The Red Suitcase (with Deborah J. Cohan)

Family Proclamations: Exploring Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality

Caregiving for aging and dying parents can be tough for anyone, but it's even tougher when it forces you to confront longtime family dynamics of abuse. Sociologist Deborah Cohan blurs the lines between academic research on family caregiving and violence, and her own personal story about a father she calls both adoring and abusive.

Her memoir is called Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption.

Transcript

DEBORAH COHAN: Time is really strange in a nursing home. People are motivated by the mealtimes. Newspaper delivery is listed as an activity. They're just mundane activities in my life or your life, but they become these big events at these nursing homes. When you're there, and you’re well, and you're witnessing that, it's really hard to watch and to do time the way they're doing time.

BLAIR HODGES: Deborah Cohan knows there's nothing easy about caregiving for a dying parent. She watched over her father as he spent the last few years of his life in a nursing home.

Witnessing a parent's decline into dementia is hard enough, but Deborah's situation was especially complicated because it happened after she endured years of emotional and verbal abuse from her father.

What's it like to want abuse to stop, but a relationship to continue? Is it possible to forgive someone who can't even remember what they did?

Deborah's answers to these questions might surprise you. She draws on her expertise as a sociologist and a domestic abuse counselor to make sense of her own life after her father's death. Her book is called Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption. Deborah joins us to talk about it right now.

There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

A UNIQUE BOOK ON ELDERCARE (1:50)

BLAIR HODGES: Deborah J. Cohan, welcome to Family Proclamations.

DEBORAH COHAN: Thank you so much for having me, Blair. It's great to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: It's great to have you. Deborah, there are a lot of books out there about caregiving for aging parents. There are also a lot of books out there about what it's like to witness and experience abuse in families. But there aren't a whole lot of books that are about both of those things in the same book.

You've written a book here about what it means to care for an ageing and ill parent who also happens to have been an abuser. That's how you introduce it. Talk about the decision to write a book like that. It's a unique book.

DEBORAH COHAN: Thanks for noticing that. I guess sometimes we write the books we wish existed so we could have them as our own guide, and as an expert in domestic violence, and also as someone who’s studied the sociology of families, it made perfect sense for me to create what I call a "braided memoir."

These two stories are very much interlocking in the book, and in many people's lives. Even if there's not actual abuse in someone's family, there's so much relatable stuff in the book because of the different complicated dynamics we all find ourselves in just by living in our families. Most families have some complicated dynamics of some sort. I was really trying to help others to think about that, and to think about how these two things that are happening in the culture are really often happening at the same time, which is the complicated family piece, and also the fact that more and more people are involved in some amount of caregiving.

And it tends to be gendered, where women tend to be doing it more.

BLAIR HODGES: You're a specialist who’s studied family violence as well. You say “family violence is a dynamic process. It's not an event or an isolated set of events.” It's an environment and you say it unfolds and takes different shapes, often over years of time. Now in your own personal experience, you've come to see how it can be lodged in caregiving. Talk a little bit about that.

DEBORAH COHAN: A lot of times when domestic violence is talked about, especially in the media, we hear about it as an episode, or we hear about it as an incident—sort of an isolated event. What I learned through working with violent men for so many years at the oldest battering intervention program in the country—which is Emerge in Boston—and also working with survivors, is that these things that are referred to as “incidents” or “events” or “episodes,” they are connected experiences. It usually escalates over time.

If practitioners and advocates and others in the field, and even just people's friends, can help people to see the connection and help them connect the dots between this episode and then this one—because I talk about how there's connective tissue, if you will.

For example, most abusers don't start being abusive by punching someone or strangling them or any of those sorts of things. These things start out in lots of other ways. They get accelerated through time. I think it's important to see this stuff isn't a one-time thing. These things build on each other.

SHADOWS IN SHAKER HEIGHTS (3:46)

BLAIR HODGES: Maybe take a minute or two really quickly here to give us the broad strokes of your family. Who is this book about? Where are you from?

DEBORAH COHAN: Currently I live in South Carolina. But I was born and raised in Cleveland in a pretty storied suburb, actually—

BLAIR HODGES: This is Shaker Heights.

DEBORAH COHAN: —Yes. Lots of books, and magazines, and articles, and all sorts of stuff on it. It's an interesting and complex place. I think people who don't live there think of it as this sort of gilded community, upper middle class, et cetera. Lots of other things are happening there, as they are everywhere. The one interesting thing is when you grow up in a community where there is an amount of privilege, and there are resources and things, things like family violence do become even more secretive.

It's not until I published the book that I found even high school friends and acquaintances coming out, reaching out, telling me, "Oh my gosh, I experienced the same thing," or, "I had no idea you were going through that in high school. So was I." People are left feeling even more alone in a situation like that.

So as I said, I was born in Cleveland and I was raised as an only child, which is a very big piece of this book because of the ways that kind of complicates things. Especially because my parents had also divorced very soon before my dad got sick. Then I wound up as his main person, his caregiver.

My dad was someone who was really adoring. He was an amazing dad in many ways, actually. You know, I still, I miss and love him every day. He died eleven years ago this month, actually. But he was also abusive. That's something we can talk about later on, but that's a really big issue to me, is for people to understand the multidimensionality of the abuser, and the fact that, by all accounts, I guess people would say I grew up in a loving home.

I grew up getting to do a lot of cool things with my parents. My parents were very successful. All this kind of stuff. But there was also this other side behind closed doors—or not always behind closed doors because my dad also was an expert at public humiliation and stuff. It was a lot to manage.

My parents also—and I think this is really interesting, some of the demographic issues and stuff—is my dad had me when he was forty-two years old, and my mom was about to be thirty-five. In 1969 those were really older parents. Most of my friends, their parents were much, much younger. So that meant when all this started with my dad being sick, I was catapulted into caregiving at a time where my friends’ parents were playing tennis and golf and retiring and doing other cool things like traveling and stuff. There again, I was sort of alone in this process.

They married late because it was a second marriage. They had me later. They got divorced very late in life. They were almost sixty-five and seventy-two. All of these dynamics, all of these demographic trends, if you will—It's actually funny how the book stands at the intersection of all of these trends. And we're seeing them more and more. We're seeing people having kids later. We're seeing people divorcing later. We're seeing people living longer.

BLAIR HODGES: Right, and adult kids caregiving for their parents or parent.

DEBORAH COHAN: Often while caring for their own children.

Then the other thing I talk about is the living apart together, where I'm partnered with someone where we don't live together. My husband lives two hours away. When I wrote the book, I didn't think about all the ways in which my life is sitting at these intersections of demographic shifts and trends and stuff. But it is, and I think some of those are really important to the way the book unfolds and to the way I think about all this stuff.

BLAIR HODGES: You do sit at intersections of a lot of things. Just to flesh it out a little bit more, too, I'll mention that, as you said, your family was upper middle class in Shaker Heights. You say you were Jewish-identified but your family wasn't affiliated or practicing. Your parents were politically progressive. Your mom was artistic, an abstract artist. Your father worked in advertising. He wrote the Hawaiian Punch song. Is this true?

