my father, sixteen years later
Today is the sixteenth anniversary of my father's death. I don't usually mark the day much, or too overtly. Yet I'm trying to think a bit more about it, perhaps because I'm a father myself now, giving me maybe some partial insight into and appreciation of the challenges my dad may have faced in life, at least as a parent and likely in other ways as well. Also, I'm approaching an age finally that I can start to imagine my father inhabiting. That is, I am 39, approaching 40, of course. He was 41 when I was born, and my earliest memory of him is at age 45. This means that for most of my life I could never picture him at all vividly as anything but someone appreciably older than I was. But that is beginning to change. It's a bit easier to imagine him as a 39 year old man that as, say, a 28 year old.
I feel forced to admit that I don't conciously think much about my father anymore. I don't assume others experience the death of a parent this way, but as the years pass he simply seems increasingly remote, as more and more of my life story involves elements of which he could have no knowledge and in which he could not participate. This is saddenning sometimes, to be sure. I find myself driving through places familiar to him (like the peninsula) and wonder both what thoughts he may have had on these very same roads and what he might think of me or make of my life now, were he alive. Yet these are kind of interstitial moments between long stretches of time in which the current world presses so hard that there's little time for memory, and what time there is may get devoted to memories that have little to do with him. This latter point makes sense when I realize that I left home for college when I was 17 -- 22 years ago -- and never really lived most of the time with him again (whereas I did move back home and live with my mom for nearly two years after he died).
Sometimes I think my detachment from his death and my loss of a parent is not simply a matter of the passing of time. Rather, I sometimes wonder if I never really fully experienced his passing. He died while I was living in Santa Barbara. I received phone calls and came up to San Francisco as soon as I could. But I hadn't seen him in months, so he seemed to kind of slip out the door, in a sense. I remember experiencing panic several time the day he died and a day or two after. Also, I think I could reasonably have been called depressed for the year or so after he died, though it was easy to attribute that to working crappy jobs and not knowing where my life was headed at that point. I don't think I ever really grieved. I forced myself to stay whole and not give in to tears, even immediately after. I'm not sure why; I'm not sure it was intentional. But I do think it means something got skipped in me like a line from a song on an old record player.
I don't have any romantic memories of some fatherly heroism or dynamism. Many people seem to have such high-gloss memories. I think those memories are actually probably basically accurate. That is, I don't think it's some greater realism on my part that makes me see my father in some realistic or unsentimental light (I'm terribly sentimental, though my sentiment fastens itself on odd objects, I think). Rather, I believe my father did not make that kind of impression, that he did not fit easily into the stereotypical all-American capable father image (however true or false in general). His was not a "big" personality in that sense. But I think that was his very strength. In a way, I remember him as relentlessly ordinary, with little inclination for the sublime or ambitious, qualities that may seem -- I guess "are -- at odds with my choice to study Romantic poetry and perform heavy rock music well into adulthood. There's no doubt that I've pursued goals that my father would never have considered for himself.
Yet, perhaps strangely to some, he allowed and in unglamorous yet powerful ways helped me pursue those very goals. Those who know me well have heard the stories about how he bought me my Les Paul when I was 15 (he had to walk into Guitar Center on a Saturday with his coat and tie with me among all the 80s era long-haired musicians -- he could not have been very comfortable, but he did it for me), how he rode BART with me to my first metal concert (and waited in Oakland while I went to the concert so he could ride back home with me), and how he took me on countless trips to the game store that sold Dungeons and Dragons merchandise. These were only the beginnings of what he helped me do. I didn't even think to mention how he helped in my path toward the advanced literature degrees I ended up with.
I don't know if he ever wondered where the fat little kid who liked electric guitars and orcs but who couldn't glue things together or write legibly to save his life came from. I'm not sure he troubled himself with such a question. (Maybe that's the kind of question that I narcissistically consider.) I think he just did what he thought he should do as a father. I really don't want to lapse into some corny story of his kindness or make him out to be perfect, because he wasn't (and who could really love a parent who was perfect [if such a person could exist] anyway?). But I do think his actions have value to them. They show a kind of day-to-day ordinary selflessness, a kind of love for one's child that resists imposing one's own ideas on him or her. It's true my dad did do a lot of things with me that HE liked, like going to Stanford football games, etc. Yet when I stopped being interested, he just let me stop and move on to something else that was part of my own vision of what to do. It seemed relatively easy for him to do that. I wonder if it really was so easy, and I wish I could ask him.
