Jump Before Your High Horse Gets too Tall

I had a fun visit from my friend Amanda and her kids today. When that was finished, I thought I would sit down and study mechanical engineering for pleasure. I was mistaken. I ended up watching a movie called Mrs. Skeffington.

Spoilers lie ahead.

The movie is good but not great. The star is Bette Davis. The movie starts in 1914. Unbelievably, Davis plays a gorgeous girl from a rich family. Bette Davis was not gorgeous, so some suspension of disbelief is required. The makeup people did a bang-up job with her, but she was still a B- on her very best day, even through a lens smeared with vaseline.

There is a reason why homosexuals like her more than straight men.

Bette’s brother loses the family fortune, and then he goes to work for a brokerage. He steals money by submitting false orders.

Claude Rains plays Job Skeffington, a rich Jewish man who runs the brokerage. He comes to see Bette and her brother, and he ends up telling Bette what happened. Bette tells him the family can’t cover the debt because their fortune is gone. Rains agrees to let things ride for a while.

Davis chases Rains and gets him to marry her, in order to get the debt canceled. He moves into her family’s mansion, saving it from creditors. Bette likes him, but she doesn’t love him. She has a bunch of desperate suitors who continue to pursue her after she marries, and she doesn’t discourage them. She loves the attention. Men are crazy about her. Wherever she goes, they trample each other trying to get to her.

Davis and Rains have a baby. Their marriage gets worse. The irresponsible brother dies in World War I, and Davis becomes bitter because she is stuck in a marriage she only created in order to save him.

Davis steps out on Rains with other men. Eventually, she finds out he has been cheating on her with his secretaries, and she divorces him. He gives her a huge fortune, purely because he’s a kind person. She practically forces him to take the daughter and raise her. Rains and the daughter take off for Europe, and Davis avoids her for years.

The Nazis overrun Europe. The daughter flees to America. Rains stays behind and gets put in a concentration camp.

Davis goes sailing with a man in his late 20’s. She is about 50, but she looks 30, so he is in hot pursuit. She catches a chill out on the water and contracts diphtheria. When she gets over it, she has the wrinkles of a 70-year-old, and a lot of her hair has vanished for good.

While she recovers, she sees Rains sitting in the room with her. Bothered by the hallucinations, she goes to a rude therapist. He tells her she needs to take her husband back. He says her suitors never really cared for her. She gets mad and says she can still get attention from men. He dares her to prove it. She throws a party and invites her old beaus.

At the party, people are horrified by her appearance. The wives of her former suitors are overjoyed. She tries to seduce one of the men, and as tactfully as he can, he makes it clear he has no interest at all.

One of her suitors is broke. He shows up after the party and pretends to be in love with her. She pretends to be broke, too, and he takes off. This is when she realizes things are not going well.

The daughter tells Davis she is marrying the young man who took her mother sailing. Ouch.

Davis ends up alone, miserable, and ashamed to take her ugly face outside.

In the end, Rains returns from Europe. He has been in a concentration camp, and somehow he ended up broke and blind. He still loves Davis. She takes him back.

Shorter version: beautiful woman uses looks to control men; then she becomes ugly very quickly and has to adjust to the loss of her powers.

Why did I watch this movie? God shows me things for reasons.

I feel it was about my dad. He used to be a powerful figure in a number of lives. His family and his employees had to toe the line. People who didn’t really like him all that much treated him well because they had to or because they wanted something from him. Now he has no power over people, and no one is kissing up to him any more. He has to ask for things instead of giving orders. If he’s not nice to people, they don’t have to be nice to him or even suffer his presence.

I only have two friends I see regularly. One has a strong maternal side, so she doesn’t mind dealing with him. Not that much, anyway. She doesn’t pretend his behavior is acceptable, but she tolerates it out of kindness. The other friend is a man who, obviously, lacks a maternal side. He is nice to my dad, but that’s largely a courtesy to me. He comes to visit, and he realizes that in order to spend time with me, he has to endure a certain amount of rude behavior from my dad. He humors him and invests some time talking to him, but he only does it to keep things going smoothly. We look for excuses to do things without my dad.

In the past, he spent more time with my dad, because they had common interests and enjoyed talking about them. Things have changed. My dad’s behavior is worse, and the conversation isn’t good.