DEBORAH COHAN: The line, yes. "How would you like a nice Hawaiian Punch?"

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah!

DEBORAH COHAN: Isn’t that wild?

BLAIR HODGES: That really caught me off guard. [laughter] Your parents were also married and divorced before they got married. Your father had two children you never got to know, just from this different phase of his life. That also fills out this background.

If you have a copy of the book there, I thought it would be nice to hear you read from the Introduction. The first page gives us a good picture of what's to come. Can you read that for us?

DEBORAH COHAN: "When I first set out to write about my dad, I thought my book would only be filled with stories of his abuse, his rage, my own resulting rage and grief, and maybe even his grief as well. However, the writing process revealed other emotions. Things that surprised me, disgusted me, delighted me, and saddened me. At moments, I was glad to be reminded of all the love I still feel for my father and reassured of his love for me.

“I've anguished over whether in my promise to tell about my father's abuse with integrity and honesty, the story would somehow be diminished by this other story of the great love we shared. It's only now that I see that the one seemingly pure story of his abuse is not even a pure story. And interestingly, I don't think the abuse is even the grittiest or rawest part of the story.

“As it turns out, the story would be easier to tell if all I needed to do was report about all the times that my dad behaved badly. You might get angry with him. And you might even feel sorry for me. But that's not what I wanted out of this book. You need to also know and feel the love we shared, the way I felt it. And I still do.

“The much harder story to tell is the one that unfolds in these pages. It's the story of ambivalence, of what it means to stand on the precipice of both love and fear, and what it means to navigate between forgiveness and blame, care and disregard, resilience and despair."

HIMPATHY (11:37)

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. A couple of things come to mind as I'm reading that. First of all, I wondered if you were presenting yourself as an exemplary type of person who'd experienced abuse. As it turns out, throughout the book, you don't. You don't set yourself forward as "everyone should process abuse the way I did." You don't expect people who have been abused to be forgiving, or to seek all of that. I want to let people know that right off the top.

I did want to talk about Kate Manne's idea of "himpathy," because that's what came to mind here at the opening of your book before I knew what was coming. Himpathy as I understand it is this idea of extending sympathy to men who are doing crappy stuff, basically. The guy's the problem, but we tend to side with the guy or try to get inside his heart or his head and extend sympathy to someone who's done terrible things.

You have a background of working with these domestic violence survivors and perpetrators. So I just wondered about your thoughts on that idea of himpathy, and how you negotiate with that as you think about your own relationship with your dad and as you were writing this book.

DEBORAH COHAN: I have to admit I have not heard of that word or that theory. That would be interesting to read more about. I certainly did worry about that a bit. Here I am, trained in feminist sociology, and have done all this work, and it's almost like I didn't want to let people down or something, or didn't want to seem like I was giving him a pass, so to speak.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

DEBORAH COHAN: I also had to write it in that authentic way I feel I did, and just realize the much more nuanced approach is actually the approach I took—which is that no one is purely one thing or another. Neither am I. I come out as pretty flawed in the book too, which I'm glad about because it's the “no one's perfect” thing.

I think there are certainly people who might read the book who might say, "Oh, my gosh, I would never still love my dad," or, "I would have stopped talking to him," or "F– you" kind of stuff. I don't know. To me that would be too easy.

I think the harder piece is to deal with that ambivalence. And as you say, it's not right for everyone and it's totally dependent on different people's situations. I also think, for some people, it's like some readers have told me, it's very valuable to have gotten to juggle both, so they can see how to juggle both themselves. It's not really that rare that someone who's been hurt by someone still wants a relationship with them.

I guess the real essence of dealing with an abusive relationship is you want the abuse to stop but you want the relationship to continue.

BLAIR HODGES: You “love” the person.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah. We see that with sexual abuse survivors a lot. There's a lot of research on that. It's complicated. It makes me want to read about this "himpathy" piece.

BLAIR HODGES: Look up himpathy. It's this sympathy for men, basically.

DEBORAH COHAN: She's critical of it. Obviously.

BLAIR HODGES: She's critical, but it's very thoughtful. It resonates well with what you present in your book, which is, you're not giving your dad a pass or excusing his behavior, you're just also recognizing the ways you loved him and why.

That's different than saying, "You know what, actually the abuse was okay," or even, "The abuse was maybe beneficial or maybe deserved." Or that all your attention would be focused on protecting your father's reputation, rather than talking about what the relationship really was and processing your feelings for other people to kind of witness and maybe go alongside with you. I think it's helpful.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah. If I grew up in the home my dad grew up in maybe I wouldn't have done anything different either. So it's really hard truths to reconcile, but I think they're really important.

WHAT HE DID (15:31)

BLAIR HODGES: It's important to think about individual responsibility, but also context. Sometimes it's easier to offload our anxiety that stuff like this happens by just demonizing an individual person. I want to be a strong proponent of justice and of attending to the person who has been abused first and foremost. I think their experience really needs to be attended to.

I think if we just demonize an individual person, it excuses the ways we participate in a society that can facilitate stuff like that, basically.

DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: They're really bad. I can kind of overlook the crappy ways I treat people because here are these evil enemies over here I can identify as the bad people and not think about the ways I might be implicated. It's complicated, though. It's complicated.

DEBORAH COHAN: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about some abuse examples from your father. You say he was financially generous, but he was also financially controlling. You've seen this dynamic in other families.

There comes this moment early on where he makes this comment to you. He says, "You'd make my life a lot easier if you'd just commit suicide." It seems like he wasn't saying that as a joke. It comes across as though he just said this to you as a matter of fact.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yes, that was in the context of something that was financially abusive and controlling. It's so interesting to hear that comment restated to me, and I've heard it so many times since the book came out.

It was even really startling the first time I saw it on the jacket of the book, and then it's on Amazon. It’s like people glom on to it because it's so over the top for a parent to say that to a kid, or in this case a young adult woman, because I was in my twenties. I think that's the comment that makes people say, "Oh, I could never have cared for him. I could have never had a relationship with him."

There is something odd about hearing it back and realizing that in a way, at the time, it was really upsetting but it almost—I guess like so many other acts of abuse, things get minimized or forgotten or denied. It's interesting to think of probably how soon after I still was able to talk to him or willing to engage with him, that sort of thing. And at the same time, I wouldn't really tolerate that.

It's just one of those things where it's very hard to describe how I know that comment is so searing to readers and anybody hearing it. It's just so disturbing. At the same time, it's such a good example, though, of how his feelings were the priority, as is true in abusive relationships. Where it's like the abuser is so focused on their feelings and the other person's actions.

It was such a prime example of where he completely distorted what I was saying and where I was trying to do something that could be helpful—to find out something about insurance and his financial contribution with stuff, and he just jumped into me verbally with this accusation and assuming the worst of me.

