Thank you, Dad

Date: May 15, 2017

This began with a sloppy first draft. Changes, for clarity, have been made since. The repetitiveness, a return to certain themes throughout, was not removed. That's on purpose, as it is telling. I realize it's not especially well-crafted because of that awkward repetitiveness.

 

As the ninth anniversary of your death arrives, on May 20, I realize just how much emotion, achievement, knowledge, religion and philosophy, food and drink, movies and music, and pain and passion was passed from you to me.

I hope I will be wise enough to better prepare for my own end, to avert the pain of it to my loved ones when I go, and I don’t leave the perception of my selfishness, as you did.  That seems brutal, and it is, admittedly. But not cold, not without compassion. With honesty. Honesty is something that is underused. 

But not today. Not when reflecting on the loss of my father which, philosophically and emotionally, can either be a shallow reflection of only happy thoughts, or of truthfulness. Of realness. Of happy things and tragic things. Of real emotions. 

I’m not much of a happy-thoughts fake. My father was unpleasantly honest or joking at times, some loved ones found, and I’d have to say that it is a fair estimation. I was grateful for that "cruelty" lots of the time, even when a part of me didn't like it. 

Honesty is the best “cruelty” there is. Honesty: not bullying, like “you’re fat,” or “why are you so lazy”— he was quite good at doling out teasing affronts at times. Sometimes, not teasing. But there was sincerity in it, more than not. Blunt observation hurts. 

So, honesty, huh? My father could be a bully. That’s not something his friends, admirers and family want to hear. That wasn’t the utmost nor the chief definition of him, either. "Bully" is a fair description of him at times, without question. Faint if you will, seeing that someone would call their own father a bully, and not in the context of despising him. Perhaps instead you will read on, determined, as I am with my father and so many others, to find the silver linings in unpleasant truths about a lost father. Frankly, I’ve no time for fake claims of happiness and the fantasy of positivity. 

I thank my father for my love of and my anger with him. I don’t want to have bad thoughts about my father, but he was well aware of those thoughts, and I think we'd both made peace with them. This is what matters: bullying as he might have been at times, I have no doubt, even at the worst of those times, it hurt him to be that man. 

That's what makes the difference. My father was quite the unfinished emotional being. Bullies, the ones I love and the ones I have no real care for, are composed of broken and incomplete parts in their emotional makeup. Aren’t we all so incomplete? you might argue. Sure. In different ways and with different ways to manage it. Different reasons for it. 

There are so many things that my father said or did that were important, and those are what I hold to me. That's what I toast him for, often, especially when having a drink alone. 

Thank you, Dad, for being so bold as to take your extremely humble, working-class childhood, an upbringing where you were raised in a one-parent household, and becoming an Army Air Corps jet trainee; for attending college to ultimately attain a PhD in English, while working full-time with a growing family. 

I'm not sure anyone on Earth appreciates what you did and tried to do more than I do. Though you did not invest in a great childhood for me and my siblings, I honor you for working despite odds and circumstances and your own problems; for raising your family from near the bottom of the working class you were from to the white-collar middle class. 

I resent some things. But there are many things for which I am grateful to you. You made it clear how valuable hard work, humility (not always but in many things) and knowledge are. You were brashly honest at times. But, you were not compassionate at times when it would have been very helpful. You could be quite numb-skulled despite your advanced degree, and your scholarship beyond it. 

You were more a scholar than a philosopher, more a technician than an artiste, and, too many times, for me, you were an example of how not to behave around other people than you were a role model. There were folks who truly appreciated you. I did, too. Often. 

You struggled with demons and, it seems to me, with guilt and memories I was never welcomed to know or share. I could see this in your eyes, and I can still see it in my memories of you. 

Despite the worst, and despite the hidden things, I admire and respect the honorable things you did, against a significant slope and in an often unwelcoming environment. 

There are things I cannot forget, regrets about you, important things. There are pains I know today that might have been so much less challenging had you been more willing to be the father and not the hands-off breadwinner. It’s too late and too pointless to hold a trial for those wrongs and perceived wrongs. I cannot cast them off, but those regrets do not define you.

You did not let things stand in your way. You did not avoid the work to achieve, to answer that strange, common calling to do something that means something, despite the costs of it. You were embarrassing at times. You were hilarious at times. You were good at times. You were wrong at times. But, I understand.

You struggled with emotions and with love and affection versus masculine comfort, like so many of us – men from broken homes and with damaged childhoods. I recall many times over the course of my life, in your presence, where the look on your face told me wordless tales about your life and the thoughts you keep to yourself and betrayed in alternative embellishments culled from those secret things and indirect, unrelated events or conversations. I, as you, are often caught in thought. Deep in thought. Lost in thought. Lost at times in haunting, terrible thought. 

My trust and respect, as a youth, generally in parents and in adults was admired by adults. How terribly I learned that such a trust should be limited, because the reality is there's only a myth of adulthood and wisdom. For me, that realization came at a fairly significant cost. And, too young. I was, and am, like so many who lacked the benefit of a childhood without serious abuse. Other have been betrayed far more brutally and even younger and I, but one abandonment of my claims, the word of an adult taken over mine, will forever discolor my life. It came at such a great cost to me. 

I forgive you. I cannot forget. I fall into bitterness now and then. But I did forgive. I hope that my peace comes with greater wisdom than you had, in emotional intelligence, and with greater care for my family than yours came. But each person is only so smart in so many ways, and quite dumb in others. I learned that from you. 

I have such a long way to go. You knew that, because you knew your own incompleteness. 

Rest in peace, Pops. 

- Jon O.

[Edited for clarity, Oct 2020]