My Father

It struck me recently that, aside from two blog posts (Euthanasia and Rest in Peace, Pops), I hadn’t written much about my father, my experiences during his death and the grieving that followed and continues to color my life. One of my sisters pointed out that she was a bit surprised, considering how open I am with my posts.

Why haven’t I written much about my father?
Maybe it’s too painful. Or maybe I’m still trying to understand the enormity of our relationship, how it changed over the years and the kind of person that I have become in the wake of my intense caring for him and in the experience of his death. In a way, I think, I’m still struggling to come to grips with what it means to not have my father here, a year and three months later.

Maybe there is just too much to say – too much to try and commit to paper, blog or whatever. I mean – how do you sum up the effect of anyone on your life in a few sentences? How can I even begin to tell you how it felt to have him lead me into the forests as a child and teach me to hunt, to appreciate nature to enjoy the mystery of those secret places? How can I tell you about the change in me when I saw him wantonly kill a rabbit and not take it home for dinner? Does that make him seem bad? He wasn’t always bad. Maybe no one is “bad.” Sometimes he was weak and sometimes he was strong. I saw both but remembered the weaknesses most of all, at least until he died. Then I began to recall his strengths. It would have been nice to be more observant prior to his death.

He drank a lot and he was tortured by insecurities that caused a lot of pain for him and his family. Still, he showed me a lot of valuable things – things I learned to avoid or to embrace. I regret that I didn’t spend the time I had learning how to work with wood like he did. He was a great mechanic and electrician as well. I know nothing bout those things – I wasted his knowledge.

He liked to write, a little prose, a little poetry and he liked to think. In these areas I know that I have surpassed him but at the same time I realize I struggle with my own insecurities but am aware enough to see my limitation, at least some of the time. He had a great desire to communicate what he perceived and in that we match – and in that we both often fail to achieve our aim.

My father was definitely not the trusting sort, but I learned to swing the other way. I learned that trust is a choice and I make that choice. He learned that trust had to be earned. We had a good number of arguments over that until we decided to accept each other as we were. He lived in fear of being hurt, I live understanding that by trusting, I will be hurt but do not want to be constrained by suspicion, cynicism and fear.

I remember when I was about ten or eleven, my father stopped me from kissing him on the cheek and giving him a hug goodnight. He said I was too old for that. Years later I taught him to hug again and to say “I love you.” I am proud of that.
I remember drunk ravings that were frighteningly violent and probably dangerous and my deepest wish to be somewhere else, to run away, to not be a part of all this confusion and anger. I did run away a number of times before the age of eighteen and each time our relationship changed for the better. I think that each time he saw me as a little bit more of a man, willing to make my own decisions no matter how odd they seemed to him. I am grateful that we never came to actual blows, though it was close once.

I remember how proud he was that I landed a job with a defense contractor and was writing software and doing networking. He had struggled with his computer knowledge and I bet that my success in this field made him feel that he contributed something to my growth. He often couldn’t see the influence he had on me.

I was really worried how he would take my transition into nursing – but he was proud that I followed after his mother. He knew, in the last five or ten years of his life that he and I had profoundly different personalities and he really respected my way of life. That makes me so very happy. He was so very happy that he could see in my the willingness to open myself though he could never understand why or how I could do it. (Note: neither do I.)

The night my father had his heart attack while on dialysis – perhaps ten hours before he would loose consciousness forever, I remember him sitting on the edge of his hospital bed grappling with the utter fear of what lay before him. He knew that the next few hours were “make it or break it.” He knew that there was a good chance he wasn’t going to make it out of that dialysis room. He was scared. I remember his face contorting as he struggled to hold in his fear. I remember wrapping one arm around him and reassuring him I would be there. For a long time after he died I regretted that I hadn’t been skillful enough to allow him to express his fear and relieve himself of that burden.

While reading a partial journal of his that my sisters and I had found laying around his apartment, I realized my father was enormously strong and I had never seen it. I hadn’t seen it because I was so busy, I suppose, staring at his weaknesses. In his journal he wrote about his fears of COPD and what it would mean for him. He wrote about his desire to run and hide and to curl up in a tiny ball and make it all go away. He reminded me of my own secret fears and desires. He had never shared any of this with us except in the most oblique references. He wrote about his thought that it “wasn’t too late to accomplish something.” I know these fears. I know that pride and I know that blindness. I hope I know that strength.

It occurred to me, after reading his journal and speaking with friends, that my father’s last conscious act – both in holding back his fears from me while sitting on his hospital bed and later when he let me go home for a few hours sleep just before he had his heart attack – that my father was, despite his fear and his deep desire to hold someone’s hand and cry, was parenting me. He was putting aside his needs to see to mine. He did not want to burden me with his very palpable fear nor his suffering. He was doing all that he could to be a father and not to succumb to fear. That, it seems to me, takes a great deal of strength. I hope that when it’s my time to die that I have that kind of strength.

There is more that I would love to write – and maybe I will. I doubt anyone will read all of this. It’s very lengthy. And sometimes it feels a little self-involved. Many of my friends have lost their fathers – some in far more tragic circumstances than mine and some many years ago when they were still children. All of them have wet eyes when they speak of the passing of their fathers. It makes me feel a little more normal to see that. I still cry now, a year and three months later. Their tears remind me that we all suffer together and that the pain of loss doesn’t go away. You don’t get over it. You just go on.

My father grew a lot in the last ten years of his life. I’m really happy to have seen this and happy that he learned to reach out to a few strangers and develop some very long-lasting and supportive friendships. Sure, there was always the drama, but for my father to bond with a group of guys – that was something different and something that I think he longed for most of his life.

He also managed to get over some of his latent racism, sexism and anger. Certainly he struggled with sixty years of practice thinking one way, but I saw him in his last years develop an open heart and acceptance of others that I never saw in his earlier years. It was a real pleasure to be so close to him those final years and watch him discover these things. I wonder now, if he would have changed nearly as much if he hadn’t been so reliant on others for his care. It was a toll on his pride, but he learned to lean on others and learned that people were willing to to help him for no other reason than because they wanted to help. Because they liked him.

…will add more later….