In a sense, what I would want people hearing this to understand is not just the intensity of what he said, but how it encapsulates so many different pieces related to abuse. Like the threats, the focus on his feelings and my behavior. All of this. The assuming the worst of me is really the key piece of this.

BLAIR HODGES: This is the kind of abuse you experienced, this verbal assault. You even say your father never actually hit you, physical abuse, but you did always have the perception he could. There was always a sense that he might, and you say that was its own sort of terror that can give a person trauma.

DEBORAH COHAN: Oh, for sure. Because somebody who says something that vicious and cruel and brutal: "My life would be easier if you commit suicide." It is a slap in the face. It is a punch in the gut. It is all of those things, kind of metaphorically. I mean, this is why I think it's so crucial and I always try to encourage my students, and I talked about this with violent offenders, is to not create a hierarchy of what sort of abuse is worse than another.

Because right, it's true. He did not pull my hair or spit on me or punch me or throw me against a wall or strangle me or any of these awful things that happen. But the threat of violence, the constant berating, the criticizing, the defining of reality—when someone says something like that to you, what are you supposed to say? I mean, there's no way to respond. It was his ability to try to exert that level of power and control, and that level of silencing me, and putting me in my place in this way. Those are some of the core defining features of abuse.

BLAIR HODGES: I learned a lot more about abuse and seeing these patterns of abuse—for example, you talked about how maybe you would be together during a trip and he would freak out. He would scream and swear at you publicly. So not only did it hurt you because your dad's treating you that way, but also, it's embarrassing and other people are witnessing this, which compounds the hurt.

This would happen during a trip where he was visiting. Then at the end of the trip you say he had this tactic of minimizing and mutualizing. Talk about the tactic, what that looks like to minimize and mutualize after an assault like that.

DEBORAH COHAN: It's comments like, "It's not so bad," or, "Didn't we have a fun time?" Or glomming onto the parts that were fun. “Wasn't that wonderful when we saw the Lion King?” Or, “Wasn't that amazing when we ate at this restaurant?”

By highlighting the goodies it forced me—again, it's part of his defining reality, but then it made me have to think, “Oh, that stuff was really nice. That was good. So maybe that's not so bad, the other stuff.”

BLAIR HODGES: It doesn't feel like he was really asking, either. It seems like what's happened here is control. He needs to control the story. He's not really looking for your input about how you felt about everything, but really telling you, “By the way, this trip was awesome, you better think it was and if you don't, there's a problem with you.”

DEBORAH COHAN: Not just that there's a problem with you, but also that you're insatiable and that you—

BLAIR HODGES: That you deserve my yelling and stuff?

DEBORAH COHAN: Or nothing I do for you is ever good enough. Then it turns into I'm not grateful enough, which was a huge part of the narrative.

**WHEN REDEMPTION ISN'T FORGIVENESS (22:16)

BLAIR HODGES: As we said before, this isn't a book of forgiveness for your father. You do repeatedly express your love for him and describe to the reader where that love comes from or what it looks like. But you're saying there's a sense in which you want some redemption for that relationship, but not necessarily forgiveness. That was an interesting distinction I'd never thought about before. Talk about how you see those two things of seeking some kind of redemption versus just forgiveness.

DEBORAH COHAN: I love that question because so often people still conclude I've totally forgiven him and then decide, "Oh, I'm not sure I could forgive him."

Like I talk about in the book, forgiveness is a bit overrated. As someone who does not identify religiously, forgiveness feels far too rooted in notions of religion. I'm not totally comfortable with that. I mean, I think the redemption is more that now I'm fifty-three years old, I understand people like my parents did the best they could with what they had at the time they did it. So I have more sort of acceptance of the multidimensionality of my parents in a way, and I think their deaths—because my mom has died also—their deaths helped to do that, even though that was something I dreaded for so long. But then it turns out there's something about it now, that I can see the full humanity of both of them in a way that maybe it was harder to see when they were alive.

The other piece of the forgiveness thing is that in working with abusers, I remember working with a counselor. We were co-facilitating a group one evening and he was pushing this abuser, really holding him accountable. He kept saying to him, "What are you sorry for, who are you sorry for?" It was like, "Who are the tears for?" Really trying to get this guy to see he still didn't really seem like he was apologetic, really truly remorseful. That it was more about his own saving face.

So I guess the reason full forgiveness still feels hard for me is my dad and I never had that full, totally open, me totally exposing all of my thoughts on this, kind if conversation, maybe over a period of months and years, where I could come to that, or where he asked for it in a way that I could give that to him. So I feel the most we can do here is redemption.

BLAIR HODGES: How do you define that then? What is that redemption?

DEBORAH COHAN: I feel like it's maybe that acceptance of all that imperfection and all the flaw and all the limitations and things, and that there are still these redeeming aspects of him as a man in the world, of him as a father, of him in my life. I mean, I guess I couldn't have the level of loving and missing him every day without that level of some redemption.

And then some people have asked me, "Well, it does sound like you forgive him, though." It's almost like people just want to use that word so much—

BLAIR HODGES: I feel tempted to that question, too. I wanted to say it's sort of a “brand” or a “genre” of forgiveness or something. [laughs]

DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly. It's so interesting, though. I was friends with a couple. The woman has died and the man is much, much older. He's probably in his nineties now. Their daughter was murdered by their son-in-law. I had them speak at my classes and they were often asked, "Do you forgive the son-in-law?"

Shirley, the mother, would always say, "No, and he never did anything to ask for it. He really never apologized. There was no authentic anything that would have warranted it and he never really accepted enough responsibility for forgiveness to be possible."

I guess I'm still kind of at that piece.

BLAIR HODGES: That's a forgiveness that seems like it has to be mutual, like the other person who hurt you needs to get inside your story, show they understand it, and make some kind of reparation or connection there. And for that kind of forgiveness to happen, yeah, you have to have the other—

I think what people might be thinking when they suggest you have forgiven is the sense that you still find good in your dad. You love him. But there's also, as you say, there's always that disconnect that's a result of the years of abuse, you can't fully reconcile because reconciliation requires both people to be involved with it. And so it's just not possible. That kind of forgiveness has to be mutual. The other person has to be involved for that forgiveness to even work, I guess.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, that it's more of a process. It, like the abuse, is not just an episode or an instance or a moment. It's much larger.

One of the things that's difficult is my dad seemed to have in certain ways, he softened and almost showed me the possibilities of redemption once he was quite ill. Once he was very needy and dependent. He was in a nursing home, and that's when towards the end of the book he’s telling me about his experience growing up and his father being abusive to his mother and witnessing it and thinking it was an outrageous thing.

And his empathy went to his mother as a child. Yet he still reproduced this as an adult. But here was a man with dementia and he was totally immobile, and by then incontinent and all these other things. It was just—That wasn't the time to start digging into our relationship.