There is nothing wrong with looking for ways to get away from my dad. My friends are my friends, not his, and they come to see me, not him. They’re not obligated to let him mistreat them or impose on them. Also, if he is indulged, he will dominate the conversation to the point where I am cut out of it completely. He would see nothing wrong with having a long conversation with my friends, in which I did not get to talk to them once. He has done it in the past. It was bad when he had all his marbles, but when it’s a dementia conversation, it’s even worse.

He doesn’t have a single friend, unless you count another dementia sufferer he hasn’t spoken to in months. He uses me to get contact with other people. It’s as if I’m growing apples and picking them for myself, and he is taking them off my plate and eating them in front of me.

He didn’t grow any apples for himself. His friendships were phony. His friends were people he did business with.

Mrs. Skeffington could not wrap her head around the obvious. She looked somewhat grotesque after her illness, and there was nothing wrong with her vision or her mirrors. She could see herself clearly. Nonetheless, she pretended she was still a beauty who could gather crowds of adoring men simply by showing up. She had to have her denial shoved in her face before she admitted what was already clear to everyone else.

My dad’s biggest problem these days is dementia. His second-biggest problem is his refusal to admit he has it. He is not so demented that he can’t see what’s happening. He knows he can’t drive. He knows he can’t practice law. He knows he can’t take care of himself. Obviously, he understands these things. Still, a few times a month, he insists on telling me there is nothing wrong with him.

Because he refused to admit he had a problem back when things weren’t so bad, he didn’t prepare at all. He thought he would die at 100, still at the top of his game. He didn’t tell me anything about looking after his investments. He didn’t plan his estate to any great extent. He didn’t give away cash every year to beat the IRS.

He never made any plans to wrap up his law practice. He simply stopped getting business. People he had represented for decades hired other lawyers.

His investments got messed up. He couldn’t keep records well. He got in trouble because he refused to pay a just debt. I had to step in and figure it all out, instead being brought in 10 years ago and being allowed to modernize everything.

After the transition was made, he insisted on interfering from time to time, and he was always wrong because he was no longer fit to run things. He finally reached the point where he could not interfere much, and it made things go much more smoothly. I no longer had to argue with him in addition to doing his work for him.

He made no plans at all for his eventual deterioration. He refused to make a living will. He didn’t educate himself about assisted living and so on. He never thought about leaving Miami in order to avoid dying surrounded by old Cubans who could not converse with him.

He tells himself he’s a great guy who was a fantastic husband and father. He tells himself his family consisted of three total screwups and one saint. He says he’s a good person who hasn’t done anything wrong. Who says things like that? Virtually everyone is willing to own a certain number of misdeeds and admit regret, even if they aren’t completely honest.

I believe God wanted me to see the movie so he could tell me this: “Your dad put himself where he is today. He did this to himself. Whatever happens to him now is completely his fault. It was to be expected. And he is still making his problems worse.”

Sometimes you have to watch people sink. It happens to us all, many times in life. We have to stand by and observe while self-destructive people crash and burn in slow motion. I marvel when I think how hard I worked to try to get my sister to let me help her.

The fact that someone else is failing and suffering badly doesn’t mean you are supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t mean you failed. God does everything that can be done to help people, and he still watches them burn in hell. You’re not more capable than God.

We try to help people, and often, it works. But there are many people who can’t be blessed because the blessings can’t get through the thick armor of pride. You can’t always help.

I can do a lot to make my dad’s life better, but there will be a great deal of suffering I can’t touch with my best efforts, and I have to feel in my heart that this is not my fault.

When I was teaching physics at the University of Texas, my head T.A. told me about the written exam. We let students work together on lab reports, but they had to take the written test alone. He said we were uncoupling the cars in order to see who was pulling the train. God is uncoupling the cars. My ability to help my dad is decreasing week by week, and soon it will disappear. Then he will be alone with God, and I will be sitting on the sidelines.

We all end up alone with God eventually. The earlier you meet with him, the better off you will be.

There is nothing wrong, abnormal, unexpected, or unjust about my dad’s situation. It’s a small taste of the justice we deserve for abandoning God. We all deserve hell. My dad isn’t in hell. He’s getting a mild preview in order to motivate him to come clean.

These unsubtle lessons keep coming. I have one father who didn’t prepare himself or me, but I have another one who is preparing me very thoroughly.

I don’t recommend the movie. It’s okay if you’re tired and you just want a reason to eat popcorn, but that’s about it.