If no one minds...
I'd like to spend a little time talking about my dad, who passed away on 12/24/2007.
It's been just over three months since he's been gone, and I can't say I feel any different, which is to say I'm not sure how to feel about it at all. My relationship with my father was rocky, at best. My parents divorced when I was two and were separated before my first birthday. My mom and I moved from Orange County, California to Bozeman, Montana when I was almost six. I never questioned her reason for doing this (which is not to say that there weren't times I resented her for taking me so far away from him) because I love my mom and I trust her judgment. In the past year, she shared with me the reason why. I don't think it really changed my opinion of the whole situation, and I can't say that gave me any critical insight into the "why" and "how" of my dad, my mom, my relationships with each of them, or their relationship with each other. I guess it just helped me to understand what had happened between them (in the chronological, objective reality sense, nothing deeper).
I can honestly say that I never once wished they would get back together. My parents were apart, and it was just something I accepted and lived with. Sometimes I felt a little different at school, being one of the only kids at that time living in a single-parent household, but the fact that I sometimes wished I had two parents at home never logically extended to me wanting my dad and my mom to be together again. My functional view on my parents divorce I have to attribute to my mother, and the reason that I'm relatively normal now is because she loved me unconditionally, with no hint of dysfunction or resentment which I see (unfortunately) happening with a lot of the people I know who are now single moms. I have no sense of finality or conclusion in regards to my dad, but this whole experience has led me to put my mother on a pedestal of uncompromising respect. If I have learned anything in the past two years, it has been that my mother is a fucking saint. After everything that she went through, she raised me selflessly. She could have easily instilled in me resentment toward my father for everything he had done to her, but she didn't. Even when I started to come to my own negative conclusions about him at a relatively young age, she always defended him to me. I am still amazed by how much she sacrificed in order to give me a childhood that somewhat resembled normal. It takes a remarkably strong person to set aside her own feelings of resentment for the benefit of another human being. I only hope that one day I will be able to carry myself with half of the dignity that my mother has.
My father was something rare. He was a character that the greatest author could only dream to create. He spent most of his entire life in Orange County, California. He came from a broken and dysfunctional family. His mother is remembered by his siblings as a monster. There were seven children, and not enough food to go around. Their father was ejected from the household for reasons none of them can understand, and even though he took up residence mere blocks away from their home, they were all led to believe that he was dead. They all saw their father as saint--he professionally raced motorcycles (Harleys and Triumphs). My father left home by the age of 16. He didn't graduate high school. He was a self-educated machinist, metrologist, and optical engineer. He was a talented artist, writer, and musician. He was almost tragically handsome. Women pursued him, and before my mother, he was dating a model. He had at least two illegitimate children that he refused to claim as his own. He was a fierce alcoholic. Children flocked to him and adored him. He often said he was made of steel--he had had at least four major heart attacks and had recovered from all of them, except the last one. "You can't hurt steel," he'd say, flexing his intimidating muscles. A lot of the kids were amazed by his huge forearms--not even three kids all pulling as hard as they could on his clenched fist could beat him at arm-wrestling. He was a leader in his industry and had engineered a revolutionary way to produce optical corner cubes cheaply, which made his originally floundering company extremely profitable and successful.
He was also a shitty father.
I have as many bad memories of him as I do good, which is a pretty awful track record when one is trying to memorialize a loved one after his death. When I was young, my dad was Nietzche's Uber Mensch personified. He was brilliant, outgoing, handsome, and was my most cherished playmate. When he came to visit me after my mother and I had moved away, we built fantastic snowmen in the yard with the defined pectorals and biceps of a body builder. He shaped a figure out of snow that bore a perfect resemblance to the famous Easter Island artifacts, and he dyed the whole thing blue. We played for hours with his model trains and ran tracks through every room in the house. One time, we were wrestling on the floor, and he started tickling me, and I unintentionally kicked him in the face. He, thinking it would be a good joke on me, immediately ran to the kitchen and squirted ketchup around his eye and came wobbling back into the living room, crying, "Megan! You kicked my eye out!" I was terrified, until he literally started crying and laughing at the same time, as the acid in the ketchup had actually got into his tear ducts and started burning. When he was away from me, he'd write me stories that my mother has kept for me in a filing cabinet at her house. He wrote an essay on the wonder of being a parent, and I can't read it now without aching.
