A father and a son. They had always looked at the world differently, and now one had grown into a person the other did not understand at all. For years, there had been distance, emotional estrangement in their relationship.
Then one day, the father, aged 84, called the son. "I have cancer," he said. "What do I do?"
Barry Neil Kaufman had to make a decision. "He was reaching out, but it was up to me to decide how I wanted to be with him."
At that point, says "Bears," as he likes to be called, differences didn't matter. "I decided I was going to give him the full me. I leaned forward, very excited and said 'It sounds like you're in for one of the great adventures of your life.' He laughed. I think that's why he called me. He didn't want to be treated as if he were sick and dying, and he knew I would present an alternative."
The next two years were a great adventure, for both father and son. "We found a safe place to be together with no barriers, no walls. We shared a love and camaraderie we had not had before." What seemed so difficult for many on the outside — even for his other siblings, became for him "like a walk with God. I felt blessed to have the opportunity to be with Pop, to heal the discord."
Bears details that journey in a book called "No Regrets: Last Chance for a Father and Son" (New World Library, $24.95). It is written as a kind of love letter to his father, but he hopes it is also a blueprint that other people might follow in dealing both with estrangement and with aging parents. "We can learn," he writes, "to fly above our yearning for acknowledgement, approval or even agreement from our fathers and mothers and possibly catch a golden ring of common ground more fantastic than any we might have imagined."
It's all about choices, says Bears, who has written numerous books and based his life's work at his Option Institute on the premise that "happiness is a choice."
But that was one of the things that divided father and son early on. "My father had a hard time understanding such a simplistic universe. He believed that genetics and our pasts mold who we are. He saw anger as a genetic condition; he got angry because his father got angry, because short tempers ran in the family. I saw anger as a choice. I got angry for a reason, and I could look at that reason and challenge it and choose whether to be angry or not."
His father, Abe, did not openly express emotions or feelings. Bears would try to get Abe to talk about his beliefs and would be rebuffed. " 'That's private,' he would say. I'd call after we hadn't talked for several weeks and ask how he was, and he'd say 'don't start with the questions.' He never enjoyed what he called 'deep conversations.' "
But all that changed after Abe was diagnosed with cancer and after he and his wife, Rosie, came to live with Bears and his wife, Samahria.
All the Kaufmans were able to find both acceptance and peace.
Bears went into the adventure with clear intentions, he says. "I decided I only wanted to love and serve my father. I realized that if I was just going to love him, I could hug him even if he didn't hug me back.
By the time of his father's cancer, Bears was no stranger to dealing with adversity. As a child, his son, Raun, was diagnosed with "incurable" autism. "Doctors would look at him spinning in circles, waving his hands in front of his face and say 'we're so sorry. This is a tragedy.' But this was our son. We didn't want him to be a tragedy. We decided he was wonderful, special, a gift of God, an opportunity."
For 3 1/2 years, the Kaufmans worked with their son 12 hours a day, coming up with an innovative technique that brought him from a mute, withdrawn, functionally-retarded under-30 IQ, to a highly verbal, extroverted, happy young man who recently graduated from an Ivy League university.
In 1983, they founded the Option Institute as a non-profit organization, where they have worked with not only autistic children, but also people suffering from addictions, depression, eating disorders, family breakups and other frailties of the human condition.
When Abe called, "I knew, in that very instant, that I had trained all my life for this unfolding opportunity. All I had learned would serve as a foundation, enabling the healing of a 40-year discordant parent-child relationship and a gentle passage through death's door."
Not everything was perfect with the father. But the son had learned to look with a different eye.
In the end, the one was not, perhaps, the father of the other's dreams. But he did become the father of the other's heart. The Kaufmans learned to love and appreciate each other simply for who they were — a father and a son.
E-MAIL: carma@desnews.com