I feel forced to admit that I don't conciously think much about my father anymore. I don't assume others experience the death of a parent this way, but as the years pass he simply seems increasingly remote, as more and more of my life story involves elements of which he could have no knowledge and in which he could not participate. This is saddenning sometimes, to be sure. I find myself driving through places familiar to him (like the peninsula) and wonder both what thoughts he may have had on these very same roads and what he might think of me or make of my life now, were he alive. Yet these are kind of interstitial moments between long stretches of time in which the current world presses so hard that there's little time for memory, and what time there is may get devoted to memories that have little to do with him. This latter point makes sense when I realize that I left home for college when I was 17 -- 22 years ago -- and never really lived most of the time with him again (whereas I did move back home and live with my mom for nearly two years after he died).
Sometimes I think my detachment from his death and my loss of a parent is not simply a matter of the passing of time. Rather, I sometimes wonder if I never really fully experienced his passing. He died while I was living in Santa Barbara. I received phone calls and came up to San Francisco as soon as I could. But I hadn't seen him in months, so he seemed to kind of slip out the door, in a sense. I remember experiencing panic several time the day he died and a day or two after. Also, I think I could reasonably have been called depressed for the year or so after he died, though it was easy to attribute that to working crappy jobs and not knowing where my life was headed at that point. I don't think I ever really grieved. I forced myself to stay whole and not give in to tears, even immediately after. I'm not sure why; I'm not sure it was intentional. But I do think it means something got skipped in me like a line from a song on an old record player.
I don't have any romantic memories of some fatherly heroism or dynamism. Many people seem to have such high-gloss memories. I think those memories are actually probably basically accurate. That is, I don't think it's some greater realism on my part that makes me see my father in some realistic or unsentimental light (I'm terribly sentimental, though my sentiment fastens itself on odd objects, I think). Rather, I believe my father did not make that kind of impression, that he did not fit easily into the stereotypical all-American capable father image (however true or false in general). His was not a "big" personality in that sense. But I think that was his very strength. In a way, I remember him as relentlessly ordinary, with little inclination for the sublime or ambitious, qualities that may seem -- I guess "are -- at odds with my choice to study Romantic poetry and perform heavy rock music well into adulthood. There's no doubt that I've pursued goals that my father would never have considered for himself.
Yet, perhaps strangely to some, he allowed and in unglamorous yet powerful ways helped me pursue those very goals. Those who know me well have heard the stories about how he bought me my Les Paul when I was 15 (he had to walk into Guitar Center on a Saturday with his coat and tie with me among all the 80s era long-haired musicians -- he could not have been very comfortable, but he did it for me), how he rode BART with me to my first metal concert (and waited in Oakland while I went to the concert so he could ride back home with me), and how he took me on countless trips to the game store that sold Dungeons and Dragons merchandise. These were only the beginnings of what he helped me do. I didn't even think to mention how he helped in my path toward the advanced literature degrees I ended up with.
I don't know if he ever wondered where the fat little kid who liked electric guitars and orcs but who couldn't glue things together or write legibly to save his life came from. I'm not sure he troubled himself with such a question. (Maybe that's the kind of question that I narcissistically consider.) I think he just did what he thought he should do as a father. I really don't want to lapse into some corny story of his kindness or make him out to be perfect, because he wasn't (and who could really love a parent who was perfect [if such a person could exist] anyway?). But I do think his actions have value to them. They show a kind of day-to-day ordinary selflessness, a kind of love for one's child that resists imposing one's own ideas on him or her. It's true my dad did do a lot of things with me that HE liked, like going to Stanford football games, etc. Yet when I stopped being interested, he just let me stop and move on to something else that was part of my own vision of what to do. It seemed relatively easy for him to do that. I wonder if it really was so easy, and I wish I could ask him.
posted by Mark Meritt at 1:27 PM
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