The long term missing of absent fathers
It's been a long time since my father died. Going on sixteen years this October. More than half my adult life.
And although there are ways that it has never stopped being hard, I have achieved as much as I can of healing. Nowadays I can see my father in perspective. The split between my Idolised Father and my Father Who Drank and was Erratic and Raging have healed, and now he is just Father Who Was Human and Tried Hard but Really Wasn't Very Good at Fatherhood.
My mother used to tell me about my dad and how when I was born he just couldn't get enough of me, and being with me. How in his lunch hour he'd take a cab from his office to go home just to change me and feed me and burp me, play with me for five minutes and then he'd jump back in a cab and go back to work. I wish I could remember those bits as clearly as I remember his long absences, or his rages. But one of my earliest memories is very fuzzy, mostly made of feelings and blurrs. I am lying on my back nad I must be very very young, probably just a few months, because I can't see very well - faces are blurred- and waving my arms and legs and looking at my fingers preoccupies me for long periods of time. And then, there is a change in the room, because my father has come in and I'm wiggling my hands, I'm beaming I'm sailing on waves of joy so pure, so vast, that I can't hold them. Because my Dad is here, and I love him, and I'm so happy to see him. And then he's walking across the room to me, and I'm all knotted up iwth the happiness and the anticipation and I'm extending my arms to him to be picked up, and when he does it's the best thing in the world.
I remember that, moments like that, and know that things must have been perfect between us for a time.
And even with my Dad's drinking and broken promises, the one aspect that never changed was that I still loved him very much.
It took me a long long time, more than ten years, to make peace with the fact of my father's dying. In the end, I think largely I did because I began to have a spiritual life which allowed him to be alive within it. That he could in a way, still be with me and know my life on earth. True, there was still the veil between us, but in moments it seemed so thin that we could stand in it side by side and almost touch.
Nowadays, I don't have the same terrible longings and I'm grateful for that. But by moments, I still miss him terribly. I miss the physical dimension of his existence so badly that it hurts.
And in those moments, I think I would give away years of my own life, just to have him back for ten minutes. Just to be able to hold him again, and be held. To feel my body crushed in my father's powerful arms, to be hugged tightly, tightly, to hug him. To see the colour of his eyes again - the real colour not just my photograph memory of it- to hear the sound of my father's laugh, and voice, and song. To smell the aftershave that he wore.
To be able to say goodbye properly.