My dad died on September 8, 2014. He collapsed on the 6th and was rushed to the hospital. My mom and I were trading emails back and forth about his condition all day on the 7th. When it was clear it wasn’t going to improve I swiftly piled my kids in the car and hit the road, driving into the night, praying we would get there in time to say goodbye.
It wasn’t like my dad and I were close, really. He frustrated and enraged me more often than he inspired tenderness in me. But, at the same time, he loomed so large in my sense of myself. So much of who I was was in relationship to him— often in opposition, and sometimes in reluctant admission that I was more like him than was comfortable for me to acknowledge.
Whether or not it made any sense, I just needed to get there, so I drove and sang the spiritual Precious Lord (a favorite of both of ours), over and over, as my children slept in the back.
When we got there he was still alive, but not conscious. An enormous man, he filled the whole hospital bed, like a whale stranded on a beach or a small island broken away from the mainland, jutting up out of the water, just that small bit too far away to reach.
Still, I trusted that some part of him would hear me, so I leaned in and spoke into his ear, “Hey, Dad. I made it. I just wanted to tell you…You and I both know that you haven’t always been the best dad. Some of your decisions have been absolute shit. But, now, you and mom have set the girls and me up to have a home of our own, where we will be safe for the rest of our lives. You took care of me when I needed you. Protected me. I couldn’t ask for anything more. It’s enough, Dad. You’ve done enough. It’s okay to go. I love you.”
He slipped away, with my mom at his side, less than 12 hours later.
I’ve been scrolling past all the posts in my newsfeed over the last several days, reading people’s tributes to their dads for Fathers Day and it has felt heavier than I expected. I don’t miss my dad, exactly. But I feel the weight of his absence, and, conversely, the way the weight of his presence still inhabits my life. The African proverb, I am because we are (or were), feels alive under my skin.
My father did not always manage to stay in his integrity, but he was always trying. My unwavering commitment to practice my own integrity is, to some extent, to honor him, but also an attempt to surpass him. Still, I am in relationship with him. Still, we are in conversation somehow.
My generation was raised to surpass our parents economically, and it’s unlikely that will happen, but in this, I can do it, I think. At least, I can try. I hope it’s enough for him, in whatever form he may exist now, as his imperfection and striving, in the end, was enough for me.
Driving back to Upstate from D.C. on the day of my father’s death I wrote his eulogy in my head. I built it, sentence by sentence, reciting it to myself after each addition to fix it in my memory. Entranced, somehow driving yet not in my body, I was trying to conjure the truth of him for me, to capture the weight of him in words before it slipped out of my grasp firmly enough to balance the anticipated loss of his weight in my life.
How to Die
I have spent the last three years of my life learning how to die. Our lives are full to the brim with dyings, large and small. I do not mean endings, though perhaps they could be called small deaths if they are approached with mindfulness for their significance in the larger scheme. But I am talking about Deaths, those endings that come out of nowhere seemingly, and after which nothing is the same. Nothing.
I thought I was becoming quite adept at death, and perhaps at the very least I have come to recognize it and accept it when it comes. The profound absence, the sense of lack, the whistling as the wind blows through the hole in my chest that Death has blown threw me as she passed.
I will confess that I did not expect the size of the hole, the insistent roar of the wind as it whips through, at the death of my father. I am 42 years old and my father and I have not been close since I was about five. Until I was about five my father was pure magic. He played and laughed and held me in the force of his gravity and that was good. It was different after that, more complicated, more fraught with the tensions of two strong egos pulling and pushing against each other.
But perhaps I should not have been surprised at the enormity of his absence. My father was a big man. He had a big body, a big voice, a big heart, a big Spirit, a big ego and big wounds ( I come by all that I am honestly, as they say). He was beautiful and horrible, as I believe we all are, but not tending to do anything by halves my father's Light and Dark were impressive in their scope.
It is the nature of things, I believe, that we never truly know who our parents are, but only who they are to us. My father was a man of deep conviction and hope who wanted to see the best in everyone and build it up. But few people are always, or perhaps even often, their best selves, and so my father left me to the wolves more times than are worth mentioning. When your father does not have your back, when he does not protect you at certain crucial moments in your life you either become any number of unsavory and self-destructive things or you learn to be your own father and become a warrior. I do not think my father planned to raise a warrior, but he did. So thank you, Dad, for laying that ground. I know I was not easy for you, but the alternatives would have been much worse.
But my father also taught me how to cry because, god bless him, he was a sentimental fool. He cried at weddings, funerals, commercials, movies, sports games, every single musical performance of mine he ever attended, reading poems, listening to the radio. If I had a penny for every tear my father shed I would be a rich woman indeed. But I inherited that from him, that tendency to be pierced through by the world because the skin barrier between us and everything else is so thin. I cry all the time, enough that it seems the world should surely be washed clean by now, but it is not. But even my father would agree that if the world creates warriors they should know how to cry. Otherwise we are truly lost.
The passion that I have for storytelling comes to me from both the rivers that converged to make me, but certainly from my father I inherited the urge to fix those stories in time. To write them down so they could be passed more clearly, to last longer.
My father was great with his hands, full of ideas of all the things he would build and make and do. Because of him I am more comfortable with a circular saw than a sewing machine and have complete confidence that if I can conceive of it I can make it. This is no small thing for a woman in our culture.
My father was also his father's son, and he expected the women in his life, particularly my mother, to care for him and attend to his needs. If you know me you can imagine how that worked out between us. But to his endless karmic credit my father adored my mother, perhaps even from the first moment. They were engaged three weeks after their first date and were married for 52 years. Did they stay together because they were people of duty and honor and so co-dependently enmeshed that they couldn't conceive of life apart? It could be argued that this is true. But they were also, from the first moment, completely and shockingly in love. And my father never waivered, never strayed, never strove for another. When my mother was preparing to send me off to college she told me, "I want you to find someone who adores you" and I understand now that she was not just speaking from her love for me, but also from experience. She knew what it was to be adored and she wanted that for me.
My dad did adore me. Which doesn't mean he understood me often or even probably liked me all the time, but I cannot remember a single time that I saw him in the last 10 years that he didn't grab my hand or pat my hip and say, no matter how I looked, "I have never seen you look so beautiful". So many times I could not hear it, because reality is more present for me than perhaps it was for my father, but I appreciate now that for him I was a shining thing. All he could see was the Light, and maybe my tired, skeptical heart could have heard that better.
In the end my father died well. He did not, as far as we can tell, suffer. Yet he held on long enough that everyone got a chance to say goodbye. And he did not linger so long that it was a torture to anyone. Everyone has to die. It is the nature of life. And I cannot imagine how it could have happened better. There is sadness in it, but there is not tragedy.
When my father died the world lost a particular rendition of a principled, striving seeker. A man who was perfect and enormous in his imperfection. A man who loved deeply and long and will be loved deeply and long in return. But I do not, for myself, believe that all that he was is lost. He will return, as we all do, to the vast ocean of Spirit and whatever wisdom he accrued will live on in we who loved him and those who are apportioned some piece of his Light to carry forward. No piece of matter ever dies, it just changes form. And my father, as big as he was, will live on in infinite forms forever.
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