But he was a drunk. One time, when I was thirteen, he locked me in the car for hours, while he drunkenly raved about how my mother was punishing him by moving me so far away. He called our house one night when I was fifteen and called me a bitch for no apparent reason, after which incident we didn't speak for close to two years. When I was little, he'd inexplicably call every night for five consecutive days, and then disappear for months at a time. I remember curling myself into a ball and crying on my mother's shoulder, wishing he'd disappear instead of stringing me along the way he did. When I was 21 and suffered an emotional breakdown, he flew out to Chicago, packed up my stuff, and dragged me back to California, promising me that he'd get me help, that he'd hold me and hug me and tell me everything was going to be okay, only he didn't do any of that. He abandoned me in his house, never once made any sort of offer to get me help (except for the outpatient rehabilitation program I was immediately entered into to get me clean--but the drugs were the least of my problems), frequently called me stupid for deriving most of my knowledge from books instead of from experience, and told me he didn't care about anything I wanted to talk about. I suffered, feeling alone and miserable, until I met Kevin, who whisked me away from my father's house and methodically rebuilt my self-esteem until I felt beautiful and confident again. My mother tells me all the time how grateful she is to Kevin for saving me.
I came back to Chicago, ready to finish my degree based more upon the confidence instilled in me by my boyfriend than from anything my dad had given me. I left California hating him, and resolved to never speaking to him again. I wanted to cut him out of my life. I was so angry at him for promising me that he'd love me, after so many years of turbulence and uncertainty, and not following through. We did start talking again, largely due to my mom's interference, but it was still rocky. On Halloween, he called me and I told him about how well my midterms had gone, and he was elated at my success. After that, I got too busy to call him much, and the next thing I heard about him was during my final exams, when I got the call that he'd had another heart attack, and probably wasn't going to make it. We had to pull the plug on him, and I sat at the bar at the Balboa Pavillion with my mom and my dad's brother, Hardy, when I got the call. We all three of us wept at the loss of him, because as much as I hated him, I loved him all the more fiercely for not loving me back. He did love me back, but it never felt like it.
Now, when I have to tell people that my father passed away, I cannot even hope to convey what happened between us. How much I loved him and admired him, and how much he had hurt me over the years. I feel a strange disconnect. I am unable to tap into my emotions about him, unless I write or examine pictures of us when I was young and he was healthy and not as jaded and wrecked as he was twenty years later. I feel so sorry for him, because I know much of his life was unhappy, and I wish I could have been a little more selfless. I wish I could have forgiven him for treating me badly, recognizing that he didn't really mean it the way that I took it. I wish I would have sat myself down on his knee, and hugged him, even if he didn't hug me back, just so that he would know that I adored him, and thought the world of him. I'm afraid that he died, thinking that I didn't care and that I'd given up on him. I had, in a sense, but my feelings of resentment toward him could never eclipse my adoration.
Thankfully, the thing that I remember best is his laughter. It was so loud and boisterous and joyful, and I think frightening to those who had never seen someone laugh with real recklessness before. I wish I could adequately describe it, but it was something that had to be experienced. I like to remember the way he was when I was little--how he treated me like a child who likes to think herself very important and grown-up--indulgently, with a hint of fun and irony. He gave me flowers and opened car doors for me. He had fun indulging his daughter's belief that she was a sophisticated young lady at the age of three.
I wish now that I had someone I could really talk to about him. I wish there was someone who would be willing to indulge me now, who would be willing to listen to me introduce my father through my memories of him. Someone who wouldn't try to tell me he was a saint, and who would accept my memories of him as valid. Most people staunchly hold onto the good things, but the fact is that he wasn't always good. I don't want to pretend that he was. I want to remember him realistically. I want closure on the whole thing. I want to be able to remember the shit along with the sugar, so that I might both learn from it and cherish it.
