A couple of people on my F-list have posted bits about their fathers or changed their profile pictures to reflect them. I'd like to but I don't have a picture of Daddy on my computer. I'll try and fix that soon. But it's interesting to read the status or see the pictures for a variety of reasons, some of which will undoubtedly become clearer as you read on. Generally speaking, thoughts of my father make me smile and give me the warm happies that daddies are supposed to give their daughters, right? That safe protected cherished sort of feeling? Or am I off in fairytale land again?
I've got a great relationship with Dad. I talk to him every night and I don't mind because he's a great listener. And sometimes he even offers some decent advice. I knew he was cheering for me when I was in the professional graduate student academic stage of my life. He's been at every major event in my life from the time I was little; hell, he probably would have been in the delivery room if that had been done back when I was born. I go to him with problems and he helps me work through them; sometimes, I suspect, exerting a bit of his will (or would that be Will?) to make them work out for the best. I know I can count on him, one of the few people in my life I honestly know that about without any doubt.
Sounds like a pretty good thing, right? The kind of relationship you wished you had with your father? There's a trick to it; a secret if you will. And it's a bit extreme if you're thinking you'll try anything for that sort of relationship.
What's the secret?
You see, Daddy's been gone since 1979. May 25 to be exact. Oh, I don't mean he left Mom and me (though I sometimes suspect Mom felt abandoned) or that he and Mom got a divorce. No, it's a bit more extreme than that. He died. I was two and a half.
Even so, everything I wrote above is completely true. Some of you have seen it in action.
I talk to him, Lord do I talk to him. Sometimes even in the presence of others. My mom saw it all the time, sometimes accompanied by a "Dad, she's driving me insane. Would you please do something?" He probably wishes I'd shut up sometimes. I can see him somewhere with my Nanny and now my mom, grumbling about how I only seem to bug him. Well, he's been available the longest. I've done it since I was a pre-teen if not since he died. I honestly can't remember when I started. For the record, I have very odd memories as it is. I can remember things much farther back than research would suggest I should be able to. I can remember seeing Daddy in the hospital before he went into surgery and I remember the funeral. I remember doing some things with him, like going out for breakfast and sitting on the counter at Bea's Cafe. After the funeral I have a gap until I'm about four or five, around the time it's suggested that memories should really start being formed. The early memories aren't like normal either; they are more like snapshots out of time. The content is there but the emotion is absent. I know I'm happy to be at breakfast with Daddy only because I can see a grin on my face in the mirror over the bar. My theory is that I had no real notion of how to label emotion when I was that young. What child can describe the concept of fear or of desperation or of happiness? Do you need a knowledge of it to encode it into your memories? Perhaps.
But I do talk to him every night. I talk to my grandmother (Nanny) and Mom almost as often too but like I said, I've been talking to Daddy the longest. How do I know he's listening? I just do. It's a feeling I have, the same feeling you have when you know someone's standing right at your shoulder, you can just tell. I've done it nearly since I can remember. I talk "to myself" a decently good bit, but a lot of it is a (sometimes) one-sided conversation with Dad. Explaining something that's happened or telling him a story or sharing a memory. (I like to think he's polite enough not to hang around for some things.) Every once in a while I'll even get this sudden flash of thought, something I wouldn't necessarily think, or something that doesn't feel like it came from me. Maybe a question while I'm talking or maybe an idea when I'm working something out through my own personal version of talk therapy. I just figure it's Dad, adding his two cents in the best way he can.
I know he was at my college graduation. Nothing you say to me will convince me otherwise. He was standing between my mother and my cousin Tony right above my godparents. I saw him, just as a flash, a sensory input that didn't quite compute with the rest of my brain, just for a split second. But it's enough for me to know he was there, sharing with my mom one of the milestones of their only child; his only child in three marriages. I can only assume from this he was at all the other events as well--high school graduation, my Nanny's funeral, my induction into the honors society in high school. He probably endured high school speech events just like every other parent; he just had an easier time getting from room to room.
