The hungry ghosts of fading men

My dad, at 77 years old, has become terrifically fragile. He walks tentatively, often with a lean typical of people with his type of dementia. He needs all of his meals prepared for him, and sometimes to even be reminded of what the food in front of him is and how one should go about consuming it. He even needs support knowing where the bathroom is and how to use it.

These are not things we like to talk about in our culture. Even writing them down now, there is a little voice in my head urging me to stop, like I am violating my dad’s dignity by being honest with you—dear, compassionate readers—about his condition. Which makes me curious about that little voice: where did it come from and whose is it? What is it about acknowledging my dad’s fragility and dependency that feels so taboo? He did nothing to deserve dementia. It is not a signal of his character or value. So why the discomfort at acknowledging its existence?

One answer is patriarchy—a word that, my mom reminds me, used to embarrass me when I was a teenager. It seemed outdated and dramatic—like one of her ruffly lace blouses that I never had a taste for. Now at midlife and bombarded by surreal headlines about insecure, reckless white men masquerading as leaders in The White House, the word slips off my tongue. Or more accurately, is screamed through my open mouth. Patriarchy. White supremacy. It’s all here, far more dramatic and embarrassing than anything I ever could have found cringe at 13.

But undergirding the patriarchy is something that I didn’t understand as a teenager, riding next to my dad on our weekly sojourns to the grocery store, talking about Buddhism and boys and basketball. And that something is dependency. Our society’s discomfort with the power of women, is in part, a discomfort with dependence, and the vulnerability of it. Women still do the vast majority of the caregiving for dependent bodies—the drooling babies and the differently abled and the aging parents. Therefore, women see us at our most vulnerable. We are dependent on them for our survival. And that scares the shit out of insecure men, doing anything they can to deny their own inevitable limitations, softness, decay.

Right as my own dad is becoming ever more dependent on me and those around him—my family, for sure, but also the grace of neighbors and doctors, strangers and friends—the most visible men in the country are modeling an allergy to dependency.

Trump, Musk, Vance etc. have an inability to admit the limits of their own knowing (a kind of wise, intellectual dependency) at a level that is stunning. If you wanted to reduce government inefficiency, why not ask the woman who created the Office of Digital Services in the first place, the person who knows more than anyone in this country about how incremental transformation sometimes has to be, and still how totally worth it? But no—this isn’t about actually fixing what is, indeed, broken; it is about feeling the high of their own rogue power to destroy other people’s carefully constructed block towers on the playground.

And it’s not just that they can’t acknowledge or heed their own dependency. They abhor it in others; wherever it exists, they scorch the earth. Imagine pretending that your aim is to reduce bloat in the federal budget and then first going after two agencies entirely focused on the most vulnerable among us—USAID and the Department of Education, which only represent 1 and 4% of the budget, respectively? It lays bare, so plainly, that efficiency is not the goal, but the eradication of tenderness wherever it shows up. Medicare and medicaid are surely next—another site of terrific tenderness.

I am witnessing the deterioration of my father, 77 years old, and the havoc of our president, 78 years old, simultaneously. Somehow they have become like foils in my mind—the one, who never played the part of the patriarch very well, but did wrestle with his own ego, wanders in and out of rooms, searching for his shoes and his purpose. The other, whose whole life is oriented around performing his own dominance, sits in the oval office scowling at the world.

Both of them suffer from what Buddhists call “hungry ghosts”—an insatiable appetite for something they can never get enough of. My dad’s was a childhood desperation for security. He did a lot to try to heal through therapy and spiritual seeking, and he did a damn good job, but peel back his cognitive capacity, his ego infrastructure, and it’s still there, this little boy anxious to be told that it’s all going to be okay (I do this many times a week, and it soothes him momentarily and then the ghost creeps back in).

"Scroll of Hungry Ghosts", circa 12th century

What is the nature of Trump’s “hungry ghost”? I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know the man. But I have a hunch that it has something to do with dependency, a compulsive craving to never, ever feel as vulnerable and soft and needy as he did at some pivotal moment, or a series of them, in his young life. There are plenty of men who have suffered this particular experience, but few of them have projected their wound onto the whole damn world so chaotically.

What is true for both of these men—my sweet, fading father and the monster in the White House—is that they can do nothing to avoid dependency. It came for us in the beginning and it comes for us in the end. And if you stop fighting it, if you surrender to it, it can become a final exquisite experience of just how much you are loved—flesh and bone, the laughter and lightness of giving up the ghost, deserved, not earned, just because you are a human living inextricably with other humans.

So it goes in our families. So it goes in our nation. So it goes in our world. If only we had people in charge who understood that.

*Thanks to Pastor Marcus Liefert for inspiring this newsletter with his spirit-expanding sermon last Sunday.