What Children Need from Dad

My father-in-law, dead now almost 20 years, used to pride himself on being "a good provider." Ironically, this was usually said in a defensive way, as if he suspected that he wasn't. "Whatever else, at least I'm a good provider." By this, he meant that he earned a good income and his family had many nice things. He was a broken man who did not feel love and did not extend it to others. The nice things were a poor substitute.

My own dad was emotionally remote in a different way. Family overwhelmed him, and he spent long hours in the basement or his study, coming out to preside over family dinners and occasionally taking one of us hostage to serve as his helper. He was a brilliant and talented man, but he was also a mystery.

My Dad in 1943 or 1944, working his way through school as a nanny

Dad died six months ago, and I inherited most of his household, including the family photo albums, boxes of ephemera, letters written to my mother during World War II, and a big binder of his published writings from the 1930s onward. If family overwhelmed my dad emotionally, his legacy has equally overwhelmed me. It is almost too much to comprehend.

Almost. He left a treasure trove behind, and I am rediscovering him through it, one scrap at a time. Dad was a writer, and when he turned 70, he put together a huge binder of his published writings, Tappings on the Keys. Someone (he? my mom? someone hired for the task?) carefully typed out every word, a chore that boggles the mind.

Dad started writing for the school paper in junior high and wrote for his high school and college papers. When I was a teen, he had a column in our town's weekly newspaper for a couple of years. He also did free lance writing, and worked in advertising and marketing for several different companies, writing for internal publications.

After the war, he wrote advertising copy for GE at the same time and place that Kurt Vonnegut was more famously employed, the Schenectady plant that served as the inspiration for Vonnegut's 1955 story "Deer in the Works." Dad never met Vonnegut, who worked in public relations.  I used to fantasize that, had he not had so many mouths to feed so quickly, he might have made a living at writing. But his gift was in Op Ed, not in fiction.

Years ago, I saw a bibliography that cited a piece he wrote for Parents' Magazine in 1953, "What Children Need from Dad." It was a shock to come across my dad's name in that context, but when my local library didn't have an archived copy, I didn't look further. So I was glad to find it in the binder.

Many of his essays and editorials are followed by his (then) present-day thoughts, but this piece stands alone. I found it odd, presenting love for a child as a "troublesome" and difficult thing to find time for, a competition for scarce resources. He admonishes fathers to stop making excuses and man up, as painful as that will be.

I'd like to know whether he believed that. He brushed our hair and sang to us and encouraged our creative efforts. Our photo albums record trips and adventures with Dad. Among the things he saved was an early Mother's Day present he helped my older sister and brother make. I want to believe he was aiming for his audience (and for the extra bucks he made writing the piece), setting himself above those "other guys." But he was also a harsh critic of himself, so maybe he was writing out of guilt at having brushed us off once too many times.

This is the first Father's Day I haven't been searching for a card to capture my feelings without drowning them in sentiment. Dad is gone, but in some ways, he is more present than ever.

From there to here to where

Another of my posts following the death of my dad. It's a different kind of passage, a sail through some rough seas.  I'm trying to recover the person he was to me before his final years as I transverse the passage from child to orphan.  I hope some of these words resonate with fellow travelers on this journey.

I did not intend the visit to be my last. Dad went downhill fast, but I had no indication he would die that day.  My son had given me a report from his visit the day before, and our best guess was a couple of weeks. Speech was difficult for my dad, and I could no longer understand him on the phone.  I knew that the only way to have two-way communication was to do it in person.

I sat with him while he went from responsiveness to a coma over the course of the day. After the first hour or so, he floated in and out of consciousness, eyes staring vacantly, lying perfectly still.  I think his systems were just shutting themselves down, and voluntary movement was gone.  So, mercifully, was his ability to feel pain, since he was unable to swallow even a sip of water.

And so I sat with him, holding his hand, able to stare at him without rudeness.  Pili, his caretaker, told me how much she loved him, even though she'd only worked for him a few days.  He reminded her of her own grandfather, once fiercely independent but now felled by a broken hip.  Helping my father helped soothe her distress at not being able to take her turn by her grandfather's bedside.  I told her what a force of nature Dad was before this final combination of illnesses and old age took him down. We swapped some family stories over the deathbed, two strangers coming to terms with loss and providing an odd comfort to each other. We talked of dying at home, and dying in the hospital, and how to let go.

How to let go of him and how to let him go.  Pili said he had promised not to die on "her watch." She said he knew she was a softie and she worried about him.

The portraits, shot in a hasty photo inventory in 2008.

He lay underneath his portrait and my mother's, the place he had slept all the years of my life.  They joked they had hung the portraits over the bed to settle any questions about whose side of the bed was whose.  They are beautiful pastel portraits of a beautiful couple in their late teens or early twenties. Since I first learned to crawl up onto that bed to bounce, in eight different bedrooms, my parents slept under those portraits.  They'd overseen heart-to-heart conversations, joyful girls-only slumber parties with my mom, the "nest" my daughter made at the foot of Grandma's bed, a few very difficult conversations, a couple of surprise presents, mother-daughter reviews of Mom's jewelry, some memorable breakfasts-in-bed.

