My Birthday with Oedipus

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

I received two rather unique gifts during my 62nd birthday celebration this week. One was eligibility for Social Security retirement benefits. The other was a visit from Oedipus, son of Laius and Jocasta, the king and queen of ancient Thebes.

Not the Oedipus from Freud’s much-criticized (and somewhat creepy) theory about childhood sexual development, mind you. I mean the Oedipus from Oedipus Rex, the Athenian tragedy written by the Greek playwright Sophocles in about 429 BC.

And, of course, I did not meet Oedipus in person. He’s a 2,500 year old myth, so we settled for a literary meeting. For reasons I will explain, it seemed appropriate to read about Oedipus this year.

You probably remember his story from school. An oracle warns Laius and Jocasta that their son will murder his father. To avoid this dreadful fate after Jocasta gives birth, they abandon that son—Oedipus—on a mountainside. 

Although his biological parents think him dead, a shepherd finds and saves Oedipus, and then the king of Corinth raises him as an adopted son. Years later, a grown Oedipus, oblivious to his true lineage, visits the famous oracle at Delphi. 

It’s not a happy visit. The oracle tells Oedipus that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Distraught, Oedipus vows never to return to Corinth, thinking this will save his father’s life and his mother’s honor.

On his journey away from Corinth, Oedipus encounters an old man on the road, quarrels with him, and kills him. Later, Oedipus visits Thebes and by solving a riddle, saves the city from a troublesome Sphinx.

The grateful people of Thebes crown Oedipus as their new king. He marries the widowed queen, Jocasta, neither one realizing they are son and mother. 

Later, a different oracle says Thebes can be saved from yet another plague, but only if someone discovers who murdered Laius. Oedipus seeks to solve the case. 

In the process, he learns his true ancestry, and that the man that he murdered on the road years before was the old king Laius. Oedipus realizes that he has killed his father and married his mother, just as the oracle had predicted.

Why do I care about this story? Like Oedipus, I have been to Greece. I passed near Thebes, and visited Delphi. My father abandoned me too. Yet, I did not marry my mother.

And I did not kill my father. Or did I?

I’ve now realized that abandoned sons do tend to kill off—not literally, but in some sense of the word—the fathers who have abandoned them. Why did my recent birthday hasten this peculiar epiphany?

When I turned 62, I did something my father never did. He died at age 61. I beat him. I don’t usually revel in someone else’s demise, but this accomplishment was gratifying.

Granted, it’s not a milestone that qualifies me for a lifetime achievement award. At best, I probably deserve only a participation trophy. 

Lots of people reach 62 and older. In fact, I read the other day about how the oldest woman in the world recently passed away…at age 119. Nevertheless, for our family, 62 is a big deal. 

As I have explained in a previous blog post, both my mother and brother wondered out loud (and perhaps worried in silence) about whether or not they would die at a young age just like a parent had done.

Family history justified my mother’s concern. Her mother died in 1939 at age 47. My mother’s grandmother died at age 24 in childbirth. My mother’s brother died young too, at only age 37.

Those are the sort of gloomy mortality and morbidity statistics that can keep you awake at night. 

My brother once verbalized the same quiet fear. In addition to our father’s early death, our father’s brother (our uncle) died young too, at age 58. Their grandfather died at age 25 in 1891.

Unlike many of my forebears, I’ve reaped the benefits of that old Irish blessing, “May you live long enough to comb gray hair.” There is something more than just beating bad family genes (or bad family luck), however, that made me revel in living longer than my father. 

I think that to survive abandonment, one must abandon the abandoner, in a sense kill him off. That’s what I’ve done with my father, and not only by celebrating my survival to an age he never reached. There are many other examples.

I really did not want my father around after the ugly family divorce in the early 1970s. I shunned his occasional efforts to see me in the 1980s. I did not invite him to our wedding in 1989. 

I even just barely missed his death in 1991. An excerpt from my 2021 book Monastery Mornings recaps the difficult moment:

My father Kevin remarried in 1973 and seems to have enjoyed some happiness during the last years of his life, but he did not live that long. He contracted hepatitis sometime after the divorce in the late 1970s. It weakened his liver, he developed cancer and he passed away in November 1991 after living for just over sixty years. Before he passed, his second wife Yvonne had called me, told me he was quite sick, and said the end was near. I had not seen or talked with him for a long time, but I decided I should visit him. Unfortunately, I arrived at his home in Roy, Utah, just moments after he died. I guess he and I just never really got in sync with each other. 

My father brought some of this down on his own head by personal choices that so negatively affected everyone else in our family. But still, like Oedipus Rex, it is quite sad, and it is a tragedy—a form of figurative patricide—that can be traced directly back to the act of abandonment.

Is it the end of the story?

In Oedipus Rex, poor Jocasta kills herself after learning the true nature of not only her first husband’s death at the hand of her son, but also of her own incestuous domestic relations thereafter. Oedipus fares a bit better.

In Sophocles’ final play, Oedipus at Colonus (401 BC), Oedipus lives on in exile, but only after putting out both his eyes in anguish. After much internal and external turmoil and conflict, involving his children and uncle—who reigned after him in Thebes—a blind Oedipus dies in relative peace, finally accepted and absolved by the god Zeus.

In many ways then, Oedipus is a redemption story, suggesting that suffering can be expiation for sin. In other words, there is life even after killing your father, but you have to do the work. 

I have to do the work too. I am still a work in progress, even at age 62, but I do understand it’s not really productive to keep killing my father over and over again. Forgiveness just might be a better path. I also should be cautious about judging my father’s errors, for my own failings just may be worse.

Perhaps Sophocles said it best, “The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.”

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.