A death in the family

My father died yesterday. From what I can understand, he fell asleep and didn’t wake up, which is the most anyone can ask for and also clearly what he wanted for himself. He had indicated in as many ways as he possibly could that he wanted to die: taking an overdose of pain killers some years back, refusing subsequent treatment, and ultimately rejecting anything other than palliative care. I see these as his choices and I respect them.

I still don’t know how I feel about his death. There are gifts from my father that I am genuinely grateful for and that are central to who I am: sailing, a dark sense of humor, the love of poetry.

But there are so many other things I cannot process. My father deliberately divested from our relationship in order to avoid the pain of an authentic connection.

(Or at least that’s how I think of it. It’s either that, or he just didn’t like me very much, and I prefer the former interpretation).

I suppose it’s his loss, but it also has made me feel less worthy of love throughout my life and I find that hard to forgive or even understand. So much time has been wasted, not just of his, but of mine.

For a while after my stepmother died, he asked me to call him every week “like old days.” We had never actually been in regular contact at all since I moved out of his house at the age of 13. But still, for a number of years I called him every Sunday at the same time, and we spoke for exactly 7 minutes, always about the weather. Every 6 weeks or so, I’d try to float another topic: my job, my family, his reading, politics. But he dismissed any topic other than the weather as irrelevant to him and — tellingly — “not his fault.” I guess in an overarching narrative where guilt is always just under the surface, the weather is the safest story to dissect. It could not possibly be my father’s fault that it rained or was too hot or cold, and so he complained about all of it with glee.

I am only just now connecting to the fact that he must have felt judged by me, that this feeling was painful to him, and that I in fact — then and now — did judge him.

Guilt is not a good way to move through life. It can be a motivator for change, but it is the release of guilt that actually makes change happen. I am sitting with that knowledge today. I released my own guilt about this failed relationship ages ago. I just couldn’t hold it any more. I can feel a stir of compassion for his incapacity to let go of his.

And meanwhile, there is always sailing.