We could have been murderers! The worst possible death-a fire tunneling up through your house. I could have been a murderer. You don't know how that feels." He turned to me. "Now do you see why I told you I was ready to die? Now do you see why I had to have a manufactured personality, why I had to be somebody else? I come from people who were willing to risk killing a child out of greed. That's evil. I was associated with evil. I'm tired of living with shame. I've held on to it for so long. Dying is the way I can let go of it at last."

Finally I understood that it was shame that had constricted his life, shame that had caused him to keep us at arm's length, for fear we would see the horrible person he believed he was. As it turned out, telling the truth allowed him to let go of it. Telling the truth brought him peace.

After my father died in 1988, I put my tapes aside and looked back at them only when I decided to use his confession as the basis for a novel. More recently, I returned once more to my shoebox of videotapes to make a documentary film. From showing the film to audiences, I've learned two remarkable things. One is that many parents have secrets that derail their relationships with their children. The other is that children long to have honest conversations with their aging parents.

What I tell them is that the hardest and most important step is finding a way to begin. We allow ourselves excuses: I'm too busy now, but I'll start the conversation soon; I don't want to pry and make my parents uncomfortable. In fact, I think we postpone these conversations because of our own fears. Many of the older people who have watched my film say they want desperately to share their stories, but assume their children are not interested because they have never asked. My father's cancer diagnosis got us started, but there are less dramatic ways-for example, a birthday or anniversary celebration can provide the opportunity to start the conversation.

In our case, using the video camera elevated the talk from a casual conversation to a project, and my father liked projects. I made sure the technical matters wouldn't disrupt us-I always had a fresh tape and well-charged batteries. I set up a comfortable spot so we could settle in and proceed without distractions, and generally we chose times when we could be assured of privacy. As a journalist, I knew that building trust would depend a great deal on how I listened. I knew I must not interrupt, correct my father or pass judgment on him. I was careful not to fill the silences, but allowed him the time to think. As I practiced listening nonjudgmentally, he became more honest with his answers. Our videotaping project provided a sense of purpose to his last months as he made a record he hoped might help others. We had become not just father and daughter, but dearest friends.

Discovering such intimacy with my father made losing him excruciating; that was the price I paid for our closeness. Luckily, I have my videos and when I watch them-particularly with my children, who are now teenagers-I am filled with happiness. My father's ideas are alive and his voice is alive, and the lesson of his life is alive and a gift for all of us. In his last days, my father showed us that confronting the truth, rather than running from it, has the power to heal. Having been with him for that lesson is my most treasured inheritance.

Learn how to interview your parents and uncover untold family stories at interviewingparents.com.

I was born shortly after they arrived and my sister was born two years later. As the three of us grew up, our parents rarely mentioned Judaism, except to express their pride in the accomplishments of Jewish artists, intellectuals and Hollywood actors. I didn’t know the word assimilation at the time, but that’s certainly what my parents had in mind as we celebrated Christmas with a tree the size of the Statue of Liberty, a sea of presents and Styrofoam candy canes that were wrapped in red ribbons hanging in each picture window of our ranch-style house.

There were no Jewish holiday celebrations, no Shabbat, no Jewish religious observance of any kind. From as early as I could remember, I had been told that religion was for the ignorant and weak, that “religion was the opiate of the masses.” Privately I did believe in God, but I didn’t tell my parents. I knew it would disappoint them.

During the 60’s I became a political activist. I marched with Martin Luther King Jr., stormed Robert McNamara’s car to protest the Vietnam War, supported the out-of-work coal miners in Harlan, Kentucky. But when the 70’s turned my generation inward, I was free to follow my private inclination toward a spiritual life. I used Ram Dass’s Be Here Now as my guiding text, learned to meditate, sat among the Sufis. But eventually, at each way station I moved on. None of it felt like home.

With the advent of marriage, then children and work, there was no more time for spiritual adventures. I settled back into the secularism I’d learned growing up, and it was reinforced on a daily basis in my life as a journalist, where skepticism was valued above all else.

And then my world was turned on end when my father was diagnosed with cancer. He had been living in California and I was in New York, but we tried to see each other as often as we could, making up for lost time since we’d become friends late in life. All through my childhood he’d been a puzzling man, driven and angry, surrounded by a defensive moat that sent the clear message that no one should come too close. But we’d made peace and when I had my children he was the best grandfather I could have imagined.

One discouraging day, shortly after I learned that my father’s chances of survival were slim, I ran into a friend in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side. She asked if I had a rabbi to talk to. Seeking help from a rabbi was the farthest thing from my mind, but I was intrigued when she told me about one who had just returned to New York after 25 years helping Jews like Jacobo Timmerman cope with the military regime in Argentina. Rabbi Marshall Meyer was back in America with the assignment of breathing life into a nearly defunct synagogue called B’nai Jeshurun, once one of the most active shuls in New York. “Call him,” she suggested. “It’s good to turn to your religious traditions at times like this.”