But had he told me all that and had we been able to have that conversation when he was well, I don't even know if that would have been possible. Had that happened, had he been able to show me more, really that actions speak louder than words, really show me in a consistent, meaningful, trustworthy way, "Deb, I can't believe I did that to you." Really showing me through living out life with me that he would never do it again. But we never got there.

FAMILY DYNAMICS WITH MOM (28:50)

BLAIR HODGES: It was thirteen years before he died—eight of those years, he was very sick in these care facilities. You say you were lodged in an uncomfortably intimate relationship with him, as you mentioned, because you were an adult child of divorce. The family dynamic you grew up with was one where you trended toward being closer to your dad. I think there was probably a protective element to that. Your mom felt sort of sidelined.

You really paint a compelling picture of why the divorce happened later on, the way your mom was sidelined, the way your family was this triangle that you felt pressured to make feel whole, which is something no child should have to reckon with.

But then later on when they get this divorce, here's a quote from you, "During the years I cared for my dad, my mom's absence felt like a death." I realized, Deborah, how hard that must have been to basically be the only one who could really care for your dad during those eight years because your mom was gone. You're an only child of these divorced parents.

DEBORAH COHAN: She kind of would accuse me of being angry at her for leaving. She would say that somehow I thought it was her responsibility to stay. She could tell it was really hard for me.

In a certain way, though, she was very compassionate at times about what I was dealt with in those moments. Then there were other times in which she, as I say, almost accused me of being angry about it. Which is a whole other piece.

BLAIR HODGES: Was that like a “They protest too much” kind of thing? It seems you were in some senses abandoned to care for him. I'm not suggesting that your mom shouldn't have gotten a divorce or anything. But their child is involved. You were stuck with handling that. It seems like a lot for a child in a family, even though you were a grown up at this point, to manage by yourself. I wonder if she worried if you resented it. It seems like—

DEBORAH COHAN: Absolutely. She didn't just worry about it, she accused me of it! [laughs]. And then it was a little confusing.

BLAIR HODGES: But did you feel that resentment? Was her charge valid?

DEBORAH COHAN: That's a really good question, because I teach this book now in my class, and it's very interesting how I ask my students if they find my mom to be a sympathetic character.

The reality is, I guess she is and she isn't. There are a lot of people who come to the conclusion, a little bit what you were just alluding to, of I should not have been left like that. It's kind of like my mom did something wrong, that I got stuck with all of this. What’s interesting is, the book came out in 2020. My mom died a few months later. Here I am teaching the book. I can't have this conversation with my mother, which I would really like to have, which is, "Oh my gosh, if only you could hear all the ways in which I stand up for you." You know what I mean?

I constantly am saying to students, "No, I don't blame my mom for leaving." In some ways I just wish she had left sooner, so they could have each had their new lease on life. To me it feels very sad that she did this at close to sixty-five and he was seventy-two. I'm not sure what else could have been done, though.

I wouldn't expect people to stay in a marriage that isn't good or healthy for them. I can't fault my mom for leaving. It's more, I wish she had been able to do it earlier and I know I was probably part of the reason she didn't, which is a hard thing to deal with at the same time.

BLAIR HODGES: Would you resist it if I said something like, “I wish your mom had tried and pitched in a little bit to take some of the pressure off?”

DEBORAH COHAN: No, I think that's true. She did in certain ways, but she couldn't in other ways. From a legal standpoint, all this financial stuff, everything. She was certainly financially generous in her own way later and about other stuff.

It might have been helpful had she just said, "Gosh, I see you're going to Cleveland again." I wasn't taking trips and doing really great stuff. I was going to Cleveland many times from Boston as I was in graduate school, as I was adjuncting, and teaching in different places, and commuting to Connecticut. I wish in those moments instead of just taking me out to dinner or—because she was living on Cape Cod by then so we were living much closer together. It might have been nice if she had just said, "I'll buy the airline ticket," or, "Let me make the reservation for you at the hotel," or whatever it was. That might have lessened the burden.

Although, she did in other ways because then she might have helped fund something else I did need. It was just a very difficult time.

AT THE NURSING HOME (33:54)

BLAIR HODGES: That is helpful. I didn't have hard feelings toward your mom, I just wondered a little bit about— As you said, your mom was still alive when you were finishing this. It makes sense that some of that stuff couldn't have been processed yet. So that's helpful. I think people that pick up a copy of the book and check it out, that's a really great supplement to it. I'm glad to hear you can talk to people about that as you teach the book, too.

The book we're talking about, by the way, again, is called Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption. It's written by Deborah J. Cohan, who is professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

You mentioned this a minute ago—finances. You basically witnessed your father's finances completely collapse. This is something a lot of people are experiencing and will probably be experiencing more and more because the social safety net in the United States is not great, but he went from a sharp dressing, fancy food enjoying ad executive to this man in filthy sweatpants sitting in this dilapidated care facility, living on Medicaid. And he ended up dying with about fifty dollars to his name. So you witness over the time he was there, his complete impoverishment.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah and also I think that's some of the redemption for him too, is just knowing if he was aware of what was left at the end, and what happened—I mean, his dream would have been to leave me with more to pay off my student loan debt, you know, all that kind of stuff. He would have been ashamed and humiliated in many of the ways that breadwinning and masculinity are so entangled with each other.

BLAIR HODGES: Ah, that reminds me, there's an excerpt I thought you might read on page twenty-seven. You actually take us to the nursing home with some stories about what it was like when you visited him. It's that middle paragraph there. If you could read that excerpt—it's a list but wow, it certainly evokes experiences I've had.

DEBORAH COHAN: "The nursing home: paved driveway. Automatic doors. Cigarette butts. Patients waiting for the next distribution of cigarettes. Orange sherbet and ginger ale and Saulsbury steak. Sticky floors. Dusty roads. Vinyl recliners. Bed pans. Bingo and sing-alongs. Stashes of adult diapers in the closets and drawers. Motorized wheelchairs. Schedules. Forms. Nursing aides and personal attendants. Styrofoam cups. Stale urine. Plastic water pitchers and bendable straws. Hospital beds. Dark, dingy rooms. A small rod for hanging clothes. Non-skid socks. No privacy. Open, unlocked rooms filled with demented wanderers. Whiteboards with washable markers stating the day of the week and the nurse on duty. Dead plants. Almost-dead people. Harsh overhead lighting and overheated rooms. Not enough real light. Tables that roll across beds for getting fed. Call bells and strings to pull in the bathroom. Air that doesn't move."

BLAIR HODGES: The stories you tell there, Deborah, visiting there seemed really hard for you, let alone what it must have been like to live there. You felt such ambivalence about it. Because you say you almost couldn't stand being there at the moment, but you also would get really distraught about leaving there.

DEBORAH COHAN: Absolutely, yes. And thanks for having me read that piece, by the way, because it's been so long since I've actually read it. It takes me back to the room also. The ambivalence showed up in so many different ways.

