My father's shadow
Looking for ghosts and clues
A few years ago, a cousin sent some messages my way on Facebook. The subject? My father.
Dad was where he always was, in western Pennsylvania, and I was (at that time) in Chicago, living and working a stone’s throw from the heart of the Loop, within literal spitting distance of Oprah Winfrey’s former studio.
My cousin was in the mood to scold me, asking (paraphrasing): Why don’t you treat him better? Why don’t you see him more often? He’s such a nice guy. So happy-go-lucky, so friendly, always fun to be around, always here to help us out. Why are you such an asshole?
Nothing against this particular well-meaning cousin, but I’ve seen them maybe a half-dozen times in my life and I’m not entirely sure I could pick them out of a police lineup.
So when they had a few words for me, I had a few words for them - two words that I can guarantee weren’t ‘happy birthday’. (Sorry, cousin. I guess my better angels were not with me that day.)
For weeks after that exchange, I kept thinking: well, yeah, of course, I get it. Hell, I’d like to meet that guy. I’d like to visit that version of my father.
Where was that man?
I understood my cousin’s ardent defense of a beloved uncle. But I didn’t see that side of him often, if ever.
My father died last spring, just shy of his 89th birthday. Eight years earlier, he’d had a seizure that mimicked a stroke and impacted some of his ability to navigate the world. A few years later, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
I loved my dad, and I miss him. But despite knowing him for 56 years (and change), I don’t think I ever knew him well.
Communication and affection were rare and valuable gems in our family, and my father - ever the Depression baby - guarded those resources and kept them locked away, doling out a few shiny bits on only the rarest of occasions - usually after a few beers.
I’ve spent most of the last 15 years building my family tree. That genealogy search was fueled in part by a desire to try to figure out my father. I’ve been on a lifelong archeological search, I suppose, for a man who remained so hidden, so submerged for me for so much of his life.
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Artifact one: I recall flashes of my dad when I was a young kid, his bushy blond hair and thick tortoise shell glasses. A few hugs and kisses here, a few spankings there.
I was the youngest of four, a gap of twelve years between the oldest kid and me. Not exactly an “oops” baby, or a late-in-life surprise, but unplanned nonetheless.
Artifact two: the memory of all the times my father made the half hour drive to rush me to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh - when I had terrible allergies and couldn’t breathe, and again a few years later when I had a seizure.
At some point after I entered grade school, the wheels came off the bus for my parents. Mom had chronic health issues and spent a lot of time in bed. My father worked as a technician for mainframe computer systems, and in those years, our rotary dial phone had a habit of ringing at 3 a.m., beckoning him to make a long drive back to where he’d just spent 15 hours, beckoning him to make magic and make all systems go.
Most of the fathers in my neighborhood enjoyed a beer or a cocktail after work. Mom wasn’t fond of Dad drinking at home, so he’d usually land at a nearby bar, the Villa d’Esta. I can joke now and say his name should have been etched onto one of the barstools, but then? It was just what dad did, what he did to be anywhere but home. I remember being there with him a few times, the haze of smoke obscuring my view of him across the bar as he chatted with other patrons, noticing every woman in a fifty foot radius.
Artifact three is a field observation: my father was an alcoholic. It feels wrong to say, but I fully own this thought: young me liked him better when he was drunk. He was smiling, friendly, and would occasionally even say nice, encouraging things. Encouraging things. Paternal pride. It was like an oasis of water in the desert. It’s not that he was cruel at other times, but Dad’s default setting was to be checked out and say very little at ALL.
I wasn’t exactly a feral kid, nor did I have a Running With Scissors kind of upbringing. Mom and Dad were, technically speaking, physically present. But Dad was gone a lot, and Mom was often in bed, hiding from the world. By the time I was seven or eight, I got very good at making myself dinner, washing my own clothes, and doing whatever I could around the house.
And yet, here’s artifact four: my father on a camping trip with me, a Boy Scouts camping excursion. I was awful at all the physical aspects of Scouting and probably hated the experience - there’s a reason I say camping for me is a three-star hotel - but let the record show, he was there. To be honest, I’d almost forgotten this brief flash of time spent together, until I unearthed photographic evidence of artifact four.
In 1981, when my mother attempted suicide, our family foundation shifted. I can look at the arranged artifacts and see there was a pre-1981 and post-1981 life for us. Mom got help for her depression, found a diagnosis for her chronic pain (fibroid tumors) and had surgery, and all of THAT resulted in Mom becoming a completely different person. “Completely” does a lot of heavy lifting there - it was a transformative time for her.
Artifact five: all the times Dad tried to engage with me during this era. I’m sure he wanted to connect in some way, make up for things he’d missed, but the sports emphasis was probably also an attempt to “de-gay” me. I failed miserably at most of the chosen games. (I sucked the least at golf. And bowling, I guess.)
It’s easy now to identify all the ways he was trying. But I’d missed him a lot during those earlier formative years, and didn’t know if I could trust him, trust the process. My mother and farther were experiencing huge transformations in their lives, but so was I. And mine wasn’t quite as positive.
My high school experience was pure hell. I won’t dwell on it here (I’m trying to write a fictional book based on those experiences) but my senior year was particularly rough. And that brings me to artifact six: my parents going to bat for me with the school principals, working out a way for me to finish my classes without being physically and verbally harassed by students (and a few teachers and administrators) so I could graduate.