And now he was dying in this bed, almost unrecognizable to the youthful self above him. I studied his face, looking at the curves and the angles, the spotted skin stretched tight over his head, the skin loose on his hands from rapid weight loss. I remembered my visiting his father, my grandfather, in his last days, an incomprehensible sight for a five-year-old child. I recalled more vividly being with my father-in-law as he lay dying in a cold emergency room bed, wondering what kind of comfort I could give.

I was not there when he died.  Pili sent me away, saying he would not leave until I left him.  Not on my watch, either, I guess. I did not leave because Pili told me to, but I did leave, and he died shortly after.

In my family, we have always talked about dying, never passing on. We never talked about heaven, and Dad told me after Mom's death that neither of them had faith that heaven existed.  Dad used to say he wanted to be hit by a truck (and sometimes he drove as if he wanted it sooner rather than later...).  He did not fear death, but for a long time he feared dying.  He had pamphlets from the Hemlock Society, yellowed with age, in his "when I die" folder. He feared the loss of control, the loss of choice.

For a long time, he feared losing his independence, losing his intellect.  He posted a DNR in his house, in his car, in the minds of his children. He was terrified of being in a vegetative state, but he was also terrified of being in assisted living. In the end, he was ready to go. He had lost his short-term memory almost entirely and he was easily confused.  He relied on his impressive long-term memory to dazzle and distract, and he managed to fool a lot of people that way.

I don't know how the dying goes, I don't know where the dying go.  In many ways, Dad was lost to me long before he died.  I am doing my best to find him again.

Let me tell you something

My dad thought ahead.  When he bought something big and expensive, he might say, "You kids will fight over this when I'm gone."  (Sometimes, I thought:  what you don't realize is we will fight over who has to take it.)  When Patrick was born, he didn't ooh and aah over his beautiful first grandson.  He started calculating how much of Patrick's life he would likely get to see.

For years, I've known there were envelopes "to be opened after I die," with letters from my dad.  Having spent years carefully prying tape off of Christmas packages to check out the contents beforehand, I found it difficult to wait. What did my letter say?

Dad died December 1.  I was with him as he faded from life, the light going out of his eyes.  He lost his ability to speak or move and drifted along the borderline between sleep and coma. I said goodbye, and I took my letter. Halfway home, I got a call that he was gone.

What did the letter say?

We've had our times, my dad and I.  Mostly good times, but some monumentally bad ones, too.  Dad rarely hesitated to deliver advice, and he wasn't entirely clear on the concept of "opinion," being pretty sure that he was right about all things. He was given to the grand gesture, like pulling the phone out of the wall when I was not quick enough to end a conversation.  (Back in the day, the phone--and there was only one per floor--was hardwired into the wall.  And you probably shared a party line with some cranky old lady.)

He clearly loved me.  Just as clearly, he saw room for improvement.  He was more forthcoming with advice than with love. Stand up straighter, lose some weight, get my hair out of my eyes, tuck in my shirt, get my elbows off the table.  Study harder, revise that college essay, practice the clarinet.  Save more money, hire someone to do that, and for god's sake, don't get married before you graduate from college.

He was a great one for the object lesson, and I was a great one for rebelling against the object lesson.  He favored the surprise attack. It is a kindness to both the living and the dead to leave that area unexplored.

My older sister and brother absorbed a lot of my dad's self-improvement energies, and that led to a lot of fireworks, especially with my brother.  Dad said to me once that, while they had pushed back, I just used humor as a weapon until I got my parents into shape, and then I eased up on them.

And every once in a while, when I really, really needed it, my dad came through for me in an unconditionally supportive way. The letter he left was one of those times.

I wanted to be alone when I read it, but I also wanted to be in a safe place.  I drove to church and read it in the empty sanctuary.  I knew I could draw on a circle of support there.

So what did the letter say?

He wrote about the joy I had brought him, about the love and respect he had for me.  He said he could never repay me for what I had brought to his life. He said he hoped when I looked back at my children, they brought me as much joy as I had brought him.

I burst into tears.

Dad wrote that letter in 1979, 34 years ago, and felt no need to edit it as the years went by.

I did plenty of editing of my own over those years--gaining a couple of kids, losing a husband, dropping out of the professional world, learning to take care of myself, learning to ask for and accept help. Dad had touched the essence of me and of our relationship and written me a letter that crosses the decades to speak in a universal way.

What would you write in your letter? What are the things your family needs to hear from you, or you need to tell them?

My children will surely find mine in snippets on my computer, in version after version, as unfinished as my Christmas letters from 2009 to 2012.

Or maybe they will just know that, yeah, they do bring me as much joy as I brought him.  Yup, they surely do.