I think that's so true of people who are visiting people who are frail and dying, or very ill. This sense of, you want to go, like I would be in Boston, I would want to go so badly. I would want to see him. I would want to give him a big hug. I would want to finally bring him food he craved or food that was a special treat instead of some of the things I listed in that piece. Then I would get there. It was like, “Oh, gosh.” I just wanted to flee. I walked in and it was just the chaos and the bureaucracy and just the antiseptic but actually filthy quality of these places that I illuminate in that piece.

Then the guilt that totally seeped in in that moment, because then it was like, "Wait, I got here. I'm here. I'm supposed to want to be with him. I'm supposed to want to stay,” and now I'm counting down the time. It's sort of like, "Oh my gosh, I've been here twenty minutes. It feels like four hours." Then when I'd leave it was almost like that, "Oh, but I spent three hours," almost like I did good time or something.

BLAIR HODGES: A Herculean effort just to get through the three hours.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, and time is strange in a nursing home also, as it is in a hospital. People are motivated by the mealtimes. The newspaper delivery is listed as an activity at the place. These things that are just mundane activities in my life or your life, they become these big events at these nursing homes in ways that, when you're there and you're witnessing that, and you're well, it's really hard to watch and to do time the way that they're doing time.

BLAIR HODGES: On a bigger scale, too, the cycle that would happen. So you talk about how there would be a medical crisis, things would seem really bad, but then he would kind of rally, show some resilience, kind of recover for a bit, you'd get a little bit of hope, and then it would crash again. And this cycle kept happening. It reminds me of this paragraph I highlighted here.

You say, "Perhaps many adult children caring for dying parents deal with this dilemma. How much to let the parent in. How much to keep the parent at bay. It's hard to get that close to almost-death, to anticipatory grief, and when an abusive history is part of it, that push/pull with how to have healthy emotional closeness and distance becomes that much more intensified."

You're talking about the already complicated dynamics and then you add the layer of abuse into it, which makes it all the more complicated.

DEBORAH COHAN: I appreciate you did such a close good reading of it, because I don't know that everybody picks up some of the pieces and the nuances and especially the contradictory realities that are present. I really appreciate that and what you've read and shared and asked and are revealing to the audience. That's just the hardest part of all, is reconciling those pieces.

Okay, I spent most of my childhood really worried my parents would die or my parents would get divorced. As an only child, those two things felt incredibly scary, that I would lose one or both of them, or that they would get divorced. It kind of haunted me up until they died, really.

And my dad, like any one of the things he suffered from people die from pretty easily. You know, he had an aneurysm. He had a heart attack. He had diabetes. He had so many different things—

BLAIR HODGES: —He had dementia, yeah.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah. And then at the same time, though, he kept—like you’re saying—bouncing back. It was like the Energizer Bunny. It was like nothing's going to get this guy. In a way that's an interesting parallel with the abuse. It was almost like, unstoppable. It was the sense of like, he could be abusive and then quick fix, make it up. Apologize, be really sweet and kind, and then do it again. But it’s like…

BLAIR HODGES: Another kind of cycle.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, another cycle. And also the cycle of vulnerability coupled with this omnipotence. That was present when he was ill. Like he was totally vulnerable. There was a time in 2006, I think it was, where I really thought he was going to die. There was no doubt. It just felt like this is imminent now. He was hallucinating and all these other things. He didn't die for six more years! And between those six years he moved to different nursing homes, basically, because of bad behavior.

But it reminds me of those inflatable dolls, or those inflatable things on lawns.

BLAIR HODGES: Like outside the car dealership thing?

DEBORAH COHAN: Like you hit it and it keeps coming back.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, yeah. It falls and then pops back up.

DEBORAH COHAN: And it’ll keep standing, exactly. And that was my dad in everything.

BUTTERFLY EFFECT FIXATION (42:54)

BLAIR HODGES: You say nothing could really prepare you for that. There was this moment when he falls at the Cleveland airport, you kind of pinpoint this as a turning point for him, where he seems to be in relatively good health, but he fell and broke his hip. You were involved in that trip too. You carried these feelings about that.

DEBORAH COHAN: Absolutely.

BLAIR HODGES: You were worried he was about to die then, and you weren't ready. Then again, you were less prepared for what ended up happening, which was years of this cycle of health crises and then recoveries. Nothing could have prepared you for that.

DEBORAH COHAN: And the reality is you're never ready. It's almost like you can know what’s happening. He was never going to get better. But I also didn't think he was going to die three days before I started my new job in South Carolina, three weeks after I moved here, after just being divorced myself. I didn’t really, it was like, “That was interesting timing, Dad.” [laughs]

But you just said something that was really interesting and reminds me of the passage I just read from being in the nursing home, and it relates to the moment he fell. So when my dad fell at the airport, he was going there in a limo, being dropped off, got out of the car and fell on ice in Cleveland at the airport. My friend, who’s now, I mean he’s ex-husband, Mark, he and I were heading to Cleveland to meet my dad to then go to Florida.

BLAIR HODGES: With him.

DEBORAH COHAN: With him. It was supposed to be this vacation. My dad had packed his red suitcase, and it turns out that red suitcase, which is also featured in the book, that thing was screaming at me every time I would go and visit him in a nursing home. I don't know why I didn't think to trash it. Maybe because I kept hoping we would get to pack it and he could go home. But like, honestly, that suitcase was just—it was like a bully, you know? It was this sense of like—it was taunting because I felt, and I still kind of do, if my dad wasn't taking us to Florida, he wouldn't have fallen on ice at the airport and he wouldn't have broken his hip, and then he wouldn’t have—then his whole life wouldn't have come tumbling down with it.

BLAIR HODGES: Butterfly effect moment, right?

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah. But at the same time, that's sort of abuse survivor logic.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, you’re putting it on you.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, like if I hadn't have done this, he wouldn't have done that to me. Or if I had done this, he definitely would have behaved differently and then I wouldn't have been told “I wish you'd commit suicide” or something.

It's interesting how even in a moment like that, that has really nothing to do with abuse, the psyche that's been dealing with abuse and those dynamics, is still contaminated by that. There was still that sense of, “God, if only we hadn't gone to Florida! If only we hadn't made that trip!”

And the reality is, I was actually very tentative about wanting to go on that trip. My dad really wanted this for us. He really wanted the three of us to go and have this wonderful time and be at this resort. And I was haunted by some of my memories of my dad on trips. I didn't want to deal with that with my husband at the time.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

DEBORAH COHAN: And then I also dealt with the guilt and the shame around not really wanting the trip. And then he actually—his whole life tumbled down as a result of a trip he really wanted that I didn't want because I wasn't grateful enough. So it did this whole thing. I mean, I can still feel it.

BLAIR HODGES: It recurs. You bring it up throughout the book. This Cleveland airport is a recurring moment you keep going back to.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yes. And then isn't it wild that I got the news of his death at a different airport—

BLAIR HODGES: Right!