I think, like always, I might be asking too much.
It's been just over three months since he's been gone, and I can't say I feel any different, which is to say I'm not sure how to feel about it at all. My relationship with my father was rocky, at best. My parents divorced when I was two and were separated before my first birthday. My mom and I moved from Orange County, California to Bozeman, Montana when I was almost six. I never questioned her reason for doing this (which is not to say that there weren't times I resented her for taking me so far away from him) because I love my mom and I trust her judgment. In the past year, she shared with me the reason why. I don't think it really changed my opinion of the whole situation, and I can't say that gave me any critical insight into the "why" and "how" of my dad, my mom, my relationships with each of them, or their relationship with each other. I guess it just helped me to understand what had happened between them (in the chronological, objective reality sense, nothing deeper).
I can honestly say that I never once wished they would get back together. My parents were apart, and it was just something I accepted and lived with. Sometimes I felt a little different at school, being one of the only kids at that time living in a single-parent household, but the fact that I sometimes wished I had two parents at home never logically extended to me wanting my dad and my mom to be together again. My functional view on my parents divorce I have to attribute to my mother, and the reason that I'm relatively normal now is because she loved me unconditionally, with no hint of dysfunction or resentment which I see (unfortunately) happening with a lot of the people I know who are now single moms. I have no sense of finality or conclusion in regards to my dad, but this whole experience has led me to put my mother on a pedestal of uncompromising respect. If I have learned anything in the past two years, it has been that my mother is a fucking saint. After everything that she went through, she raised me selflessly. She could have easily instilled in me resentment toward my father for everything he had done to her, but she didn't. Even when I started to come to my own negative conclusions about him at a relatively young age, she always defended him to me. I am still amazed by how much she sacrificed in order to give me a childhood that somewhat resembled normal. It takes a remarkably strong person to set aside her own feelings of resentment for the benefit of another human being. I only hope that one day I will be able to carry myself with half of the dignity that my mother has.
My father was something rare. He was a character that the greatest author could only dream to create. He spent most of his entire life in Orange County, California. He came from a broken and dysfunctional family. His mother is remembered by his siblings as a monster. There were seven children, and not enough food to go around. Their father was ejected from the household for reasons none of them can understand, and even though he took up residence mere blocks away from their home, they were all led to believe that he was dead. They all saw their father as saint--he professionally raced motorcycles (Harleys and Triumphs). My father left home by the age of 16. He didn't graduate high school. He was a self-educated machinist, metrologist, and optical engineer. He was a talented artist, writer, and musician. He was almost tragically handsome. Women pursued him, and before my mother, he was dating a model. He had at least two illegitimate children that he refused to claim as his own. He was a fierce alcoholic. Children flocked to him and adored him. He often said he was made of steel--he had had at least four major heart attacks and had recovered from all of them, except the last one. "You can't hurt steel," he'd say, flexing his intimidating muscles. A lot of the kids were amazed by his huge forearms--not even three kids all pulling as hard as they could on his clenched fist could beat him at arm-wrestling. He was a leader in his industry and had engineered a revolutionary way to produce optical corner cubes cheaply, which made his originally floundering company extremely profitable and successful.
He was also a shitty father.
I have as many bad memories of him as I do good, which is a pretty awful track record when one is trying to memorialize a loved one after his death. When I was young, my dad was Nietzche's Uber Mensch personified. He was brilliant, outgoing, handsome, and was my most cherished playmate. When he came to visit me after my mother and I had moved away, we built fantastic snowmen in the yard with the defined pectorals and biceps of a body builder. He shaped a figure out of snow that bore a perfect resemblance to the famous Easter Island artifacts, and he dyed the whole thing blue. We played for hours with his model trains and ran tracks through every room in the house. One time, we were wrestling on the floor, and he started tickling me, and I unintentionally kicked him in the face. He, thinking it would be a good joke on me, immediately ran to the kitchen and squirted ketchup around his eye and came wobbling back into the living room, crying, "Megan! You kicked my eye out!" I was terrified, until he literally started crying and laughing at the same time, as the acid in the ketchup had actually got into his tear ducts and started burning. When he was away from me, he'd write me stories that my mother has kept for me in a filing cabinet at her house. He wrote an essay on the wonder of being a parent, and I can't read it now without aching.
