Reflection: Four Years Since the Death of My Father

We stayed late at school tonight, Thursday, for conferences and I drove home in the dark. I mused over the fact that the custodian had told me snow was coming. I knew I needed to pull the basil out of the ground before it froze. And I remembered that the death of my father was the second week in October, four years ago. It was this same week, conference week.

It has been a long time, that I’ve been trying to deal with my father’s influence on my life. When I was young, he was my biggest advocate. Until he wasn’t. Somehow I always hoped there would be an opportunity to repair rifts between us that I couldn’t really speak of. I felt it was his job to apologize. I also knew that it was likely that would never happen.

By the time my father was actually nearing the end, he had been ill a long time. I had already planned to be there, to visit. My brother called and said Dad had a stroke and was unconscious, was not speaking, or eating, previously had requested no IV. Could I please come immediately, instead of in 2 days?

Well I looked but there were no flights any sooner. Reflecting that the world is indifferent to our tragedies and emergencies, I continued planning to arrive in two days.

My colleague Stephanie saw me walking down the school hall asked me, was I still here, why wasn’t I leaving already?

And I said no, no flights.

She said aren’t you worried you said that he’s dying.

And I said well Stephanie he will hold on until I get there. He will have to.

Ah Susan she said and hugged me and we cried. And I was right. Dad stayed with us until I arrived and then until I left three days later and he passed away less than an hour after I left his bedside.

I don’t feel very good about this. Although it’s been said the persons often pass away when the family is out of the room.

My father was a true homme du norde, as the French call it, a man of the North a man of the woods and streams happiest by himself perhaps on the trail or in the canoe. But there was no doubt that he loved me. He kept calling me, asking me to come in his last few years of illness. And I felt so irritated.

I had already said to my brother, a year earlier, that I was angry at my father about his response to our parents’ divorce and some things that happened when Noah and I were young adults. But now, today, I think I was angry because he was dying, leaving me again, and I wanted to ask him how can you do this?

Loyalty

And I think about loyalty too he was loyal when it was impossible to be loyal he was loyal when he was broken and he was loyal when he was an exile. I could always get him on the phone, even though he lived far away.

Now, today, as the custodian tells me that it will snow I think of him cross country skiing. He used to send pictures of himself in the snow, enjoying the cold.

Dad refused to admit defeat in the end and seemed not to be aware that he was mortal. He asked me in his last couple years, “why am I not getting better? What am I going to do?” He could not see the truth about himself perhaps. But he knew the truth about my marriage and at the end of his life Dad refused to see Leo. It wasn’t until after Dad was gone that I put the pieces together and realized what Dad could not say. He could not say something bad about Leo to me, Leo was my husband. The family loyalty thing. And yet, now I think that Dad alone, of the extended family, understood and believed me about the situation.

I remember when I began teaching school because we were broke. Dad said “Susan you are a hero for doing this. You are saving your family.”

Dad, by refusing to see Leo while he, Dad was ill, told me what should be done. In this way, the death of my father was a turning point for me. I had heard what he didn’t say: enough is enough.

And as I came home this Thursday I didn’t want to think about the death of my father. I went out in the backyard and I got the basil and washed it and I got the lawn mower which needs to be repaired and I put the lawnmower in the back of the car and I thought about how I have to do this myself because I am alone. I cut my lawn, I repair the lawn mower, I fix my own garage door, and I wait for winter and I think about going cross country skiing with Ella, my granddaughter. We will see the woods, where I always remember Dad. I remember him alone looking at the horizon or speaking about some natural phenomenon. I can see his clear blue eyes which saw things as they were. He could look at things as they were. He also knew that knowing does not change things.

Some people think knowing things will solve all your problems but that’s just foolishness.

Dad told me several times in the two or three years before he died, “Susan, the happiest day of my life was the day you were born.” I would mumble some “yeah thanks,” but my emotional response was always “if that’s the case why didn’t you protect us from the fall out of the divorce? Talk is cheap, Dad, you taught me that yourself.” And yet, now, looking back, this detail does seem meaningful. Perhaps when our parents are alive, they seem bigger than life, heroic, capable of amazing feats, superhuman. After they die, you begin to see them life sized.

The Dark Days of 1982

My father wanted to do the right thing in 1982. But he didn’t. He was put in a bad position: he had been doing the work our mother should have done for the children for over a decade. Now, she was leaving, and she expected him to keep doing that work. He meant to, but, like a drowning man, he fell off from his responsibilities and when my brother was 13 and I had already been sent away to college in the middle of my junior year of high school, my mother discovered my younger brother was staying at the house over Christmas by himself as my father and his new girlfriend had gone to Mexico for a week. My mother, seeing this as a desperate situation, told my father she was taking over custody of my younger brother.

Ten years later, a similar story (with younger children, admittedly) made the national news, with the entire country watching the court case that came out of it.

It was a bad scene.

Back then, I said I could forgive Dad. You can’t do much else, you can’t get another father. But until the day he died, I still held this in my heart.

You Finally Have to Let it Go

After the death of my father, I finally had to let it go. I was pretty sure he didn’t want to be the parent he became in 1982. In learning more about Dad, cleaning out his house, I realized that he had missed some things, because of his pride and because of his fear. I vowed to be like him in some ways, and not to be like him in others. I went home and began to reflect on how I was going to change.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from him was that yes, we are going to die, and if we don’t do the things that we want to do consciously, they just won’t happen. I don’t know if Dad had any of those things he wanted to do, but I sure did, and I could see that with the direction I was going, they weren’t going to happen. In the year after the death of my father, I began to feel grateful to him. He had, without any words, somehow shown me the way. I finally accepted his claim about his happiest day, not with anger, but with reflection: how *could* someone who felt this way make the choices he had made?

I knew I had to try to be different and began to try. It wasn’t all Dad, of course, but a big part of it was. And it was enough to make me go from anger to gratitude, and that’s a pretty big leap.

Some things aren’t right or wrong, they just are. Such it is, then, with the death of my father. I think now of snow falling, and that it must fall, it must be, and I feel peace.