DEBORAH COHAN: —as I was about to board a plane to go and see him for the last time, which at that time really I knew was the last time because they called me to pretty much tell me that earlier in the day. So I arranged to leave that evening, and then missed it. Again, at the time it was like, “Oh my gosh, you're such a screw up! You can't even get to see him when…” It was just this…

BLAIR HODGES: The reflex of self-blame.

DEBORAH COHAN: Criticism, yes. I had internalized that so much, and so it was a process to try to realize like, no. My dad could have fallen anywhere. Something else could have happened. Because of course something else would have happened. But it was so hard to see in that moment.

ONE LITTLE EXTRA SOMETHING (47:49)

BLAIR HODGES: This reminds me the ways you're very confessional and vulnerable yourself in the book. This isn't a book about Deborah Cohan the hero who cared for her dying father. This is a book of Deborah Cohan who's wrestling with the ambiguity of being someone who experienced abuse, who has really hard feelings about that, and who also has feelings of love. But there was, I think one of the most arresting—

Well I probably shouldn’t try to qualify it. To me, the most arresting moment in the book is when you're listing all the medications he's taking on any given day when he's in a care facility. There's Ambien, Glucotrol, amoxicillin, mycelium, and even more. You see this one-month pharmacy bill that added up to twelve hundred dollars. Then you add this startling line. You say, "One extra little something slipped into this whole mess would be untraceable."

This is one of the darkest thoughts a caregiver might experience, but you're not the only caregiver who I've heard talk about this. So I wanted to spend a little bit of time there about what it was like confessing that, talking about that in your book.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, I certainly—I hope it's understood in the book that it wasn't about revenge.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

DEBORAH COHAN: It wasn't like because of that moment when my dad thought his life would be easier if I committed suicide that I want to somehow poison him or kill him. It was this very deep in my bones feeling of, “No one should have to live this way.”

BLAIR HODGES: It was, you were witnessing suffering. And your brain was like what can we do for this?

DEBORAH COHAN: To stop it, yes. My parents, as I said, and you identified it as well, they were very progressive. And I still remember conversations when I was growing up where my dad would say, "If that ends up happening to me—” like, you know, he would talk about people who—

BLAIR HODGES: Right. “I don't want to live like that."

DEBORAH COHAN: “I don’t wanna live like that. Just kill me. Do something.” So I think even he would have been compassionate and understanding to the thought I had.

But what's also interesting that you didn't reveal in your question though is, when I revealed it to myself, I was also telling it to my husband at the time, who thought I was just totally crazy for thinking it, for saying it. It was almost like I should be ashamed of myself.

And then there I go, retelling the whole thing in the book. So I wasn’t, I really never wound up being so ashamed of it. It was more the sense of the absolute desperation a caregiver feels. The absolute helplessness to stop the suffering and to also stop witnessing it, too! It was like, how much longer can we all go on like this? It was sort of like this is an untenable situation.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, this wasn't a revenge plot.

DEBORAH COHAN: Absolutely not.

BLAIR HODGES: This was a desperate moment of trying to figure out how to make the suffering end. I mean, you talk about how caregiving amplified your childhood instincts, your hyper-responsibility and hyper-vigilance, and what toll that could take on you over a number of years.

What was it like being hyper-vigilant, hyper-responsible about your father?

DEBORAH COHAN: Well you almost alluded to it in the list of the medications. I was carrying around like, a file box in my car with all sorts of information about his health, with all sorts of papers, with duplicate copies of things, because I don't want to be caught off guard, not prepared. If someone calls me, I want to have it all ready. I always had pen and paper with me.

Yeah, it’s true that there's a hyper-vigilance that happens when someone's experiencing an abusive relationship or witnessing abuse. That sense of being on guard, of trying to have every base covered. That sort of thing.

BLAIR HODGES: Be blameless, really.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, you know I did that, I extended that into caregiving. I made a list of—I mean, it was sort of crazy, but I did—I sent a copy to my mother, I sent a copy to the nursing home, I sent a copy everywhere. And actually it was when he lived at home, before that, where I had something on the refrigerator that had his social security number, all of his information—like the drugs he takes, his health history, the dates of surgeries—so that any of the nurses caring for him in his home could see that, could know what was going on, could assist.

BLAIR HODGES: You were also on call all the time, expecting any phone call. It seemed like you were just tied to your phone in case there was a phone call that would come in.

DEBORAH COHAN: Right. And when he died, I talk about how that night after talking with my friend for hours on my couch, afterwards then I just go and I turn off the phone. And I've done that every single night since. I never leave my phone on.

BLAIR HODGES: Right! From that point on.

DEBORAH COHAN: It’s like he’ll call me at three or four in the morning. If I'm up, I'll answer, if I’m not—

I could be called at any moment about anything and there was just no boundaries on it. Because again, it's the sense of they have to for different liability reasons, but I was being called about anything and everything.

DOES THE CHILD BECOME THE PARENT (53:22)

BLAIR HODGES: It took up mental and emotional space twenty-four hours a day. And as you watched all these losses pile up—he stopped being able to drive, he stopped being able to walk, he stopped being able to write, then read, then feed himself, then he lost control of his bladder, he couldn't think straight, he couldn't remember. The dementia took over.

And you tell us about a friend of yours called Julie. She's a geriatric care specialist. You said she's actually not comfortable when she hears people talking about a role reversal in this situation. It's common for people to say the child becomes the parent and the parent becomes like the child. You're doing a lot of the same things. They're helping feed them, they probably wear diapers, there's all these things going on. You say Julie is not comfortable with that comparison. But you kind of disagree with her. I wanted to hear your thoughts about where Julie's coming from and how you see it.

DEBORAH COHAN: Well I mean, she was so compassionate to me about my dad and about all that has happened. In fact, I remember saying to her, I'm going to be using your name, if you don't want me to use it, I can give you a pseudonym.

BLAIR HODGES: It's the risk of being friends with a writer. [laughter]

DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly! But I mean, nobody's really talked about in a singularly bad way in the book. Not even my dad. So with Julie I think that's a common thing in gerontology, in her field, is the sense of empowering the person who is being cared for.

BLAIR HODGES: Conferring dignity. If you say they're like children that's undignified or that's demeaning.

DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly. And that's why these nursing homes will ask families to post pictures of when the person was younger and more robust and vibrant on the door or in the entrance to the room, so when people are going in to see the patient they're also reminded, “Oh, this is really who I'm seeing. I'm not just seeing this person who's only weak and sick and vulnerable.”

But you know what's interesting to me about that is I felt that a lot with my father. I felt like I wanted to just scream to [laughs] anybody who would listen or any of the nurses or anyone, this isn't really my dad! This is my dad! Kind of asserting the strengths and the brilliance he did have. At the same time, though, it was very hard for me to give that credit to other people, you know? [laughs]

So when I would see other residents who were really bad off, I had a hard time thinking about them in their prior phases of their life. I think that's just something caregivers struggle with. I certainly wasn't unique in that.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure, and I'm sympathetic to Julie in the sense of conferring dignity and being mindful of this person as a person worthy of concern and care and not infantilizing people. But you also say, when you're feeding your dad and he's spitting up down his shirt and all these things, you can't help but feel like that role has been reversed. I'd like to find a way to both dignify and honor the parent, and also validate and recognize the experience of the child who is now being a caregiver. I think both things are possible.