I've come to rely on that quiet presence I sometimes feel. Not all the talking I do is just idle chit-chat either. I learned a while ago that Dad is great at finding things I've lost. He's found my cell phone, my airline itinerary, my Mother's bias tape, friends' medication, driver's license, credit cards, keys. He's found lost billfolds, sympathy cards (not his), and misplaced papers. I've gone to him when I'm worried about outcomes and want as much help as I can get. I talked to him about grad school, about dealing with Mom, now about money and cars and apartments and new jobs. No, I don't believe he can change anything but I'm not quite so sure he, or anyone who has died, can't help out in some ways, even as intermediaries or interceders on our behalf. After all, we used to say that Nanny had a direct line to God when she was alive. I figure the line just got a whole heck of a lot shorter now.
Dad's even got a knack for electronics. He started my mom's car once or twice when she was having problems with it before it died completely. And he always opens the locks when I ask him (not always nicely either I should be ashamed to admit.) Oh, and he used to change the channel on my TV when I was fourteen and watching Days of Our Lives too. Usually during the good bits--and no I don't mean the subtle exposition on life's trials and tribulations experienced when your lover gets amnesia and forgets that she's married to another man but secretly having an affair with you. I mean the really good parts. Seems Dad didn't think I should be watching that. How do I know he did that? Well obviously I can't prove it but after about the twentieth time it happened and I had to get up out of the nice comfy chair and walk across the room to put the old console TV back on "2" I was most annoyed. The twenty-first time it happened I changed the channel back, put my hands on my hips, looked up at his "corner" (I generally have a corner of the room where I direct any comment I make to him), and said in what was probably my best long-suffering teenager voice "Daddy would you please stop doing that?!" Never happened again. Ever. Finally a parent who listens to their teenage daughters!
All this is not to say that life with daddy has been all sunshine and roses. I've gone through the process of grief over and over since he's died. He, and my relationship with him, is the basis for much of my views on life after death. I know he's here. I know this isn't the end of my existence as it wasn't the end of his. And if my mother's dream after he died can be believed, I know there is a heaven of sorts and what it looks like. I take a quiet sort of strength from the knowledge that I am not alone, no matter how alone it seems.
Still though, it is difficult to have never really have had a father. It brings up all sorts of questions and quandaries in the dark when I think deep and ponderous thoughts about why I am how I am. Does my insecurity stem from deep-seated abandonment issues that I haven't even begun to realize? I sometimes wonder if my knack for picking not-so-great men (Phil, of course, is an exception!) comes from not really having a consistent male influence in my life, though heaven knows Mom tried to provide it and a neighbor tried his best to be a second father to me. (His death, ten years and one day after Dad's, devastated me as well.) I've never really seen a marriage because of Dad's death, not the daily give and take that goes into making one work. Will that affect me later in life if I try to have my own marriage? Undoubtedly it will but by how much? How much social information am I missing, or misguided on, because of his absence? What male secrets am I not privy to because I didn't have a father growing up? Am I looking for a father-figure to replace the one I lost or will my eventual male partner be a real husband?
I look at myself in the mirror and wonder where he is in me. Do I have his eyes? his hair? his skin? Probably on the last since I am much fairer complexted than my mother. What parts of me did he contribute? What personality traits can I thank him (or blame him) for? Does my at times obsessive personality come from him? My stubborn streak? Where is he in me? Will what killed him eventually kill me or my sons and daughters? Do I have his grin? The curl of his hair? His laugh, his intellect, his height, his drive? I've never got a chance to really know since I learned of my father through snippets of stories told by my mother and my family as I was growing up. I still enjoy, and sometimes long, to hear stories about him as others knew him, something that has gotten much harder now that Mom's passed as well. The man he was alive is not the father I know dead after all. Some days I'd give anything for another minute, another second with him. I don't remember what it feels like to have him hold me or what his voice sounds like. I can't remember his laugh or what he smelled like. You don't really know those things are important until you know you don't know. My nanny's voice might be faded now, six years after her death, but it is there. I've got Mom's on my computer, ripped off of a voicemail that was still on my cell phone. But his is indistinct, a virtual reconstruction of what he might sound like based only on random bits not hard fact. I think I almost have it but I'm never quite sure. Did I ever know?
So yeah, I've got a good relationship with my dad. I just wish one of us didn't have to be dead for it to happen.
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