I did graduate and tried moving on to college. Spoiler alert: if you miss fifty percent of your high school classes hiding out from bullies, turns out you end up with quicksand for an academic foundation.
Artifact seven is a bittersweet one: me coming out to my dad when I was 21, and hearing him say something that is among the things I hold closest to my heart when I think of him: that I was his son, and that he loved me. Followed by “now, can you get a decent job and stop asking your mom for money when you call?” That was him, and me, in a nutshell.
Bittersweet because of his kindness. And bittersweet because of a related memory: the time when my mom and dad asked me, when I was 16 or 17, if I was gay. And told me it would be OK if I was.
I’d forgotten about this for years, but was heartbroken when I remembered it, remembered emphatically telling them NO.
Because I couldn’t trust them. I couldn’t trust our family. I couldn’t trust him.
My father was never an abusive alcoholic (he rarely raised his voice) but the inconsistency of his emotional state under the influence - coupled with my mother’s struggles with mental illness - meant that the ground could shift beneath me at any time.
(I should note here that my siblings may have their own experiences, memories and perspectives. I love them, but that’s their story to tell. This is mine.)
I spent most of my twenties flailing in the quicksand of my life, working at an array of jobs with uniforms and name tags, moving so often my mother would complain about having to buy a new address book to contain all the places I lived. Angry that my dreams seemed so out of reach, frustrated that I had so few tools to change that.
Thank goodness for therapy.
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I rebuilt my life in my thirties, crawling slowly out of the muck and working hard to build a solid foundation. I did a few long stints in administrative work, and then, in a ridiculously random moment of luck, I realized a lifelong dream: I was a staff writer for a nationally known website. People paid me to write things and then published them!
Dad was proud of me. (Mom got to see a few of my freelance bylines before she died. Thank you, universe.)
As I navigated the uncertainties of that writing job, the universe really smiled on me. I fell in love. (I’ve had bouts of bronchitis lasting longer than That Writing Job….but my husband is a few feet away as I write this. Lucky me.)
The gods had another bit of serendipitous magic for us. My father reached out to me to work together on our family tree.
We’d lost Mom a year or so earlier. I think Dad - Mr. Emotions At Arm’s Length - had his outer shell cracked open a bit by that loss. I remember talking to him during mom’s services, and learning - for the first time - how they met. How he saw her across a room and said, “she’s the one for me.”
Something he couldn’t put into words and say to me until the day she died.
A year later, when he reached out to me about my interests in genealogy, I was in a good space to respond.
We were never going to share a love of baseball or beer, or trade notes on how to build a bookshelf or fix a car, but this, this was finally our shared little club.
And it wasn’t just any shared hobby. It gave me the thing I’d always hoped for from Dad: he opened up to me, as much as it was humanely possible for him to do, about his life, his past, his family and his memories.
Let me be clear: he was still the same old circumspect, wary fellow he’d always been. But here and there, for a few minutes at a time, the mask would drop, and I’d get to see a bit of my dad in a different context.
I knew my dad had a rough time of it growing up. Alcoholism ran deep in his family. Artifact eight is a story mom told me before she died: my father as a child, fleeing his father’s fists, and being struck by a car as he ran away from his house.
It broke my heart to imagine how afraid, how unsafe he must have felt. It also made me finally understand dad’s protective wall, his mask.
I’d been looking at my father from the perspective of a confused child - through a glass darkly - but I began to see glimpses of the person behind the brick wall, glimpses that filled in the blanks.
We connected in those years, sharing our genealogy research, Dad telling me stories about the people who populated that tree. I treasure that time, and the connection we had for a few years.
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There are artifacts I cannot number, ones that don’t seem to fit anywhere in the outline, in the timeline. The ones we never talked about.
The DUIs. The other women who were connected to Dad over the years. And the child he had with another woman, one he never mentioned during his lifetime.
Dad’s protective brick wall eventually returned. My sister’s death by suicide, coupled with the onset of his health issues, slowly closed the gates. (With his Parkinson’s, the mask became quite literal.)
It was devastating to see him after his seizures took a toll on his cognitive abilities. This was a man who was cleaning out the gutters until he was nearly eighty. He was a putterer who couldn’t sit still - until his health forced him to do just that.
And it made him miserable. My sister and niece (and other family members) did a phenomenal job - at great personal cost - with the herculean task of caring for him, literally through his final moments.
Just this week, I received a literal box of artifacts. A few necklaces Dad wore, a cross, an anchor, representing his Navy service. The bullets fired at the 21-gun salute at his funeral.
I turn 57 in a few weeks, looking through the eyes of an adult with a much clearer understanding of dad’s journey……but behind my adult facade is the same softhearted kid, still wishing I could figure this guy out.
I still don’t know why it was so easy for him to be relaxed around some people (like my cousin) and so emotionally distant around others. Maybe there was more at stake with those of us he loved the most.
I’ve always been told I was my mother’s son, the sensitive writer with a soft heart and a touch of ESP. But perhaps I was my father’s son, too. I was, for much of my life until recently, a man behind a protective wall, shadowed by sometimes crippling social anxiety. (I know, how Cats In The Cradle of me: ‘My boy was just like me!’)
My father remains a mystery, a fascinating, maddening one.
Rest well, Dad.
Bravo dear Patrick!