DEBORAH COHAN: That's why when I talk about feeding my dad birthday cake, there's this point where I talk about it as like a terrible beauty in feeding a parent. That gets at that to me. Again, the ambivalence, the contradictory reality, the sense that we should be there in a certain way. They did this for us. We should do this for them with no sense of negativity.

At the same time, this is not really how it was supposed to go.

BLAIR HODGES: There was no rehearsal for it, too, for you. You were just there. The cupcake was there. And here you are, you're feeding your dad.

DEBORAH COHAN: And he wouldn't have wanted that. The last thing he would have wanted was to have me feed him, I mean oh my gosh.

LETTER TO DADDY (57:34)

BLAIR HODGES: There's one more excerpt I'd like to hear you read here. You wrote some of this book in your dad's presence there at the nursing home when he would be asleep, and you were at his side. This is on page one 142. You wrote to him in that moment in 2009. If you can read it.

DEBORAH COHAN: Sure. It's just funny. I'm laughing only because I feel like I have that page memorized. I have actually read this piece quite a bit when I've spoken about the book. It does feel like a really evocative passage, and not because it talks about his abuse at all, but also because of the writerly technique that I used in it of taking almost like field notes that I wound up using. It's exactly the same, I didn't change anything. But I didn't know I was writing a book at that moment either.

"I watch you as you sleep, not unlike you probably watched me as I slept as a newborn baby and as a young girl, and wonder, in awe, in calm, and in worry. A parent watches a child sleep with anticipation of a future. An adult child watches a sick parent sleep with a sense of the past. You are finally still and quiet. You, a man who I know is chaotic and loud. We rest in this calm as you fall in and out of slumber and I grade papers. I need to study your face, memorize it, because I know I'll need it one day. Yet the you now is not the you I want to remember.

“In a few days, I'll be back with over a hundred students, giving lectures, attending meetings, going to a concert, a lunch with a friend, a performance of The Vagina Monologues. And in my week ahead, I worry about being too busy, about running from one activity to the next, breathless.

“Yet one day, Daddy, you did this too, right? How would you restructure those days now? What did you hope for? What do you look for now? You look tired, though I can't tell if you're tired of this life. Yesterday I brought you coffee from Caribou with one of their napkins that made a jab at Starbucks that said, 'Our coffee is smooth and fresh because burnt and bitter were already taken.' Whenever I see great lines and logos I think of you. Your creativity still shines through as we leaf through metropolitan home and marvel at minimalist spaces. Your stained sweatpants are pulled up halfway toward your chest and your stomach looks distended.

“Earlier today I saw as you put imaginary pills to your mouth with your fingers, something I assume to be a self-soothing ritual you performed after the nurse told you it was not yet time for more medication. Being in Cleveland, I'm surrounded by childhood friends hanging out with their dads, younger men than you in their sixties and early seventies. Robust, athletic, energetic men vigorously playing tennis and golf, working, traveling and chasing after their dreams, not figments of their imaginations in thin air.

“Oh, Daddy. Your eyes open suddenly, and you ask, ‘What are you writing?’ I quickly respond, ‘Oh, nothing really, it's just for school.’"

LATE-STAGE CONFRONTATIONS (1:01:06)

BLAIR HODGES: That's Deborah Cohan, professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. She earned her PhD in Sociology and a Joint Master of Arts in Women's Studies and Sociology at Brandeis University. That excerpt is from her book, Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption.

You mentioned a little bit about this already, Deborah, but maybe just take one moment and talk about the ways your father maybe tried to reckon with the abusive dynamics of your relationship later in life. If there was any indication that he came to regret how he treated you.

You talk about, for example, when he tried to volunteer at a domestic violence clinic. Even in that context, it didn't really come up. It doesn't sound like you had many opportunities, or that you felt safe enough or whatever, to straightforwardly confront him and say this was an abusive situation.

DEBORAH COHAN: I certainly tried. There was a time when I was doing the abuse intervention work and I was working late into the night and our groups ran from 8pm to 10pm, after men had worked their jobs and then came to this program, and then I was leaving Cambridge—This was when I was in Boston, and leaving late at night, 10:30, 11 o'clock, and walking into a parking lot by myself and driving home. And I remember this one day my dad and I were on the phone, he was so concerned for my safety. It really upset him that I was doing this, and doing it late.

And I did in that moment really try to question his fear and to try to help him understand, though it didn't really work, but to really try to say, ‘Dad, the things that these guys do are no different than things you've done. I'm not afraid of them. That was not an issue for me.’ I guess he didn't want to also see me driving around late at night.

But the reality is had I been afraid I wouldn't have been an effective counselor for these guys either. I had to try to help my dad understand that I was working with them in as fearless and compassionate a way as possible, but I guess in that moment I also felt fearless and compassionate in the conversation with him, of trying to say, ‘Dad, you're labeling these guys as monsters, as demons. And actually, your behavior is on a continuum with theirs.’

And that's disturbing to hear from your daughter, obviously. But it was important for me to say. So I'm really glad I had a moment to tell him that. It didn't lead to a very productive conversation because he, like many men in the program, still wanted to minimize aspects of their behavior or rationalize it, or it was like this—"But Deb, I never hit you. Deb, I never did this. I never did that. Like that would be horrifying. But what I did wasn't as bad."

I didn't really let him get away with that, and that's another reason why, for me, writing this book was critical. Because there really is not enough out there to highlight the damage of verbal and emotional and psychological abuse and threats.

There's so much out there around physical abuse, and also sexual abuse. Movies and books and things like that. And those are really important cultural documents we have in the world. But the thing that also has happened is, people don't understand enough about the damage of the emotional abuse and the verbal abuse. And as a result, with so much less written about it, I really felt this tremendous ethical responsibility to write the book.

SEE YOU AROUND (1:05:06)

BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how much your dad is still with you. You close the book by saying you see him in so much of life. I wondered what's an example of that? And whether you think that fades over time at all?

DEBORAH COHAN: No, I don’t think any of this fades. I definitely don't think time heals everything or any of that stuff that people say.

No, I do—I see him in so much, I guess in the past six years or so I have gotten much more involved as a public sociologist, translating ideas and concepts and theories and things for the larger public. So getting quoted in major news outlets and doing a lot of writing and things like that. That's probably the part where I so miss my father, because he would get such a tremendous kick out of the fact that I wrote for Teen Vogue, or that I, you know, was quoted in Time magazine, or I wrote a piece for Newsweek recently. I mean he just, that was his bread and butter. That's what he loved.

