These gorgeous, sunny autumn days are a gift. Today, we’re reaching eighty-four degrees, tomorrow the mid-seventies, but both days will be filled with golden fall light.
I raked some leaves yesterday, cleaned out a portion of the gutter, cleaned the bathroom, vacuumed and tried to make some sort of sensible arrangement of all the reading material in the den that seems to multiply and expand on a daily basis.
Today is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 96.
We had a complicated relationship and that didn’t just hold true for me, it was the same for all of my siblings. I was talking to Don about my dad this morning, trying my best to explain that complexity to him. I don’t have a lot of great memories of him when I was a kid. He was volatile, you never knew what would set him off, he was extremely needy, he was impatient, he was angry. He was an alcoholic, though I didn’t yet have a name for it when I was very young. To this day, I can’t stand the smell of alcohol on someone’s breath. We always had to tiptoe, and I use the word figuratively, around him. The ‘don’t upset your father’ kind of warning was a staple of my childhood. For many years, I did my best to avoid him. I was happiest when he wasn’t home. Loud arguments erupted fairly frequently. Holidays, when there was so much pressure to be happy and festive, seemed to be especially hard for him. It was difficult for him to maintain a light-heartedness on those days and he would invariably succumb to that pressure and everything would implode.
He meant well. He loved us deeply. He was a good, good man with a big heart. He was as loyal as the day was long. I can’t tell you how many times I saw others reach out to him for help. He protected those in need of protection. But he had a disease. He also, my sister and I now realize, was traumatized by the four years he spent fighting in WWII. Because, ultimately, my dad was gentle soul and what he witnessed during the war changed him forever. We didn’t fully realize this until his last hours on Earth, when we sat with him as he prepared to leave us. I wish we had realized it sooner.
I wasn’t able to really appreciate my father until I moved away to go to grad school. I finally had distance, which I desperately needed. I was able to see him with fresh eyes. And, as time went by, he got sober. My parents moved to Northern Michigan, which had always been my dad’s happiest place. He found a community there. He was no longer under the pressures from his job (he retired early.) He was happy. I actually liked being around him and we had a healthy relationship for the first time ever. In fact, I would often go home for 5 weeks on my breaks from my teaching position at Boston University. And I had the best time, just being there with Dad and Mom.
I’m so grateful for that. Both Don and I had complicated relationships with our fathers. And both Don and I were able to find a new relationship with them later in life.
A result of the troubled years, the years of alcoholism, was something that often effects adult children of alcoholics; a fear of commitment, a fear of intimacy. That I finally worked through that, with Divine help, of that I am sure, is a miracle. I was able to open up to the possibility of a healthy committed relationship, despite my fears, and two weeks after I said that out loud and owned it, I met Don.
And no one was happier for me than my dad.
I’m so grateful that the memories of my father that I choose to hold in my heart now are loving ones. That I was able to be with him on the day he passed away. That I was able to tell him I loved him and mean it. That he loved us was never in doubt. That he would do anything for us was also never in doubt. But that day, as my sister and I held his hands and stroked his head, nothing else mattered but that love. Everything else – all of it – just slipped away.
Happy Birthday, dad.
And Happy Saturday.