Iwas surprised when Rabbi Meyer answered the phone himself, and even more surprised when he told me to come right over. I had never spent time with a rabbi before, and I watched curiously as he moved about his office pulling down one book after another, reading aloud what Jewish scholars had to say about death and dying. He was full of passion for my predicament, and after setting aside a stack of books for me to borrow, he bent forward and said, “I’m going to tell you something important, so you’d better listen.”

Rabbi Meyer shared with me what had happened to him when his own father was dying. He had left college to be with him and had stayed by his side week after week, month after month, until his friends and family told him he was being obsessive and ought to get on with his life. Finally he gave in to the pressure, returned to school, and within days—without his son by his side—his father died. His regret was enormous. “Go to your father,” he told me. “Stay with him and don’t let anyone talk you out of it. Stay with him for his sake, and for yours.”

I will be eternally grateful for that advice. With his prodding, I left my family in New York and moved to Los Angeles to care for my father in the last months of his life.

During those months I read the books the rabbi had lent me and came upon Abraham Joshua Heschel’s belief that death is a reciprocation to God for the gift of life. Death is not a failure or a tragedy, it is the return of a gift. And that fit with what my father was telling me; he insisted that death wasn’t something to be afraid of, that dying was another opportunity for learning. For my father each crisis presented an opportunity, and that was his attitude toward cancer. He insisted his cancer was a blessing, because it was making him face the unanswered questions of his life. “Who am I,” he asked one day, “if I am not this persona I constructed to impress people? Who am I if I’m not this ‘manufactured man’?”

Only weeks before his death, after much soul-searching, my father answered this question in the form of a confession. He told my sister, my brother and me a painful memory he had concealed all his life.

At 14 he’d been unwittingly involved in a terrible arson when his mother set fire to her small lingerie shop for the purpose of collecting insurance money. When my father understood what was happening that night, and when he witnessed the upstairs tenants running from the flames with their newborn baby, he was overwhelmed with shame. He broke into sobs when he confessed this secret and he told us something I will never forget. He said he believed he got his cancer because he was tired from a lifetime of trying to bury his shame. He said that dying was the way he could let go of it at last.

I returned to New York to mourn my father, and the agony of losing him was unspeakable. For days I sat in my dark bedroom with no desire even to put on a light. Finally I remembered my conversation with Rabbi Meyer, and one Saturday morning I took myself to B’nai Jeshurun to say Kaddish. Week after week I stood and cried. I knew no Hebrew; I knew nothing of the rituals of synagogue life. I always left before the end of the service for fear of being engaged in conversation and having to reveal my ignorance. But I found great comfort in standing with the other mourners, and in ways I didn’t begin to understand, saying Kaddish was helping me find my way back to life.

Slowly I began to figure out the Hebrew letters, to follow along reading right to left, even to pick out some of the Hebrew words. I learned the tunes and allowed my voice to join the others. In those early years of B’nai Jeshurun’s renaissance a microphone was passed among the congregants during the weekly discussion of the Torah reading. I liked these discussions; they reminded me of Quaker meetings I had attended in my days of searching for a spiritual home. But what struck me most during these exchanges was that intelligent people were talking openly and frankly about their belief in God. The months went by and this time I did not want to move on.

Several years after I’d become a member of B’nai Jeshurun, I mentioned to my uncle, visiting from Florida, that I’d found a synagogue I really liked. He was curious about my embrace of Judaism and asked if he could come with me to services. The following Saturday as we walked toward the heavy wooden doors that stood open on West eighty-eighth Street, he turned to me with a quizzical look. Was this some sort of joke? “This was our shul when we were children,” he exclaimed. “This is the synagogue where I became a bar mitzva, where your mother was confirmed.”

After all my travels, I’d ended up at my family’s synagogue.

When my son, Jake, became a bar mitzva five years later, my uncle came from Florida to participate in the service. It had been 63 years since he had stood on that bima and read from the Torah and now, when I saw my 76-year-old uncle and my 13-year-old son side by side with scrolls in their arms, I was overcome with joy. A lost stitch had been picked up, our broken history restored. I was filled with hope knowing that our tradition held us, ran through us and gave us connections to one another beyond what we could know.

That was the beginning, not the end, of my journey back to Judaism, because each year during the High Holidays Judaism has helped me gain new perspective on my father’s life. Judaism teaches that there is always an opportunity for renewal, always the opportunity to face yourself and begin again, which is just what my father did. Shame had taken a terrible toll: In order not to risk being exposed for the evil person he believed he was, my father held himself apart; to maintain a false persona, he separated himself from his authentic self; not to be seen by God, he denigrated the belief in God. But the partner to all this alienation was a longing for an encounter with truth. My father was never actually content with the persona he created; he was always searching for something more.

That drive for truth is at the very heart of Judaism, and in that way my father was, in the deepest sense, a Jew. He made his life and then his death a journey toward truth. And in the end, while his death returned me to Judaism, it was Judaism that returned my father to me by showing me the meaning of his struggle. H

Kate Wenner is a novelist and was an award-winning producer of ABC 20/20. Her novel Setting Fires (Scribner) is based on the months she spent with her dying father. An excerpt can be found at www.settingfires.com.