I mean, he would have loved that I was on this podcast. He would probably be really angry and humiliated about some of what I'd be talking about. But he definitely had this overwhelming pride and interest in my accomplishments. And that has been a really hard thing to deal with because my career really took off since I've lived here, and that's when he died.

And he always dreamed of living in the Carolinas, or in New Mexico, or Arizona. So sometimes I feel like I'm sort of living out something he really wanted that he didn't actualize. I think he would be pretty over the moon about the fact that I moved to South Carolina and have made a good life for myself here. I'm a lot happier as a person than I ever was before.

Some of that is probably healing from abuse. It's being in a new relationship. It's so many different things. Like, I wish he could know me now. I wish I could talk to him and know him now. It's just such a strange thing, you know? But I do feel like, hopefully somehow, he knows.

I had him for a long time. I'm partnered with a man whose dad died when he was ten years old. I'm often thinking to myself, "Man, I wish he knew Mike." I mean, he really missed out. He really missed out, and Mike missed out knowing his father. And I didn't have that. But instead, I had this very torturous, very complicated relationship. It's really tricky.

But it's interesting because the conversations I grew up having with my dad that were really fun and provocative and helpful to me were often conversations around advertising and marketing and all that kind of stuff. Funny enough, my partner, Mike, that's his thing! He's a Director of Media Relations. So here I am still having those conversations at dinner. It's a little bit bizarre.

**REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES (1:08:19)

BLAIR HODGES: In some ways, that circle continues to close.

DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, Deborah, let's conclude with the segment Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. This is when you can talk about anything you regret about the book now that it's out, what the most challenging thing about writing it was, or what kind of surprises you encountered as you created this book. You can speak to one, two, or all three of those things. Regrets, challenges, and surprises.

DEBORAH COHAN: I would say I don't have any regrets, which I'm so pleased about because of the nature of the topic. And the fact that surviving abuse and dealing with caregiving are riddled with regrets, the fact that I could write a book and not have regrets about it is pretty remarkable to me.

BLAIR HODGES: You didn't even find any typos or anything like that? [laughs]

DEBORAH COHAN: There might be I don't know—

BLAIR HODGES: I didn't notice any. [laughter]

DEBORAH COHAN: There might be, I don't know, but I'm kind of crazy about that kind of stuff though. My dad was too. Oh my gosh, I inherited my spelling and all that craziness from him.

BLAIR HODGES: Funny. I didn't notice any. So no regrets. Alright, well, challenges and surprises?

DEBORAH COHAN: I mean I don't have any regrets! I don't feel like there's anything I revealed in the book that I wish I hadn't revealed. There's nothing I wish I had included that I didn't include, that kind of thing, which feels really good to me.

Yeah, I mean I actually have been thinking about this a lot as I've been writing this new book I'm working on, because it's that sense of, you just really don't want to forget something. You want to make sure that whatever you wanted to say is in it.

BLAIR HODGES: Once it’s out, it’s out, so.

DEBORAH COHAN: Right. And at the same time, though, I've started to grow more comfortable with the fact that writing itself is a process and that I will come to think about things and know things in new and different ways.

And I guess, when you ask what's surprising, I will say it has surprised me that the thing I was most afraid of—which was the death of a parent or both parents—has been also freeing. It's been a pretty startling revelation I guess you could say.

BLAIR HODGES: Is it hard to talk about that? Some people might say, “Oh, this is a person who's glad their parents died,” if you talk about that as a freeing moment.

DEBORAH COHAN: I don't really mean it like that, because I wish they were still around. It's really not that I'm glad they died. It’s that their deaths have liberated me to be more authentically me in a way I guess I felt I needed to be.

BLAIR HODGES: You're not trying to close the triangle anymore. It’s freed that—You talk about how that dynamic went on your whole life. You were trying to hold that together.

DEBORAH COHAN: Absolutely. I remember reading this book called The End of Eve by Arielle Gore. The last line is something like, "I was once someone's daughter, but now I am free." And I remember when I read that, I just bristled. I was like, “Oh, gosh,” it felt revolting in a way to me. It felt mean and all these things.

And now I get it. I really understand that. There are some ways in which that role can be confining and restrictive and that sort of thing. I remember reading that and then I also remember going to my book launch in Cleveland for this book, and the adult daughter of one of my mother's best friends was there. We were talking about our mothers and this beautiful friendship they had. She had some issues with her mom and she had said, "I miss her so much. And it's so freeing that she's gone." Again, it was like that sense of “Oop, this is a little surprising.” I've just kind of meditated on that all along. I sort of see it in a new way. That has surprised me.

**CURRENT PROJECTS – 1:12:20

BLAIR HODGES: It's another example of how both things can be true. The love for your parents is clear in the book, and there's also a sense of freedom and an ability to kind of let go a little bit and live more into yourself and your new partnership and your work.

Speaking of which, what's the new book you're working on?

DEBORAH COHAN: It's actually a memoir related to my mom.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh! To be fair. You've got to get both.

DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, you've got to do both! Well, and that's going to be an interesting one in many ways for similar and different reasons. But it's more related to art and art making. My mom was a fabulous painter and printmaker and I've really now come to see how much growing up with creative parents totally changed me. It made me. It changed me. And maybe that's part of what's freeing, but it's part of what I miss. I wish now I could have those conversations with them about my own creativity.

My mom's death in 2020 was right at the height of the pandemic, September of 2020. My second parent who I didn't get to go and see when she died. It was like, “Okay.”

BLAIR HODGES: Wow.

DEBORAH COHAN: But hers was different. I wasn't involved in her care. She wanted me to have nothing to do with it. It's almost as though she took what she believed were my feelings about my dad, that it was a lot to deal with, and she just kind of closed me out. So that was difficult.

But actually, I was incredibly scared of, how am I going to deal with all of her art? She has thousands of paintings. I thought it would be overwhelming and it would be tremendously sad to be surrounded by so much of her work. And it has actually been the complete opposite. It has been super, super helpful and healing and it's helped me see so much around creativity and what's involved in the creative process. So yeah, that's kind of brewing in the background as well.

BLAIR HODGES: Great! I really look forward to that. That seems like, not really a sequel, but definitely another part of the story. And based on Welcome to Wherever We Are, that's a book I want to read. So Deborah, thanks so much for spending time with us at Family Proclamations and talking about this book.

DEBORAH COHAN: Thank you so much for having me and for all of your thoughtful questions. That meant a lot.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Camille Messick, my wonderful transcript editor. Thanks to David Ostler, who sponsored this first group of transcripts. If you'd like to sponsor transcripts, please reach out. Let me know. My email address is blair at firesidepod dot org. You can also contact me with questions or feedback about any episode.

There's a lot more to come on Family Proclamations, so why not take a second to rate and review the show? Let me know what you think about it so far, like this review from Benjamin E. Park. He said, "If you like engaging conversations with smart people on pressing issues, this is your show."

I love that review. Thank you so much!

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Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and we'll see you next time.