But he was a drunk. One time, when I was thirteen, he locked me in the car for hours, while he drunkenly raved about how my mother was punishing him by moving me so far away. He called our house one night when I was fifteen and called me a bitch for no apparent reason, after which incident we didn't speak for close to two years. When I was little, he'd inexplicably call every night for five consecutive days, and then disappear for months at a time. I remember curling myself into a ball and crying on my mother's shoulder, wishing he'd disappear instead of stringing me along the way he did. When I was 21 and suffered an emotional breakdown, he flew out to Chicago, packed up my stuff, and dragged me back to California, promising me that he'd get me help, that he'd hold me and hug me and tell me everything was going to be okay, only he didn't do any of that. He abandoned me in his house, never once made any sort of offer to get me help (except for the outpatient rehabilitation program I was immediately entered into to get me clean--but the drugs were the least of my problems), frequently called me stupid for deriving most of my knowledge from books instead of from experience, and told me he didn't care about anything I wanted to talk about. I suffered, feeling alone and miserable, until I met Kevin, who whisked me away from my father's house and methodically rebuilt my self-esteem until I felt beautiful and confident again. My mother tells me all the time how grateful she is to Kevin for saving me.
I came back to Chicago, ready to finish my degree based more upon the confidence instilled in me by my boyfriend than from anything my dad had given me. I left California hating him, and resolved to never speaking to him again. I wanted to cut him out of my life. I was so angry at him for promising me that he'd love me, after so many years of turbulence and uncertainty, and not following through. We did start talking again, largely due to my mom's interference, but it was still rocky. On Halloween, he called me and I told him about how well my midterms had gone, and he was elated at my success. After that, I got too busy to call him much, and the next thing I heard about him was during my final exams, when I got the call that he'd had another heart attack, and probably wasn't going to make it. We had to pull the plug on him, and I sat at the bar at the Balboa Pavillion with my mom and my dad's brother, Hardy, when I got the call. We all three of us wept at the loss of him, because as much as I hated him, I loved him all the more fiercely for not loving me back. He did love me back, but it never felt like it.
Now, when I have to tell people that my father passed away, I cannot even hope to convey what happened between us. How much I loved him and admired him, and how much he had hurt me over the years. I feel a strange disconnect. I am unable to tap into my emotions about him, unless I write or examine pictures of us when I was young and he was healthy and not as jaded and wrecked as he was twenty years later. I feel so sorry for him, because I know much of his life was unhappy, and I wish I could have been a little more selfless. I wish I could have forgiven him for treating me badly, recognizing that he didn't really mean it the way that I took it. I wish I would have sat myself down on his knee, and hugged him, even if he didn't hug me back, just so that he would know that I adored him, and thought the world of him. I'm afraid that he died, thinking that I didn't care and that I'd given up on him. I had, in a sense, but my feelings of resentment toward him could never eclipse my adoration.
Thankfully, the thing that I remember best is his laughter. It was so loud and boisterous and joyful, and I think frightening to those who had never seen someone laugh with real recklessness before. I wish I could adequately describe it, but it was something that had to be experienced. I like to remember the way he was when I was little--how he treated me like a child who likes to think herself very important and grown-up--indulgently, with a hint of fun and irony. He gave me flowers and opened car doors for me. He had fun indulging his daughter's belief that she was a sophisticated young lady at the age of three.
I wish now that I had someone I could really talk to about him. I wish there was someone who would be willing to indulge me now, who would be willing to listen to me introduce my father through my memories of him. Someone who wouldn't try to tell me he was a saint, and who would accept my memories of him as valid. Most people staunchly hold onto the good things, but the fact is that he wasn't always good. I don't want to pretend that he was. I want to remember him realistically. I want closure on the whole thing. I want to be able to remember the shit along with the sugar, so that I might both learn from it and cherish it.
I think, like always, I might be asking too much.