Those closest to me, those who’ve read some of my previous blogs, likely know that for me, the deepest wound in my emotional psyche is the loss of my father some many years past. 27 years, 8 months, and 22 days to be exact. However, at the time, his passing was a period of confusion, shock, mental fog, and something I handed with a great deal of disconnection. With the exception of one critical moment, shared with my brother, that is as vivid and real today as it was when it happened. Perhaps more so.
My father and I had not established a hugely significant bond when I was growing up. There was no acrimony, but no substantial harmony either. He was the authoritarian figure, the breadwinner, the one whose return from travel was anticipated not for his presence, but for his presents. AND his nightly arrival home from work, on the occasions we’d crossed a behavior boundary, was an arrival feared due to the foreboding warnings of my mother that we were to ‘wait until your father gets home.'
In my late teens, I bore witness from the front lines to the losing battle and bitter surrender of my parent's marriage, as well as to the emotional carnage it left behind for both of them. It was brutal, in hindsight, but numbing at the time. I had managed the news of his passing as I survived through the final year of their marriage: with detachment and disconnect.
After he’d moved out of the house, his job soon took him overseas while my 20s took my own focus inward, and during a couple of years of distance and limited contact, he because somewhat removed from my thoughts. Then, one day, he showed up at my work unexpectedly, and we started to rebuild from there.
We formed a new connection, one more of an adult-adult than a parent-child, and I believed then that I’d reconciled with my feelings. We’d talk technology and SiFi, meander through garage sales on weekends, occasionally find a good greasy spoon burger joint and watch rented videos like Blade Runner or Alien. I felt like we’d finally established a great rapport. And I remember an overseas phone call spent talking about everything going on in MY life, not knowing that his own was ending. I am certain that he knew it at the time.
I thought I’d come to a place of peace with all of this. I took solace after learning of his passing in knowing that I had told him I loved him, and he returned the sentiments. I felt and shared with others the great comfort of having reconciled that relationship while there had been time to do so. I preached adamantly to anybody I cared for with a fractured relationship that they must not allow the opportunity to be lost to close that chapter with love and resolution.
What I didn’t anticipate was my own emotional growth and continuation from there. I did not consider the many experiences yet to further shape me or my own path leading me to discover more and more of his spirit echoed deep in my identity. Nor did I anticipate the awareness that can only come from being a parent… that of my own mortality and the role I play in the life cycle of the children I am a father to myself.
I had reconciled with him but could not have reconciled with myself. I had no idea what lay ahead for me, how I’d grow to long for the impossible chance to share with him that I now realized what had been sacrificed and put into me. The endless workdays, the supportive 6am rides to a paper route, engagement in Boy Scouts, driving lessons, labored attempts to discuss “s-e-x,” and his likely painful awkwardness and reflective recognition of my emotional separation from him in those painful latter years.
My father died horribly young. A member of a generation of smokers, like so many others, he died of cancer. But what brings this all up today is the age at which he died. My father lived for 54 years, 1 month, and 27 days. That’s an incredibly young age to consider having one’s life end. And for me, brutally painful.
Because today, I am 54 years, 1 month, and 27 days old. I am at the exact age at which my father died.
I can’t fathom my life ending at this age. Recognizing that his life ended at this age, TODAY for me, is just overwhelming.
Through these many years since I’ve seen and watched my friends and acquaintances lose a parent with increasing frequency. I’ve empathized with the pain of their loss while being filled with envy at the years they were so privileged to have had. Years I never did, Years during which I might have asked questions I'll never know the answers to or have said the things I now can never say.
I anticipate that my kids might face this situation in some 20+ years. Perhaps this post will still be accessible to them then. If it is, maybe they’ll realize I know what they’ll face. The looking back, the realizations, the regrets around missed opportunities.
And they’ll know that it’s ok, that I knew, and I get it. Things left unsaid can simply be things that go without saying.