My Father

Writing about my father is about as easy as wading through wet cement. My father was a complicated man, and my relationship with him was equally complex. To write about him, particularly to write about my relationship with him, brings back all the convolutions, all the contradictions, that I couldn’t reconcile during his life. The relationship was sometimes tortured, often peaceful, and full of love. I was my father’s baby, a “daddy’s girl” in many ways. I know that my image of my father has grown in complexity since he died. With his death, I have seen not only my own contradictory illusions, but also the human motives that can reconcile what I remember. I have begun to see a man who believed strongly in a particular code of ethics, a strict set of behaviors, which kept him on a particular track for good and ill throughout our family’s many misadventures. This must have been sorely tested when our brother died, but my father held to his principles. He kept what was left of our family together, he stayed with his grieving wife, and supported his surviving children as best he could. No wonder his patience sometimes wore thin with me, as the usual scrapes of childhood and adolescence grated on his stoic demeanor. No wonder he sometimes flared up for what at the time seemed like no reason. This ability to see him in full, however has come to me only in his absence and only with time, as my need and nostalgia for the false image of him fades. And as he becomes clearer to me in memory, so too does his influence over me. Looking back, I can begin to make out how he helped me grow in ways that continue beyond his lifespan. He was such a big figure in my life that only now, after his death, can I begin to see who I am beyond his shadow, what I am “after Daddy”. Before I move on, I must mourn and come to terms with my loss. That includes accepting the end of the possibility of reconciliation. I have always been my father’s daughter. What comes next is learning how to merge this role with that of the woman I may become. Writing about my father means reviving decades-old feelings of confusion and anger, of insecurities that reached so deep that I did not know how to trust myself with this life. It means writing about everything I would rather not face. I was his hope for the future and his ally. I was also his hostage; the one he was going to carry successfully through life. I don’t know if he ever tried to understand who I was, or who I was capable of becoming, as I progressed from his precocious little bookworm to a rebellious teen and then a young woman. Writing about him is often painful as each good memory either brings forth a bad one, or is followed swiftly by the saccharine aftertaste that lets me know that once again, as I did so often in my childhood, I am avoiding the unpleasant, the unhappy, and the true. Trying to decipher the influence of my father, of his legacy, I am once more a little girl, dependent and trusting, and sometimes betrayed. With all the pain and hesitation that I felt - that I still feel - about my father, about his illusions and his intelligence, his childlike and openhanded generosity and the harsh and unappeasable judgments he could bring down, I am only sure of this: He was my father and he is dead. And now that his active presence in my life is through, I can begin to see him as a complete and separate entity. I can begin to understand his continuing effect on me. This complex and contradictory man is very much a part of me. No matter how I approach the subject, I am still my father’s daughter. In retrospect, I see the loss of my father as a crucial factor in my growth, in my ability to finally walk away from childish ways that no longer serve me or my family. It’s a complicated intersection, the meeting of grief and growing, and at first glance the subjects seem so unrelated as to be impossible to match up. All I have to go on is the instinct that there is such an intersection and it will play a crucial role in my life. Self image is one of the primary gifts that daughters receive from their fathers, and self-esteem - or the lack of it - may perhaps be the major legacy left to us after we lose our fathers. After his funeral, when I was going through his papers, I was pleasantly surprised to find file folders full of my work from school. He had saved all my report cards. For me, what remains is both the love and the shock of betrayal as time and time again he brought me up short. I can clearly recall his great faith in me. And just as I lose myself in memories like these, I find myself interrupted by the other image that I tended to suppress during his life: the stern father whose word was law, who saw me as an unruly child in need of guidance, if not discipline. The moments when I miss my father most are not the ones I expected. Yes, I do wish he could walk me down the aisle at my wedding. I miss him more, I find, in the unexpected moments that remind me of how he was in day to day life. Going to sports collector’s shows & seeing items there he would love to have had, seeing his favorite teams play on television, the aging appearance of one of his favorite actors makes me - just for the moment - sad. These are the details that bring my father back to me, and also remind me of my loss. I find it hard to imagine what my life would be like, or what my loss would feel like, if I did not have these tangible memories. I regret not having my father here to witness more about my life but I know that I am lucky to have had the opportunity to know him, to have had his presence through my growing years. When something so painful happens, we want so desperately for it to not be true that we will ourselves to believe that it isn’t - that it hasn’t happened at all. The fact that in the natural order we are supposed to survive our parents does little to mitigate the depths of this loss or the intensity of our reaction. If anything, the assumption that such a loss is normal and natural, is at any rate preferable to the alternative of parents mourning their children, makes getting past our denial a little harder. We fear our pain; we fear being thought “childish” in the eyes of our friends. And so we suppress our reactions. No matter what our age, when our fathers die we are losing Daddy. You regress. I just never imagined my life without my father. And what bothered me the most was that there was this profound alteration in my view of the world after he died. In retrospect, I believe this is the way he would have wanted to go. He would have not tolerated illness or a slow decline. That sort of instantaneous departure leaves me with this hole, wondering where is he? What happened? I have the sadness and the disappointment of not having more of a relationship with my father. And I have the sadness of not being able to tell him how I felt and that he had been my hero as a child. I think, with time, he and I may have come to a closer relationship, but that time was not there. Being able to let go and take him and our relationship as it was, was very freeing. Life is precious, and it goes. The death of my father freed me from some of my old ways of life and inspired me to grow in others. What I do next is up to me. If we are being honest with ourselves, most of us will usually admit to some connection between the men we choose to love and the first man who loves us. These partners may be very different from our fathers, but our emotions toward them may be more about our fathers than about the mates we tell ourselves we have freely chosen. Freed by the absence of the imposing male presence of our fathers, we may finally be able to express our real needs and find mates or lifestyles that will fulfill us. I know how long I spent not seeing my father’s worst characteristic, the gap between his temper and his generosity, between his deep love and his inability to see me or my mother as we actually were. Sometimes, when I was with men who shared my father’s temper, I would simply refuse to acknowledge any problem at all. I sought out men who carried on the worst traits of my father, men who had short tempers and were quick to judgment. Men who left me feeling not only rejected but stupid as well. But when I was with them, for as long as I could, I would tell myself that their quick rage was only the flip side of their intelligence. When they cut me apart with cool, cruel observations, I would try to believe that I could reconcile their sharp words to the playful wit that I loved, as if by the sheer force of my belief I could turn their hurtful traits into endearing ones and could find emotional fulfillment in them. I was making believe I was happy. Yes, my father was a dear man and loving. But he was also capable of great cruelty. A grieving woman is a prickly person. Death isn’t catching but loneliness is, and if our partners withdraw into confusion and fear during this crisis, just when we need them so much, then we, already hindered by our troubles, experience a double abandonment. Sometimes, in our grief, we may cause disruptions where before they did not exist. Guilt, too, the hopeless guilt that comes with the knowledge that it’s too late to make amends, can twist us into pushing against love and sympathy, creating a chain reaction of thought. Death puts an end to all the possible scenarios, all the heroism we hoped for and what I lost may have been an equal, if uneasy, mix of real, protective Daddy and unrealized fantasy. But both disappeared with his death, forcing me to confront what I had wanted as well as what I had perhaps once had.